Quick bits:

• My end-of-year vacation has started! I’m off work until January 2nd. I’ve got nothing planned — not even for new year’s eve — and that is exactly the way I like it.

• Winter solstice was 24 hours ago. The darkest days¹¹1 In the northern hemisphere, that is.  are officially behind us.

• Google believes I am a “public figure” now. I can claim my knowledge panel now, it says.

• Google, the thing that is supposedly all about knowledge, has a new version of its LLM out (2.0 Flash Experimental), so I asked it “Who am i” and it responded with this:

  You are Gemini, a large language model created by Google. You have access to up-to-date information through Google Search and don’t have a knowledge cut-off date.

  … what now? I am Gemini?!

  I am a Taurus anyway. Also, a Google search revealed that “the sexual connection between Taurus and Gemini is very hot and passionate, albeit rare.”

  Right. Good to know.

• It turns out you can use git commit --amen instead of git commit --amend and it will work just fine. Eat pray commit.

• The other day, I did a double-take as a wolf walked past my apartment. But no, it turned out to be just a dog — quite a giant one. Awoo.

• I scheduled the deletion of my Facebook account a while back, but I had second thoughts and brought the account back to life. Groups like Free Your Stuff Berlin are just too useful not to have access to.

• I haven’t been cycling in the last few weeks. I need my bike repaired, and the repair shops aren’t replying to my request. It is the end of the year anyway, I suppose.

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Shower thoughts:

• There is only one “math” in the US but multiple “maths” in the UK. This is why people from the UK are smarter.

• The most appropriate sport for public figures is public figure skating.

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I’ve been making good progress with D★Scribe.

I’ve rewritten the whole thing in Preact, making good use of Preact’s signals. I am much happier with D★Scribe’s implementation now, in a way that I couldn’t have achieved with Svelte.

The UI has evolved a bit too:

It really does look like Scrivener, does it not? Scrivener’s a good app. I can’t help but steal be inspired.

The new implementation has undo/redo support, too. To achieve this, I hooked an undo manager into all signals that represent app state, so that every new bit of state automatically gets undo/redo support. The undo manager coalesces updates so that a single ⌘Z undoes the last batch of typing, rather than undoing each single character one by one.

The “compile” function works, too: it generates a Markdown file from all the individual documents in the sidebar, with the proper heading levels. This means that this word processor is now ready to be used for real writing, I suppose.

Still, I did not manage to port over everything from the Svelte version. Drag-and-drop is missing from the new version. As a stop-gap measure, I’ve added a “parent document” dropdown and “move up”/“move down” buttons instead.

There is a lot more to be done. My list of ideas is long.

I have now been working on this project for a month, and this is its fifth major version (fourth major rewrite), ignoring all the small experiments I did along the way. It’s a lot of work discarded, but I learnt a lot on the way.

I did not think I’d be creating GUI apps with Electron any time soon, but here we are.

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Entertainment:

• I went to see Stupid Fucking Bird,²²2 Stupid Fucking Bird, directed by Adam Ludwig, written by Aaron Posner (2024).  directed by my acting teacher, and I am genuinely impressed: I was not prepared for how an amateur group of acting students could put together something so genuinely good.

• La Caja³³3 La Caja, directed by Lorenzo Vigas, written by Paula Markovitch, Laura Santullo and Lorenzo Vigas (Teorema, Ivanhoe Pictures, Labodigital, 2022).  is a good movie that subtly gets under your skin.

• ELEX⁴⁴4 ELEX (Piranha Bytes, 2017), published by THQ Nordic.  is growing on me. It’s quirky and not generally good, but eh. It’s entertaining. Surprisingly hard though, even on an easier difficulty level.

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Links:

• Fur and Loathing Podcast (Brazen): I heard about this gas attack before, now just over ten years ago, and it’s very interesting (and creepy) to get more of an insight

• Writing and Lightness (Robin Sloan): I write whatever and whenever I want, and that lightness fits really well with me.

• Fine, I’ll Talk About the Drones… (Hank Green, vlogbrothers): X-Files theme intensifies.

• Will taking ayahuasca help you maximize shareholder value? (Good Work): Trenchcoat!

Entertainment links:

• SNL VFX Mystery (Captain Disillusion)

• The Terrible Swedish translation of the Lord of The Rings. A story of Bad Grammar, Arson, and Black Magic (u/Tokyono): This story sure escalates!

Work links:

• Companies issuing RTO mandates “lose their best talent”: Study (Ben Werdmuller): I’m not surprised. Not that will stop companies issuing RTO mandates, though.

Tech links:

• Microsoft rejects a documentation change because AI might not understand it: It is astoundingly stupid that we seem to be writing documentation for AI now.

• Ethical Web Principles: That’s all good and well, but what do we do with these principles now?

• The Decide, Evolve, React pattern in Ruby (Ismael Celis): Neat! Something that belongs in my toolbox.

• My favourite color is Chuck Norris red (Declan Childlow, HTMHell): I had no idea HTML/CS colors were this complicated.

• How Not To Sort By Average Rating (Evan Miller): Yes!