Current mood - 2/5

What I Did

Back at work after three weeks off of vacation. I am normally a "CHRISTMAS!!!!" person but the general state of things in 2025 made me feel pretty gloomy.

2026 isn't looking much better as I write this. I am feeling pretty angry about a lot of things to start the year, and the constant drive to smash AI down my throat has me feeling particularly biting.

Like I said on my social media account -- there are some high-profile folks in the PHP community who were AI boosters who are complaining about their businesses getting wrecked by it. I am always a fan of keeping receipts, so you will see no sympathy from me towards those two.

At work:

• eased back into things with fixing another issue where imported records are being marked as synchronized with external services but were not
• started a longer task of porting over a Python RabbitMQ-backed queue worker that update merchant records to be a PHP Kafka consumer instead

Being weak coming back from holidays, I decided to let CoPilot convert a bunch of stuff over. What a damn disaster. Never again. Thanks for the outline, bud, but I had to cross check everything anyway. Saved me zero time.

At least there is an existing test suite for me to convert over and THAT has been way more useful than anything LLM tooling has done for me.

Self-loathing is not a good way to start off a year.

At home:

Continued tweaking my little 3D printer to make it a small printing beast. Along the way discovered a cool calibration print to verify all the basic calibration steps (temperature, pressure advance, retraction length, flow ratio, and shrinkage] have been confirmed to work.

Played board games this weekend with my usual monthly crew. We continues our Apocalypse World game where we started out in what used to be Las Vegas and are headed to The Magic Kingdom to try and rescue a teenaged girl who was kidnapped to be used as breeding stock. I play Thor Thorson, crazy cult leader who runs around covered in tattoos, wearing no shirt and tight leather pants. He is absolutely convinced his gods will protect him, and I play him that way. So much fun.

We also got in a game of Nuclear War with every single expansion IN EXISTENCE as part of it. Great fun.

We than finished things off with a surprisingly chaotic game of Cosmic Encounter where I completely messed up the board setup so we had to wing it. One of the downsides of meeting 9-10 times a year and maybe playing a game once or twice a year -- you keep messing up the same setup steps unless you write your own (which the other person in our group who owns a tons of games often does).