Quick bits:

• A Gemüsekebab food stall opened up near me, and every time I walk by, there is quite the queue. Somebody needs to explain to me why Berliners are so obsessed with Gemüsekebab. This phenomenon is truly beyond me.

• Zendaya’s website is back! She must be reading my week­notes.

• I’ve switched my main editor from Visual Studio Code to Zed. We‘ll see how that goes. It’s very fast, and I’m a sucker for anything that helps my feedback loop. I’m not a fan of the integrated GenAI tooling, though, but it’s easy enough to ignore.

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My job search is muddling along.

I’ve been searching for about two months now. The amount of job opportunities is remarkably low. The opportunities also disappear quickly: one time, I saw an opportunity that I decided to check out in a moment, but a few hours later it already was closed because it already had too many applicants.

The lack of opportunities puts my plan to move to London¹¹1 Help me out — Get me a job in 2024!  at risk, especially because I am looking for opportunities that have some stability. It is not appealing to be stranded in a country that I will be kicked out when I no longer have a job.

What also stood out is that I’ve barely gotten any referrals. You’d think that people would jump on the opportunity to get a referral bonus. Perhaps referral bonuses are a thing of the past.

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What is up with the drivers in Berlin? My impression is that cars in Berlin are more dangerous than ever to cyclists and pedestrians.

I got nearly run over by a car the other day as I was crossing a street at the pedestrian traffic light (which was green for me, to be clear). The driver just … grinned at me.

On the same walk, I saw cars drive through the red light, and even saw a car drive on the wrong side of the road.

I saw drivers turn right (without using the turn signal), paying no attention to cyclists going straight ahead.

I’ve seen so many drivers sneak slowly between bollards to get onto pedestrian-only areas. They absolutely know that what they’re doing is wrong, and occasionally they even have the gall to shout or honk at pedestrians while they’re doing it.

I can’t have a relaxing walk in my area anymore, because the cars make that simply impossible.

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My fiction writing hasn’t made much progress, perhaps mostly due to being distracted by Ink, and so now I feel compelled to figure out how interactive fiction works and how to write it myself.

I don’t think this will be a long-term interest, for a few reasons: it’s not a very popular form of fiction, it requires considerably more effort to write interactive fiction compared to regular stories, and lastly, I find that it does not create narratives that are as engaging.

It might help me get unstuck in my writing, though: often I feel that the choices I need to make in my story are not quite the ones I want to commit to, so it might be good to use an approach where choice is built in.

We’ll see how this goes. In all likelihood I’ll go back to my regular fiction writing.

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In a move that indicates that I really don’t have much of an idea of what I want to to do with the budgeting app prototype, I started rewriting the lexer and parser in Go, The resulting app is much, much faster than the one in Ruby. Parsing all the data in Ruby takes 7–8s while the Go version clocks in well under 100ms.

This matters a lot. Tight feedback loops are essential. Not only is the resulting executable fast, Go source code also compiles quickly.

Having a single binary executable that’s easy to redistribute is also so nice. That is something always a little irksome about software written in Ruby (or other interpreted languages).

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Entertainment:

• I am not enjoying Pillars of Eternity²²2 Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian Entertainment, 2015), published by Paradox Interactive.  as much as I had thought. The writing is not nearly as good as I remembered. There is a bit too much of it, too. Perhaps Baldur’s Gate 3 has spoiled me?

• I’m so slow to read through Attack Surface.³³3 Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021).  My attention’s not at it anymore.

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Links:

• Spotify’s Phony War On Bots (Benn Jordan)

• The Dunning-Kruger Effect is Autocorrelation (Economics from The Top Down / Blair Fix): I did not know that the Dunning-Kruger effect had been debunked, and this article is a solid analysis.

• Do you listen to music when you play video games? (Renegade Cut / Leon Thomas)

• How to Make Something People Give a Shit About (Joan Westenberg)

• Hey Guys: Yep!

Silly links:

• Goats of Berlin: Important map of Berlin.

• Draw together: Way more fun than it seems at first!

Tech links:

• Silicon Valley Deserves Your Anger (Paris Mars, Ed Zitron for Tech Won’t Save Us): Another excellent episode.

• Why We Can’t Have Nice Software (Andrew Kelley)

• What does Alan Kay think about programming and teaching programming with copilots and LLMs of today?

• Users ditch Glassdoor, stunned by site adding real names without consent: Yikes. This already filled me with disgust before I realized how this affected trans people. Fuck Glassdoor.

• The one about the web developer job market (Baldur Bjarnason)

• Write CSS. Not too much. Mostly scoped. (Lee Reamsnyder)