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Feeling like it’s suddenly shaping into a busy fall, navigating some work travel amidst work demands.
travel recap#
Travelled a bunch recently, and there’s one more trip to go in the near future: an onsite in Durham again this October.
Some thoughts from recent trips:
croatia (split, plitvice lakes)#
In August, I took the opportunity to do some Europe travels: my parents were visiting my sister for about a month and a half, and my sister wanted to take a few days off so that they could go on a trip somewhere in Europe. I decided that joining would be fun, considering how burnt out I was feeling, and we settled on a trip to Croatia. Landed in the middle of a heat wave (an arrival temperature of 39C!) and got to see lots of Roman ruins, hiking, and some beach swimming. It was a good trip overall, although in exchange for my demand that we take air-conditioned siestas from 2pm - 5pm, we found ourselves packing in a lot of early mornings and late nights, which was definitely tiring. It was also rather strange to be travelling with the parents again - I’ve travelled a lot with Mi Yen but not as much with Mom and Dad lately, and it’s strange how much it feels like the shoe is on the other foot in terms of parenting responsibilities. Mi Yen and I spent a lot of time worrying about them: Mom was somewhat moody with Mimio for most of the trip, and Dad was particularly glued to his phone and not really present and taking in the sights and surroundings. It’s rather a callback to when I was glued to my GameBoy playing Pokemon as a kid on family trips.
posit conf (houston, tx) and some AI reflections#
PositConf has solidly become a “catching up with my R friends” thing instead of a “learning new things in R”, which is mostly because of my experience but a little more uncomfortably because of the focus has shifted towards AI and LLM-derived tooling. Where last year felt like it was 10% AI talks, this year solidly felt like 50% of the talks involved AI in some way, shape, or form. I really enjoyed Christine Zhang’s keynote about NYT data viz, and Wes McKinney’s thoughts on AI were interesting, but my overall feelings coming out of the conference felt somewhat similar to my friend Jon Harmon:
I think something that I internalized over this conf was that the people who “offload” to AI for a given project care more about the outcome of that project than they do about the craft of doing that project. I’m deeply invested in the craft of so many different things that it feels like I avoid fully offloading to AI on basically any topic. Even still, there are things I use AI for: sometimes for generating art images, sometimes for naming things, sometimes for drudgery in SQL optimizations, sometimes to interview me to help me do stuff I don’t want to do from scratch (writing peer reviews is hard!) - these are things I care more about the outcome for - moreso than the craft itself. Other people’s interests are naturally different, so the things they are willing to offload to AI are different: I’ve heard professors say they want all essays to be human written, but in the same token they’re willing to let LLMs derive the code for coding assignments. I’m a programmer at heart, so I want code to be derived by a human, but I could not be arsed to find pictures for slide decks I have to put together. It’s natural that these don’t perfectly overlap for every human in the world, but it also means that literally everyone ends up dealing with AI slop in their field, and this sucks. Probably longer form thoughts are due here.
I did have a great time hanging out with my soccer engineering squad, which is always a blessing, and also got to soft-advertise for a new ML Engineer spot on my team, which will be sorely needed soon.
dry-aging update#
I finished my first dry-aging run and it was delicious. I’ve just started on my second dry-aging now, it’s a bigger 103 rib subprimal I had special ordered from Pete and Gus’s in Barrhaven: 24 kg in all, and 34.2 lbs of which went into the dry-age setup.
volleyballing#
I’m playing setter on two inter/high-inter teams through the fall: one with Javelin friends on Tuesdays, and the other being Gerard’s team on Wednesdays. So far I’ve enjoyed playing - the Tuesday team is currently smurfing all over our opponents to an average score difference of 25-10 per set, so we’ve been trying to get moved up to a higher division. The Wednesday team is okay, the competition is stronger but I feel a bit less chemistry with them overall. Definitely a bit less likely to continue with that in the winter - might start or join a second team of Jav folks?
I’m also doing Javelin drop-ins on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which helps me maintain some flexibility in my workload and schedule.
work#
Work has been busy. Q3 is coming to an end, and we’re trying to release a fairly large update to our models, but also we’re planning out Q4 and Q1 of next year so trying to juggle project priorities and resource allocations. Also trying to hire a new engineer for the team, which in itself is a daunting prospect.
Still edging on a tiredness level that feels like burnout, and not really sure how to deal with that.