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I feel bad about how little attention I’ve been paying to the Iran War. What is happening with it? Do you know? I think it’s off again but maybe at the time you read this, that won’t be the case.
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Eri took Emma and John to see the Chiikawa movie, Chiikawa the Movie: The Secret of Mermaid Island on Saturday (Tokyo Weekender). I’d been able to nab a car again to drive us all around (we were worried it was going to rain) and so while Eri was with the older kids, I drove Rowan over to a park he’d spotted a few times out the window of the Seibu Shinjuku trains. Well, no. First, I took him to the wrong park (Heiwa-no-Mori Park) but then I took him to to correct park (Ochiai Park). Ochiai Park is a bit run down in the way that playgrounds often are in Japan but it crams in an impressive array of amenities: a caged basketball court, swings, slides and two flying foxes.
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I really thought I’d mentioned ‘flying foxes’ in a previous weeknotes but my searching suggests no. Wikipedia says this term is used in Australia, New Zealand and Scotland (…?) to refer to the zip lines that are sometimes found in children’s playgrounds.
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It was truly an action-packed day on Saturday because after the movie/park, we went to Denny’s for lunch and then over to Ferdinando’s for afternoon tea. We haven’t seen him and his family in quite a while so it was nice to catch up again.
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Crossmate is now at v1.2.0. The biggest new feature is the chronicle, a compressed record of an entire game (including all player moves). The idea is to allow the original database records to be destroyed after the game with each player retaining their own (significantly smaller) independent copy. That way, if another player deletes the records of a game, it doesn’t impact any other players. I had something like a chronicle (called an archive) but it wasn’t trying to completely replace the game record. I decided to try a different approach after noticing that Crossmate is already using 60MB of my iCloud Storage. Honestly, I’m not sure how that’s possible given how the only data being stored is textual. My theory is that Apple creates additional metadata when you update records in iCloud’s database and because of how many updates can occur in a single game in Crossmate, that can build up to be quite significant after a month or so. By replacing all of that with a single record, I’m hoping the impact on storage will be negligible.
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Nikhil Suresh wrote a blog post about the current ‘A.I.’ moment that I thought was very good. Suresh argues many executives realise the reality of LLM-based systems does not match the hype but that these executives are incentivised not to say this publicly because it risks embarrassing their suppliers/customers. I think I’m more optimistic about the potential of LLM-based systems than Suresh (I prefer to call the technology ‘LLM-based systems’ but we’re talking about the same thing). My own opinion is that LLMs in the 2020s are similar to personal computers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The difference, at least as I understand it, is that the enthusiasm towards computers was somewhat tempered. There’s very little temperance around this technology at the moment.
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Andrew Kelley gave a talk at the Software Should Work conference that was held in Columbia, Missouri from 16-17 July. It’s called ‘Don’t Take the Black Pill’ and is up on YouTube. Kelley is famous for being the creator of the Zig programming language, but this talk isn’t really about Zig, languages or anything like that. Instead, Kelley argues for maintaining hope.
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Kelley goes on a brief aside in his talk to speak positively about Ninajirachi’s song ‘Infohazard’ (Apple Music). I concur. It’s terrific; as is its music video (YouTube). (I’m a little embarrassed to say that despite Ninajirachi being Australian, this is the first I had heard of her. Given she swept a whole bunch of the Australian music industry’s awards last year, this, if nothing else, proves that I am very solidly in middle age.)
