Denis Defreyne

Weeknotes 2026 W07: Regressing

February 9​–​15, 2026

Quick bits

  • I feel like I’m regressing with Tarmak-4. I was doing so well, and now I’m confusing r and s again, and g and d, and s and d, ugh. I’ll give it another week of acclimatization before I move on to Colemak proper.

  • I’m also regressing physically. Wow that makes it sound terrible! I meant I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather this week.

  • For the first time, I’ve witnessed a crow chuck the contents of a trash bin on the ground. Ever wonder why there is trash everywhere in Berlin? It’s the crows! Maybe the foxes too — I’m not singling out the crows.

  • I made my first pun in French this week. I’m very proud of myself.

A new story

I wrote a short story: The Help. About 1100 words — if that means anything!

I’ve kept the editing to a minimum. I’m done with the story, and I’m confident it’s good enough. Moving on to the next!

This is my continuation of my Alphabet Superset. At the rate I’m going, I think I should be able to finish before I die of old age.

Old writing projects

This week, I’ve been going through my dozens and dozens of abandoned writing projects. There really are a lot. Going through them made one thing clear: many of them I’ve forgotten about and I have no memory what exactly they were exactly about. For some, I’ve written thousands of words, yet I have no idea of what I was trying to achieve.

I’ve heard the advice of writing a one-sentence “log line,” or a one-paragraph synopsis at the start of a project. I had been dismissing that as a waste of time, but now that I’m wading through these old projects, I really wish I had these short synopses at hand.

And some of these old projects still have genuinely good ideas! I want to keep ideas around, even if I had not succeeded earlier at turning them into proper stories. Some of my story ideas are demanding enough that I feel I need more practice first. I am becoming a better writer slowly, but I’ve still got a ways to go. Also: sometimes an idea simply needs to marinate or wait to be combined with other ideas for it to be ripe.

Here’s one of these ideas that I would love to turn into a story but have no idea how just yet:

A corporation taps into the cosmically horrifying power of an elder god to achieve their KPIs and OKRs.

Spicy.

A photo camera

I bought a photo camera! I got the Sony α6400, with the kit lens. First impressions:

  • The kit lens is serviceable. It’s versatile, but not fast. I imagine that I’ll get a few primes once I get the hang of the camera and the kit lens.

  • The UI is terrible. I knew what I was getting myself into, so it shouldn’t have been as much of a surprise as it was. It’s not just the menus, but the dozen buttons in various places, who are all not quite labeled correctly because their functionality drastically changes depending on the mode you’re in.

I’ve not had a chance to try out the camera properly yet. I’ve been struggling to make the time. Plus, the weather has been so cold, dark, windy and rainy/icy that going out was neither fun nor productive. This camera is not running away in any case.

Another question is what photo management software I want to use. I tried digiKam for the first time, but good lord the UX is atrocious.1 Do I just use the filesystem to manage my photos instead? I don’t need a photo editing application in any case — I already own licenses for both Pixelmator Pro and Affinity Photo.2

Bad air

The air pollution in Berlin is finally clearing up.

I wake up every day with a splitting headache that feels like a hangover. I think that happens for three reasons:

  • Air pollution — like I’ve been saying!
  • Low humidity — 30% humidity is uncomfortably low.
  • Caffeine — I get caffeine-induced headaches.

I have control over some of that. My caffeine intake is not unreasonable. Humidity is a bit harder to control, but no longer an issue now that the weather is warming up.

When it comes to the air pollution though… I’m powerless. “Stay indoors” is useless advice when the active ventilation pulls all the bad air inside. I was holding off on purchasing an air purifier, but maybe it would’ve been a good idea to do that months ago already. In any case, the air quality is back to reasonable.

I also wonder: Berlin can be incredibly dusty — could the air pollution explain that, at least in part? There are days where I have to sweep, dust or vacuum every day. I got my camera on Tuesday afternoon, and on Wednesday morning it already had a thin layer of dust on it.

GenAI improvements?

For the past few years, I have repeatedly been told that my opinion about (generative) AI is out of date, and I simply haven’t used it properly lately, because it has gotten so much better in the last few months.

It’s a nonsense argument. But I am always curious, so I asked Google Gemini to produce a map of Europe, labeling the German states and highlighting Berlin. This is what it produced:

AI slop! A map of Europe, with Bremen and Madrid located in the Mediterranean sea, Hamburg somewhere in Doggerland, Spain is now Saarland, Russia has become Thuring, and France has become Lower Saxany.

Oops! Haha. Let’s try that again:

AI slop! A sepia map of Europe. Paris is in the ocean west of Ireland, Russia is Mecclensurkg-Holstia, Turkey is Madrid, Sicily is Buavia, the Atlantic Ocean has become the Medierrenon States Ocean, Algeria is Genmiard-Sanwgloar, Paris has become just “T,” and there is a big red circle around Vienna labeled Berlin.

Ohh. Oh no.

I’ve attempted to use Gemini for proofreading texts I wrote, but I’m quite struggling to get it to produce anything meaningful. When I gave it a text and asked it to “find any erros,” it happily ignored the text I gave it and pointed out the “erros” typo in my prompt. When I told it to analyze the given text instead, it said “what text?”

For software development, I’ve struggled to make LLMs generate code that is even syntactically valid — let alone semantically correct.

Folks… where are these improvements supposed to be? This shit is as borderline unusable as it’s ever been.

Entertainment

  • Fennell’s Wuthering Heights3 is a mess — probably the most tonally inconsistent and confused film I have ever seen. I disliked it enough that halfway through I considered getting up and leaving.

    But you know you have a good friendship when you can both be deeply bothered by a film yet still have a good time.

    The semaphore version of Wuthering Heights is definitely better.

Tech links:

  1. You’d think that photographers have a sense of aesthetics, but that clearly does not translate to software interfaces. ↩︎

  2. Both of these are owned by large corporations, and I’ve got no clue what will happen to these software products going forward. ↩︎

  3. Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell, written by Emerald Fennell and Emily Brontë (Lie Still, LuckyChap, MRC Film, 2026). ↩︎

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