Quick bits:

• I have completed three full years of week­notes. This whole week­notes thing has been going on for far longer than I anticipated. I still don’t understand why I’m doing week­notes,¹¹¹ Apart from being continuously inspired by Tom Stuart, that is.  but I sure know that I like it.

• If you live in the US and are able to, it is critical that you go vote. The rest of the world depends on it, too.

• After nearly four years, the battery of my Braun hair clipper is on its last legs, and replacing the battery is nigh impossible without soldering. It seems my only reasonable option is to throw it out and get a new hair clipper… but I really want something more sustainable. Any recommendations?

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Shower thoughts:

• “LLM” stands for “Live Laugh Model.” This is a fact, and I will not be taking questions at this time.

• Why do books have prefaces but not postfaces? Wrong answers only.

• There are wetsuits and drysuits, but why is there nothing in the middle? What about moistsuits?

• Doctor: I’m afraid it’s HTTP.
  Patient: Oh no! Is it terminal?
  Doctor: Usually it’s GUI browser.

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J told me the other day that it’s clear that fidelity is incredibly important to me. I agree! I’ve long felt that if something is worth doing, it is worth doing well. I care about my craft, and I expect people whom I work with to also care about their craft.

Occasionally, this leads to situations where people get upset with me when I don’t accept their “good enough.” I’m well aware that my definition of “good enough” often is much stricter than others’.²²² At least I don’t get the label “pedant.” So there. 

As an example: back at university, I was given two master theses written by former students as examples. One of them had some of the worst writing I had ever seen, riddled with spelling and grammar errors³³³ Clearly no spelling correction was ever used on this dissertation, and there was one word that was misspelled in three different ways in the same dissertation.  to the point where I had trouble paying attention to the content.

I remember an intense feeling of frustration. In many ways, a master dissertation is the final product of a university education, so it stands to reason that it is some of the highest-quality stuff produced during those years. And yet… at my university, if you had any piece of writing as a master dissertation at all, you’d pass, no matter the quality of the writing.⁴⁴⁴ It wasn’t just the quality of the writing, either. Both dissertations were fundamentally flawed conceptually, one of them using wrong methodologies to draw entirely incorrect results. 

Compare this to something entirely different: Gamelan. While I was still playing Javanese Gamelan,⁵⁵⁵ I stopped playing because of back pain problems. My back has never been the most healthy, and sitting on the floor for hours, especially as a tall person, was figuratively killing me near the end.  the head of the group would occasionally bring in sheet music, and then ask all of us to make distinct corrections. He had found the sheet music online, but after listening to the recording, found problems in the transcription, which he then provided corrections for. He didn’t have to do that — the sheet music would’ve been “good enough” — but he cares about his craft, and I greatly appreciate that.

Why is it, though, that fidelity is so important to me? To that question, I have no answer.

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The idea of a one-person stage play is still floating around in my mind. I cannot quite figure out what I want to do with it, however.

One thing is clear: anyone I have talked to about a solo performance says it is a fantastic idea. I, too, feel that it will really be worth writing and performing. It excites me, too, for the same reason that I like doing public speaking.

This would be one of the most challenging projects I have undertaken, though. The runtime of a solo show is roughly fifty minutes. That’s a standard duration, as far as I can tell, which makes sense because the people that come to see a play (solo or not) want to get value for their money. But filling up fifty minutes in an engaging way is quite the challenge.

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I’m making slow progress on my interpreter book. I have a first draft of the lexing and parsing chapters, at least. There are about fifteen more chapters to write. And then re-write them, because I am working only on the first draft.

Don’t expect regular status updates on this book, though. Irregular, at best. No updates, at worst. I am writing this book for fun and for myself. I reserve the right to pause work on this book, or give up on it entirely.

Ruby turns out to be a great language for writing evolving interpreters in. I will need multiple versions of the interpreter, as I need evolve the implementation to gradually add more complex conceps.⁶⁶⁶ Error reporting and symbol resolution are two concepts that are rather invasive, requiring extensive changes throughout the codebase, and I’d rather not introduce those right away.  I can’t just add all of it at the same time! Ruby, being so malleable, lends itself really well to this task; it’s trivial to load different classes at runtime, or even modify them, based on a command-line option or environment variable.

Some might be horrified at being able to do that in Ruby. I think it’s great — when used appropriately.

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I’ve come to realize that there are two distinct sources of stress at work for me. Either:

• there is too much to do (a backlog with too many tickets), and I feel that I cannot work fast enough to catch up, or:

• there is too little to do (a backlog that is mostly empty), and I feel that I will end up in the situation where there isn’t anything of importance to do.

Either way, I feel stress. Either way, I feel that I am not as productive as I could be. Either way, I feel my performance is lacking.

There might be middle ground of having just enough work in the backlog, but I think this is much more of a problem with my brain than with the amount of work.

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Entertainment:

• Slow, slow progress with the Alan Wake novelization.⁷⁷⁷ Rick Burroughs, Alan Wake (New York: Tor, 2013).  It’s not great, but at least it is an inspirational piece of writing.

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Tweets and toots:

• The European Commission on X as a non-core platform: The EC is throwing shade, and I’m loving it.

• Elizabeth Laraki on her profile photo nonconsensually being edited with AI: This is gross. But also: Laraki works in AI, and I’m all for people getting a taste of their own medicine.

• Mike Perham on Tesla’s broken autopilot: How is it legal for these cars to even be on the street?!

Links:

• Tiny Glade: The Lord of the Rings - Helm’s Deep (Komi Makosako): Amazing!

• Windows 95 startup sound pitched over surrealist landscapes (Sapphire): It’s art!

• Cat avoids eviction after thousands criticise London Ambulance Service (Rebecca McCulloch, MyLondon): Defib is an adorable cat name.

• Is It Perimenopause or the Fascist Death Knell of Late-Stage Capitalism? (Casey Rand for McSweeney’s)

• The European Tram Driver Championships: 26 Cities, 52 Drivers, 100% Sporting Drama (The Tim Traveller)

• The ONLY video you NEED for the SUBJUNCTIVE (languagejones): Neat!

Politics links:

• How Israel’s bulky pager fooled Hezbollah (Maya Gebeily, James Pearson and David Gauthier-Villars for Reuters): I am simultaneously impressed by what Israel managed to pull off here, and horrified by the despicable acts of terrorism propagated by Israel.

• This Is Exactly How an Elon Musk-Funded PAC Is Microtargeting Muslims and Jews With Opposing Messages (Jason Koebler for 404 Media)

Tech links:

• The Stallman Report: I did not read this in detail, but I’m sharing because Richard Stallman is an awful person. Heed the multitude of content warnings .

• Employees Describe an Environment of Paranoia and Fear Inside Automattic Over WordPress Chaos (Samantha Cole for 404 Media): Entirely normal way to run a company, eh?