Meal of an oat, turned into a cake on a pan [Tuesday 17]

Yesterday's early morning commute was on point, and we got a pretty good commute going on, even as we missed our regular train. The following train got in a bit early, and it was effectively the same as Monday. At work, I got to oversee the coops do some menial chore (instead of myself, so it wasn't hazing, we just got them to work the important stuff instead). During lunch I had a couple of slices of pizza at our group's Lunch & Learn, and none of that upset my stomach. Which raises the question, but at this point the question should be moot anyway because I know for a fact, am I really lactose intolerant, and what the hell is happening to me, with my body reacting negatively some times and not others.

After lunch there were a few hours of panic as I misinterpreted the 'knowledge transfer' meetings my manager was involved in and took them to mean he was the one leaving. I also helped a coworker who I work with pretty closely work around a massive pain in the butt, but as it turns out it was all pointless because we can't use the tooling he was working on. The co-ops did pretty well with their tasks, and I assigned them more work after that. Hoping to give them more responsibility today.

Also discovered the most interesting auto-suggest writing tool out there (https://transformer.huggingface.co/doc/gpt2-large) and played around with it for a really long time. There's several different models in the website and you can either change the models or the parameters (bottom left, it took me a stupidly long time to figure it out), to make it work more with your style. The ones it generated with very little of my input were pretty alright, but rather boring. When I used it to autofill just some parts of the sentence because I was having a block or wanted to see where it could possibly go, I got some interesting results. I'd seriously consider using it for everyday blogging or writing in some form if it were not so slow. If they made it faster, improved responses, and a good API, I'd consider subscribing to the service for a few months, just to get myself out of the rut, if I'm ever in one.

I wonder what the future of services like this is. Is there ever going to be a day where automated writing bots do most of the writing, on discussion sites and on news sites? In that case, wouldn't human voices and human expression be disregarded? Or wouldn't there be so much content out there that getting any meaningful voice heard would be pointless because everyone and their hundred thousand bots are shouting into the void, trying to tune everyone out? One possibility to consider, something I was mulling over last evening, is that maybe there will be bots to read that content to, so you separate wheat from the chaff and read only the stuff that you like or find interesting. Maybe something new every once in a while. If there can be content-creating bots, I don't see why there cannot be content consuming bots to help us humans with all the consuming of the content.

In any case, got out of work slightly later than usual, and the commute back home was pretty lowkey -- back home in 40 minutes is quite reasonable in my book. I watered the sprouts and the oyster mushroom, cleaned my room, dd a few other chores. I spent maybe an hour cleaning and oiling my bike, after quite a while, and it felt great. I rode my bike to Wegmans, and did a solid grocery for a pancake-based diet. Got back home, and spent some time figuring out what I wanted to have for dinner. In the end, I settled on oatmeal pancakes with bok choy on the side. The pancake was slightly burnt (I just made one huge pancake), but ohh man it was the best. In Nepal they have buckwheat pancakes that also have slightly burnt taste -- not clear to me if it's the grain or the process -- I had been missing that. Though I didn't put too much butter into the pan, the pancake was really juicy, and was a pretty great companion to the bok choy. It was a good meal, the ideal antidote to the awful dinner I had had the night before.

Talked to the family, multiple people, went to the regular run, started pushups, and just chilled for a bit before going to bed at almost 12. I should really try to do things quicker in the evenings so I can go to sleep early, but I keep getting distracted by some thing or other.

There's an event with my University this evening, and I"m hoping I also make it to a writer's event in Harvard square. Keeping fingers crossed that they both turn out well, and I can make it to both!