Weeknote 2023 Week 9

Activity

• I spent a lot of this week laid up in bed feeling somewhat sorry for myself having caught a nasty flu/heavy cold followed by a secondary chest infection. I managed to see my GP and get some antibiotics for the chest infection, and I’m now starting to feel much better. I did manage to work one day this week (Friday) but I had to reschedule all my calls as I currently sound like some kind of sick parrot when I try to speak.
• While I was off I have mainly been reading, watching X-Files and playing video games:
  • I purchased and started playing Atomic Heart - I was drawn in by the world building and premise but after about 4 hours I was put off by the unlikeable protagonist and the weird sexual undertones of the whole game (actually it’s pretty overt: overtones?). It inspired me to go back and replay Bioshock.
  • I put another big dent in Dyson Sphere Project which is probably one of my favourite games of all time. It’s a factory builder like Factorio but it has beautiful graphics and a more peaceful environment (for now at least, the developers are working on adding an optional combat mode to the game to be released later this year).
  • I watched most of X-Files season 6. I miss the seasons from the early/mid nineties which made America feel big and isolated (due to a lack of mobile phones and other such technology) but it’s still entertaining. I am enjoying both the “monster of the week” and the overall mythology/arc of the series.
  • I’ve been reading and making notes about Why Has Nobody Told Me This Before? which details some practical tips for dealing with anxiety from a practicing clinical psychologist. Some of the stuff I have heard before but there are some interesting gems in there that I’ve found helpful. #ImWorriedSick
• I haven’t written any new blog posts this week as I’ve been too under the weather but I have some new ideas that I’m collecting.
• Tomorrow we’re off to see comedian Jon Richardson at the local theatre. Jon reminds me a bit of me in that he’s an anxious millenial and a lot of his jokes are about exactly that. It should be a good gig.

Interesting Links

• Cleanlab whose open source product we use a lot for checking data quality at work wrote a blog post about a new offering they’ve published called ActiveLab which provides a really nice clean interface for accelerated data annotation via active learning. I might blog more about my experience of using this tool once I get my hands on it.
• A report shows that nearly 40% of software engineers want to work fully remotely. A number of trusted sources have been predicting that this will become a trend for a little while now. I share the view that Companies that put remote first will win the war for top talent.
• This week Valve shipped an update that enables ray tracing on steamdeck. I haven’t tried it yet but it looks pretty interesting. That said in order to get ray tracing to work, you apparently have to sacrifice performance in other areas so I’m not too sure if it’ll be worth it. I might give it a go for “lulz”.

Next week

• Next week I’m hoping to be back at work in full capacity, I need to prepare for a talk on using NLP to extract information from scientific papers that I’m delivering to the University of Manchester’s NLP interest group the following week.
• I’m no longer contagious so I’m hoping to get out and about a bit more.