I need a better chair situation

[infryq]

Yesterday for work I updated the crowdcast group on this week’s plan, and attended an epic 2.5 hour meeting that covered restructuring the research group at large, current efforts at acquiring data, and potential new statistical models. The PIs are clearly overwhelmed, but don’t yet fully understand that reducing their own management workload involves both giving up some control over decisionmaking and reducing the amount of time the people they’re tapping to act as intermediate managers have for primary research. Normal growing pains are normal.

I had some good detailed conversations with D, the former grad student on whose work all these systems are based. He is on loan to us from Google. He was cathartically appalled at the dearth of onboarding I’d been given, and was able to dig up some ancient docs he’d made to transition the team after his thesis defense in 2016, as well as the primary research paper for the crowdcasting system. He’s also in favor of the dev system and server improvements I’ve been advocating for. I’ve been managing upwards a ton on this project so it’s good to get validation from someone with cachet.

I met with M on his masters thesis work to look over the code the text world folks finally sent, and we talked through a couple options for extracting the knowledge base for the natural language utterances it generates.

The nuts.com order came, which means we can put off getting staples like oats and polenta and nuts for a while yet.

Food was surprisingly fine; I cut 5 grams from the morning oatmeal for the pair of us and that seems to be setting a healthy tone for me snacking regularly and avoiding overeating.

Dinner, P had his evening class, DS9, crossword, snack, sleep. Dreamt of subway tram and trolley hacking as a 12 year old boy. Also something to do with french new wave records in an old timey shop.