Updates from Michael Camilleri

Weeknotes #343

Fri, 14 Aug 2026 23:57:00 +0900

As regular readers will have realised, I often try to start these with some comment on the news du jour but I don’t really have much to say at the moment. Last week the U.S. intervened (or implied they would intervene) to prop up the yen which I guess… thanks? (ABC News) I’m not looking forward to discovering the starting price of the upcoming iPhones 18 and anything Scott Bessent wants to do to help me with that is appreciated.
Speaking of the news, I appreciated the most recent episode of Geopolitical Cousins (the podcast by two geopolitical analysts, Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic). I mentioned this podcast last year but to recap: it’s a podcast where geopolitical analysts Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic discuss recent geopolitical events from the perspective of analysts who write advisory notes to investment clients. They’re clear it’s not investment advice (and I don’t use it for that) but I appreciate that it gives their discussions a different flavour to what you tend to get from journalists or academics. They’re also on YouTube.
Tuesday was Mountain Day (obligatory Wikipedia link). Rowan and I ‘climbed’ (by escalator) the ‘metaphorical mountain’ of the new Yodobashi Camera in Ikebukuro to visit their sprawling toy floor. I generally try not to buy toys randomly for the kids but I couldn’t resist getting Rowan the Lego Creator 3-in-1 Aircraft: Race Plane (31160) and then, for Emma and John, the cheapest sets they had from Lego’s Minecraft collection (21583 and 21266). Rowan has now learnt why the sets have different age ranges. His manual dexterity has improved in the past few months but 31160 has a number of small pieces that require a decent amount of finger strength to manoeuvre into place and that’s currently beyond him.
I mentioned last week that I had used LLM-based coding agents to work on an incomplete Janet project and I wondered whether I would use it to work on Persimmon. I did indeed do this and then I moved on to finally making my own Janet dialect. Back in 2020 (!), in the same weeknote where I noted that Joe Biden had won the presidential election (!!), I mentioned that I had written a parser I called Claret that parsed a more Clojure-like syntax into Janet data structures. Well, once I had the persistent immutable data structures available with Persimmon, I decided to make a standalone program that uses Janet’s VM but swaps out Janet’s immutable data structures for Persimmon’s. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or not but this more ambitious Claret is now up on GitHub.
There’s a version of Lumines Remastered on the App Store and came away disappointed. I tried to play it on the iPad and I don’t think that’s the right way to play it. If you have a game controller you pair with your iPad this might be great but they haven’t bothered to code in support for hardware keyboards.
Anyone who has played the first level of Lumines will be very familiar with Mondo Grosso’s ‘Shinin’’. I wondered if it was available to stream and it turns out it is (Apple Music).

Mon, 10 Aug 2026 01:31:37 +0900

I used Claude and Codex to get to a working version of Persimmon, my technically-in-development-but-really-just-abandoned C library for persistent immutable data structures.

Weeknotes #342

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 23:39:00 +0900

Somehow it is August already.
They made an Avatar: The Last Airbender movie. I had hoped to watch it with all three children but Emma said she wasn’t that interested and, truth be told, Rowan’s enthusiasm was at least 90% due to the popcorn I had opened into a bowl. I thought the film itself was fine. It was fun to see the characters again but I admit that it’s been less than a week and I’m struggling to remember much of what happened.
It’s perhaps not that surprising given Rowan’s always enjoyed watching me play Rocket League on the Xbox (in a way that neither John nor Emma were) but he saw me watching some highlights from the FIFA World Cup and has become semi-obsessed. Eri is bearing most of the brunt of it; Rowan insists on ‘playing soccer’ with her in the playroom at least once a day. ‘Playing soccer’ consists of him trying to kick the ball into the wardrobe (i.e. the goal) while she stands in front of said wardrobe. It’s got to the point where I am wondering if we need to consider finding him a club. Although, given how he handles it when I lose in Rocket League, I’m not sure that’s going to be much fun for all involved.
I went on a bit of a bender and had Claude and Codex working on multiple Janet projects simultaneously. The main thing I was able to do was finally get Loopy finished. This is an HTTP server that wraps Mongoose v7.0. I’ve had it in a semi-completed state for more than a year but there were a few elements that I needed to fix and I kept putting it off. Then it got to the point where I didn’t really remember how all the pieces fit together. Coding agents to the rescue! Now I’m wondering if this means I might finally finish Persimmon and Watchful. Time will tell.
When I was little, Dad had a prayer that he used to recite with me before I went to bed. I’ve been trying to remember it for years to no avail before realising that of course he would have said the same thing to Monica. I asked her and while she didn’t remember it perfectly, she remembered enough that I was able to track it down. In the extremely unlikely event that you too have been wanting to know this information, it’s called the ’Vesper Verse’ and goes like this:

Lord, keep us safe this night,
Secure from all our fears;
May angels guard us while we sleep,
‘til morning light appears.

More information is here.
John Gruber linked to Brendan Leonard’s excellent comic ‘Do It 14,000 Times Slower With This One Trick’.
Speaking of excellent things, Brent Forrester has such a video on YouTube in which he discusses what makes the Simpsons episode ‘Lemon of Troy’ so good. Lots of people make videos like this on YouTube of course but Brent Forrester also wrote the episode which, you know, lots of people have not done.
I was listening to a Triple J Hottest 100 playlist (as one does) when ‘Dogs Are the Best People’ by Australian alt-rock band, the Fauves (Wikipedia) came on. As I listened to Andrew Cox’s nasally drawl, I realised there was another song on the edge of my mind that I kept wanting to remember. In what is obviously one of the themes of this weeknote, I did a bit of digging and discovered it was 1998’s ‘The Charles Atlas Way’ (Apple Music).

Sun, 02 Aug 2026 11:28:33 +0900

I got Claude to set itself up so that when it wants my attention for anything, it causes Ghostty’s Dock icon to jump and make the background of the label of the relevant tmux window a tasteful yellow. I assume this is what it felt like in prior generations to make a spice rack.

Weeknotes #341

Fri, 31 Jul 2026 23:17:00 +0900

I feel bad about how little attention I’ve been paying to the Iran War. What is happening with it? Do you know? I think it’s off again but maybe at the time you read this, that won’t be the case.
Eri took Emma and John to see the Chiikawa movie, Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island on Sunday (Tokyo Weekender). I’d been able to nab a car again to drive us all around (we were worried it was going to rain) and so while Eri was with the older kids, I drove Rowan over to a park he’d spotted a few times out the window of the Seibu Shinjuku trains. Well, no. First, I took him to the wrong park (Heiwa-no-Mori Park) but then I took him to to correct park (Ochiai Park). Ochiai Park is a bit run down in the way that playgrounds often are in Japan but it crams in an impressive array of amenities: a caged basketball court, swings, slides and two flying foxes.
I really thought I’d mentioned ‘flying foxes’ in a previous weeknotes but my searching suggests no. Wikipedia says this term is used in Australia, New Zealand and Scotland (…?) to refer to the zip lines that are sometimes found in children’s playgrounds.
It was truly an action-packed day on Sunday because after the movie/park, we went to Denny’s for lunch and then over to Ferdinando’s for afternoon tea. We haven’t seen him and his family in quite a while so it was nice to catch up again.
Crossmate is now at v1.2.0. The biggest new feature is the chronicle, a compressed record of an entire game (including all player moves). The idea is to allow the original database records to be destroyed after the game with each player retaining their own (significantly smaller) independent copy. That way, if another player deletes the records of a game, it doesn’t impact any other players. I had something like a chronicle (called an archive) but it wasn’t trying to completely replace the game record. I decided to try a different approach after noticing that Crossmate is already using 60MB of my iCloud Storage. Honestly, I’m not sure how that’s possible given how the only data being stored is textual. My theory is that Apple creates additional metadata when you update records in iCloud’s database and because of how many updates can occur in a single game in Crossmate, that can build up to be quite significant after a month or so. By replacing all of that with a single record, I’m hoping the impact on storage will be negligible.
Nikhil Suresh wrote a blog post about the current ‘A.I.’ moment that I thought was very good. Suresh argues many executives realise the reality of LLM-based systems does not match the hype but that these executives are incentivised not to say this publicly because it risks embarrassing their suppliers/customers. I think I’m more optimistic about the potential of LLM-based systems than Suresh (I prefer to call the technology ‘LLM-based systems’ but we’re talking about the same thing). My own opinion is that LLMs in the 2020s are similar to personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The difference, at least as I understand it, is that the enthusiasm towards computers was somewhat tempered. There’s very little temperance around this technology at the moment.
Andrew Kelley gave a talk at the Software Should Work conference that was held in Columbia, Missouri from 16-17 July. It’s called ‘Don’t Take the Black Pill’ and is up on YouTube. Kelley is famous for being the creator of the Zig programming language, but this talk isn’t really about Zig, languages or anything like that. Instead, Kelley argues for maintaining hope.
Kelley goes on a brief aside in his talk to speak positively about Ninajirachi’s song ‘Infohazard’ (Apple Music). I concur. It’s terrific; as is its music video (YouTube). (I’m a little embarrassed to say that despite Ninajirachi being Australian, this is the first I had heard of her. Given she swept a whole bunch of the Australian music industry’s awards last year, this, if nothing else, proves that I am very solidly in middle age.)

Thu, 30 Jul 2026 11:06:23 +0900

So demonstrating that I am well and truly in my 40s, I report to you that Ninajirachi’s album, I Love My Computer, is very good.

Weeknotes #340

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 23:49:00 +0900

On Saturday, Eri took Emma to an open day at Bunka Gakuen University Junior and Senior High School, which unfortunately was limited in capacity so wasn’t something we could all attend. I wasn’t expecting to find any Times Car car-sharing cars available (I am aware how many times I just wrote the word ‘car’), but lo and behold there was one available on short notice so I booked it and then took John and Rowan over to Hobby Center Kato, the model train shop that’s attached to the Kato Precision Railroad Models head office (Wikipedia). Since it’s not really the purpose of the building, the shop isn’t that big but it does have a rather intricate diorama set up on the ground floor that was fun to see. I probably flubbed the entire trip by not spending the money to ‘play’ with the upstairs diorama. I think the idea is that you get a train and a brief window of time to operate it on a dedicated track so that, in theory, you don’t mess things up for anyone else but I know my boys and I’m not confident they would have, like life, found a way.
I wish I’d had somewhere more interesting to go for lunch but the best option was a nearby Gusto, a Japanese ‘family restaurant’. I’ve written about visiting family restaurants a couple of times before, but in looking for a good explainer for readers unfamiliar with Japanese Western cuisine (not a typo), the Government of Japan actually has a decent English-language webpage. My tax dollars hard at work, I guess.
Monday was Marine Day (Wikipedia) and I decided to celebrate by taking Emma and John to see Toy Story 5. The movie has been out for a few weeks now and I was a little surprised at how few cinemas around us were showing the subtitled version (i.e. the English dub). The easiest to go to was the Toho Cinemas in Shinjuku which I’m not sure I’d ever visited. This is the one with the Godzilla sticking out the top. It’s a bit of a shame that the district where the cinema is located, Kabukichō (Wikipedia) is a red-light district because the cinema would otherwise be the obvious choice for us to frequent. We went at 9 in the morning so nothing risqué was even open but the short walk from Seibu Shinjuku Station to the cinema was pretty rough on the nose.
I think the opinion we’re supposed to express about TS5 is that it’s emblematic of the complete creative bankruptcy of the U.S. entertainment industrial complex but I am going to zag and instead tell you the movie was great. If you want an example of how bad things can get, there is at least one in cinemas right now—from Disney no less—but it’s not TS5. The reason Toy Story 5 avoids this problem is that it’s not really a Toy Story movie in the sense that these films are about Woody and Buzz. It’s really like a spin-off, with the focus this time on the cowgirl Jessie. I don’t know if Pixar can pull this trick again but it worked a treat this time.
I had some inchoate sense that AT Protocol (Wikipedia), the protocol behind Bluesky, is better than alternatives like ActivityPub (Wikipedia). I only just came across this but in January of this year, Dan Abramov (a proponent of AT Protocol), wrote a good primer that helps make that sense much more solid.
Speaking of links to the web, I thought about writing to Hank Green (Wikipedia) about Crossmate as I know he’s into word games. I wanted an e-mail address and went to his personal website to find one. There’s not one listed there but his website is delightful.
I was talking to Eugenia about the band Garbage (we were discussing the first CDs we’d bought in the 90s) and that prompted me to go back and listen to Version 2.0. I mostly bought the CD for ‘I Think I’m Paranoid’ (Apple Music) but the whole album is a banger.

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 18:50:00 +0900

Toy Story 5 is good.

Weeknotes #339

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 23:57:00 +0900

Emma, John and Rowan finished school for the term which of course means we’re now in Hell. I plan to switch to working from home two days a week rather than three but I’m not sure what we’re going to do to keep them occupied. Oh, and the summer heat is oppressive enough that I think we might actually be in Hell.
Rowan wanted to go out on a shinkansen and so I made a deal that if we did that, we had to go to a museum first. I thought the easiest choice (given its relative proximity to Tokyo Station) was the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (Wikipedia). I’ve written about MOMAT before (the abbreviation is not a typo) and it remains one of my favourite galleries in Tokyo almost because of its relative lack of popularity. I wasn’t sure what to expect from Hiroshi Sugimoto: Extinction but I thought it was excellent. I’m not familiar with Sugimoto and while the exhibition is arguably the equivalent of a greatest hits album, for someone new to work this was great. I must say that Rowan held up exceptionally well. I wasn’t sure whether I’d spend the entire time wrestling him but fortunately no.
Crossmate passed App Review and is on the App Store! So far I’ve had literally zero (zero!) responses from Apple pundits I’ve told about it so it seems unlikely to set the world on fire. Still, if you’re eager to get into my good books, check it out unprompted (well, outside of this prompt) and then tell me how amazing it is.
Speaking of things with a limited audience, Josh Kingsford (the comedian behind the YouTube channel Comedy Without Errors) has released the last instalment in his sprawling 5-part series about Louis C.K. (full playlist). Kingsford explores the allegations against Louis C.K. that led to his cancellation, C.K.’s response to these allegations and C.K.’s return to cultural relevance (he released a novel, Ingram in November 2025 and his new Netflix special, Ridiculous, premiered on 30 June 2026). The entire thing runs for more than six hours. I can really only recommend it to people who loved C.K.’s comedy as much as I did. The short version? C.K. is an extremely talented liar without contrition. I disagree with some aspects of Kingsford’s argument in the final video about separating the art from the artist but in this case, I agree that it’s extremely difficult to do that with C.K.
I really liked Mike Masnick’s essay, ‘Enshittification, Despotification, and the Open Internet’. Masnick is the author behind the website, Techdirt. He’s been writing about online platforms for some time and his essay, ‘Protocols, Not Platforms’, was an important influence on the AT Protocol (the highest profile usage of which is the microblogging site, Bluesky). In ‘Enshittification’, he explains how the architecture of an online services shapes the incentives that prevent (or at least limit) these services becoming worse for users over time.
To fit this week’s theme, I think the musical selection needs to be something pretty esoteric. Is it fair to put Thievery Corporation’s ‘Lebanese Blonde’ (Apple Music) into that category? I’m not sure but let’s.

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 09:43:39 +0900

Crossmate is in the App Store! If you like crosswords, you might be curious to check it out. It’s my new crossword app for iPhone and iPad that supports 1-3 players.