Early Morning Car To Georgia

There is A Lot That I Can’t Talk About this week, so instead, a preview of next week. In seven days, I will wake up, get dressed and showered, and then get into my car for a seven hour drive to Atlanta. I could fly. Work will absolutely pay for that, I swear. But last time I flew to Atlanta, I got so sick that I spent all week in the hotel room (when I wasn’t throwing up in Target) and then got stuck overnight in Charlotte. I am not going through all that again, so the fewer people I meet on the trip down, the better. And also, there’s Cook Out. This cannot be understated - there’s one just off I-75 as I get into the outskirts of Atlanta, and so I must go.

When I’ve told people of this plan, there’s a certain split. Americans cock their head at the drive time and then say “ah, that’s not that bad.” British people look at me as if I have completely lost my mind, given that it’s a longer trip than London to Edinburgh. But don’t worry! I will be bringing snacks. Of course, I normally load my iPad up with a host of British television the 1970s and 1980s for the plane ride…and while I can do that again, it’s probably not the best idea to try and watch any of it during the trip¹. So…podcasts? But I’m not really a podcast person. Seven hours of “Ian’s old ‘walk to Activision’ playlist from 2011”? That is somewhat more likely.

(I did look into going via train as well. Obviously, that just sent me into a spiral of “look at all the train lines China has built in the past 30 years!!” after seeing the Amtrak schedule)

I will also try and test my all-new remote posting set up next weekend, allowing me for the first time in over 10 years to post without out my personal laptop. Less exciting for all of you to be getting updates from Buc’ees, mind you…

Neighbours and Heavy Plant

One thing I continue to find amusing, almost eight years to the day that I moved to Cincinnati, is that I can be in the middle of Kroger and get a call from the Mayor. Admittedly, a former mayor (though seemingly a popular one!), and he’s only phoning me because he’s my next-door neighbour and one of our visitors has left their tailgate down, but it’s definitely somewhat unique to where I’m living now.

(Other neighbour interaction of the week — the one who came around, invited us to her church, and then politely asked if we were running a daycare. It’s the Melissa and Doug grocery shop that’s visible from our windows, isn’t it? That and the massive adventure playground in the back garden, I guess…)

And then the other big thing of the weekend. Tammy is amazing. She’s the person that sees the retaining wall go up with a small digger and thinks “that would be really useful to have to level out the back garden and clear the hill.” And then the next day: “Oh, they’ll be dropping it off on Thursday.” From never having even touched one of them before, in the matter of a week, she’s got a hard hat on and tearing the hill down. There’s now straw down, grass growing, an adventure playground moved into a brand-new and perfect position, and the sense of a garden coming together. I’ve already told Maeryn I’ll be teaching her French Cricket soon enough.

Daddy, Can I Have an Adventure?

Honestly, I don’t know who could say no to a three-year old saying that. I couldn’t, anyway. That’s why, after making chocolate cornflake nests for the first time¹, it was time for an…adventure! Though an adventure in an understated manner, as I hadn’t really slept and didn’t think I could do an awful lot. And so it was that I searched for adventure playgrounds and again stumbled onto one of the weird things about the USA: for all its failings (and yes, as we can clearly see right now, there are a lot), it is bloody good at libraries and adventure playgrounds. We’re talking swings, two different sheltered areas, a Teletubbies/That Black Hole Episode of Blue artificial hill area with tunnels and slides, a separate toddler area complete with playhouse, fake small rock wall, zip line, instrument corner, a three-level adventure playground…and a maze. Yeah, just a small maze they seemed to drop in for fun. And working toilets! All less than a ten minute drive from the house and completely new to all of us. Needless to say, fun was had, and Maeryn was able to tell Mummy when she came in that she’d had an adventure.

In fact, it was a bit of an Adventure Saturday, because Tammy and I went out for a birthday/anniversary dinner with a sneaky trip to Jungle Jim’s afterwards. The Corner Dumpling House does indeed do very good dumplings…though we were. A touch sad that the sesame noodles had been pulled off the menu to make room for…Cincinnati chilli noodles. The type of fusion that justly starts wars. Also, I’d forgotten that JungleJim’s imports British Easter eggs during the season, but that actually worked in my favour for once as I walked out of there with a £15 egg for $9.

As for today, there was a Costco visit and no gardening while MAeryn has her afternoon nap. Just a good simple weekend. That’ll do.

Benefits of a classical education

The surveyors has rendered their verdict…and that is: the garden is about twice as large as we thought it was. I am apparently incapable of buying a house in this country without a huge garden. Right now, it’s just going to be extra grass for Maeryn to play on, but let’s not kid ourselves that I’m not having Grand Designs thoughts and looking at Dezeen for concrete ideas. Don’t worry, I won’t need an architect!

Ooooh, look at this…

I spent a good half-hour standing in the middle of my new domain, working out where the stilts and cantilever would go…and then I came to my senses a little and thought about where we could place a bench where we could sit whilst Maeryn plays. That feels a bit more realistic, but also great in its own way.

One Week Later

Soft Play is a lie. My bruises, cuts, and scrapes attest to this. Also, Maeryn as a three-year-old does care one little bit if daddy is afraid of heights, we are going right to the top and the biggest slides. And when we get down, we will shout “Again!” and run back up.

Anyway, a relatively successful week of solo parenting, I think…although I played on easy mode by Maeryn still going to daycare three days of the week and my work not minding too much that I had to take Friday off because she was under the weather, but we had a good time, went shopping, got registered at the library, and went down many slides. Plus, she now has a new grocery checkout toy so she can pretend to be on the till (spoilers: she’s very bad at it, having committed multiple counts of theft in just one afternoon).

All that being said, I did enjoy a lie-in this morning…

Now We Are Three

Well, not quite, but it’s a long weekend of celebrating Maeryn’s third birthday. She asked for red cake with sprinkles and so she got as much food dye added into a Momofuku Milk Bar birthday cake recipe that I could risk, as well as little red cakes coated in a wd~50-style strawberry glaze. “It tastes like strawberry fake skin!” — my PR school is available for hire for desserts, Christmas parties, and plunging the world into another polycrisis.

Anyway, a quiet but fun birthday celebration was had on Saturday. Cake, presents, and people. The most popular present so far is the Intro To Capitalism 101, or the Melissa and Doug Vending Machine. Although it does have a small flaw that the buttons work without needing money to be fed into its slots…

Last week, I fretted about a rather worrying week of AI usage. This week, I finished writing an agent harness to do the research without me, presented it to the entire company on Thursday, and am now about 80% through the arxiv paper write-up¹. And I slept better!

It’s going to be something of an odd week. In a reversal from our usual pattern, Tammy is out for a week. Only four hours away and in the same time-zone, but it means a lot more to-ing and fro-ing from daycare than I’m normally used to during the working week. It’ll be fine though; Maeryn and I are both taking time off tomorrow to celebrate her birthday by joining the library and eating our first mini eggs. Well, her first mini egg, anyway…I have definitely lost count…

The Dangers Of The AI Casino

So you were supposed to get a long tech blog this week. I actually have it sitting here on my hard drive, with diagrams, metrics, and even a fairly solid mathematical foundation. Plus a solid pun linking that foundation to a 1980s British novelty band. Alas, when diving into things in just a little more details, I discovered that my new fancy hybrid fusion scoring system…basically cancelled down to ZMUV from 2001. Which is a fine fusion operator, to be sure…but can I write an entire blog post on it with Black Lace GIFs? No, I cannot.

It actually became something of an obsession this week; I have tested over 50 different fusion operators in the past week, looking at runs close to and past midnight, pushing Claude to just do another run after parking in the daycare car park, and feeling guilty the one night where I didn’t run any experiments. It is a bit of a slippery slop(e) in this Brave New World, and I haven’t quite yet found the right balance. On the other hand, I have empirically proved that the squashing function we use at work (and invented in 2022) is excellent.

(as I write this, I’m building an evaluation MCP service, so it’s not like I’ve heeded any warnings properly yet, either¹)

Anyway, next week, there will be less computing. For one thing, I have to make a cake. “Red cake. Red is my favourite colour” So Maeryn will be getting the reddest cake anybody has ever seen, complete with small cakes encapsulated in a strawberry carrageenan glaze inspired by a former New York pastry chef. And maybe an icee. Because I might have problems dialing it back.

Tired, sLeepy

If you need somebody to cheer you up, I can heartily recommend a toddler getting out of the car, running straight for your door yelling ‘Daddy!’ at the top of her voice.

This week, I have been learning just how much it costs to replace about 100 linear feet of retaining wall. And the answer is…a considerable amount. For that sort of price, they could boardform it, right? Right?

Kevin from Grand Designs sucks in his teeth

Hello, Joshua

Something of an existentialist crisis this weekend. I’m reading some papers in the (parked) car, while Maeryn is taking her afternoon nap. I feel like there’s some potential in ideas from one paper back to the LEAf work I was doing over Christmas, so I open Claude up to build a skeleton implementation. As it does this, it throws up this message as it’s thinking:

“But Doctor, I am Pagliacci”

(oddly, my skeet on that went semi-viral in the Bluesky AI community, which was fun. Given the other horrors of February 28th, it was a nice distraction)

It has been…a week. A month, yes, but oh, a week. Work by itself has been a rollercoaster of good news, bad news, indifferent news, news that changes as the hours tick by…that sort of thing. So, no, none of the things I thought I’d be writing about this month happened; I had a very early night on Thursday instead of going out, the house has remained in a state of disarray (including an awkwardly placed pork fat container which hung around like Chekov’s gun all week until it finally went off on Saturday)…and let’s just say we’re all glad to see the back of February.

So, March now. Maeryn’s birthday is almost upon us! I am still trying to work out just how to get her the “RED CAKE!” she has requested. What shape is it going to be? Do I just dye the batter red and leave it like that, or do we do something more involved? Should I do a big red cake and little red cakes? Could I use Alex Stupak’s encapsulation method for glazing? Or just reuse the one I did for the DIE cake a few years back? Oh, the decisions…

Trolls And Scissors

We have reached another milestone in toddler development. Maeryn has decided on the first film that she likes watching all the way through and is excited to watch over and over.

Unfortunately, it’s Trolls.

I suppose there are worse things; it’s not Frozen, and I was at least pleased to see that although Russell Brand is one of the trolls, he’s the one that sells everybody else out in a heel turn halfway through the film. Exiting The Bergen’s Castle perhaps at some point considered a subtitle. Anyway, Maeryn is not to be told that there are sequels.

We have also discovered the delights of scissors and scissor books. Which did mean I spent a god hour picking tiny bits of paper off the floor…but by the end of the weekend, she could cut out a frog without cutting said frog in two most of the time. Although I have had to reassemble many animals with tape along the way…