If it helps anything at all: It's normal. At this point, you've already proven you're smart and knowledgeable. Now, the universe wants to see if you can also finish what you've started. That's the main thing a PhD proves: That you can take an incredibly interesting topic and then do all the boring stuff that they need you to do to be formally compliant with arbitrary rules.

Focus on finishing. Reduce the scope as much as possible again. Down to your core message (or 3-4 core messages, I guess, for paper-based dissertations).

Listen to the feedback you get from your advisor.

You got this!

The two machines solve totally different problems. I never bothered to get the keyboard for the ipad - because typing is something i do on the macbook air. The ipad is incredible for reading pdfs that are meant to be letter/a4 sized.

When was the last time you sat down and solved an original problem for which you had no prior context to "complete" an approximated solution with? When has that ever happened in human history? All the great invention-moment stories that come to mind seem to have exactly that going on in the background: Prior context being auto-completed in an Eureka! moment.

The not recognizing people in unexpected locations is something I just mark down to "page fault" and move on. Nobody expects total recall anyway.

Except: Yesterday, I used an LLM (4o-mini-high) to do this kind of task instead and i might never go back.

I also find the image generation great for getting a "feel" for what a room / location might look like so I can improvise describing it a bit better.

LLMs are _really_ good at finding words that "go well together" - so use it to come up with a bunch of words to describe the atmosphere of a particular location or the mannerisms of a particular NPC.