Quick bits:

• My new passport is being made, and I should receive it in the next week or two. It’s been a long process: it’ll have been two months. Most of that time was spent arduously hunting for earlier appointment slots.

  I don’t have a direct need for a passport right now, but it’s good to have it ready, just in case.

• There was no trash collection over Easter weekend, and the trash started piling up. I’ve had to wade through heaps of it. Humans generate wild amounts of garbage.

• I’m switching editors: I’m moving back to Visual Studio Code after trying out Zed for a while. The latter is no good for Ruby, though it is rather nice for writing Go. The Go support in VS Code is fine too, though, so I might be back to using VS Code full-time.

• I’ve started using the Pomodoro technique to improve my focus. I think it’s helping. Even without a day job, there is still plenty to get done.¹¹1 My now page contains what I’m working on.  Working in 25-minute chunks has helped me make progress on my budgeting app prototype and on improvements to Nanoc.

• Spring has sprung at last. There is so much green now, and this weekend was nicely warm (about 25 °C / 77 °F).

Quick nonsense:

• A pet peeve: using “headquarter” as a singular noun. It needs to be plural! It is “headquarters” (with an s). The word “headquarter” conjures visceral images of a quartered head. Eww.

• The other day at exactly 19:57, I bought exactly €19.57 worth of groceries. For just a minute, time truly was money.

• My mailbox is low down and I need to duck to see whether there’s anything in it, and now I feel very self-aware whenever I’m doing a quick little curtsy in front of the mailbox. Pure grace though.

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I don’t generally write in my week­notes about ongoing events that do not directly affect me, but this piece from The Guardian about the use of AI touched me as it is so deeply frightening. There is plenty I could quote, but this one stood out:

“We were not interested in killing [Hamas] operatives only when they were in a military building or engaged in a military activity,” one said. “It’s much easier to bomb a family’s home. The system is built to look for them in these situations.”

Or this:

Two sources said that during the early weeks of the war they were permitted to kill 15 or 20 civilians during airstrikes on low-ranking militants.

The whole article is a horrifying read. I couldn’t get through it in a single session. The article from the Israeli +972 Magazine, ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza by Yuval Abraham, goes in even more detail, but it made me feel too sick to continue reading.

Prof. Catherine Flick says it well:

[…] using machine learning (“AI”) systems to identify potential targets and then to suggest that they be targeted when at home with their family members, including children, is one of the most abhorrent, unethical, inhumane things I’ve ever seen.

The IDF’s continued civilian slaughter is horrific. It makes me deeply ashamed of humanity that we are using technology not to lift ourselves up as a society, but to commit and justify mass murder.

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The job search continues.

Salaries vary greatly between opportunities, even for similar roles. In Germany, I’ve seen roles offering €65K/year and roles offering €160K/year. The difference is wild.

My move to London is likely not happening soon. I’ve been shifting my attention to finding jobs in Berlin or remotely in Germany. It is much more important for me to have a job (I’ve got expenses!) than to be in London. The move to London could happen still, but likely not soon. 2025 perhaps?

As always: Would you like to work with me? Help me out: Get me a job in 2024!

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By sheer coincidence, I found a way to create custom icon sets in Scrivener. Behold my new Scrivener icon setup:

Custom icons live in ~/Library/Application Support/Scrivener/Icons. The Alps icon in the Place submenu is a PNG image named Place (Alps).png in that directory. And that shows the trick: whatever is outside of the parentheses (Place in this case) is the name of the submenu, and what is inside (Alps in this case) is the name of the submenu item.

Neat, is it not? This feature is documented (in the section titled Creating Your Own Icon Sets under 7.4.1 Creating Your Own Icons of the Scrivener manual), but I’m rather pleased that I discovered this by coincidence myself.

This is using the Office XS icon set, by the way. Those icons fit in quite nicely with the existing Scrivener icons.

I can hear you asking: Did I spend my time procrastinating, optimizing my Scrivener setup rather than getting any writing done? Well, yes. Yes, I did. Don’t judge me.

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Entertainment:

• I finally, for the first time, finished Diablo 2²²2 Diablo II: Resurrected (Blizzard Entertainment and Vicarious Visions, 2021), published by Blizzard Entertainment.  with its expansion. I am 23 years late to the party. The game’s fun, but maybe that is just those sneaky dopamine hits speaking.

• I’ve mostly given up on my Pillars of Eternity³³3 Pillars of Eternity (Obsidian Entertainment, 2015), published by Paradox Interactive.  replay. I’m just not enjoying it. I think I’m longing for a turn-based mode too much.

• Three more chapters left in Attack Surface.⁴⁴4 Cory Doctorow, Attack surface (New York, NY: Tom Doherty Associates, 2021).  The pace is picking up, but I fear it is becoming an experiment at how slow I can read a book.

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Links:

• How Many Clicks Does It Take To Get to the Center of Diablo? (Noah Caldwell-Gervais)

• March’s font of the Month: Indoor Kid: DJR never disappoints. Now I just need to figure out how I’ll put this font to good use!

• Amazon Ditches ‘Just Walk Out’ Checkouts at Its Grocery Stores: Whoa. It was just humans all along?

• Food Delivery Apps (Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, HBO)

• how i fixed my attention span (Answer In Progress)

• I Had Chemo and My Hair Came Back Curly! (Hank Green, SciShow): I too have had the question “why the heck is Hank’s hair curly now?!”

Tech links:

• Programming Apprenticeships

• xz Utils Backdoor (Bruce Schneier)

• Andrew Plotkin’s takeaway from the xz backdoor situation

• OSQI (Tim Bray)