Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
10pm is reading time. The computer has to go off. Saturday and Sunday are days with afternoon naps. The inner cat awakes in me and I sleep. This almost makes the week feel 9 days long.
Longer-time unplugs are much harder to organize and vacationing usually fills the day with activities that don’t involve work rather than unplugging.
I do, I’m old enough. The birthday of the Internet is officially 1983. I was 3 years old in 1982, a first-year kindergarten kid. My parents lived outside of Sofia because of permit issues – socialism regulated who lived where and they didn’t have permission to stay in Sofia. We lived in a rented bungalow in a village nearby that had running water but no bathroom. I was banned from visiting the toilet because my parents were afraid I’d fall in. We had flowers, trees, and a manual water pump. I remember that I ate the dandelions. The puddles had frogs. We were told touching the frogs would cause warts, so the interaction was with sticks and stones (no frogs were harmed). We had a small hill that was good for sleds in the winter. A train line was not far, and we had to walk by the tracks to reach the kindergarten.
The Web was invented in 1994, birthing a prototype of the modern Internet and many supergiant services. I was already hooked to computers by 1994. We had 8-bit computers at school, and I studied programming with Basic (ignore the first paragraph on that post). We also had computer clubs where kids could watch how other kids played, which was almost as good as playing yourself. Smoking was permitted inside so you could cut the thick gray air like cheese. I spent my summers around the chess bridge club in Stara Zagora which had 20-ish XT and 80286 computers.
Both milestones I associate with the freedom to roam around and having lots of free time away from my parents. Sofia and Stara Zagora had fewer cars, and it was considered safe to let your kid play on the street with other kids without supervision. I was allowed to go to school by myself from 1st grade when I was 6, a right my kids are deprived of by law. Culturally, we got our highs from books, VHS videos, and audio cassettes. The influencers existed but spoke from the TV, rather than social media.
I’d say, life was simpler and not necessarily better or worse. I like my hot water and inside toilet, the Macbook Air, and the WIFI but playing football every day was also great. And can we get rid of the cars? That was such a civilisation-level mistake.
I’ve made plenty of choices where I wanted two things incompatible with one another and chose one. I don’t feel like any of that was a sacrifice, I treat it as a choice.
For example, I returned to the university in my late 20s way outside of the ordinary university age because I realized I had too many gaps in my coding & engineering skills. In the following years, I combined full-time office work (with flexible hours, thanks to my former boss) with a relatively demanding education. It’d be common to leave home before 7am for a morning lecture, drive to work, work for 6-7 hours, and then go to the university for an evening session. But although physically exhausting, it felt great and I had a purpose. It was worth the effort.
I’m trying to not look at the loss after a bad choice with too much emotion when possible. The reason is primarily work. When deploying a new change, there’s always a risk that I overlooked something and caused major harm. You need to be willing to do these things despite the possible negative outcome, otherwise you won’t ever move. Many if not all of the beautiful things in life are hidden behind a wall of risk – choosing a career path, falling in love, having kids, investing. So many things can go wrong at every step. This is not a reason to stay home and not make any steps. Once things go wrong, revert (if possible), identify what’s affected, write a plan, execute, learn, and move on. This is an oversimplification taken from the software world but I believe in it.
So no sacrifices for me. Choices.
I’d love to do the countdown for an important rocket launch or be busy in the control room.
I watched the Starship attempts live and watched some of the previous milestones for SpaceX live. I always have goosebumps before the launch and enjoy words like “Nominal” and “RUD”. I enjoyed the space Roadster, the simultaneous landing of two boosters and such, even when the vehicle experienced an RUD.
Of course, rocket engineering is very far from my actual area of interest so I’d only do this for one day.
Productivity is like a flower, it needs nurturing and dies if salted. For me, the fertilizer is knowing the meaning of work, how to do it, being on a good team, and feeling enthusiasm.
I feel most productive in the mornings, late afternoons, and early evenings, and least productive after lunch.
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