Warning: Feelings

My roommate Yash is back with his parents for a couple of weeks, which has left me alone in the house and quite severely exposed my delusion of being a loner. I’ll probably write a separate post about this at some point, but I’ve been quite overwhelmed with feelings of loneliness which aren’t helped at all by me being a general homebody so this week has been quite rough, and forced me to start training myself to address the things that feed into it. I ended up finally utilizing the free therapy options offered at Cloudflare, and make sure to have at least one cleaning related task on my daily to-do to ensure I do not spiral into my room becoming a depression nest (shoutout Geega my goat). This has helped so far, and will likely be plenty to tide me over until I myself go back to my family at the end of next week. I also reached out to my colleagues at work and have scheduled a day of working together out of a cafe since our teams agreed to work from home for the next week due to most people taking off for Holi.

I promise I’ll be okay, it’s a bit of a sad boy funk, I’ll get over it.

Onward to the rest of the weeknote!

  • I had to email the customer support for one my credit cards when I realized I needed to use my registered email, and had helpfully used one of DuckDuckGo’s disposable aliases for the job 😅. Figuring that one out was thankfully pretty quick, and has been put down in a note for future Harsh.
  • Amogh helped me figure out how to be able to pay for stuff on Steam (the aforementioned credit card being at fault) again, so any irresponsible gaming purchases I talk about in the coming weeks are his fault.
  • Last week I talked about adding WebMentions support to this site, this week I kept iterating on it and it now properly extracts comment text when available and correctly attributes to the real user instead of the brid.gy relay.
  • I shipped a new release of Claw this week, incorporating some UI feedback from Abhinav and my first attempt at a (mostly) LLM generated feature: Temporary tag blocks. I had to get my hands dirty at the end anyway because the LLM just completely forgot about data migration and integrity, but having it do 80% of the work while I was at the gym is pretty cool. I also have to admit that the UI flow that Claude came up with is miles better than anything that had been floating around in my brain. I don’t know much it helped, but I used this “skill” as part of the prompt.
  • Someone on the payroll team at Cloudflare probably discovered Idempotence this week as everyone at our office got paid twice :P
    • Fret not, the extra money is already back with Cloudflare. Cheers to a brief taste of unearned wealth, the closest I will come to sharing an emotion with a billionaire.
  • While trying to make that bank transfer I realized that my SIM had stopped working altogether, suspiciously after the Android 17 Beta 2 upgrade. Mild panicking ensued, and I had to add an additional side quest for a duplicate or a new SIM the next morning when I was meeting Swapnil and Mayank for breakfast.
    • The boys helpfully accompanied me to the Jio store where I got the unfortunate news that the SIM owner has to be present in-person for a duplicate (which happened to be my mother), so I went to get a new Airtel SIM instead which was a relatively quick affair.
    • Of course right after that when I get home, the Jio SIM starts working again so all of the struggle was for naught. I fucking hate software sometimes.
  • My weekly NixOS upgrades were basically impossible this week, there was a bad Linux regression, and home-manager also has a severe bug so I just reverted everything and will deal with it next week.

In case anyone is missing the food talk, this week was rather light on the experimentation front due to the aforementioned sad boy hours. I mostly ate salads and air fried a chicken breast or two a couple of times. I did try air fried potato wedges one night and they came out pretty nice, albeit slightly dry since I got the temperatures wrong. Lesson learned!