Weeknotes 2022 W21: Short week

This week was nicely short: Thursday was a public holiday, and I took Friday off as a bridge day along with it.

On Friday, I hung out with an old friend of my mom’s who was in town for the week. I hadn’t seen her in about 20 years, yet we instantly recognized each other. We spent two hours (I think — my brain can’t keep track of time well) in which I took out my best German, and I’m pleasantly surprised how well I can hold a conversation in German.

I’m a little surprised that I’ve still not caught COVID-19. (That’s a good thing, of course.)

Last week was my nine-year Berlin anniversary too! I forgot about that in my last week­notes. Berlin still feels like home. I’m happy here.

Gremlins: Just one this week.

• Monday was the first time playing Destiny 2 with friends in multiplayer, and we got disconnected from the Destiny 2 servers multiple times. “This doesn’t usually happen” they said — apparently until I came along.

Personal projects:

• My implementing equality in Ruby article is finally published! Behold: The complete guide to implementing equality in Ruby! You can also read the article on the Shopify En­gi­neer­ing blog as well, but I think the version on my own web site is prettier.

• I’ve tweaked the design of my web site slightly. Most notably, paragraphs are now separated using a blank line, rather than a first-line indent. The first-line indent approach works well for linear prose and where space is at a premium (e.g. books), but it’s less suitable for the kind of writing I do on the Internet.

• Earlier this month was Nanoc’s 15-year anniversary. Just like my Berlin anniversary, I missed that one in previous week­notes. It’s wild to think that I’ve been working on Nanoc for a decade and a half. Development has slowed down, mostly because Nanoc just works.

• My bytecode implementation of Lox (from the Crafting Interpreters book) is nearly finished, but I decided to do my own thing with it. I’ve got the itch to create a programming language of my own, after all. My variant of Lox doesn’t have superclasses, but it has structs with statically allocated fields. Why? Because.

In terms of entertainment, not much has been happening lately.

• I cancelled my Netflix subscription. Their anti-LGBT stance is not something I can tolerate any longer.

• Not having Netflix means that I’m unable to continue watching Better Call Saul. I’ll have to find a way around that.

I’m upgrading my gaming PC! I mentioned that in previous week­notes, but now I’ve actually ordered new components:

• CPU: Intel Core i7-12700F
• Motherboard: MSI PRO Z690-A DDR4
• RAM: Corsair Vengeance LPX 2×16GB DDR4 3600

This gaming PC is 7 years old, and the only upgrade I’ve done lately is replacing the graphics card with a RTX 2070S. These should provide a significant upgrade to what I have right now, and I even came in under budget.

Links:

• Olympiad level counting (3Blue1Brown): Grant talks about the unreasonable effectiveness of complex numbers in discrete math.

• Opera singer sues Berlin metro over racism claims (The Guardian): “I’ve lived in Baltimore, New York, Nice and Vienna, but in no city have I felt as unsafe on public transit as in Berlin.” Yikes!

• Supply chain hack using Python/PHP (Kevin Beaumont): Quote: “The malicious code sends all the environment variables to a Heroku app, likely to mine AWS credentials.” Yikes.

• Music MiniPlayer for macOS (Mario Guzman): Aww, it’s adorable!

• SwiftUI in 2022 (Michael Tsai): My interpretation is that SwiftUI is promising, but isn’t quite ready to be the default macOS GUI framework.

Blockchain:

• Dan Olson on Seth Green’s Bored Ape show: Watch the video — it’s hard not to agree that this is the “Unbearable Cringe of Crypto”.

• U.S. issues criminal charges in first cryptocurrency sanctions case (The Washington Post)