Weeknotes 2025 W30: Swans

Quick bits:

• I’ve recovered from being punched in the head. I had a headache that lasted a day or two, but no nausea and the dizziness went away fairly quickly too. Still some neck pain left, which I believe is unrelated.

• The skin infection is almost gone. Two more weeks of medicine. It’ll have been about two full months.

• My birthday picnic is not happening. Finding a free weekend day with decent weather (no rain) is proving to be remarkably difficult.

• Earlier this week, I saw a homeless person, disheveled and stinking so much I had to hold my breath, holding what seemed like… a big shiny diamond in his hand. How strange.

  I also saw a homeless person who reminded me of Jesus, in part because he seemed to bless all passers-by. Also strange.

• I am reminded of how terribly placed the taxi stop is at the Berlin main station. To arrive, taxis have to drive through the crowd in front of the main entrance, and to leave they have to drive through the crowd again. The cab drivers are noticeably impatient, and push their cars through the crowd a little too unsafely to my liking.

• I suddenly have two umbrellas. They’re either multiplying or I stole someone’s by accident. Oopsies.

It has been one month since I got laid off.

The job search continues, slowly. My initial LinkedIn post got a ton of traction (seen by over 200 000 people, LinkedIn says) which has gotten me a nice reach, but not much came out of that, and now it’s back to mostly crickets.

Help me out: Get me a job in 2025. Refer me to your excellent jobs.

I had the initial meeting at the Arbeitsagentur,¹¹1 Employment office.  but they’re not effective at finding me relevant jobs. To illustrate how irrelevant the jobs can be: last year, during my unemployment, they suggested a job where the job requirements included knowledge of Microsoft FrontPage. Oof.

The local swan family is doing well:

The cygnets have grown so much! I estimate they must be just under 2 months old. How adorable. (And not to be fucked with.)

Progress with Deniki! The split view items now have their own navigation bar, similar to how Xcode’s split views work:

While the application itself is built with AppKit, the navigation bar is SwiftUI. The integration of AppKit and SwiftUI isn’t the smoothest, but that is expected, given that AppKit and SwiftUI are such different approaches.

I’ve got a handful of things to finish up, but I might put an alpha version for download at some point.

I haven’t mentioned my work-in-progress article on expression parsing in quite a while, but I have not forgotten about it.

The second draft is mostly complete, but I put it aside because I could not figure out how to write it well. An article is just not the most effective medium for this topic, I find: articles are inherently static, and algorithms (for parsing or otherwise) are inherently dynamic.

There are two alternative approaches that I have been playing around with:

• Could I build interactive widgets to demonstrate the parsing algorithm? This no doubt would be effective, but it is also surprisingly difficult to do. I don’t have the right tools to prototype such widgets, and it would need vast amounts of time to create.

• Could I turn the article into a video instead? This, too, would be a lot of work, but the intrinsically visual medium would be a good fit for this topic. Designing the visuals would also be a lot of work, though significantly more straightforward than creating interactive widgets.

Until I can figure out how I want to take this forward, the project is stuck in limbo.

Entertainment:

• Last weekend (before I published my week­notes, even), I watched The Phoenician Scheme²²2 The Phoenician Scheme, directed by Wes Anderson, written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola (Focus Features, Indian Paintbrush, American Empirical Pictures, 2025).  with J——. It slipped my mind and I don’t remember much of it, maybe because I got fucking punched in the head. I do remember it was a film that I thought was worth re-watching, so I’ll do that.

• I started a new play-through of Cyberpunk 2077³³3 Cyberpunk 2077 (CD Projekt Red, 2020), published by CD Projekt.  and I’ve got two thoughts: it is still buggy, and gets the genre wrong.

  Right when I started my new play-through, a car was driving on the street except that the model was invisible, so it was just the driver floating in mid-air. Later, one of the models glitched and exploded into a shower of distorted quads. Then, I randomly got catapulted a kilometre through the map. How is this game still so buggy after all these years?

  But more importantly: I think this game fundamentally misunderstands the Cyberpunk genre. “High-tech, low-life” doesn’t quite apply to this game, because the game thinks cyberpunk is cool. Nova. People live by themselves in unreasonably large apartments, some of them with beautiful vistas. They own multiple cars. The presence of nefarious megacorporations is normal and barely critiqued, because they provide cool tech. The whole game, in my opinion, is extremely not punk.

Toots and skeets:

• I like sofia’s autocomplete shitpost. Very much how I feel about it, too.

Links:

• Fantasies of Nuremberg (Jacob Geller)

• I Saved a PNG Image To A Bird (Benn Jordan)

• Trams are Great! So why are the Streetcars SO BAD!? (Not Just Bikes)

• Fallout: Bakersfield Trailer: Delightful. And gory.

• Avernum 4: Greed and Glory Trailer: The Avernum games are great (as are all Spiderweb Software titles) and I’m looking forward to playing this one.

Tech links:

• Against the Censorship of Adult Content By Payment Processors (Soatok)

• A Friendly Introduction to SVG (Josh W. Comeau)

• Economist Warns the AI Bubble Is Worse Than Immediately Before the Dot-Com Implosion (Victor Tangermann for Futurism): Fun.

• How Complex Systems Fail (Richard I. Cook, MD)

• Vintage Macintosh Programming Book Library: Neat!

• Using fortune to reinforce habits (Mark Smith)