Update: 20260315 - Another proof of concept in the wild.
It seems like everybody else is either saying that LLM technology is either true artificial intelligence and we should all bow down to it (it is not, and fuck that noise) and we'd best get used to it, or that it's going to destroy everything and we'd best get used to it (it's not but some mornings it feels that way). Plenty of people with more going on than I do have litigated this to hell and back, marketing companies are doing marketing company things, and frankly I don't care to …
Windbringer's internal clock tells me that, as I write this the calendar date is 27 December 2025. To be honest, I kind of lost track of the date just before Christmas of this year. Everything started blurring together around that time, in part because it had been raining so much in California and in part because my schedule - my usual sense of how things are supposed to happen - no longer exists. I'm still searching for a new job and while I might have one or two leads I have no details. Plus, hanging one's hat on a single option is …
If you haven't been paying attention to social media lately (and for the sake of your mental health, I hope you haven't - ye gods, the world...) I got laid off in the last week of October without warning. A not entirely unprecedented early morning meeting rapidly turned into being told that my position was being eliminated, effective immediately. This was immediately followed by my work laptop and phone factory resetting themselves, while I was in the middle of typing a "so long and thanks for all the fish" message to my now-ex-cow-orkers. 1 So …
It's been a bit since I've checked in with everyone.
About a week after my last post I found out that I'd been moved back to day shift at work. Through a miscommunication I found this out the hard way, which is to say right after logging in one evening my boss wanted to know where I'd been all day. Long story short, I used the entire week to slowly wind my sleep schedule back to normal, getting up an hour earlier and going to bed an hour earlier every day until I was back on day shift. It didn't …
The inherent instability of working night shift aside, I've been pretty busy straightening up my life by straightening up my usual environment. Therapy cleaning, if you will.
To avoid recapping the last couple of years, after my mom died I shipped a large number of shipping crates of stuff (paperwork, research, data storage, and a large volume of family pictures dating back several decades). All of that stuff had to go somewhere, so much of it was stacked up in my office, where I spend much of my time because I work from home these days. Now and then in …
Compared to how things have been going lately, things... haven't changed much, really. I'm still on night shift at work and it looks like I will be for another couple of weeks; September at the earliest. There's a lot going on right now and things aren't in place yet. That's about all I'm in a positin to talk about, and all I really know. Everything involved in that happens during the day, and I work a good twelve hours after all of that (which is also after everybody clocks out for the day and goes to bed). So there isn't …
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that I'd had some emergency dental surgery that involved some reconstructive work. And I was in the hospital a few weeks after that (which I haven't written about but might later) for something unrelated. Another thing I didn't write about was what happened after I got out of the hospital. But let's take those in order.
For starters, a few days ago as I write this I went back in for x-rays to see how my jaw is healing. The bone graft the surgeon did looks pretty good but it's not fully consolidated …
Not even on fumes, mind you. Entirely unpowered and moving by momentum alone.
I'd say that 2024 has been a hell of a year, but I don't have to tell you that. If you've been paying attention at all to everything going on chances are you're feeling a mixture of dread, resignation, frustration, and most of all weariness. Bone-deep tiredness, and you can feel each and every one of your cells marinating in it. Or possibly frying like a whole turkey in peanut oil. But trauma dumping is Not A Thing We Are Allowed To Do, so I'm going to …
I'm still around and kicking, just taking it easy (or as easy as feasible right now). As I write this, we're well into March and I'm trying to be gentle with myself - not forcing writing if I can't string words together (which is annoying when ideas come in the shower), not really looking for anything specific to do, just letting things unfold for a while. I don't have any big projects lined up, nor am I looking for any (I do, actually, but it's going to be one of those "pick at it off and on for a while" kind …
As I write this, it's just shy of the end of 2023.ev. I'm now up and around and functional enough actually think about writing. Not because of any New Year's festivities, unfortunately.
If you guessed that I caught covid-19 in December, you'd be right.
I went on travel for a week for work in December, which is probably when I was exposed. It might've been at work, it might've been at the hotel (where, during that week, two wedding receptions and four holiday parties were held), for all I know it might've been at the airport when the TSA …
