Weeknotes 2023 W04: Feedback week

A relaxed week with not too much happening. I’m guessing these week­notes will be shorter than usual.

They’ll also be shorter because I’ve got the feeling that my RSI problems are returning. That means I should avoid using my keyboard for a while.

At work, the feedback from last week’s reviews came in (see Week­notes 2023 W03: Review week), and the feedback for me is positive! That is what I expected, and I am satisfied.

One of the pieces of feedback is that I never show up in the office — something the HR department has complained about. This is despite being clear from the beginning (starting with the job interview) that I would be working remotely. In any case, I’m getting my contract amended so that it makes the remote-working aspect explicit.

My social life seems to be picking up. I’ve had a handful of people over at my place in the last few weeks, and that felt good. I like hosting people — and it’s not something I’ve really done much of before. (The pandemic is to blame, in large part.)

It’s nice to text a few friends “my house is open, so feel free to drop by on Saturday” and have things just happen.

I’ve been doing a tiny bit of maintenance work on Nanoc (see the list of recent commits) but haven’t gotten around to the open issues yet.

Nanoc’s tests on GitHub often fail with a segfault. It has been happening for a long time, but I’m quite lost as to why that happens. On my local development machine, Nanoc never segfaults.

I’ve made more attempts at continuing the writing efforts for my short stories, with not too much luck. I think I hold myself to too-high standards.

Another problem is that writing short stories takes a good chunk of time, and I’m having trouble allocating that time. I always feel that there are more important things to do.

I’ve started writing two articles:

• One is about the size of functions: what is a good size? What is too short, and what is too long? The conventional wisdom doesn’t fully apply, so I felt an article would be useful.

• Another article goes into some detail about how difficult it is to keep two data sources in sync. Synchronising data is surprisingly difficult — so difficult that I think it is better avoided in 99.9% of the cases.

Entertainment:

• I watched Swiss Army Man. I was not prepared for the strangeness of that movie. It’s extremely weird — but certainly enjoyable.

• I gave up on my Fallout: New Vegas re-play. It runs badly and crashes regularly. When my character dies, my gaming PC locks up and the only fix is to restart the PC. This gives dying an extra punishment which is much more frustrating than it’s worth.

• I’ve been attempting to run Fallout 4 but I can only get it to run in extremely low quality mode. It’s so ugly it makes my eyes hurt. At the same time, loading times are atrociously long. I don’t understand. Aaaaand, uninstalled.

• Oh no, I’ve bought Fallout 76. I played it for an hour or so, and while it’s supposed to be a multi-player experience… the game world is just empty. There are no other players. It’s the loneliest Fallout game ever, and that is pretty ridiculous for a multiplayer game.

Links:

• You Can Stop Updating Copyright Attribution Years (Hynek Schlawack): I need to follow this advice still!

• A.I. versus the law (LegalEagle)

• What Happened to Jon Stewart? — A Retrospective and Jon Stewart doesn’t understand Capitalism (Skip Intro): I’ve been confused by what Jon Stewart was up to lately, and this video series was interesting.

• Pentiment (Lettermatic): This article goes into the detail of making the fonts for Pentiment. The game (and its fonts) are fantastic.

• Macroeconomic Changes Have Made It Impossible for Me to Want to Pay You (Mike Lacher, McSweeney’s): Too real.

• We tried to run a social media site and it was awful (Financial Times)

• You’re Not a Fearmonger. You Have Sentinel Intelligence (Jessica Wildfire)

Tech links:

• A Comprehensive Guide to Generics in Go: This seems like a good and fairly complete introduction to generics in Go, and so it goes into my bookmarks.

• Notes on a smaller Rust: This goes into my programming language design treasure chest.