Category: General

I delved back into the world of Stable Diffusion yesterday, this time to focus on training models. I did not have success. Just trying to figure out how to run Dreambooth was confounding. I tried running it locally as well as in Colab, but a nebulous web of commands and dependencies meant that my first couple attempts were a waste.

Running these training models takes several hours, so trial and error here is monumentally slow. And compatibility with the M1 Mac is a bit difficult as well. I almost wish I still had my six-GPU mining machine to run these models against. Oh, well I’ll have to try again next week. I spent way to much time working on this instead of doing what I was supposed to do yesterday, so I’ll need to see what I can do without tying myself up all day.

So I got paid this morning, which is good. I am only really planning on one more paycheck at my normal salary, then it’ll probably be cut significantly until 23Q2. I’m trying to plan accordingly.

I just had this thought last night:

If FTX really did some data destruction and deleted customer trade history just think how fucked taxes are going to be.

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) November 15, 2022

There was a Tweet going around over the weekend, when it looked like FTX’s internal systems were compromised, and people were saying to delete the FTX app. I did, as I don’t use it anyways, and I couldn’t login. Then another Tweet came out saying not to delete it because FTX was trying to destroy evidence. So sometime last night as I was trying to fall asleep, my brain went WHAT ABOUT TAXES?!

Anyone who deposited funds on FTX could reasonably claim that all funds were lost. I deposited thousands via ACH, and I still have those records. Most of my friends were doing the same and using FTX for custody, so they’ve got a total loss.

Part of my anxiety was the realization that I have no idea what my tax burden is going to be. I’m in a way higher income bracket now — perhaps temporarily — and a lot of my income went into coins that I still own. I could feasibly wash trade my BTC, ETH and SOL right now, and claim that deduction, along with whatever funds I lost in the CREAM hack (was that even this year?)

The good news is that the community is still really with us. The core community is still there and the team just had a huge fire lit under their asses. I feel it, and I know the rest of the team does as well. We have to deliver.

So last week was a bit of a mixed bag. Friday we learned that ATMTA lost half of their operating funds through the FTX collapse. So the company has between six and nine months cash on hand. Meaning that they’re exploring various options to increase their cash flow: raising money from VCs in what will undoubtedly be a down round; as well as cutting costs, including salary cuts or furloughs. Oops.

Thankfully Missus didn’t quit her job, and I’ve been saving cash quite aggressively, although, admittedly a lot of that has been going into crypto. We should likely be able to weather a significant loss of income without too much worry. We’ll have to tighten our budget, not as many toys and games, that’s for sure.

The never-ending doomscroll on my Twitter TL is just something else entirely. And Twitter, poor Twitter. Elon has come in like a wrecking ball, and between the crypto panic and slow collapse of Twitter, I don’t even have the stomach to look at it. There’s still the occasional ray of hope, but it’s pretty dark right now.

My mood has been well, considering. I’ve been at a good baseline. Missus is back, the girls are the usual challenge, and my shoulder healed enough that I’m not noticing the sharp pain, and I was able to go to the bouldering gym again yesterday for some climbing.

Now the new week is here and thing are going to be interesting. Will I get paid tomorrow? Who knows? For now I’m going to assume payroll is going to be a few days late. We shall see. The biggest question I have right now is whether to go forward with our Costa Rica trip. I paid a couple hundred out of pocket to book the vouchers, but we still haven’t paid the all-inclusive resort fee.

I don’t know if yesterday was the worst day in the history of crypto, because it sure felt like it. As if Tuesday wasn’t bad enough, the proposed Binance buyout of FTX failed and the markets tanked. POLIS and ATLAS were down fifty percent, SOL tanked and BTC dropped at least twenty percent down to the 15.5k level. Insane.

I seem to have gotten off luckier than most. FTX.com is completely insolvent, but it appears that the US site (a separate business entity) appears to be processing withdrawals. I pulled most of my funds out over the weekend, and only have a small amount that’s awaiting ACH cooldown. I realized earlier that I still have funds for the girls on there that I need to move off, so that’s the first order of business today.

Younger is already off to school, but Elder is still laying in bed telling me she doesn’t feel well and wants to stay home. So it’s going to be one of those days. Ugh.

And there’s family drama also. My mom’s been in the process of splitting from her husband of twenty-five years, due to some financial — um — mismanagement. Basically he got caught up with some paid group a while back that made options recommendations. Basically he got scammed, took out loans from his retirement funds, borrowed money from my mom, and went down a road to ruin. So they’re getting divorced.

I made the mistake of including his email in a Girl Scout sales campaign — he said he wanted to stay in touch with the girls — and he texted me back asking to check out whether some site was legit. It wasn’t. I was perturbed that he was still messing around with scammy shit, but I let it go. Then he sent me another email last week asking if I was interested in some ‘financial opportunity’. I ignored it. Then yesterday, of all days, he sent me some Nigerian Prince kind of scam where he wanted me to borrow $20k from him. The fucking nerve. I blocked him and vented to Missus over a few messages. I didn’t want to talk to my mom about it but she needs to know.

So that’s my day, and I’m not even talking about work stuff yet.

Another election day is passed, and it’s still too soon to know what control of the Senate and House look like. Local results are out though, and the woman who beat me in the primary a few years back is now going to be a City Council member. Good for her. I can’t imagine dealing with all that mess right now.

Crypto is a garbage fire right now. There’s been a battle brewing between CZ of Binance and SBF of FTX; CZ fudded the shit out of the FTT token, caused a liquidity crisis at FTX and then stepped in to backstop or buy FTX. People went crazy, saying this is as bad as the LUNA and Celsius collapse. 2022 has been a hell of a year, what can you say. The entire crypto market — at least as far as my bags are concerned — got hit, BTC, SOL, ATLAS, POLIS, all of them had huge dumps yesterday. The only good news is that the Star Atlas tokens are holding positive versus SOL.

I fixed the build at work again, after I broke it, again. Dependabot alerts and my impatience caused some problems, but we’re clean right now and ready to dive in again today to get to work.

Today is Election Day, which doesn’t hold as much significance in the household as it did when I was running for office. The girls had a half-day yesterday, and have school off completely today as their schools are used for polling places.

I’ve been completely cut off from the political process these last three years, although Missus’s Labor activities puts me back in the same orbit. I ran into our Congressperson a few weeks ago and drove Missus on a literature drop. The person is not even our Congressperson anymore since redistricting, but they’re in a tight race and we want Labor-friendly candidates in office. Unfortunately, that means Democrats.

I already voted a few weeks ago, my Congressperson is not in any danger, but there were local Council and Board members up on the ballot as well, so I did my duty there.

I was watching Last Week Tonight and their segment was on Trump lackeys taking over the voting officials in prep for 2024, so that did make me feel a bit guilty around abandoning DSA and going full crypto instead.

I’m bringing the girls over to their Momo’s today. We stopped by yesterday to say hi and she graciously agreed to take them. I was hoping to bike them over there since it was eighty-degrees yesterday, but temps have dropped into the sixties with a strong wind. We might be able to use it to our advantage though, since it will actually blow us toward Momo’s house. I’ll come back by myself, finish work, then pick them up in the car.

Work is well. I fixed the build, although I’m now at a loss where to work next. Docs, most likely.

Another Monday, another daylight savings time. Fall is always better, since we get the extra hour, although I wasted the extra time by staying up too late last night. At least the girls are at school and I have a clear calendar the rest of the morning. That’s good, too, because I’ll need it.

Yesterday was much more chill than Saturday, which was a bit of a rough one. I let the girls be their worst Sunday morning. I kept them home from church since it felt weird for me to send my six-year old by herself. No sir. So they watched TV and ate garbage until noon, at which point I had them help me straighten up the house. We really went to work and organized all of the girls coats and shoes. Then we went out.

I took them to the local outdoor mall, and we walked around. They’d been asking me to bring them to the playground there as it has these … cups? … that the girls sit in and spin around in. The cups are on an angle, so that one tends to spin around, and by moving your body slightly you can get a good spin going. It’s like a merry go round for one. So we did that, then we spent some time in B&N looking at books and games. The girls wanted to act out a play on the stage in the kids’ area, they’re so cute. Then we went to the library, then picked up groceries for the week. We had dinner, then we played Heroes of Hesiod, although the girls didn’t finish it — it’s too hard with just two players, but they made it more than halfway.

Then I read them to bed.

So this week all I have to do is grind through and make it to Saturday when Missus comes back. The girls are going to be fine. Elder can talk to her mom via Apple ID now, so that’s good, but Younger still woke up in my bed this morning. We’ll have to work on that.

Today is the last day Missus is home before she flies off to Vegas for a week. Union-related, of course. The girls will be stuck her with me of course. The last trip Missus took wasn’t too bad, it kept me on my good behavior, and I’ve had to keep it up this week because I’m kicking so much ass. Other than some drinking last Saturday and on Halloween, I’ve been on top of my game.

But my shoulder still hurts, either from injury or overuse, I’m not sure. Most likely the latter. Between my climbing stint on Saturday and the yard work on Sunday, my right shoulder is on fire. I thought I had sprained a muscle or tendon, but it’s been a whole week now and I still experience discomfort lifting my elbow behind me. I’ve been doing some gentle hangs around the house to work out the pain, hanging from the molding around the interior doors, and I’ve got a spot in the garage where I can hang from a two by four.

Yesterday a garbage truck hit one of the overhead wires in a nearby intersection. It was the fiber optic cable that feeds the cable and internet to the entire subdivision. It went down as I was wrapping up a meeting, so I decided to go for a ride. I packed my go bag with library books and a bottle of water, and rode up to the library to turn them in. Then I headed back in a different direction and rode to the local bike shop to see what they had. I wound up taking a drive on a used Specialized that had the caliper brakes and shifting system that I wanted. It wasn’t everything I wanted, it still has smaller tires and is only a front suspension, and the tires are almost too knobby for riding around the city, but it’s what I need if I’m going to continue going off-road.

In all, I rode over eight miles, which is OK, but is probably only about forty minutes of riding. I’ll pick the bike up this weekend and take the girls out for a riding session.

It’s Wednesday, and I’ve got a lot to catch up on: the climbing comp, Holly hacking, Halloween, work.

Saturday night I participated in my first climbing comp. I just did it for the t-shirt, really, but I’m really glad I went. I pushed myself really hard and met a lot of interesting people. And I placed second in my division — out of two! So when I was signing up I needed to pick a division. I thought men’s rec was going to be too easy, so I signed up for beginner to give myself a bit more challenge. And what a challenge it was. I made a few attempts on the first route, but after four attempts I thought it better to move on. There was a crowd.

So I eventually made my way around the routes on my score card, trying to avoid ones where groups of more experienced climbers were working. I managed to flash two of them, and sent another two, completing half of my routes. Then I settled down to work on the harder ones. After the three hours was up I had sent two more routes and had put another dozen attempts on the last two.

It was the longest climbing session that I’ve ever done. What was interesting was that my Whoop showed a lower strain level that my normal climbing sessions. It’s likely because of the turn-taking that was going on. I usually let two or three people work through my attempts, which kept my heart rate much lower. My muscles, on the other hand, got a lot more work than they normally did, especially my shoulders and forearms.

So when I was done I got a couple of beers while they tallied the results, and just kinda hung out talking with people. It was super fun. They announced the winners — I did not meet the person who beat me — so I got another gym shirt and a block of chalk — which I sorely needed.

Sunday I did not want to do the yard work that Missus wanted us to do. She wants me to cut the grass but I’m determined that I’m not going to do that until spring. So I procrastinated by trimming the wall of holly bushes and transplanting a rosemary plant. The hollies are seriously overgrown. I’m not sure if I cut them last year, but the tops had shot up like another four feet in the air. I had to cut a foot of the back of the plants to make my way between them and the house, and then I proceeded to trim the entire north side of the trunks, pruning any branches that were growing toward the house. Then I started climbing the trunks like a lumberjack and took down the tops. I also cleaned out a bunch of invasive creepers and runners, plus a bunch of small trees that were growing inside the hollies.

The rosemary plant I carefully trimmed down, keeping all the branches for processing later. I managed to get it down to one trunk, which was growing out at an angle, but was straight, and I dug it up and replanted it where it will get more sun. I rotated the root ball so that this new trunk was pointing straight up and the branches were poised to receive the most amount of southern sun.

We also had a fire Sunday evening while the kids were playing.

We had a fire Monday also for Halloween, but this time in the front yard. I moved the firepit and a patio couch to the front yard, move the empty birdbath and put the candy in it. I pulled out the PA speaker and found some spooky music to play. Then I sat and handed out candy while Missus and the girls went out with the other neighborhood kids.

And here it is Wednesday, and I can almost move my right arm without flinching. I can’t remember the last time I was this sore, and not in a good way. I don’t know if it was just the climbing, but I know the hedge trimming didn’t help either. All I know is that I could barely move on yesterday, and I had figured I’d be ready to go back for another session. Maybe today, I could, but I don’t think a full climbing session would be a good one. I’ve got some hanging around the house I can do, just working on the shoulders and hand grip. It’s obviously my weakest and I need to get where I can do some pull up and one-handed holds.

Work has been going great, to the point where I don’t want to stop coding. Even now, I’m thinking about what I need to do today and can’t wait to publish this post and get to it.

I have one of the most precious things in the world today: a clear calendar. No meetings at work, just the opportunity to put my head down and deal with a few things that I have on my list. Missus does come back and I have to pick her up; we’ll go out for lunch also. So not quite a ‘clear’ calendar, but at least no work meetings.

Elder and I finally got her homework done. Thank god for Wolfram Alpha and the fact I know how to plug 14 * (2 3/8) into a command line. She finally understands that she needs to write out each step and show her work. Her other papers she’s gotten in class have been A’s since we’ve been working together, so there’s progress there. Now I just need her to actually turn in her work.

I’m signing up for a climbing competition this weekend. I’m entering as a beginner, which is v0-v2. I’m tempted to do intermediate, which is v2-v4, but I’m not sure if I want to put myself in a position where I only finish half the routes.

I’m sitting on the back deck right now, hoping I can work outside, but it’s too windy and chilly. Back to the desk, I suppose. Lots of things to do, can’t wait.