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…

Coding Fatigue

There’s a bunch of articles going around about AI burnout and how this New World of Claude may not be all it’s cracked up to be, which is mostly summed up by this skeet from Camille Fournier, about a manager’s lot:

The part of "everyone becomes a manager" in AI that I didn't really think about until now was the mental fatigue of context switching and keeping many tasks going at once, which of course is one of the hardest parts of being a manager and now you all get to enjoy it too

— Camille Fournier (@skamille.themanagerswrath.com) February 10, 2026 at 8:30 PM

This week, I have run 25 experiments, all trying to both replicate and improve upon one particular embedding paper, sometimes staying up beyond 11pm to get the most recent results and kick off my next idea, have designed a tvOS app that’ll work with my local NAS and an NFC reader in an attempt to reduce the slop that Maeryn is exposed to (the debasement of “We’re Going On A Bear Hunt” on YouTube is what pushed me towards this), and have already formulated new model training plans that will likely take up the rest of February. On top of actual work, and you know, spending time with Tammy and Maeryn. I still haven’t put the earlier projects I did anywhere near deployment, as there’s always something else to be tinkering with.

Token Anxiety

i think i mostly echo this for myself. with so much that can be done, i often feel like i should be doing something, always

[image or embed]

— Tim Kellogg (@timkellogg.me) February 15, 2026 at 6:44 AM

(the important thing is that I am not quite at this point, though I will say I did make time this morning to kick off a new run of a refactored LEAF trainline pipeline this morning while I was having breakfast. But you’ll pry my books from my cold dead hands)

Anyway, aside from a few mountains dotted around here and there, the snow is mostly gone. The solar panels have stopped complaining and started producing power again. Now I just need to see if the retaining wall got damaged even further under the weight of all the snow…but it’s basically beyond salvaging, so I don’t think it’ll really matter in the grand scheme of things.

In-between starting this post and finishing it, the first skeet has become a flashpoint for anti-AI quotes, and even one of my ex-bosses became the main character on BlueSky for a good hour or two. It’s incredibly annoying as I watch people share blatant lies and slip into 9/11 conspiracies, or just infuriating when I read an article about When The Wind Blows that dismisses the characters’ memories about the Blitz as lying to themselves. I don’t know why this bothers me so much, but it does; I have read retelling after retelling of people’s time during WWII…and yes, quite a lot of them had thrilling times. Ignorant Americans trying to rewrite history that isn’t even their own. No, this doesn’t have anything to do with AI per se, just that the people that apparently can’t even read and understand sarcasm also have a tendency to share those things. As well as getting deeper and deeper into a conspiracy mindset that feels like it is going to end up re-inventing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion but from a leftist perspective.

And now I should probably stop subtweeting half of the internet and go to bed.

60-A-Day Cough

Most of the illnesses seem to have faded away now, but I still have a cough that sounds like it is has been sponsored by John Player Special (Number 666).

The temperature will go above zero tomorrow; after two weeks of -20ºC at night and snow everywhere, I am beyond ready for the melting. It has been such a long time since I have seen grass.

Anyway, with things thawing out, I have to start thinking about the rest of the month and also next month…which means it is time to begin planning for Maeryn’s birthday cake! I don’t have much to go on, but our enthusiastic cake expert has demanded “red cake”. Which means this technique will probably be involved at some point but beyond that, I am still trying to think of everything from shape to flavour…still, over a month to go right now.

More exciting updates next week!

End of January

Quite frankly, I am very sick of being sick. I have spent most of January completely wrecked, hanging onto work with my fingernails, shivering in bed at 8pm, running out of breath simply by standing up, waking everybody up with loud uninterrupted coughing, and you know, just generally being miserable. Let us hope that February is slightly better.

I do have a bunch of things to talk about next month, but only because they didn’t get finished this month and so Claude and I have to take them with me to Shrove Tuesday; one of them is a project I’ve been tinkering with for eight years that Claude cut through a Gordian Knot in under five minutes, and the other is something that came out of watching Eno last year. If I can get either of them to a demoable stage, we’ll have another fun walkthrough. If not, then you can all wait until March.

It’s snowing again. It wasn’t content with being -20ºC this morning, it is now snowing once more. Not a fan. Although seeing a half-frozen Ohio River from the bridge you’re driving over is an interesting sight. It’s not going to stay cold enough for it to freeze completely for the first time since 1977-8 , but it’s going to come close…

If you sent me an email in January…you might get a reply in February…