Lobsters community shares weekend and weekly plans
Developers and tech workers discuss their personal projects, side hustles, and leisure activities across two recurring discussion threads.
What to know
- The Lobsters community balances intensive technical work—including index compression optimization, HAM radio certification, and system recovery—with personal leisure, life transitions, and skill-building projects.
- A subset of members reported finally moving past blocked projects after weeks of frustration, signaling broader workplace recovery or progress.
- Many contributors are managing major life changes simultaneously: job transitions, pet adoptions, relocations, and pursuing advanced technical certifications.
- Community members emphasize leisure and self-care despite busy schedules, with recurring acknowledgment that 'doing nothing' is also acceptable.
Technical projects and skill-building are central to personal time management.
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“Programming-wise, I want to write a little software that displays cargo check and Clippy's output in a the browser.”
jak2k · Lobsters ↗
Personal life changes and responsibilities require significant time and planning.
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“continuing to prep for the dog we'll get next week (calling vets, buying items) getting new tires for the car making some investments”
regulator · Lobsters ↗
Overcommitted schedules and lack of personal downtime are widespread concerns.
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“TBH, I dislike weekends as they end up being hectic like this (for some things we can't say 'no', so this isn't entirely self-inflicted).”
samebchase · Lobsters ↗
marginalia Search engine developerdallen Software engineer and researchernemin Software developermotet-a Software developer
How it unfolded 6 developments, newest first · click a bar or a number to jump postscomments
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6
Search engine developer optimizes index compression with novel byte-plane technique
A developer shared technical details on value block compression work for a search index, using zigzag delta encoding and byte-plane rearrangement with LZ4 compression to nearly double compression rates and save approximately 4 TB of disk space.
“Fiddling with value block compression in the marginalia index. Very cursed stuff.”
— marginalia -
Fiddling with value block compression in the marginalia index. Very cursed stuff. A bit simplified, but I'm basically zigzag delta encoding[1] the data and then reshuffling it in byte planes, and then compressing them with LZ4. So if I have for the sake of simplicity 64 longs that have been zigzag delta encoded, the data is rearranged into ```…
2 more of the top 3 · 34 posts in this stretch
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Revving up after being ill for five days. There is a bit of a backlog at work, but it's not too bad, and a lot of it is fairly mundane and perfect for ramping up. At home, I have completed shutting down all I had on Digital Ocean and migrating the stuff to less objectionable places. I made a boring word game and am considering ways to spice it up.
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Good luck on your HAM radio exam! I am not supposed to talk about this, for Elmers will come from the hilltops screaming, but by a logistical accident I managed to pass the General license exam before I had ever taken the Technician license exam. This was all at a HAM radio conference, and upon learning that I didn't have a Technician license exam…
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Developers report progress on long-blocked work projects and skill-building
Multiple commenters noted breakthroughs in work projects that had been stalled, alongside personal learning pursuits such as HAM radio certification. One described finally making progress on three blocked projects as feeling like 'WD40 finally dissolves rust enough.'
“Slowly chewing through three blocked projects. After weeks of frustration, it's nice to finally see things move. It's like when WD40 finally dissolves rust enough for you to make those first tiny movements in a seized mechanism.”
— nemin -
**Work:** Slowly chewing through three blocked projects. After weeks of frustration, it's nice to finally see things move. It's like when WD40 finally dissolves rust enough for you to make those first tiny movements in a seized mechanism. **Non-work:** Reading a manual and grinding practice exams for a HAM radio exam. I'm aiming for CEPT Novice…
2 more of the top 3 · 4 posts in this stretch
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Tech: at work, we're recovering from a massive outage on Friday after an unexpected certificate expiration (created before I had joined, with a 10 year expiration...), and I'm making plans to avoid this in future. At home, we finally have an internet connection in our new place; I'm looking into finding an electrician to run some ethernet cables…
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Working on my talk on accessibility in programming for SeaGL.
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background
Lobsters community shares weekly work and personal plans — A follow-up thread from the same community gathered plans for the week ahead. Members discussed ongoing technical challenges like index compression optimization, HAM radio certification preparation, recovery from system outages, and preparations for life changes like new pets and relocations.
- 2 days quiet
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4
Community member transitions from current job
A developer shared that it was their last day at their current position, describing the company as cool but unsuitable due to work schedule constraints.
“It was my last day at my current job, it was an interesting experience, it's a cool company but it doesn't really suit me. Especially regarding the work schedule…”
— motet-a -
It was my last day at my current job, it was an interesting experience, it’s a cool company but it doesn’t really suit me. Especially regarding the work schedule… so I’ll have a few days’ rest.
2 more of the top 3 · 19 posts in this stretch
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I take it quite easy this time so sleeping in a hotel, going out for dinner instead of cooking on my own stove etc. The necessary prep is plan route on computer and load that into bike gps system, clean an lube chain, adjust tyre pressure, pack a set of normal clothing, bring some water and food, a notebook for the case I think of something…
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[Attending](https://handmadecities.com/news/reminder-friday-co-working-in-kirkland-9-18/) a co-working session in Kirkland, WA. Still collecting more [donations](https://handmadecities.com/memos/HMC-Memo-006-HMC-Library.pdf) for our community's library. *Note: Thank you to the Lobsters folks who reached out to spin up Handmade meetups in new…
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3
Developer shares draft paper on AI's negative impacts on software engineering
A community member posted about work on a research paper examining negative effects of AI and 'vibe coding' on software engineering, emphasizing a thoughtful tone to reach beyond already-skeptical audiences.
“Hopefully actually getting a paper I've been working on about the negative impacts of AI and vibe coding on software engineering to draft status.”
— dallen -
Well, OpenBSD-GEFS made it into the wild, but it'd probably be useful to format a partition without booting 9Front... I'm writing/porting newfs_gefs.
2 more of the top 3 · 8 posts in this stretch
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Hopefully actually getting a paper I've been working on about the negative impacts of AI and vibe coding on software engineering to draft status. This has been a labor of love, rather than something done for work or school, but I'm citing my sources and trying to strike a tone that isn't ranting or shaming, since I want to reach an audience beyond…
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Driving round Scotland, the good bit up near Inverness for the weekend. See some folks I've not seen for a while, drive some roads I've not driven for even longer. Looking forward to it.
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2
Lobsters community shares weekend plans in weekly thread
Members of the Lobsters discussion community posted about their planned weekend activities, mixing technical projects with personal pursuits. Topics included OpenBSD filesystem work, solo bike trips, job transitions, and creative hobbies like learning ukulele.
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I'll be at the local hackspace as every Friday, and I attend a small Chaostreff in another nearby city. And I'm invited to a birthday party! Programming-wise, I want to write a little software that displays `cargo check` and Clippy's output in a the browser. This will give me a good opportunity to play with [`smol-rs`](
1 more of the top 2 · 2 posts in this stretch
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S.T.A.L.K.E.R. GAMMA I think. The more I'm looking at what it's doing the more I realize it's basically the neovim of S.T.A.L.K.E.R and installing it felt just as dubious as did installing the pirated copy of Shadow of Chernobyl I got my hands on in 2007*. \* As was the fashion at the time. I've since bought it because it turned out to be one of…
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Community members respond with their own busy weekend schedules
Commenters shared additional weekend activities including motorcycle rides to local forts, table tennis matches, and family obligations, with several noting the hectic nature of weekends.
“TBH, I dislike weekends as they end up being hectic like this (for some things we can't say 'no', so this isn't entirely self-inflicted).”
— samebchase -
* Going on a motorcycle ride to a nearby fort (Purandar) at 6 AM on Saturday with some people from church. * Playing table tennis with someone I have not played with before, but indications point to him being good (I've seen him play PickleBall). * Dinner with friends for my wife's birthday (the dinner got rescheduled). * Church on Sunday morning…
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What people are saying 10 voices from 1 site · best of 68 · verbatim
- Sep 22
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I am winding down after months of feeling immense pressure to be productive at all times. I'll be playing WoW Forever beta when not working or being with the family. We (me and the wife) are also looking to enroll into a math undergrad at a uni in barcelona. 1-2 classes per semester
- Sep 21
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Celebrating the equinox. Human societies thrive on celebration and the way the Solar system[1] is aligned with our moon gives us several natural times to do so, and the summer/fall equinox is a good one because there's lots of great stuff to eat. Highly recommended. 1: I learned last week that Solar system is the technically correct…
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Ah, nice! Migrating away from DO is also on my list, this week I'm moving my family mail server to Hetzner — then I'll have my personal mail server and personal website, but those are less risky. I was also sick with covid, and I'm finally feeling better.
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I'm visiting my mom for her birthday, so I'm planning to finally migrate my family mail server to an OpenBSD VPS running [OpenSMTPD](https://www.opensmtpd.org/) (I was using [Mail-in-a-Box](https://mailinabox.email/) before). Then I can personally update her mail client and make sure everything works for her, without having to troubleshoot from 5k…
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It's about 1.1 TB per index partition with 8 regular partitions, and two smaller ones. Total available storage is ballpark of 90 TB, but it's also got to keep the crawl data and a bunch of other stuff, and have enough storage to allow constructing the index. At least part of the motivation for the change is to reduce the amount of additional space…
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I've really enjoyed getting more in-depth into poker theory and practice so have been slowly building a poker solver. Along the way I'm writing all the “standard library” bits that I think are missing in C++, or could be simpler and better. I'm currently on a yak shave of writing a small build system from scratch for my projects too. My goal is to…
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On my way to finish the Stuxnet book this week. Completely blown away by so many things and I have so many questions. First of all, how did these (Symantec, Kaspersky) private companies get the sinkholes/honeypots?? I've been reading the original threads on the orange site from when this unfolding and its really fascinating. I would love to put…
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I'm pre-training a small language model to become more competent in my field. Once I'm done with that, I'll be moving on to post training. If all goes well, I'll have a post-trained model ready by the end of the month. I might be making things harder for myself by choosing a non-standard ML framework (I'm using `burn` in Rust). I did so to force…
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Work: in the throes of AI knowledge management/context management. Interesting stuff - we started having discussions Descarte-style of "how do I know what I know". Home: building a toy app for workout recovery.
- Sep 18
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goin to local amusement park with my sibling. continuing to prep for the dog we'll get next week (calling vets, buying items) getting new tires for the car making some investments will continue to work on little things: read books, study, exercise, practice programming gotta apply for more jobs, too. i am weighing whether or not i should post on…