saroj

in 2015, simon brodkin, while throwing money at sepp blatter during a press conference, made a joke about the 2026 world cup being held in north korea. it seems to have come true. a scandalous decision, we'll be rooting for belgium.

for me, lately he's become a great figure not just for his football but for his character and the way he is off the pitch too. whether it's his facial expressions or the way he sweetly needles opponents now and then, he adds a nice splash of color to the game. for a player this lethal on the pitch, both physically and as a goalscorer, to have a funny, likable side and to show it comes across as pretty endearing.

because he's got a monster of a physique, he probably sticks in people's minds as a predatory player, but he's really a very smart footballer too. even though he's still very young, his knack for being in the right place at the right time is incredible. if you take a look at the goals he scores, on a lot of them you'd end up praising the guy who made the assist, thinking what a nice tap-in he set up, when in reality haaland makes such flawless off-the-ball runs that he locks the defense up completely. defenders are left undecided whether to go at the man on the ball or mark haaland. he makes it nearly impossible, almost every single time, for an easy help defense to be made on the man on the ball, he times those distances beautifully. that's something you can chalk up to both instinct and a real footballing brain.

i actually find his career with the norway national team even more remarkable than his club career, and i put it above it. they increased the number of teams in the tournaments and all that, but these guys play pretty good football, along with the confidence haaland gives them. it's not like they have bad players either, in fact there are a lot of underrated guys in the squad, but for years the elite center forwards of irrelevant countries have always had their national team careers excused just because their national teams were bad. this guy leads a pretty top-tier team without making excuses for anything, and that deserves huge praise too.

i don't think he'll stick around very long at city, i figure he'll leave within a year or two. this guy won't end his career without doing a stint in spain and at some point italy too. it's been known for a while that he has that kind of desire in general. we'd have liked to watch him as barça's center forward instead of real, one way or another, so we'll see..

my main ai assistant.

there's just one frustrating issue. when i keep a conversation pinned, whether it's about the stock market, a diet plan, or a project at work, it gradually starts ignoring the earliest parts of the chat as the conversation gets longer.

i've had project discussions that stretched to ninety pages over three weeks, and eventually it started acting like the most important decisions from the beginning had never happened.

i found a workaround that seems to help. i scroll all the way to the top of the conversation and save the entire chat as a pdf. then i upload that same pdf back into the conversation to refresh its memory.

maybe it'll be useful to someone else too.

https://claudskills.com/

a platform that curates ready-made skill files for claude ai.

i'm not particularly deep into ai. up until recently, i'd barely used it at all. but over the past two or three weeks, i've started trying a few different models for small tasks and general questions.

for casual conversations, chatgpt seemed pretty good. but when it came to actually getting work done, gemini completely outclassed it.

swimming.

he's the kind of player that, simply because he exists, i find myself checking the schedule to see when argentina is playing. the one match i never want to miss is argentina's, just so i can watch messi play again.