Notes for September 6-12

Even though my personal calendar is now filled with a smattering of fresh events, I am quite happy about the ones that don’t involve health, legal and tax annoyances. My back and other ailments seem to be stabilizing thanks to daily exercise and my having dedicated some time to cooking my own meals, which, besides being cheaper (a concern I’ve been having of late), also forces me to stand and move about, not to mention giving me an excuse for handling very sharp knives in very satisfactory ways.

And I’ve lost weight–either from exercise or minor hardship, that is both undebatable and welcome.

My free Codex Open Source plan ended yesterday, which meant I was keeping a close eye on piclaw and a few other projects I wanted to make some significant progress on–as a last hurrah, over the last week I was getting Codex to implement the foundations for family features and budgeting, and to do the usual code audit and refactoring pass.

However, I am very happy to report that I nearly got more free credits, and the reason for the near-miss is pretty awesome: go-264, the SIMD/assembly-based H.264 decoding library that I started building many months ago to quickly extract video frames on low-end hardware without all of the overhead from ffmpeg, is now apparently being used at ChatGPT inside OpenAI.

They reached out, pushed some PRs with fixes and enhancements I had not gotten around to due to lack of suitable hardware, and… gave me an extension to my Codex plan, which expired yesterday.

Sadly, I got a “The promo code is invalid.” error when I finally clicked on the fresh Pro invite this morning, so I guess that’s that (I don’t think you can have multiple extensions back to back, and yes, I made sure I was back on the Free plan before clicking).

But hey, it was a good run while it lasted, and it was a nice gesture on OpenAI’s part.

My alternative plans to scout OpenRouter and such for suitable open models that would be minimally good enough are now (again) on, and thankfully I did quite a bit of pricing research. Last week’s plans for “stopping” using AI were unrealistic, but timely enough for me to reassess my usage and plan for alternative approaches.

So I am focusing on other stuff a bit more, especially since I do indeed want to lower my screen time altogether.

With that in mind, I have been fixing my Calibre MCP server and making sure I get in at least half an hour’s reading each night. My propensity for skimming over The Economist every weekend has crowded out regular books a bit and I’ve started building up an arXiv queue again, plus, of course, watching Ted Lasso.

Can’t beat that for a wholesome feeling that nearly makes up for everything else going on.