What are you doing this week?

I just made the leap from ~20 years of engineering and tech to teaching public high school programming. Last week was our first week back and I am just trying to keep my head above water. This week, kicking off three different AP compsci classes. I just couldn’t deal with the horrible confluence of forced LLM usage and corporate culture anymore, so time to pursue some other dreams!

Staying far away from work and the computer by spending one week in the beatiful Estonian capital, Tallinn and its surroundings.

It is quite a change of pace compared to Budapest, in no small part because Estonia as a whole has less people than that city.

Enjoying the 3d weekend for the US, then prepping tasks and logistics and other code-based prep work for taking a small team to Reykjavik the following week for an offsite work week!

Canadian amateur radio operator exam (Basic) on Thursday - so far passing all the practice tests with 85+! Studied "hard" for about 2 months, but before that, I had to retry actually starting studying many times throughout the past year (starting with regulations is bo-ring). Already got my sights on the VE2LKF callsign :D (my name as initials). Could be cool to start a lobste.rs HF digital radio club...

Trying to finish up an article on "AI" too (in quotations, because it's more general than just AI). This is writing from a historical approach, trying to understand my current feelings and how the people of the past felt and how we may need to continue shifting our feelings on the matter. No AI was used in the writing of it in any capacity, and I say that to give respect to my readers and demonstrate great effort that went into the piece and hopefully the words will retain their weight.

I'm about to head out for a long bike ride since we have a 3 day weekend Labor Day weekend.

Tomorrow is back to work, and I'm going to look at some bugs in our Catia importer.

For work:

I am working on a b2b prototype for Thetix (https://thetix.ai) with a design partner. Also trying to have conversations with more folks. Better have conversations than spend time building something nobody wants.

For fun/research:

I am building a shared workspace feature for Abject (https://abject.world) so that a team of people can share a workspace and work on a shared project.

I'm also working on two different kind of coding agents, both testing different werid ideas. One is uslmax which builds off my blog here (https://blog.mempko.com/a-million-kakapos/). The other is called turboagent which is testing another wacky idea (I'll open source if it turns out it's not crap). Also uses Raku (https://raku.org/) which is a bit strange.

been spinning the wheels in my head about an essay about broader cultural trends due to LLMs, with reference to the really thought provoking book Otaku: Japan's Database Animals by Hiroki Azuma. Roughly something about how the customer-facing chatbots are "database replicants", reassembling culture out of preexisting parts in a way that is appealing to database animals... Or something like that.

Otherwise, getting back into writing Haskell after doing zero programming for the past two years. Finishing up Pnin probably, maybe starting in on some Faulkner if my LoA order comes in... Or Libra by Delillo which has been calling my name for months.