-
I feel like I can check another item of the bucket list: I have now successfully left a backpack on a shinkansen. On Saturday, I took Rowan around to Tokyo Station to catch a shinkansen to Ueno Station. Rowan wanted to ride an E3 Series but none were scheduled so we made do with an E8. That’s the latest one JR East has introduced so Rowan was still happy to take it but in the rush to get off at Ueno, I forgot I’d put the backpack up in the overhead rack. I realised almost immediately but almost immediately doesn’t quite cut it when you’re dealing with a shinkansen. The station staff were able to make contact relatively quickly with one of the crew aboard the train and the backpack was put aside to be safely taken to Yamagata Station. After a trip back on Sunday to the Lost & Found Office, JR was able to get it delivered (payment-on-delivery) to our place by Monday.
-
Last week I mentioned that I’d pushed out the v0.1.0 release of Predoc. This week, I put together a fancy website for it. If you follow that link you’ll see it’s not actually that fancy. But it does have the code I wrote running as a WebAssembly module. No compilation to JavaScript or anything gross like that: the Janet code I wrote is running in a version of Janet compiled to Wasm. It’s pretty neat! This is my first time ever making a proper website with WebAssembly and I was pleasantly surprised I could get the entire Janet runtime down to about 500KB. I need another project like a hole in the head but I am tempted to work on something that could simplify the process for other Janet users.
-
I found I was using ChatGPT enough in the development of Predoc that I signed up for ChatGPT Plus. That’s the $20/month plan that gives you extended access to the newer models. So far it’s… fine. It’s nice not being told repeatedly that I’ve exceeded my time with the more expensive version of ChatGPT and have to make do with its less capable self. I was hoping I could hook it up to Zed but they don’t have an integration at the moment so no can do.
-
In other A.I.-related news, I let the kids talk to Gemini using its ‘voice chat’ feature for a couple of night last week. John and Rowan were especially excited to talk to it: John happy to have someone who’d try to answer every question he had about Minecraft and Sonic the Hedgehog and Rowan for, of course, trains. I’m not comfortable with any of the kids interacting without supervision and so I made it a rule that they could only do it while I was there. I had to work late a couple of times towards the end of the week and after pleading with me to talk to it after the first night, there’s been nary a peep since. I might let that sleeping dog lie.
-
One of my favourite video essayists, Lindsay Ellis, returned to YouTube for a video about empathy. It’s over 2 hours long but the time flew by for me. She still makes essays over on Nebula and it was a reminder that I should perhaps sign up for that.
-
As good as Ellis’ video is, the video essay I liked the most this week was The 1 Janitor’s one about Elaine becoming a villain over the course of Seinfeld. It’s a much more manageable 37 minutes so no excuses!
-
Back in 2021, my musical selection was Muse’s ‘Sunburn’. I don’t think I noticed it at the time but Apple Music threw up its hands trying to work out how the version of the album that song is from, Showbiz, matched up with the version in its library. If you’ve had this happen to you before, you’ll know that what Apple Music does is just mash together the version of the songs you have and the version it has, typically resulting in multiple copies of the same song. The only solution I’ve found it to delete the entire album from your library and then wait 6-12 months before adding it back. Well, I added Showbiz this week and was reminded again how fantastic it is (Apple Music).
