Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
In the era of mindless slop, a human paid respect to the visitors of the official Sumo site to warn us about ticket scams. Yes, the text could’ve been enslopified but is it not, it is understandable, it is clear, it is as highlighted as it could be. And worth sharing.
Sold out, watch sumo online. No tickets for you.
I’m kind of far anyway and my vacation is over.
I spent three months not working. Today is the last day of AFK, already mentally preparing to get back to work, starting tomorrow.
Automattic has this fantastic benefit that for every five years of tenure, you get a 3 month vacation that you can take all at once. You can’t split it, and you can’t work while taking it. Just sign off from everything and do whatever.
I had big plans for the sabbatical. You know, stuff I want to do, can do, busy things that would’ve eaten up most of the AFK. Thankfully, I didn’t share the big plans here, as that would’ve committed me to following up. I did a little bit of planned activities but mostly had a vacation.
My grand plan was that I’m going to master experimentation. I was under the growing feeling that something about my understanding of how experiments should run is wrong, and built myself a study plan with six books. I read four, though not four of the original six because I changed what I want to read next twice.
So, if not doing the grand plan, what did I do?
First two weeks were pure unwinding. It’s a feeling that’s really difficult to explain, I’ve had one sabbatical before and didn’t experience it. Doing any type of work is stressful and each morning, your body wakes up thinking about it, and willing to face that stress, and expend energy there. This stress accumulates and puts some permanent weight on you. Remove that and it leaves a void of some kind. The body still wakes up, ready to face the challenges of the day, but there are no challenges. So, two weeks of slowly adjusting to the feeling I don’t need to worry today. Around the end of these two weeks, I understood that my grand plan won’t happen.
What I did instead
I think the reading with kids was probably the most impactful thing I did. I feel the AI revolution is negatively affecting them, lowering the quality of the text and video they’re exposed to. Learning and improving still requires reading and understanding advanced text. Books don’t come naturally to their lives, like they did in my, when I was their age. So I’m happy that they read some books and will be a bit more prepared for their next grades.
I’m very thankful to Automattic for the Sabbatical benefit. I feel I used it well.
Back in June, I mentioned that I got a fresh pair of comfortable white shoes. This is how they look today:
Brooks Revel Max
I gave up trying to maintain the white color after about 10 days. I bought another pair (Adidas Terrex) with the intent of keeping these white, while doing the dirty things with the others, which have plastic and easy to clean top. However, the white shoes simply refused to stay white and the original color didn’t come back after washing. So rather than fighting a lost battle, I switched the pairs and did all the walks, hikes, and football with these, and kept the others for cleaner occasions. This above is the result.
The breathable mesh is significantly damaged. The sole shows signs of ungluing. The insides are still fine.
Overall, I had a good summer with these. I used them well outside of their intended purpose (running on asphalt). They were comfortable, the sole had good grip. My feet didn’t hurt, I didn’t slip, I could kick the ball. Two things I didn’t like:
I will probably keep using them as football shoes until my toes drill a hole.
The second book from the Dungeon Crawler Carl Series didn’t disappoint. Action from start to finish, with a short break for promises and explanations about the future books. I’m sure I won’t remember any of that but it was nice to know that something outside of the dungeon exists.
The plot is simple. Carl, his cat Donut, and a few friends will grind through the maze, collecting experience points, and solving quests. Nothing sophisticated. I enjoyed it so much that completed the book in one go.
5*/5
I was very surprised to find this email in my inbox today. It said my profile had been closed for spam. This got me a bit upset because the last time I logged in chess.com was in 2024 and the only way I could be spamming would be if I got hacked.
As it turned out, I included a link to my blog in the bio years ago, and the anti-spam AI flagged that link as spam. Chess.com’s support bot connected me with a human within minutes, and my account was restored almost immediately. I got a bonus diamond membership, played a few games, and realized I forgot how to play there.
It’s great that chess.com maintains nice human support. Kudos to their support engineer who got my account back. Most online services do not make it easy to reach out a to an understanding human, especially if you’re logged-out. Boo for the AI that messed everything up in the first place.
Veselin.blog 