Weeknotes 2022 W19: Zero gremlins

May 9​–​15, 2022
1100 words

This week has been mostly uneventful. That’s good, yeah?

My tendinitis isn’t quite gone yet, but it’s moving in the right direction. My physiotherapy appointments have come to an end. I’ll need to be careful to prevent it from coming back.

Let’s talk cooking! I bought Mela, a recipe manager for macOS (and iOS, but that’s not relevant to me). Now I can collect my recipes in one proper place, rather than letting them lie around in various text files and browser bookmarks.

I find it hard to follow a recipe to the letter, but recipes are often a good base for me to build on. Not that I’m necessarily a great cook — the thought of cooking for others fills me with anxiety — but I can get definitely get some tasty stuff on my plate.

I don’t plan on including a regular list of recipes in my week­notes, but here are two recipes I particularly liked:

No gremlins this week. Technology has not failed me at all. I am impressed!

Speaking of technology that fails: the news around blockchain tech has been grim lately.

I was watching in disbelief as the $LUNA currency dropped from about 115 USD just over a month ago to 0.0002 USD in record time — a loss of value of 99.9999%. That amount is staggering. I’m struggling to understand what happened, but as with all blockchain tech, the way things work is highly complex.

Jacob Silverman said this: “Jokes about crypto madness aside, this is going to get very grim and very materially real for some people.”

I’m angry at the people who have been advocating for blockchain technology and pushing others into crypto. Cryptocurrencies are, and has always been, a dangerous scam. It’s pretend money with the ability to cause massive harm. It’s not going to end well for the vast majority of people.

My implementing equality in Ruby article is making progress. Veeery slowly. Yep, I’ve been talking about this article for an eternity now. It’ll come.

One aspect that is causing issues is the medium. The Shopify engineering blog, which will host this article, is a Shopify store and thus not built on a proper CMS. This greatly limits the available formatting options, which rather sucks because I spent quite a bit of time marking it up properly for my own web site. My web site uses Nanoc (of course) and uses fancy typography and layout approaches that are hard to replicate elsewhere.

I’ve picked up the bytecode implementation of Lox (from the Crafting Interpreters book) again and made progress with it. I’m sorta-kinda going my own way with it: I’m not following the book too closely anymore, and rather using it as a guide to get me where I want to be.

One thing I deviated from is the error reporting. The error reporting in my implementation is a lot nicer. To illustrate, here’s the output for 1 + + 1, which fails because the extra + is a syntax error:

Parse error in FILENAME at 10:15:
var two = 1 + + 1;
              ^ Expect expression.

I’m not saying this error message is great, but there has been progress. (My implementation does not have the concept of files yet, which is why it just says FILENAME.)

Another choice I made in my implementation is to not have global variables. I’m not a fan of global variables, so good riddance I say! This simplifies the implementation to boot.

Crystal was a good choice for programming language for this project. I’m so happy with it that I might use it for my budgeting app prototype. I wrote about this prototype last in Week­notes 2022 W06: Technical failure; it is pretty much abandoned now, mostly due to technical difficulties. I believe Crystal would solve the main issues I had in there: it would help with strong type safety which is a must-have for this kind of project, and runtime performance would be highly valuable for it as well.

But eh, I’m going to stick to doing only one project at a time. My free time is too valuable.

I picked up Better Call Saul at Esther’s recommendation. I’m only a few episodes into season 1, but it’s great, and the first episode certainly hits the ground running.

I initially wasn’t sure whether the series would be my thing, because I haven’t watched Breaking Bad, but as far as I can tell, Better Call Saul is quite watchable as a standalone series too.

I picked up No Man’s Sky last week, and finished the current “community expedition” which ends next week. I snuck in to get the fancy expedition rewards before it’s too late. I’m unconvinced about No Man’s Sky itself: I treat it as a casual game that I fire up once in a while, though it has elements that make you invest a lot of time in it. It’s a lot of grinding still, with new gameplay concepts like settlement management sucking up even more time.

Links:

Entertainment links:

Blockchain links:

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