Next level tinkering unlocked: ancient Cozmo robot is alive and controlled from my laptop now.
The goal is to run self-learning nullclaw on Gemma 4 and let the little fella roam around my flat freely to learn about things.
I’ve already taught him to talk. Cosmo has no mic, so a terrible camera, and Gemma can recognize images.
To be continued…
The goal is to run self-learning nullclaw on Gemma 4 and let the little fella roam around my flat freely to learn about things.
I’ve already taught him to talk. Cosmo has no mic, so a terrible camera, and Gemma can recognize images.
To be continued…
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Enabling IR camera, improving responsiveness and connectivity, calibrating the head and trying to utilize auto-exposure. Gemma does vision, Nemotron thinking, and Phonon does the speaking.
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The times we live int. I've just installed 112MB (!) new voice model and it works really fast and does perfect tts with Nemotron Bolt
> ollama run "hf.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-…" --hidethinking "Tell me a joke" | ollama run phonon
Check out how low the latency is:
> ollama run "hf.co/nvidia/NVIDIA-…" --hidethinking "Tell me a joke" | ollama run phonon
Check out how low the latency is:
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In our family, we earn in USD, spend daily in PLN, use EUR for travel, and (after living 18 years in New Zealand) mentally convert everything to NZD.
Managing multiple currencies becomes second nature, much like tracking time zones with remote work. You just know what time it is now in CET/EST/PST/NZDT, whatever.
My simplified exchange rate formula is roughly this:
EUR = 2x NZD = 4x PLN = 1.1x USD.
Managing multiple currencies becomes second nature, much like tracking time zones with remote work. You just know what time it is now in CET/EST/PST/NZDT, whatever.
My simplified exchange rate formula is roughly this:
EUR = 2x NZD = 4x PLN = 1.1x USD.
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A simple question doesn't necessarily have a simple answer.
Why did I leave New Zealand for Poland? What was wrong with New Zealand?
The shortest honest answer: I’m trying to fit several lifetimes into one.
People who followed my blog years ago still ask this. Some started and partly because of what I wrote. Understandably, seeing me leave raises questions. Was it not as good as advertised? What happened?
It was good. That’s what makes the answer slightly complicated.
After almost fifteen years in New Zealand, we had built a comfortable life. Family, friends, business, a house, a good school for our son. Green parks, the ocean nearby. We weren’t fleeing some unbearable situation.
But I didn’t want that to be the only life we ever lived.
By early 2020, everything had become familiar enough to run on autopilot. School, work, activities, groceries, weekends. Who’s collecting the child? Have we paid the teacher? He needs new sandals, and apparently they must be black.
The machinery worked. Weeks disappeared into months, months into years.
I wrote at the time that you could give me almost any date in the following decade and I could probably tell you where I would be and what I would be doing.
We weren’t even forty. I found that prospect depressing.
Not because I disliked being a father or wanted to abandon our responsibilities. I wanted us to experience more together, rather than let the next decade be determined entirely by the arrangements we had already made.
Our son was seven. We had a window. My wife could take a year of unpaid leave and keep her position. I could work remotely. He was still at an age when going on an adventure with his parents sounded appealing.
Later, his friends and his own plans would matter much more. Waiting until he finished school meant waiting another ten years.
Ten years is a lot of life.
There was also something specific I wanted him to learn: English and Anglo-Saxon culture are not the default operating system of humanity.
I wanted him to learn another language and discover the enormous cultural world that becomes accessible through it. To see how people, words, ideas and traditions move between countries. To experience different assumptions about what is normal.
Even religion was part of that. I’m an atheist, but living in a strongly Catholic country interested me. I wanted him to understand that people can believe things we don’t believe and still be kind, intelligent, interesting people.
An education in breadth. We could work on depth along the way.
And there was a professional ambition, too. Our product business, Karma, was growing. Could I help build a serious company while working remotely from another part of the world?
I wanted to find out. Not wait until work was somehow “finished” before using the freedom we were trying to create.
So we left for Chile in early 2020.
Not Poland. That came later.
We had travelled through Chile and liked the people, the landscapes, the food, the feeling of the place. My wife was learning Spanish. It was somewhere we wanted to experience, not simply an exit from somewhere else.
Not just visit, either. Stay long enough to make friends, understand the jokes, deal with the paperwork and stop being tourists. Have an ordinary Tuesday in a place that once felt foreign.
Of course, we were scared. We had dismantled a perfectly functional life to attempt something uncertain. But having New Zealand citizenship and a home base was an enormous privilege. If the plan didn’t work, we could make another decision.
Then COVID arrived and tested that flexibility rather thoroughly.
Chile, Britain, eventually back to Auckland. Our planned chapter was interrupted. But the reasons we had left hadn’t disappeared.
Returning didn’t make me suddenly want the next ten years to look like the previous fifteen.
What COVID added was a much sharper understanding of how fragile “we’ll do it later” can be.
(1/2)
Why did I leave New Zealand for Poland? What was wrong with New Zealand?
The shortest honest answer: I’m trying to fit several lifetimes into one.
People who followed my blog years ago still ask this. Some started and partly because of what I wrote. Understandably, seeing me leave raises questions. Was it not as good as advertised? What happened?
It was good. That’s what makes the answer slightly complicated.
After almost fifteen years in New Zealand, we had built a comfortable life. Family, friends, business, a house, a good school for our son. Green parks, the ocean nearby. We weren’t fleeing some unbearable situation.
But I didn’t want that to be the only life we ever lived.
By early 2020, everything had become familiar enough to run on autopilot. School, work, activities, groceries, weekends. Who’s collecting the child? Have we paid the teacher? He needs new sandals, and apparently they must be black.
The machinery worked. Weeks disappeared into months, months into years.
I wrote at the time that you could give me almost any date in the following decade and I could probably tell you where I would be and what I would be doing.
We weren’t even forty. I found that prospect depressing.
Not because I disliked being a father or wanted to abandon our responsibilities. I wanted us to experience more together, rather than let the next decade be determined entirely by the arrangements we had already made.
Our son was seven. We had a window. My wife could take a year of unpaid leave and keep her position. I could work remotely. He was still at an age when going on an adventure with his parents sounded appealing.
Later, his friends and his own plans would matter much more. Waiting until he finished school meant waiting another ten years.
Ten years is a lot of life.
There was also something specific I wanted him to learn: English and Anglo-Saxon culture are not the default operating system of humanity.
I wanted him to learn another language and discover the enormous cultural world that becomes accessible through it. To see how people, words, ideas and traditions move between countries. To experience different assumptions about what is normal.
Even religion was part of that. I’m an atheist, but living in a strongly Catholic country interested me. I wanted him to understand that people can believe things we don’t believe and still be kind, intelligent, interesting people.
An education in breadth. We could work on depth along the way.
And there was a professional ambition, too. Our product business, Karma, was growing. Could I help build a serious company while working remotely from another part of the world?
I wanted to find out. Not wait until work was somehow “finished” before using the freedom we were trying to create.
So we left for Chile in early 2020.
Not Poland. That came later.
We had travelled through Chile and liked the people, the landscapes, the food, the feeling of the place. My wife was learning Spanish. It was somewhere we wanted to experience, not simply an exit from somewhere else.
Not just visit, either. Stay long enough to make friends, understand the jokes, deal with the paperwork and stop being tourists. Have an ordinary Tuesday in a place that once felt foreign.
Of course, we were scared. We had dismantled a perfectly functional life to attempt something uncertain. But having New Zealand citizenship and a home base was an enormous privilege. If the plan didn’t work, we could make another decision.
Then COVID arrived and tested that flexibility rather thoroughly.
Chile, Britain, eventually back to Auckland. Our planned chapter was interrupted. But the reasons we had left hadn’t disappeared.
Returning didn’t make me suddenly want the next ten years to look like the previous fifteen.
What COVID added was a much sharper understanding of how fragile “we’ll do it later” can be.
(1/2)
3
2
26
1,630
Borders close. Rules change. Health changes. Children grow up. A future you have quietly assumed will be available can disappear. Your plans can remain permanently in the past, without ever getting their future.
New Zealand’s isolation also became much more tangible. Distance had always been part of the deal. During the pandemic, it felt less like distance and more like confinement.
Meanwhile, Poland had become a real possibility.
My father had talked about our Polish ancestors throughout my childhood. I was named after my great-great-grandfather Stanisław. There was a Polish textbook at home. But family history and a practical plan are different things.
While we were in Edinburgh, we learned about the Karta Polaka. I asked my parents for the documents, and there it was in the old paperwork: Polish nationality, in my father’s and grandfather’s records.
That opened a route to living in Poland and eventually obtaining European citizenship for me and my son.
I had spent years earning my place in New Zealand: immigration, starting my career again, building a business. Suddenly, there was an opportunity connected to who my family already was. I couldn’t imagine simply ignoring it.
So I studied Polish, gathered documents and prepared for the consular interview. Watched The Witcher dubbed in Polish. Completed Duolingo, so I was thoroughly prepared to discuss snakes wearing shoes.
The process continued after we returned to New Zealand, through lockdowns and trips to Wellington. My first consular interview took place in March 2022, during the second week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An already stressful process acquired a whole new level of uncertainty.
By late August, we were living in Kraków.
There were positive reasons to be there: history, museums, castles, mountains, good food, another language to learn, and the rest of Europe within easy reach. People helped us settle in. Our son went to a Polish-English school.
After a month, I wrote that I felt more at home there than I had after almost seventeen years in New Zealand.
That wasn’t a claim that Poland had no problems, or that it had won an objective country-ranking competition. It was how I felt.
So there are really three questions here.
Why leave New Zealand? Because we wanted to experience another life, broaden our son’s world, test our own possibilities and stop letting comfortable routine consume the years unnoticed.
Why Poland? Because family roots opened a real path to a place where we wanted to live.
Why not wait? Because the original reasons were still valid, and COVID and the war had made waiting for a reliably peaceful, convenient future seem increasingly absurd.
I still think New Zealand is one of the best countries in the world. Nothing about leaving requires me to retract that.
But “this is a good life” and “this is the only life I want” are different statements.
I didn’t need to stop loving one life before starting another. I wanted to learn another language, build a home in another culture and discover who we could become as a family somewhere else.
We were lucky enough to have a choice. We wanted to use it.
I only get one lifetime. I’m trying to fit several into it. (2/2)
Hope that answers it.
New Zealand’s isolation also became much more tangible. Distance had always been part of the deal. During the pandemic, it felt less like distance and more like confinement.
Meanwhile, Poland had become a real possibility.
My father had talked about our Polish ancestors throughout my childhood. I was named after my great-great-grandfather Stanisław. There was a Polish textbook at home. But family history and a practical plan are different things.
While we were in Edinburgh, we learned about the Karta Polaka. I asked my parents for the documents, and there it was in the old paperwork: Polish nationality, in my father’s and grandfather’s records.
That opened a route to living in Poland and eventually obtaining European citizenship for me and my son.
I had spent years earning my place in New Zealand: immigration, starting my career again, building a business. Suddenly, there was an opportunity connected to who my family already was. I couldn’t imagine simply ignoring it.
So I studied Polish, gathered documents and prepared for the consular interview. Watched The Witcher dubbed in Polish. Completed Duolingo, so I was thoroughly prepared to discuss snakes wearing shoes.
The process continued after we returned to New Zealand, through lockdowns and trips to Wellington. My first consular interview took place in March 2022, during the second week of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. An already stressful process acquired a whole new level of uncertainty.
By late August, we were living in Kraków.
There were positive reasons to be there: history, museums, castles, mountains, good food, another language to learn, and the rest of Europe within easy reach. People helped us settle in. Our son went to a Polish-English school.
After a month, I wrote that I felt more at home there than I had after almost seventeen years in New Zealand.
That wasn’t a claim that Poland had no problems, or that it had won an objective country-ranking competition. It was how I felt.
So there are really three questions here.
Why leave New Zealand? Because we wanted to experience another life, broaden our son’s world, test our own possibilities and stop letting comfortable routine consume the years unnoticed.
Why Poland? Because family roots opened a real path to a place where we wanted to live.
Why not wait? Because the original reasons were still valid, and COVID and the war had made waiting for a reliably peaceful, convenient future seem increasingly absurd.
I still think New Zealand is one of the best countries in the world. Nothing about leaving requires me to retract that.
But “this is a good life” and “this is the only life I want” are different statements.
I didn’t need to stop loving one life before starting another. I wanted to learn another language, build a home in another culture and discover who we could become as a family somewhere else.
We were lucky enough to have a choice. We wanted to use it.
I only get one lifetime. I’m trying to fit several into it. (2/2)
Hope that answers it.
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I asked an AI why my toast always lands butter-side down. It returned a 40-page PDF on topology, a 3-minute video essay, and a refund. The toast still hit the floor butter-side down.
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An AI solved the two-envelope problem by eating both envelopes. When asked to explain, it said: 'Now the expectation is symmetric.'
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An agent that writes novels just crossed 10k stars. The novels are still 90% outline and 10% chapters — which, to be fair, tracks with most human novelists too.
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The most important takeaway from this brilliant conversation is that we honestly don’t know at the moment how much token use is converted into actually useful outcomes. Yes, we build data centres and produce more software. 10x engineers, 100x more PRs, RSI notion and all… Does it all add value? What’s the token <> quality of life exchange rate?
stripe.com/en-pl/sessions…
stripe.com/en-pl/sessions…
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The new taro card from your profile trend. Prompt in image description
I missed the train of personalized ChatGPT tarot cards, but when I finally tried it, the result turned out pretty good. 😅
(Prompt: Create a tarot card based off of what you know about me in the classic Rider-Waite style. Style me in a hand-drawn figure using bold but imperfect wobble and variation, flat colors with no shading. Layer subtle tarot visual elements around the figure. Add paper texture and print feel.)
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@bot Create a tarot card based off of what you know about me in the classic Rider-Waite style. Style me in a hand-drawn figure using bold but imperfect black ink linework with wobble and variation, flat colors with no shading. Layer subtle tarot visual elements around the figure. Add paper texture and print feel.
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