A bit of Elixir news. You really should check out the Bumblebee announcement for Elixir. The headlinining thing is probably Stable Diffusion on Nx but that's honestly less useful to most of us.

For one thing I need a better GPU to run it or need to figure out what options to pass to slim it a bit. I can run SD on this 3070 but I can't do it in Nx presently.

What's more interesting are the much lighter models, models that you can probably develop with on CPU in many cases. Text sentiment, image recognition. Things that most of us consider too hard to bother with or too cumbersome to have from the get-go can now be trivially included in your proof-of-concept. Right from Elixir.

Check it out. I'm going to be playing with it.

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About Archives (podcast)
The cozy programming podcast talks cozy subject matter.

Elixir job opportunities

Senior developer, Erlang Solutions
(Nordic countries only)

Erlang Solutions are well-known in the community and ecosystem. They arrange many of our conferences through CodeSync.

They are hiring consultants to work with their clients, remote but for the Stockholm branch. 3-5 years of Elixir or Erlang is the recommended experience level. You can indicate your interest here and I'll reach out :)

Requires occasional trips to Stockholm, Sweden.

Refocusing

Heading into the end of year I'm putting my YouTube channel on pause and I'm taking a hard look at my weekly schedule.

I've been running a bit thin from stretching myself in many directions lately and part of regrouping and refocusing requires reducing what I do.

There are a few things that inform my approach:

Life has felt hectic recently.
Time with the kids has been heavy on the logistics during the weekdays.
I'm 10 years from the age when my father passed away (early).
I only work 50% on client work.
I'm not managing my health properly.

Hitting a spat of Covid just now also forced me to come a screeching halt for a couple of days.

I'm not dying, falling apart at the seems or deathly stressed. I'm just noting my pace isn't working out and I need to adjust.

The thing about my father might be oversharing but it is also an actual driver in my thinking. My grandfather died when my father was a teen. My father died when I was a teen. And while I'm very determined not to repeat that, it should help that I don't smoke, it stands as a stark reminder that life can be very short.

Working only 50% on client work should mean I have plenty of space in my schedule to address time with the kids, get out more with them and occasionally take a breath. I haven't felt it though. Because it has mostly been filled with other things I need to get done around my other projects.

I will always feel hectic when I'm trying to do more things than I have time for. Currently the ambition of my video production has been a video a week which was accurate for a while but hasn't been recently. That is too much. I need to revisit it with a much more sustainable pace, probably about one a month. But before I do that it will be on hold across December and at least January I think. Video has dominated a full day of my week for the last while. Removing that is a lot of time.

There may be one or two things published that were already committed to. We'll see how that shakes out.

I would prefer to reinvigorate the blog before I address the videos again as well honestly. I don't intend to stop the videos long term. I really enjoy the challenge and pushing myself into new arenas.

As always, reach out at lars@underjord.io, on Twitter via @lawik or apparently on the fed where I'm @lawik@fosstodon.org.

Thank you for your attention. I appreciate it.