Weeknotes 2024 W42: Fidelity

October 14​–​20, 2024
1500 words

Quick bits:

Shower thoughts:

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’.2

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 errors3 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.4

Compare this to something entirely different: Gamelan. While I was still playing Javanese Gamelan,5 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.

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.

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.6 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.

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

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.

Entertainment:

Tweets and toots:

Links:

Politics links:

Tech links:

  1. Apart from being continuously inspired by Tom Stuart, that is. ↩︎

  2. At least I don’t get the label “pedant.” So there. ↩︎

  3. 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. ↩︎

  4. 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. ↩︎

  5. 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. ↩︎

  6. 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. ↩︎

  7. Rick Burroughs, Alan Wake (New York: Tor, 2013). ↩︎

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Incoming links: One-person stage play, Weeknotes 2024 W43: Gross.