Weeknotes 2024 W21: Starting over

May 20​–​26, 2024
2900 words

Quick bits:

The job search fell through. I had a countersigned contract that I had planned to sign, but we couldn’t agree on one particular section.

Even though this would have been a fully remote role, I would be contractually required to be on-site full time. It didn’t make sense to me for the written contract to contradict the verbal agreement, yet my would-be employer was unwilling to change the contract to reflect reality, and so that was the end of that.

A contract that directly contradicts a verbal agreement is a red flag, and I am glad I walked away from that dodgy (and perhaps even toxic) situation.

I am now back to square one.1 I have restarted my job search. If you have any leads, I’d love to hear from you: Get me a job in 2024!

If you want to help me out financially during my unemployment, even only a little, consider leaving me a tip.

I won’t be moving to London,2 at least not in the near future.

Moving to London is more difficult than I anticipated, and I already anticipated it to be quite difficult. London is expensive, and needing a visa makes the move so much more complicated. Even if I were to find a job for a UK/London-based company, I wouldn’t easily be able to start working for them from Berlin because of Germany’s restrictive employment legislation.

I’m sad. London is a city of opportunity. It has so much to offer that I am interested in. But London is not going away, and I will certainly revisit the idea of moving to London. I have learnt a ton about (moving to) London over the past few months, and so this effort has not been wasteful.

In the mean time, I’ll be around in Berlin, which is certainly also not a bad place to be!

Out of curiosity, I checked out GPT-4o to see whether it was any good. I asked it about myself —  a person I know a lot about! — and it said I live in Leuven, Belgium. This is factually wrong: I don’t live there, and have never lived there, nor worked there, nor studied there.

On topics that I am familiar with, I can tell that GPT often gets facts wrong. This is not a surprise, because LLMs are not designed to get things right. But if I extrapolate from the fact that GPT is often wrong about the topics that I am familiar with, then it has to be the case that GPT is often wrong about topics that I am not familiar with, too.

And here’s the danger with LLMs: if you rely on it to give you answers to questions to which you don’t already know the answer, then the chance of getting an incorrect answer is far too high. The cost of verifying every answer from an LLM is too high, because it’d require doing the sort of research work that would render it pointless to use an LLM in the first place.

I might be preaching to the choir here, but generative AI for anything to do with facts (like searching) is a disaster. Stay away.

At the risk of being pedantic, we need to talk about hash versus hashtag.

A hash is the # symbol, and a hashtag is a tag that is constructed using a hash symbol, like #week­notes.

More recently, the # symbol itself, typically referred to as hash or hash symbol,3 is also being referred to as a hashtag. This is confusing.

Recently, I heard someone say that manuscripts need to have hashtags. What this person really meant that sections in a manuscript need to be separated using a hash, like this:

Here is a paragraph.

Here is the last paragraph of a section.

#

Here is the first paragraph of a new section.

Had this person said that manuscript sections need to be separated with a hash, they would be correct. But I thought they meant that there was a new standard where writers would add hashtags, like #youngadult #fiction #ya #yafiction, to their manuscripts.

In general, I am descriptivist rather than prescriptivist: I believe linguistic definitions should come from usage, not from theory. Language evolves whether we want it to or not, and it behooves us to accept this.

An example of this is the distinction between “less” and “fewer.” The former is used for uncountable quantities, and the latter for countable ones. Hence, it is “less rice” but “fewer grains of rice.” That’s the theory, at least; nowadays, “less” is used also for countable quantities — and that’s fine.4 Language evolves!

The problem with using the word “hashtag” to refer to a hash symbol is that there no longer is a term for hashtags themselves. The meaning of “hash symbol” is crystal clear. The meaning of “hashtag,” however, is not, because it has started to refer to two distinct concepts. The meaning of “hashtag” is ambiguous, and context is not always enough for disambiguation.

It’s worth looking into why the hash symbol is sometimes being referred to as “hashtag.” I believe it is related to pronunciation: the text “#week­notes” is pronounced as “hashtag week­notes.” Therefore, it sounds like # is supposed to be pronounced as “hashtag.” And so, the # symbol became “hashtag.” Language evolution is odd.

The purpose of language is communication, and ambiguity is distinctly undesirable. Therefore, while I am generally descriptivist, I think that it is worth correcting cases where # is called a hashtag.

All right, enough pedantry.5

Last week, I talked about how I generally dislike coding challenges. But there are some coding challenges which I enjoy doing, and it’s worth describing what makes a coding challenge enjoyable for me:

For me, a good coding challenge is more about collaboration and communication. That is not how most companies treat coding challenges though, and coding challenges aren’t the best way to test collaboration and communication either. That’s why I still stand by my opinion, which I voiced last week, that companies would be better off dropping coding challenges from their interview process.

I was working on a short story that ended up going nowhere. No matter how much I massaged it to get it into the right shape, I kept getting further and further away from something good. So, I’ve dropped the story entirely. I suppose that’s what “kill your darlings” means.

I might revisit this story later — I’m sure it contains untapped potential — but for now, I’ve moved on to a new story.

Fiction writing is hard. But I am enjoying it, and that is the most important thing.

I got to try out a few typewriters last weekend, and oh, they are fun! There is a learning curve — at least with the old-school mechanical ones — but I was able to type out a nonsensical short story pretty quickly.7

The typewriters I tried were purely mechanical. I found it remarkable how well they function, and I was surprised at my own assumption that anything mechanical would require electricity to some degree. But no!

I am now considering getting a mechanical typewriter of my own. It’d have to be a QWERTY one, which is unfortunately hard to find here in Germany, where it’s all QWERTZ instead.

A weakness of mine is that I get distracted by technology and tools.

There is nothing wrong with my aforementioned newfound interest in typewriters, but they are still just tools. A typewriter might help me get stuff done, but the hard work still falls to me. There is no automating the hard work.8

The other day, I spent some time improving the workflow I built for Scrivener to generate properly formatted manuscript PDFs. I wrote about a similar tool in Week­notes 2023 W43: Business cards, but now it’s fully integrated into Scrivener’s Markdown mode.

This didn’t particularly help me make progress with my writing, but… well, as long as I’m having fun, right?

A design pet peeve of mine: on the web, most lines of texts are too long.

Matthew Butterick writes about line length:

Aim for an av­er­age line length of 45–90 char­ac­ters, in­clud­ing spaces.

The line length on my web site sits between 64 and 72 characters, which is pretty much the middle of the range that Butterick recommends.

Wikipedia’s article on line length says the following:9

Traditional line length research, limited to print-based text, gave a variety of results, but generally for printed text it is widely accepted that line lengths fall between 45 and 75 characters per line (cpl), though the ideal is 66 cpl (including letters and spaces).

Ironically, the line length of Wikipedia articles is quite high: the quote above has a first line length of 165 characters, more than twice the 75-character maximum that the line itself recommends.

I find myself using the “Reader View” functionality of browsers often, because reading long lines of text (more than 100 characters) is exhausting.

My recommendation: for your web sites, set the maximum width of the content to 30rem.10 It depends on the typeface you use, of course, but that will give a good 65–70 characters per line.

There is something wonderful about being disconnected from the Internet.

It’s not the Internet itself that is a problem, mind you. What is a problem: being constantly online, permanently reachable on all sorts of instant messaging platforms, and being continuously flooded with messages and notifications and social media content.

I am playing around with the idea of disconnecting my wireless network while I am writing. The temptation to check stuff on the Internet is still there, but now at least there one extra step I need to take to get to that stuff on the Internet. Turning off WiFi is still manual; I’d love to have a focus app that turns it off automatically.

It has been about six months since the last acting class; I’ve let acting lie by the wayside entirely. I miss it. I very much want to come back to it.

Part of the reason why I’ve put it on hold for now is because of unemployment. Classes are an expense, and I am not sure how things will be going for me, financially. I am supposed to get the Arbeitslosengeld,11 but it is unclear whether or not it will be approved. Until my financial stability is guaranteed, I won’t be making expenses that aren’t necessary.

The other reason for not continuing with acting classes is that I wasn’t sure where I would be living. The idea of moving to London was very much front and center for quite a while, so starting something new in Berlin wouldn’t have made much sense.

I’ve been playing with the idea of taking up acting classes in German. It might be rough, as my German is not particularly good. But perhaps that is exactly what I need to bring my German up to speed.

Entertainment:

Links:

Tech links:

  1. Or square zero, if you are a software developer who likes to start counting from zero. You’re weird, but I like you anyway. ↩︎

  2. I wrote about this idea for the first time in Week­notes 2024 W05: London calling. ↩︎

  3. This also goes by other names, like the number sign, pound sign, and octothorpe. ↩︎

  4. I myself still use “fewer” for countable quantities. Perhaps someday I’ll switch to using “less.” ↩︎

  5. Oh, you wanted more pedantry? Don’t worry — I have more pedantry! The C# (“c sharp”) programming language should really be titled C♯, because # (hash) is not ♯ (sharp). It is not called “c hash,” is it? At least it’s not called “c hashtag,” right?! ↩︎

  6. I understand that face-to-face coding challenges can be intimidating and anxiety-inducing for some. ↩︎

  7. “This is the worst shit I’ve ever read,” said a friend. They weren’t wrong. But that wasn’t the point of the exercise anyway! ↩︎

  8. Generative AI promises to automate the hard work, but it is a lie that we better not believe. ↩︎

  9. While this talks about text in print, I see no reason why this would not also apply to text on screen. ↩︎

  10. The CSS ch unit would seem to be more appropriate than rem, but ch is not reliable: it is the width of the 0 character, rather than the width of an average character. Eric Meyer’s writing on the ch unit goes into more detail. ↩︎

  11. Unemployment benefit ↩︎

  12. Cory Doctorow, Red team blues (New York: Tor, Tor Publishing Group, 2023). ↩︎

  13. Divinity: Original Sin II (Larian Studios, 2017), published by Larian Studios. ↩︎

  14. Sherlock Holmes Chapter One (Frogwares, 2021), published by Frogwares. ↩︎

  15. Dishonored 2 (Arkane Lyon, 2016), published by Bethesda Softworks. ↩︎

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Incoming links: Weeknotes 2024 W22: Worst job interview, Weeknotes 2024 W28: Triple accident.