2026: Third Quarter and Beyond...

Lately

Three quarters of 2026 have already passed. I originally meant to write this around the middle of the year, but here I am with the year almost over. I had been writing bits and pieces, but kept putting off publishing it, so it has effectively become a whole-year update.

It is not that I had nothing I wanted to write about—there were three or four topics I had been exploring with interest recently. But when I tried writing them with an LLM, I couldn’t be bothered to read the rough drafts it produced, so they are still sitting in my repo as drafts.

Codex has been offering frequent usage-limit resets through its 28-day challenge, and I have been making the most of them. Naturally, by the time I needed to write this post, I had used everything up, so I ended up writing it myself. I know maximizing token usage is no measure of achievement, but I wanted to make good use of the resets while they were available.

It has been almost a year since I changed jobs,
and I have been learning Finnish for over half a year now, having started in February.
I also moved out of Daechi-dong, the neighborhood I had grown fond of over the past five years.

My old place didn’t find a new tenant right away, so there was some overlap with the new place, and I went back and forth often to move my things bit by bit. Watching the old place empty out left me feeling strangely reluctant to leave. It wasn’t my own house, but I suppose it was the neighborhood I was sad to leave behind… Once I left for good, though, that feeling faded pretty quickly.

Home Server

I bought the MacBook I use at home in 2023, so I have had it for about three years. I didn’t do much video work back then and went with 1TB, but now that I occasionally shoot videos and run all sorts of projects, the storage has started to feel tight.

Fortunately, I had bought an external SSD along the way, but relying on that alone felt a little precarious, so I ended up getting a NAS. I had wanted one for a long time anyway, so it was nice to finally have a good excuse.

With the move and the growing number of devices at home, I figured it was time to sort out the network too. I had been using an ASUS router whose specs were fine, yet its coverage was strangely limited. I was also running out of ports.

So I separated out the gateway and went with UniFi to bring the switch and APs into the same lineup. It looks clean and neat in the rack, which I am happy with.

The Mac mini I bought right at the beginning of this year has found its place too and is doing a good job as a home server. During the move, I also brought all the scattered IoT devices together under Home Assistant.

Setting up HA OS and organizing all the data scattered across internal and external drives, my MacBook, my desktop, and so on before moving it to the NAS would probably have taken me days if I had done all that tedious work myself. These days I have dependable LLM teammates, so I was able to get HA running without doing any of the setup myself.

Just look at that nicely laid-out topology.

Moving

Daechi-dong to Jeongja was a direct subway ride, but it still took almost an hour. I wanted to reset a room that had accumulated five years of stuff, and to live somewhere a little bigger with separate spaces for different purposes.

So, after thirty years of living in Seoul, I moved closer to work.

That let me get some larger furniture, and things that had been left without a proper home finally found their places. My daily range is pretty small: I spend most of my time in the study and only go to the bedroom to sleep. Maybe that makes unpacking feel less urgent, because even four months later, I still haven’t finished.

thingies

I don’t go often, but I visited a Monet exhibition at the museum across from my parents’ place.

Games

I played a lot of Pokémon Pokopia earlier this year, but maybe I am getting older, because I get bored pretty quickly with games where decorating is the endgame… Animal Crossing might have been my last one.

Still, with Death Stranding 2 coming to PC this year, it was one of the games I really enjoyed.

I also spent a while playing a lot of Maestro. It really reminded me that the brain has a left half and a right half.

Everyday Life

I also happened to run into Jensen Huang at work this summer.

Gubong Farm, a regular stop on our company workshop trips.

Odds and Ends

I happened across a vintage mother-of-pearl telephone and hooked it up to work as a Bluetooth handset. It is connected to the server too, so I use it to talk to Codex on my home server, as well as to take mobile calls as if it were a landline. I would like to put the hardware in a nice enclosure, but I am holding off in case that makes me want a 3D printer too.

Presentations

I wanted to speak at FECONF again this year, but I hadn’t spent much time exploring frontend topics, so I didn’t submit a proposal. (I also forgot to book a ticket.) Earlier in the year, while studying Finnish, I had been digging into some language analyzers. A few ideas came out of that, so I wrote a workshop paper. The workshop was held alongside ACL this year, which made it a bigger occasion. I couldn’t go to the US to present in person, but they supported virtual participation too, so I got to share my work at an online booth.

I also went to OpenAI DevDay Exchange, though I am not quite sure what to call the gathering. I expected the talks to be a recap of September’s DevDay, so I went in with modest expectations, and it was pretty much what I expected. They did have unlimited pizza-flavored steamed rice cakes as refreshments, though, which I tried for the first time.

Travel

I visited Shenzhen this year. I still haven’t sorted through the travel footage, so I haven’t uploaded it yet. I tried one of the well-known self-driving taxis (the first ride was free) and saw drones delivering food.

Lately I have been feeling that the research pushing us toward AGI is ultimately laying the groundwork for it to reach the physical world. Plenty of people beyond developers use LLMs through software, but for now it is still mostly people interested in this area; not many use them closely in everyday life. Eventually, it has to reach the physical level and become something we can actually feel. Shenzhen felt relatively advanced, but even there it hadn’t fully become part of everyday life.

Of the neighborhoods I visited in Shenzhen, 华侨城创意文化园 (OCT-LOFT) was the most interesting. If I return for a longer stay, it might be nice to spend some time there.

In the fall, I went to Jeju. I rented a Tesla through SOCAR and made the most of driving it around for three days and two nights.

Now that I am finally writing this down, it is hard to remember all the details. I will probably keep adding bits and pieces until the end of the year.