Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2024 W51: I am Gemini

December 16​–​22, 2024

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 days1 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.

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.

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:

A screenshot of an open D★Scribe window. It shows some Markdown text in the center part of the window, flanked by a sidebar on the left, and an inspector on the right.

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.

Entertainment:

  • I went to see Stupid Fucking Bird,2 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 Caja3 is a good movie that subtly gets under your skin.

  • ELEX4 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.

Links:

Entertainment links:

Work links:

Tech links:

  1. In the northern hemisphere, that is. ↩︎

  2. Stupid Fucking Bird, directed by Adam Ludwig, written by Aaron Posner (2024). ↩︎

  3. La Caja, directed by Lorenzo Vigas, written by Paula Markovitch, Laura Santullo and Lorenzo Vigas (Teorema, Ivanhoe Pictures, Labodigital, 2022). ↩︎

  4. ELEX (Piranha Bytes, 2017), published by THQ Nordic. ↩︎

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