Home Archive Trilium Notes About

Triage

Posted on 2018-03-21

I am tired and feel like I shouldn’t go to sleep yet. The Soylent thing has been working only very very slowly. I assume the first few days were just losing the contents of my bowels and now I just want to keep it up. Maybe in the hope that it will remove the habit of snacking when I feel stressed/bad.

The thing about feeling stressed at work has gotten a little bit better. But somehow I don’t feel that much like I’m winning.

Tomorrow a pretty useful thing would be to wake up reasonably early, then ~8 hours of work. I could really use some emotional support. Something’s wrong, actually a bunch of things feel wrong. I feel lonely. I don’t want to be fat. Work sucks and looks like my attempts to hoist myself into an AI safety, or at least AI-related position might fall flat. I might have reached beyond what I am currently good enough for.

I guess the last part feels pretty close to it. Work sucks. If I could do anything with my life, I would do X. Solve for X.

My feelings about it are, … I feel like I kind of grew up with the implicit assumption that work matters. Like, when you are the best at school or at work, people will like you and you will be happy. I want to feel, …, okay? loved? like, I want to cry about how hard and painful things are. Speaking of which, dental pain sucks.

So what’s so painful. First answer is “the fact that I feel I don’t have anyone to cry to”. (At this time. Growth mindset I guess.) I guess compared with that the other things which come up are much lesser. Actually maybe not. I also feel that I have no idea where I’m running, but I’m running there as fast as I can. And stopping where I am, or even the entire idea of stopping, feels dangerous and scary and I don’t want that.

Huh. It would be pretty funny if the function of snacking was to make this cluster of things not hurt. On the other hand, I might still be in the period where going off SSRI’s can do funny chemical things to your head, so there’s that. I guess there might be some fancy antidepressant I could start on to make me itch less right now, but would I want this to stop itching? Maybe not medicating it and not trying to shut it down might be good signal to do something differently…

With that off my chest, it’s still almost midnight and I feel like there are things I should be doing tomorrow. I have a pretty good idea of work things that need doing.

Things on my mind are:

Feeling of having to come up with more stuff.

Huh. Does it? It feels like it makes me bad, though S2 would publicly say it doesn’t. I also feel tired so probably not gonna IDC on that… Bookmark I guess.

I’m probably not going to reach a point of “yeah I have a plan for tomorrow and it’s a plan which totally resonates”, because I’m pretty tired.

Okay.

Let’s also put some things into Complice. Record weight, eat just Soylent. (Hmm. My calendar reminders are also getting a bit unwieldy. Maybe cancel some of them. Or reevaluate why they’re there. Or start behaving by them…?)

Get the goddamn batteries. And while I’m getting the goddamn batteries, also get some (goddamn) laundry detergent. And check out what other things I’m missing. Lowest-effort way to do that would be coop’s delivery service to the Google office. Yeah, sure, that sounds good.

My room is again slowly becoming a mess. That felt good fixing last time, let’s add that.

Feeling of having to do more.

Okay, when I’m home, I’m going to try to write some Python code that will run in Kubernetes on Google’s cloud to download a dump of Wikipedia for my master’s thesis. Oh, also, I might be able to download it in chunks so it doesn’t have to be loaded into the backing store (probably some kind of BigTable or whatever) in a single thread.

Actually let’s change around my Complice goals, too.

I should also make plans for Easter break. Not sure about what’s the deliverable for that. There’s a bunch of ways I could spend Easter. Baseline, lounging around in Prague chatting with friends. Working intensely on my master’s thesis. (That sounds good in some way.)

Triage done? Argh doesn’t feel entirely like it. I should also make some better plans for one of my partners visiting Zurich.

Itch. But well, I guess this triage will do. The parts which are most important on it are keeping on track with not overeating or snacking, and making some progress on the thesis.

Part of me feels like this is just not enough. Just getting that one Kubernetes script done in one day? Hah, don’t make me laugh. At this rate, you’ll be stumbling around at roughly the same spot in the thesis until time runs out.

Oh, and also, I want to some day go and implement a bunch of ML papers so I can learn TensorFlow and get the confidence to say “I can write AI”. That might actually have higher priority than the master’s thesis, if I were to only care about getting a job in AI.

Sigh. 3, 2, 1, chaaaaaaaarge, and let’s go to sleep. And if we can’t, maybe we can try to probe this “nothing is enough” thing.