Sorry not sorry

I wrote not a single word in this newsletter in the month of June, and if you were expecting an apology I have bad news for you. What I will give you is a partial accounting of what I was doing instead...

A partial accounting of what I did in June instead of writing in this newsletter (non-chronological)

• Overflowed with love for the New York Knicks. The day that they won the NBA finals was one of the most joyful, most emotional days of my life. I spent nearly the entire day walking around in a stupor that was occasionally punctuated by one of those moments of dawning realization that left me either giddy with laughter or in not-quiet tears. The last time I remember feeling like that was the day my first child was born. While it is, of course, not quite so deep, it is similar in the way that it felt like a core part of my identity had been suddenly transformed - and even though I could anticipate it, I couldn't fully comprehend how it would hit me. And while becoming a father was a more profound experience, it wasn't one that I got to share in the moment with millions of other people. Seeing the city celebrate, hearing from my friends who were there about how the experience unified the city in a sense of joy, hearing from my fellow Knicks fans and sharing in that sense of catharsis with them...it's hard to overstate how meaningful this was.

Greg Pak (@gregpak.net)

KNICKS IN FIVE KNICKS PRIDE BROOKLYN

Bluesky SocialGreg Pak

• Spent a long weekend with a handful of my closest friends doing mostly nothing. We ate, we drank, we smoked a few cigarettes. We ambled around in a forest just outside Chattanooga, Tennessee. We got to be together and see each other, which - given that we all live in different time zones - is a relative rarity. 

• Lived that single dad life. Not permanently, thank God. But immediately after I returned from my work trip to NYC/fun trip to hang with the boys, Sarah left to go to Mallorca with a couple friends. So my jet lagged ass was getting kids where they needed to be and making sure that they consumed enough calories and ensured that this particular 5 day stretch wouldn't give them any specific fodder for therapy in their twenties. 
• Played a lot of Slay the Spire 2. You hear more about Pokemon from me because it was such a central organizing activity in my life over the past few years (and will probably continue to be), but if the kids hadn't dragged me into it I never would have started playing and when I go months (as I currently am) without playing, I don't miss it or feel any itch to get into it. The Slay the Spire games are a different story. They represent the rare game that I can get completely absorbed in, coming up for air and only then realizing that a few hours have passed. The sequel has introduced a couch co-op mode for playing with friends, so having another avid player in my house has made it even more engrossing. 

• Went to the cinema 4 (!) times. I'm a Michaela Coel stan, so I made it to see The Christophers (sadly, Mother Mary only opened here for a very brief window while I was away). I also got to both of the buzzy, young-auteur horror movies - Backrooms and Obsession - and wasn't terribly impressed with either. On a lark, on the hottest day ever recorded in Dutch history, I sought refuge in the cinema and randomly chose to see Tuner, which I think has flown under the radar. If the Safdie Brothers had made Baby Driver, it would have been Tuner...and now I'm kind of obsessed with thinking about how many different filmmakers could do their own take on Baby Driver and have it be its own distinct pleasure. 

• Finished 3 books...3 very different works of fiction - The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (s/o to Kwasi), and the Murderbot Diaries (#1-4). All fine in their own ways. Murderbot is probably the one that will stick with me the longest for its first person portrayal of neurodivergence. 
• Worked on some delightfully weird projects. I ran a little New York City pop-up for a day, I began curating a digital museum exhibit and designing the virtual exhibition space, I setup a Mac Mini with Hermes Agent to do most of my business administration, I got my physical "Read Me Like A Book" card deck printed, I revamped Searcher mode of the online version of RMLAB to be more of a connective social experience. 

So...you get it, right?

The white whale surfaces!

If you've been around these parts for a while, you might be aware of my occasional deep dive into trying to create a generative AI-driven Pokemon deck builder and the various reasons that it just doesn't work. It's been an ongoing way for me to evaluate where the capabilities and limitations of the latest models are. I haven't built a new version in a while, though I have a suspicion that using a knowledge graph of the standard legal TCG Pokedex with a frontier model might address some of the issues in the past (honestly, the knowledge graph might be more important than the frontier model...I wouldn't be surprised if less capable models could still handle it).

It was only a matter of time before someone else - namely The Pokemon Company - decided this deserved some attention. This month, it came to my attention that there's a current challenge to build a bot that can build decks and play the Pokemon TCG competitively. Tommy sent the link to me 2 days before the application window closed, which gave me a convenient excuse to not pursue it because - if we're being honest - what they're trying to do is at least an order of magnitude more involved than what I've done in the past and well beyond my technical proficiency. 

I am not optimistic about the outcome of the challenge. It might be a promising first step, but I still believe that the number of different mechanics, the amount of uncertainty related to the opponent's deck/available cards/strategy, the unpredictability of card draws, etc. require a much greater amount of compute for simulation than they seem to be putting behind this challenge. But we'll see!

(And, yes, in the middle of writing this I did spin up an agent to explore how to build a knowledge graph of the Pokedex. I'll get back to you on that one.)

Three quick thoughts on the end of the road

• This is a staightforward note about someone who spent an intense period of time cultivating a skill and was reaching the end of a culminating project to represent that time. It's an experience that I imagine a lot of us have, but in the midst of it we rarely have the presence of mind to document it - and to document it so well. 
• In 2 weeks time, Peter Kooy will retire as the head teacher of De Spits Katholiek School just down the street from me in Utrecht - a role he has occupied for over 2 decades. This is noteworthy to me because my children attend De Spits, and "Meester Peter" was the first person we ever met at the school while we were in the midst of all the busy craziness of figuring out everything related to moving into a new neighborhood - including getting kids enrolled in schools. I am wary of the insistence that the jobs we do as professionals must take on the heavy weight of vocation, that there's some specific role that each of us was put on this Earth to do and we must find that specific thing. Unfortunately, I think educators get hit with that expectation quite often when the truth is that for a lot of educators, it's just a job. Which isn't to say that they won't do it to the best of their abilities, just that they don't need to make it the very center of their existence. But every so often you come across the person for whom the story is actually true, the teacher who seems to have an innate gift for connecting with and bringing the best out of young people. In Meester Peter's case, he had that specific innate gift (I mean, really, I can't know for sure how innate it was; I only got to see the outcome after literal decades of cultivating his craft) as well as the ability to steward the soul of a valued community institution. That sustained dedication to the children of our neighborhood carried out with little fanfare over a long period brings to mind Bishop Myriel in Victor Hugo's Les Miserables. I wish Meester Peter nothing but the best in his retirement, but I know that we will miss him. 
• A month ago, I read this outstanding essay by the tech writer Om Malik. His interpretation of the story of Pinocchio - not the Disney version, but the original book series - and its relevance to our present moment in the way that so many of our social institutions seem setup to prey on the vulnerable and advocate empty forms of value - really struck me and I bookmarked it to share at some point. A couple weeks ago, I heard that Om had passed away. He was a voice I had paid some attention to at a distance, but I knew lots of people who knew him personally, and the sincerity of their grief and the fondness of their recollections of him as a person moved me. So, I'm sharing the essay. It's one of the last things he wrote and a worthy indication of the legacy he'll leave behind.

That's all for now...there are plenty of ideas swirling around in my head, but we'll save them for another time.