Weeknotes 2022 W27: Air

I’ve been very social this week, hanging out with quite a handful of people. That was nice. Hanging out outside is what summertime is for, right?

I don’t drink alcohol, and it is rather amusing/embarrassing to see people around you gradually get drunker and drunker, burping and hiccuping as their speech gets gradually less intelligible.

My most recent COVID-19 test did end up showing a very faint positive line. Luckily, I feel fine though (no symptoms). I’ll retest soon.

The RUG::B talk I prepared didn’t go through, as the meetup got changed into a social meetup in a park, but the stormy weather then ruined those plans.

Most likely, I’ll instead give this talk in September at the earliest.

I finally placed the order for the M2 MacBook Air. I’ll be able to pick it up from the local Apple Store at the beginning of August. It’s quite the expense (just short of €2000), but I’ve been saving for it for a while, and I’m counting on it lasting for 4 years or more.

I’ve been quite serious about budgeting, and my budgeting strategy for replacing past purchases made this purchase pretty straightforward.

I dropped the work on Gex, the programming language I have been working on. I don’t think I can get it to a somewhat reasonable state before I start my new job, and the new job will most likely take up most of my energy, leaving little left to make much progress with it.

To be clear, this isn’t deriding my future employer. When I say I won’t have the time and energy, I am speaking from experience. 40 hours per week of work leaves little time for side projects, and I feel that I’m beyond the point where I want to have intensive side projects like these, and would rather spend the time in more relaxed ways.

Building a programming language is a tough project to do by yourself. If I were serious about seeing this though, I’d look for others to work with on this. Working with someone who’s experienced in designing programming languages and writing compilers would be delightful.

If I had all the time in the world and money were no concern, I would most likely be working full-time on projects like these. I just think it’s extremely unlikely that I’ll be employed to do so, because these projects are high risk, require an enormous effort, and the payoff just is not there — at least not financially.

Let’s talk entertainment!

I picked up the Beyond Light expansion for Destiny 2 and finished the main storyline. Plenty of post-campaign stuff left to do, still.

Stranger Things season 4 is good. I have enjoyed the previous seasons, and I like this season because it is more moody, more atmospheric, darker. But I have some concerns:

• Why are the episodes so long? The final episode is the length of a feature film, which is just too long.

• One character in the show is a Russian soldier played by a German actor, which kept throwing me off because his accent is definitely German and not Russian.

• I accidentally spoiled (spoilered?) myself quite early on by looking at the cast list. Don’t do it.

• The “hacking” scene is funny because it shows C# code (or should I say… C♯?) and modern HTML. I found it worth watching Marcus Hutchin’s explanation!

Links:

• Celebrating 50 Years of Smalltalk (Richard Kenneth): My first job was writing Smalltalk, and I have interesting memories from that period. There are parts of Smalltalk that I still miss on a day-to-day basis.

• Give Up GitHub (Software Freedom Conservancy): I’m conflicted about this. I mostly agree with the points put forward (especially around ICE and Copilot), but GitHub in general is just really nice to use, and no other software comes close to it. I’m also avoiding self-hosting anything, because it’s very much not easy to do properly.

• ‘Anonymised’ data can never be totally anonymous, says study (The Guardian): I’m not surprised.

Blockchain links:

• Reddit dives into NFTs with new Collectible Avatars (The Verge): Reddit doesn’t call these “NFT”s presumably because the term “NFT” has a connotation that’s growing more and more negative.

• It’s Still Not About The Technology (David Rosenthal)