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It’s been a pretty slow start to the year for us. I’m a little ashamed to admit that the Christmas tree is still up, for instance. Monday was Coming of Age Day (Wikipedia) but other than a bicycle ride with Emma, we stayed at home for almost the entire three days. The weather has been nice enough (for the middle of winter) but it is cold (it is the middle of winter) and none of us have had a burning desire to go anywhere. Well, other than Rowan. He’s always up for a train ride, of course.
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On Sunday night, we somehow came across the show Tōshōchū (which would transliterate into ‘In Pursuit’). The show is essentially a giant game of tag in which a number of contestants are placed in a large venue and given a period of time during which they must survive. In opposition to the players are a number of non-contestants called ‘Hunters’. The Hunters are dressed like the Agents from the Matrix films and stalk the venue looking for contestants. If a Hunter sees a contestant, they commence pursuit and if they catch the contestant, the contestant is out. Each contestant has three or so people following them around everywhere with a camera and it seems like there’s a rule that the Hunters aren’t allowed to ‘see’ the film crew when spotting a contestant. The whole thing goes for multiple hours with episodes split up over multiple weeks. The episode went a bit late but since Monday was a holiday, we let the kids stay up to watch it all. I think this might have been the first television show we’ve ever watched as an entire family.
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On Friday Netflix suddenly recommended that we might be interested in watching Tōshōchū (Netflix) (apparently, Netflix has been co-producing the show since 2022). It was definitely the kind of thing that makes people think giant tech companies are spying on you but the more rational explanation of course is that the airing of the show over the weekend reminded a lot of Japanese that it exists. Some number of those people then either remembered Netflix has episodes or found them by searching. That activity led to Netflix’s recommendation algorithm noticing the show and promoting it to more users which, if people followed the suggestion, would of course promote it to even more users.
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I’d been thinking about writing a blog post about my experience with Claude Code but then I came across Daniel Hooper’s write-up and he covers most of it. I don’t do anything as complicated as what Hooper does but the sentiment is very similar.
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One of the first projects I made when I came across the Janet programming was the testing library, Testament. The initial impetus for creating it was that I wanted the testing library to produce a side-by-side comparison between the expected output and the actual output. This is pretty trivial but for a long time now I’ve wished you could created a colour-coded ‘diff’ that showed the characters in the expected output that are missing and the characters in the actual output that are added. Well, with some assistance from Claude, it’s now there.
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On the topic of algorithmic recommendation, last week I linked to Ben Folds’ cover of the Postal Services’ ‘Such Great Heights’ for Triple J’s Like a Version and mentioned it was only on YouTube. After one of my replays of the video, YouTube recommended I might like the Like a Version cover RÜFÜS DU SOL did of Nirvana’s ‘Something in the Way’ (YouTube). In this case, I am familiar with the cover but I see I haven’t linked it in a weeknote before so let’s rectify that (Apple Music).
