Weeknotes 2025 W36: Strangely aggressive

Quick bits:

• Happy September! Was it already September last Sunday? I don’t remember. Probably not. Time is relative and meaningless.

• I had a bit of a craving for Objective-C earlier, but I don’t want to write C anymore. And so I’ve had the thought: What would Objective-Zig be like?!

Shower thoughts:

• Vampires are real. I found one, but it’s not quite what you’d expect. Sometimes, I get neck pain and feel the life force draining out of me, and then I know: I am dealing with a Microsoft Teams.

Back to square zero for the job search. I had one interview process which I felt went excellent, but it fell through nonetheless.

As usual, refer me to your excellent jobs: Get me a job in 2025.

Meanwhile, LinkedIn’s list of “hiring in your network” jobs almost exclusively has irrelevant promoted jobs.¹¹1 Thank you, uBlock Origin, for allowing me to filter those out.  I wouldn’t be surprised that the good jobs aren’t on LinkedIn, or are not even publicly advertised at all, but I nonetheless expected there to be a little more opportunities.

Also meanwhile, I’ve made some more tweaks to both my CV and my LinkedIn profile. A CV (or a LinkedIn profile) is all about selling yourself and giving a great first impression. To that end, I’ve removed my job at Pitch from my CV; I only worked there for a few months and such a short stint doesn’t quite look as great on my CV. It is bittersweet: I liked Pitch a lot but I couldn’t make it work out for me.

Germans can be so strangely aggressive.

I was waiting for a train when an older lady approached me and said “Wo geht’s hin?” which roughly translates to “where are you going?”

I got confused as to why she approached me. I couldn’t make out what she wanted. Was she awkwardly trying to make small talk? Was she just weirdly curious about what people around her were doing on a Sunday? Did she want to know where I was going so that she could tell me how bad of an idea it was go to there and then feel smug about telling me off?

Turns out she wanted to help, because I looked lost to her. (I was not.)

It’d have been nice if she asked me first whether I needed assistance instead of demanding that I divulge my travel destination, you know?

Speaking of Germany: the new three-kilometer section of the A100 highway in Berlin was finally opened last week (after twelve years of construction and € 700 million), and the traffic got so bad that they had to close the newly opened section.

That’s right — all that work and all that money went towards making traffic worse.

Imagine the great things one could do with that money to improve public transit.

The TomatenMark-to-HTML translator that I use on my web site now has neat error reporting, indicating where a potential error occurred:

Tomatenmark-to-HTML conversion failed
sample.tmark:5:6: error.MismatchedBeginEndNode
@end chapter
     ^^^^^^^

Printing the line along with the ^ indicators is just a small improvement,²²2 And a little lie — it doesn’t quite look like that just yet, but will be soon. The filename isn’t there yet.  but immensely helpful. It can definitely be improved further, for example by replacing the error identifier with a proper error message.³³3 It’d be nice to give each error a unique ID, like TM-003, which can be looked up on the not-yet-existing TomatenMark web site. Each error entry on the web site would explain the error with examples. That’d be neat! 

With that out of the way, I probably want to move back to working on my Zig SSG which I’ve put aside for a while.

In case I haven’t mentioned it explicitly yet: Zig is a joy to use. For many reasons: fast compilation,⁴⁴4 It still is using LLVM to produce a debug build on ARM (Apple Silicon), which is relatively slow, but work on improving that is ongoing. Exciting!  built-in testing, effective memory management, proper modules, and so much more.

Entertainment:

• I picked up No Man’s Sky⁵⁵5 No Man’s Sky (Hello Games, 2016), published by Hello Games.  again, starting over because I had no memory of what I was doing since I played it last. As last time, I’m not sure I am enjoying it all that much: there is a ton of grinding.

• I bought Neyyah⁶⁶6 Neyyah (Defy Reality Entertainment Pty Ltd, 2025), published by MicroProse Software Pty Ltd.  at its launch discount, a no-brain purchase for a fan of the Myst series like myself.

  First, the things I’m not as much of a fan of: I find that there is too much lore-dumping early on in the game, and the FMV cutscenes with their awkward acting aren’t doing it for me.

  In terms of visuals and atmosphere, though, it is spot on. Given the absolutely tiny team behind this game, what they’ve managed to achieve is impressive to say the least.

Links:

• The World’s Shortest International Railway Is The Best Thing Ever

• All Transphobes are Racist (Brigitte Empire): Scratch a transphobe and a racist bleeds indeed.

• The Worst City on Earth, Built in Minecraft (Sluda Builds)

• Self sabotage? In this economy? (struthless)

• You Don't Need Animations (Emil Kowalski)

Tech links:

• Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up (Mike Judge): Quote: “If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware?”