Weeknotes 2022 W25: Heat

June 20​–​26, 2022
900 words

Ugh, what a week. The overturning of Roe v. Wade left me angry and hopeless. I don’t even live in the US, but the impact of that decision will surely be felt in Europe as well.

On Wednesday evening, I attended a social work event for my new employer. I’m not starting there until August, but it was good to get to know the people I’ll be working with.

But oh boy, social hangovers are a thing.

I’m still COVID-19-negative.

The weather in Berlin has been hot. Last Sunday went up to 37°C (99°F), which is too hot for me. Today’s prediction is 32°C (89°F), but with quite high humidity.

I learned that there are plenty of areas around Brandenburg with old, undetonated ammunition: about 3500 km² where there are still lost bombs, mines, grenades, and more. Last week’s dryness and heat lead to forest fire in Brandenburg, which the fire brigade said was tough to control due to it raging in an area with undetonated ammunition.

WW2 feels like a distant past, but the repercussions are still felt in 2022.

The heat is causing problems for my MacBook Pro as well. The fans are continuously spinning at high speed, and Activity Monitor shows that the CPU is throttled to prevent overheating. It makes it tough to get much done.

The new M2 MacBook Air laptops should be available next month, and I’ll order one as soon as they’re available.

I bought a new pan! I had been using IKEA pan before, but I think it was well past its expected lifetime. I got the new pan from WMF, but I haven’t actually used it yet.

I suppose the trick to getting all the good cookware is to replace old stuff piece by piece, slowly but steadily.

Shopify announced their “tokengated experiences” project. This is a major reason why I resigned from Shopify. I believe this project is unethical and should not exist.

In this context, NFTs are used as access passes. This is a dystopian idea, where tracking is omnipresent and customer privacy is eradicated. Dan Olson goes into more detail in chapter 9 of his evergreen video Line Goes Up – The Problem With NFTs, which is absolutely worth (re)watching.

My programming language Gex now has support for structs. You can define structs, pass them as arguments and return them from functions:

fn print_size(size: Size) {
  println_float64(size.width);
  println_float64(size.height);
}

struct Size {
  width: Float64,
  height: Float64,
}

fn main() {
  var size: Size = Size {
    width = 100.0,
    height = 200.0,
  };

  print_size(size);
}

Structs are allocated on the stack and passed by value. In the future, I’d want heap allocation to be an option, with garbage collection.

The biggest challenge was making the ordering of declarations irrelevant. In the example above, the function print_size() is defined before the struct Size, even though the function uses the struct. That works just fine, as it should!

Next up: adding methods to structs.

Star Trek Strange New Worlds’ latest episode, The Elysian Kingdom, is another hit. I hope SNW is a success, and that its success brings back the popularity of episodic storytelling.

I watched the first season of Loki and it’s good entertainment. I’m enjoying the surrealist vibe of the show. The chemistry between Tom Hiddleston and Owen Wilson is something to behold.

I finished the Witch Queen expansion of Destiny 2! That was a lot of fun. Now, on to all the other content that I’ve missed so far…

I played the remake of Myst. It is pretty, but I’m unsure whether it was worth the purchase: the replayability of Myst is low especially because I remember so much of the puzzles and their solutions. (I would love to get a remake of Riven, though.)

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Incoming links: Weeknotes 2022 W40: Fire.