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       Attention
       May, 5 2025
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       Written on my laptop, sitting on a couch
       in VauxWall climbing gym.
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  Today's a bank holiday in UK and I am taking advantage of this
  to enjoy some of the things I like doing the most: climbing,
  hacking with smol hardware, and phlogging... Wow, while writing
  it I realised it can't get much nerdier than this (at least in
  London, where there's been so many tech folks climbing in the
  last few years)!
  
  I titled this post "attention" as my mind has been wandering a
  lot lately, to the point I started thinking this might become
  an issue at some point. Just to give you an example, I was
  editing this post while connected via SSH to my gopher server
  (yeah there's probably something wrong about that too) while
  I realised the connection was a bit laggy: this reminded me
  that I had not installed mosh there yet and I literally had to
  force me from doing it in that very moment, breaking the flow
  of writing.
  
  This kind of things happens continuously lately, and the fact
  I am phlogging from a bouldering gym while following how my
  meshtastic node is doing kinda gives you an idea of my day to
  day life. And this is not even a work day... :-/ I think this
  is also, at least in part, the reason why I disappeared from
  here for quite a while now. Before it was choosing where to
  blog what (I eventually chose here for more personal stuff,
  a Web blog at aittalam.github.io for personal, more techie
  things, and blog.mozilla.ai for more work-related things).
  Then BYOTA (if you don't know about it check the following:
  https://github.com/mozilla-ai/byota) became a nice talk at
  FOSDEM and following that a Mozilla.ai blueprint. Then a few
  new ideas came out and now I have:
  
  - regular byota github issues (happening at a super slow pace)
  - a post on mozilla blueprints and why IMO they are a really
    cool idea
  - a "think smol" post where I put in (English) words my
    SUPER long (Italian) talk at EndSummerCamp last September
    (see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erYvE486tQE). This
    one I also promised to Tomasino, I don't even remember how
    much time ago... :-/
  - a couple of posts for work, one about prompt optimization
    and interpretability and another (not sure whether this
    will happen) about the Progress Reimagined podcast episode
    (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDM80NQZASs)
  
  Add to this regular work (which I love - we are currently
  working on something that's super new to me and I am learning
  a lot of new stuff) and family and me not being able to stop
  looking for something new to read / watch / do... Well, it's
  a lot.
  
  The strongest signal that I should just relax for a while is
  that I missed 3 (THREE) 1:1 meetings last week. Like, the meet
  started and I had not realised it was already time for it. 
  Luckily, not all of them were work-related! But I had set up
  one of them just 20 minutes earlier, then *poof*, it just
  left my mind as soon as I started doing something else.
  
  Another reason this thing is happening is that I have most of
  my nofifications off because, for all the above reasons,  I
  feel like I need to be in focus mode to get anything done. And
  it's not like this never happened before: if I look at notes
  I wrote down 20 years ago, it looks like I always had to
  struggle with too many things happening at once, but probably I
  was feeling less accountable for them at the time?
  
  One reason I talk about accountability is that I definitely
  feel a sense of urgency wrt what is happening in the world.
  Like, we need to do something *now* and that something has a
  lot to do with owning our tech, and teaching people about this,
  before things get even worse than they are now. I feel it
  because this is impacting my kids' life more and more, and
  while I know how to deal with all of (waves hands) "this" to
  some extent, I know they don't yet and I think I should do
  something about it.
  
  Ok, rant done. Probably one of the things that I considered
  less useful, but eventually I feel better, and getting my
  oxygen mask on might help me helping others getting theirs on
  too now. We'll see.