I’ve been in my brain a lot recently. This is by design: I’ve got things I want to learn and think about, and it’s been rewarding and fun. But the impact on my mental and physical health has been stark. I go to bed with a full head, and wake up with an immediate desire to scroll on my phone until something makes me get out of bed. Self-care has felt hard.
This is pretty much how I spent—and wanted to spend—my teens and twenties. It’s how I managed to self-build a pretty great career out of nothing. I was also seriously depressed. Did being up in my head so much enable me to build this career? Probably more than is good to admit. I don’t think I regret it: I enjoyed it, I think I have done good work, and I have profited from it. But I could have given myself more credit and care for doing that to myself.
One of the main things my brain is spending cycles on is continuing to properly catch up on the Large Language Model news of the last few years. I’ve been wallowing and ruminating and tinkering with the different models and techniques. Putting aside the hype and very reasonable questioning of their value, they are really interesting. I enjoy how repeatedly counter-intuitive they are. It’s fun, and as Simon Willison says: often quite funny.
As a customer of LLMs, I got access to Copilot Workspace this week. I made an issue to remove the broken comments feature from this blog. It did it perfectly first try. So that worked.
OK, so… all of the above is me mitigating the fact that I spent Saturday afternoon in a David Lloyd. There’s nothing interesting to say about that. But it was good, my skin looks great, and it was perfect after all of that braining.
My mental and physical health was so rubbish that I failed to make it to LRUG on Monday, and the Interesting Do on Tuesday. Both things I would have loved to have gone to.
But I did go and see my school-friends The Skints on their unplugged tour. I hadn’t seen them live since they headlined Koko in 2013. That gig was when it was clear that they didn’t need my support any more, and I’m just loitering around while my friends were working. This gig felt very grown up. I liked it.
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