Weeknotes #334

Rowan turned five. I have no memories I can consciously recall before that age and so the first four years have always felt special to me in a way that the rest of childhood won’t because of the (quite probably wrong) sense that I am the exclusive keeper of these memories. That also makes me sad because I am so terrible at that job. I went back and looked at the weeknote when John turned five and I cannot remember John ever asking for Edward and Henry. I guess it’s a good thing I started writing these weeknotes.

The birthday day itself went well. I finally cracked and after constant pleading bought my first Pura-Rail trains. I held out on buying any track but I have put batteries in them and they’ve been zooming across the floors since he opened them. Pura-Rail trains fit on Brio tracks but don’t grip the wood as well as I think they grip the official—and truly, truly ugly—blue plastic ones. For future reference (since there’s an extremely good chance I’ll forget this), it was an ALFA-X and a Doctor Yellow.

Here we are in June and I have yet to write my annual spring list of podcasts I have on rotation. Now it’s true that I often do this in summer (see last year’s) but this is the first year I’m seriously considering not writing a post. The truth is that since I started using coding agents, the amount of time I’m spending on podcasts has completely plummeted. I finally accepted reality this week and deleted almost all the episodes in my backlog because short of another multi-month hospital admission, there was no way that I would get through them. I haven’t turned off the subscriptions yet but that might come next. These posts are the ones that I get the most feedback about by far so I’m reluctant to stop completely but that is the conclusion I feel like I’m barrelling towards.

So of course I spent more time on Crossmate as I ready it for a ‘public beta’ (read: the randos I can solicit to give it a shot). Anthropic released Claude Fable 5 and it was fortuitous timing because one of its strengths is meant to be security vulnerability detection. It dutifully identified a couple of question decisions regarding my Cloudflare Workers and we got those fixed (I think).

Or perhaps I should say I hope because as I write this, the Fable model has become unavailable in response to the United States directing Anthropic to stop making it available to foreign nationals (Anthropic’s statement). On a purely selfish level, this is disappointing because in my completely unscientific testing, I did find Fable 5 an improvement over Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.5. It was going away on 22 June (for subscriptions like mine) but hopefully I’ll have a chance to use it again soon.

I also put up a marketing site for Crossmate so if you’re wondering what it looks like, there is a screenshot there. If you know how to install apps through TestFlight and want to check it out, drop me a line. The e-mail address is on the marketing page.

There was a post on Bluesky about the most 80s song you could think of. My friend sogaiu linked me to the music video for Huey Lewis and the News’ ‘Power of Love’ (YouTube) and just wow. Speaking of being five, this particular song is one of the earliest that I can remember but I don’t think I’d ever seen the music video for it. It is quite a trip.

I’ll make that the musical selection for the week (Apple Music) but know that in actuality it was another week of a lot of ‘D’you Know What I Mean?’.