Tag: writing

My three-month sabbatical

~ Veselin ~ 13 Comments

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

  • Played football with my kids.
  • Went to Musala (twice) and Vihren with my family, three successful summits.
  • Had joint reading sessions with the kids. As a result, the little one read six books about the Ninja boy, and is at the end of Alice. The big one read the Dungeon Crawler Carl 1 & 2, and most of the Three Musketeers.
  • Did math classes with the kids. Little one understood some of the second and third grade math and got stuck with text problems. Big one went over most of the material for his next grade. Not sure how much he understood, but I feel like we both improved.
  • Kept walking, kept doing pull ups almost daily.
  • Watched lots of YouTube. I now know how engines are disassembled, how to solve higher degree polynomial math problems, and a lot more about local AI setups. I watched a guy repair a Bugatti, and another one waste endless hours to online scammers, and a third guy fix broken video cards.
  • Visited my parents more often.

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.

Best purchase ever

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments
Daily writing prompt
What is the best purchase you have ever made?
View all responses

I try to not get too attached to items and keep them replaceable.

I grew up in an environment when we couldn’t really own anything expensive. One day, my parents brought home beautiful fake adidas pants with three stripes (I think it was abidas or something like that). I went out with it and a kid pushed me down during play (probably on purpose) so my pants got torn. I learned by that mistake and the next fancy thing (a sweather) my parents brought, I didn’t wear at all. Then there was a birthday party and I wanted to put it on, and it was already too small. I outgrew it. So that didn’t work either.

Later in life, I had a chance to experience shopping stuff I need and want, I need and don’t want, I want but don’t need, and even stuff I neither wanted or needed. I it was around my mid-30s when I established some stable principles and conclusions about purchases.

  • The satisfaction you get from a new car and from a new book is not too far out but the car is far more expensive
  • Storage space is a limiting factor for the things you want but don’t need. Space management requires a good sense of minimalism. Once you learn how to throw away things, you get attached to items even less and no longer buy as much as before
  • You can’t be cheap on stuff you’ll use for work, and some of the hardware that frequently fails, I keep fallbacks. I have multiple backup glasses, some kept at specific locations, multiple headphones, countless chargers, cables, connectors, a battery that can recharge my computer and so on.

So with this philosophy, the items I buy are replaceable. Even my book collection is fluid, with a constant outflow of books that get donated.

If I can nominate one item that was life changing and at the same time inexpensive and easily replaceable, that’s my Apple Watch. It keeps me walking.

Some insights from Sabine Hossenfelder’s book Lost in Math

~ Veselin ~ 5 Comments

I’m reading the book Lost in Math by the famous Youtube content creator and scientist Sabine Hossenfelder.

The author shares stories around a common theme – beauty shouldn’t be an argument in science. According to Sabine Hossenfelder, scientists have the tendency to chase beautiful ideas and dismiss hacky, unnatural solutions that explain the world very well due to their ugliness. She gives the heliocentric model as an example. Scientists from the past had difficulties accepting that stars are as far as we know they are because the numbers were too large, which felt unnatural. I’m encountering this type of problems relatively often, with beauty being used as an argument for expensive ideas, for example new standards, or second systems / rewrites.

Who could’ve imagined that this is where I’ll find cues on my quest on figuring out web experimentation (yeah, I’ve not blogged about that, but maybe it’s a good moment to start). I’ll just share two quotes.

…you could go most of your life without having to confront [the results of an] experiment”

Apparently, physicists sometimes run experiments that take a really long time, like decades. For example, particle accelerators that are expecting to produce a new particle in decades, meanwhile postponing decision making and facing the realities of known models not producing the expected results. In my world, where experiments are run on web, I’ve also encountered long-running web experiments. Usually because the sample size is small or because we expect some distant future event to happen, which never comes.

“If you are an honest physicist, 99.99 percent of your ideas, even good ideas, are going to be ruled out, not by new experiments but already by inconsistency with old experiments.”

Same applies to web experimentation as well, although the share is probably not 99.99% (as it isn’t for theoretical physics either). Verifying ideas against prior experiments can filter out many of them quickly. But there’s always the problem – does that old experiment still apply even if we ran it X years ago? What if something in the setup was wrong and it works now?

This book touches my chords despite being unrelated to my work. Something in the area of process is overlapping. I don’t know why yet but I’ll keep reading.

What Level of AI Use Is Okay for a Blog Post?

~ Veselin ~ 12 Comments

I spend part of my day reading posts and I catch myself developing an allergy to AI slop. At the same time, AI is right into the editor, and attempts to change every word I write incorrectly. So not using it would be foolish. Here’s my gut feeling about what’s fine and what isn’t.

Not Fine

  • Copy/pasting any direct results of a prompt. It deserves a separate post why that’s not fine but for now, it’s a form of bad taste.
  • Any form of GenAI images. They were fun for a little bit. Now, they are just a way to state that the post is AI slop.
  • Let AI change the meaning of content when improving. AI tends to flip the meaning when doing subtle improvements.
  • Engine-oriented titles. If I’m the reader, I want text oriented for humans, not engines. The engines can burn some more CPU and figure it out.
  • Letting AI remove complex words, slang, puns, and emotion. Too much uniformity doesn’t improve readability, it sterilizes the text.
  • Emoji. Thanks to ChatGPT, emoji are like peanuts in a text.

Fine

  • Syntax, clarity, and feedback. AI can help improve the structure and readability the text.
  • Improve individual sentences. I tend to write long sentences and use unconfident words (examples from my post below). Funny that it uses the word unconfident but asks me to remove the word unconfident.
  • Research. Copy/pasting the body of a post to ChatGPT sometimes help find stuff I missed and fact checks. Particularly useful for book reviews.
  • SEO improvements, as long as it doesn’t change the meaning of the content.

Overall, when I catch excessive AI use, I feel an ick about the text. If it feels AI generated entirely, zero chance that I’ll read it.

February In Books

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

I purchased lots of books in February but only read eight. The two best were the two that had been stuck on my unread shelves for months, if not years. I read them to clear space for other books and was pleasantly surprised.

Best

  1. The Fifth Season by N. K. Jemisin – I have to admit I purchased that because the book cover was pretty. The book itself was written in a strange way but it stuck and I think it was the best for the month, although the competition is close. The volcanic Earth where humans can cause earthquakes and volcanic eruptions is quite memorable.
  2. The Wisdom of Crowds by Joe Abercrombie – Abercrombie delivers a lot more of the same in both good and bad sense. The Wisdom of Crowds is mind-blowing but also 750-ish pages, 250 longer than the necessary to be my top pick for the month. Savine dan Glokta doesn’t disappoint.
  3. Nettle & Bone by T. Kingfisher – an excellent short fantasy with a simple idea and a complex magical system about domestic violence, curses, and fairy godmothers. Although a fantastic book and a clear 5*/5, the other two were more impressive. I’ll happily read other works by the same author.

Worst

  • Extremis by Barry Eisler – I gave it 4/5, 2 weeks later I’m ready to adjust it to a solid 3. It was clear what will happen from the first page, and it happened in a slow motion.
  • Operation Star Guest by Lubomir Nikolov – I read the flying saucer book from this post but unlike the other books by the same author, which I frequently award with 5*, this came as sloppy and rushed. We are on a mission to find a flying saucer and contact an alien civilization. What do we do? Worry about food because we didn’t pack any and how to start fire. Yeah, no.

Overall, a good month for reading with a total of 8, five of which got five stars.