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Tuesday was the Autumnal Equinox Day (Wikipedia) and Eri and I took the kids to the National Museum of Western Art in Ueno. Ostensibly, I wanted to see the Picasso exhibition of human figures they have set up in a room of their ordinary collection but it also put us in a convenient location to catch the shinkansen to Tokyo. Neither of those things are of particular interest to Emma or John but Ueno Park does have a semi-permanent spot set up in front of the zoo for a couple of vendors to sell kakigōri (Wikipedia) and they were excited about that. It was also still quite hot out and so when we did make our way over there, it was quite refreshing.
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We then went on the aforementioned shinkansen and this time it was the E7. That was Eri’s first time to catch a Tohoku shinkansen, a memory I’m sure she’ll treasure forever.
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I’m still popping my head into the local My Basket to see if they’ve seen the error of their ways and are stocking my beloved meat pies again. Alas, no. They do still have the cheese meat pies that I don’t like, sitting there and laughing at me as I walk past their frosted prison.
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It wasn’t all bad news on the food front. I discovered that the local Inageya supermarket is selling Granny Smith apples from New Zealand. Granny Smiths (Wikipedia)! I wrote back in 2022 of my surprise at learning that this type of apple was originally cultivated in Australia but had then pretty much given up on ever finding them in Japan. Not sure if I’ll see them again as I can’t imagine they’re going to be very appealing to the Japanese palate but I’m nevertheless glad the New Zealanders are trying to make them happen.
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Over the past few months, I’ve developed a workflow where I will explore a particular software codebase using an LLM I access through the code editor, Zed. Basically, I’ll open the project and then start asking questions. Working together with an LLM is what gave me the confidence to make my fork of the IRC client catgirl (which I need to make public) and it was what helped me fix a non-deterministic bug that was affecting Janet’s Windows implementation. This weekend, I decided to see how an LLM would go at generating an implementation of the SHA-1 algorithm (Wikipedia) for my pure Janet cryptographic hashing library, Digestive. Crazy stalkers might remember me developing this library back in 2023 and it’s slowly gnawed at me for two years that I never implemented anything after MD5. Well, in one of those ‘blow your mind’ moments, I pointed Claude’s 4.1 Opus Thinking model at it on Sunday and asked it to write the SHA-1 implementation. It didn’t get it right the first time but that was due to a handful of mistakes that meant the code wouldn’t run at all. Once I fixed those, I had the hash for the empty string. I then asked it to do SHA-2 with a 256-bit output and that time it did it in one-shot. I subsequently discovered that there were some bugs in those implementations but even with that caveat, I came away deeply impressed (I also eventually got it to produce a working SHA-3 implementation but that was more difficult). I hope to write up a fuller post about the whole experience soon.
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A couple of weeks ago I watched the frustratingly spelled KPop Demon Hunters with the kids (Netflix). As with many movie musicals, I did not immediately take to the music but it has grown on me over time and a great deal of the programming this weekend was soundtracked by the movie version of ‘Takedown’ (Apple Music).
