With computers it has always been clear what you get when you instruct it to do something. Even if it doesn't always feel like that. They are complex systems and sometimes an outcome to a simple instruction can result into unexpected outcome. But technically you always get what you ask for.

Since all the way back to sixties there has been hopeful predictions that machines would free us from all the menial tasks and allow us humans to focus more on creative activities. With the advent of generative A.I. it very much looked like the creative work is the first one the machines will take from us reversing those wishful promises.

There is less than three months until our big larp event. While we have beem planning and preparing for it for well over a year there os still a lot to be done before the first players can step into our spaceship. Even though it will be a rerun of our 2019 game and we have tried to reuse aa much as possible from that run there is still a lot of new stuff to build.

I have been with my current company for almost 12 years now. That's already above average in this industry. And even though over these years our retention rate has been quite high there has been many people joining and leaving the company during that time.

A bad Star Trek show is still better than a good Star Wars show. At least in my opinion, and my youngest one seems to agree.

People often hate Mondays. It's the first day of week. Back to work after refreshing weekend, the full workweek ahead. I like my job and am often even looking forward for a new week. Today wasn't one of those mondays.

I checked my calendar yesterday evening and sow an uninterrupted streak of meetings. There were 11 meetings total with just a small lunch break in the middle of them! I know my work nowadays is mostly sitting in meetings, but even for that this was a bit too much. Must be a record of meetings per day.

Internet brought us connected devices. Mobile technologies made it not tied to the wire, but unfortunately we still don't have wireless electricity so all those connected devices need to be charged. With advancements of battery technology and the emergence of Internet of Things at least some of the devices can be powered for years while we are waiting for better batteries (or wireless energy transfer).

What do we do if the power goes out?Well, then we just have to watch TV in the candlelight.

Today the world Earth hour once again encourages everyone to turn of all (non-essential) lights dor one hour. The act is a gesture to bring awareness to the climate change and encourage people to conserve energy.

Our management team has worked in the current composition almost a year now. Most of us have been there for over two years and some much longer. Even though we have had a few dedicated occasions to get together physically most of our collaboration happens online.

The get together events have been great and I've learned a lot about my colleagues during those days. With some of them we have regular meetings where we often have time to also catch up on non-work related stuff. But what has been missing is seeing (or at least hearing) how each one of us lead our teams.

LEGO together with Wizards of the Coast are releasing a new Dungeons and Dragons themed LEGO set at the beginning of next month. The design is based on fan submission to a design competition under the LEGO ideas moniker held in 2022. The set is released to commemorate 50 years of DnD.

If you are still driving an ICE car in Finland there might be an unhappy surprise waiting for you at the gas station. Due to the recent political strikes here the fuel deliveries have been suffering and in anticipation of shortages to gas people have been hoarding some reserves for themselves.

LLMs have been transforming many things how I both consume and produce content. While I still do enjoy writing these posts manually many things that I write at work are at least partially written by the help of A.I. tools. I also don't bother skimming through articles when I can just feed them to the A.I. and let it produce a summary for me. What's even better is that I can ask follow-up questions if the summary doesn't give the answer I was looking for or I need to dig deeper into the topic.

I've always loved working with data. As a programmer I have done many things, but when I get to so something that manipulates data that is the best. There is just something different even though the code itself isn't that much different.

I have never veen good with the visual things so that why I probably don't like that much working with user interfaces. It also includes the user which can always be unpredictable. Data is always data. There is no surprises with it. You get what you expect, clearly defined. You don't have to quess.

Fool's spring is the period of time in late winter when the weather turns warm, sun is shining and the snow starts to melt. Only to be set back by another period of wintery weather later on.

It's not common to have such periods of time here in Finland. At least not this early. We often get some odd warm days during april that do feel like spring, but everybody is expecting the winter to strike back at least until the beginning of May. There has been years when we've gotten such backwinters still in May. Still, nobody talks about fool's spring around here...

Over the past several years, while I have beem climbing up the career ladder I've been coding less and less, to the point that during last two years I have hardly written any. While I have decades of experience and I'm still keeping up with the latest developments in the area I doubt I could just jump back being a day to day coder.

For the past teo days I have had many meetings with the people I manage. It's the time of the year for annual salary reviews. Well, actually it's a bit late for that already, but we were a bit behind the schedule this year. For the past month I have been mostly occupied by going through all, evaluating their performance, growth and feedback they have received from others. With 66 people under my supervision it's not a small task.

I watched the new animated Super Mario movie today. I don't know if it's that good just as a movie, but it certainly was a great throwback to various Mario and other related classic Nintendo games.

There was a lot of hidden references and fun moments in the flick. On top of that the soundtrack was a perfect mix of tunes from all those games and old hits back from the days.

One of the most important things you need to do when moving is updating your address to all the possible services that might need it. In Finland we have a great system where you can basically update your address to all the government registries and postal office at once. Of course that doesn't cover all the commercial services you might need your address for. Especially the online stores still need to know where to ship your purchases.

Yesterday was one of those rare occasions when I wrote my daily post in the morning. While on the trip I predicted there might not be time to write later in the day and in the evening there might be a couple of drinks (there was). So to play it safe I decided to get it out of the way early in the morning while sitting on a train.

It was a long day with all the travelling, meeting people and then hanging out with my colleagues in the evening. Today wasn't much easier even though I was back home already at a reasonable time, but tgis still felt like a long day.

This week starts with a travel for me. Going to visit two of our local offices together with some other members of our management team. Even though those offices aren't that far for me I haven't been visiting them for quite some time now.

Even if not working that much remote there aren't that many opportunities to meet those people in other offices besides common company events (when there are so many people present that there isn't enough time to focus on just them) and occasions when they come to our headquarters (and I happen to be there too).