Weeknotes #182

It was all social all the time this week. I finally got an invite to Bluesky on Monday via Scott. My initial thoughts were that it was nice if a bit quiet. John Gruber really summed it up best when he quipped that Bluesky is for people who liked Twitter. As someone who did quite like Twitter, I appreciate some of its early decisions (notably quote-posts). I’m @pyrmont.bsky.social.

Of course, I didn’t have much time to enjoy the afterglow of being in the cool club before Meta launched Threads on Thursday, obliterating any momentum that Bluesky had. While I prefer Bluesky’s design (both in terms of the app and the protocol), Threads becoming the dominant short-form text posting app feels inevitable, even at this early a stage. My hope is that Meta does follow through with the promise to support ActivityPub and I can follow Threads accounts through something like Ivory. In the meantime, I’m @[email protected] (God, Mastodon’s fully-qualified usernames are so ugly).

I lost two Wordles in a row! The first snapped my 294-game winning streak.

I released Digestive, a new Janet library! I mentioned last week that I wanted to implement the MD5 algorithm but had been unsuccessful because I needed unsigned 32-bit integer types and Janet only exposes signed 32-bit integers (it does have 64-bit integers as well but I was trying to avoid using those). Well, I somehow discovered that Janet can add 32-bit unsigned integers to a buffer (i.e. a byte array) and that started me wondering whether I could operate on the buffers directly. That meant needing to write my own bitwise functions—as well as an addition function (?!)—but it worked! I am incredibly indebted to the pseudonymous sogaiu who developed janet-checksums and generously shared some of his debugging output with me so I could track down where in the algorithm my code was breaking.

Was that a good use of time? Probably not but I felt incredibly accomplished when it finally hashed my test string hello correctly. And I do have a much better understanding at this point of block ciphers, endianness and bit-numbering (Wikipedia entries here, here and here).

My favourite episode of Peppa Pig is the 40th episode of season 5, ‘Super Potato’. It is a masterwork of absurdist humour that I think is the height of the series and perhaps children’s entertainment generally. It’s on YouTube.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen a video essay I really liked but I was pleasantly surprised by Patrick Willem’s recent essay on the film-making of Taylor Swift. Cynical attempt to cash in on the hottest person in popular culture? Maybe, but it’s well done regardless.

This isn’t really a video essay but I did find this video from Sam Denby of Wendover Productions explaining the backstory to Nebula quite informative. If, like me, you’ve wondered who they are (and you’ve got around half an hour), he does a decent job filling in the blanks.

The final video of my YouTube infotainment trifecta is a talk by Richard Feldman about static typing. Feldman does a great job explaining why static typing declined in popularity and why it’s rebounded. I particularly enjoyed his explanation for why he thinks it’s very unlikely that dynamic languages will enjoy a resurgence.

I finally made it to the episode of Hit Parade focusing on Britpop and it was as good as I’d hoped. It’s had me listening to a lot of Britpop all week. I’ll go with Definitely Maybe as my selection for this week (Apple Music).