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As regular readers will have realised, I often try to start these with some comment on the news du jour but I don’t really have much to say at the moment. Last week the U.S. intervened (or implied they would intervene) to prop up the yen which I guess… thanks? (ABC News) I’m not looking forward to discovering the starting price of the upcoming iPhones 18 and anything Scott Bessent wants to do to help me with that is appreciated.
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Speaking of the news, I appreciated the most recent episode of Geopolitical Cousins (the podcast by two geopolitical analysts, Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic). I mentioned this podcast last year but to recap: it’s a podcast where geopolitical analysts Jacob Shapiro and Marko Papic discuss recent geopolitical events from the perspective of analysts who write advisory notes to investment clients. They’re clear it’s not investment advice (and I don’t use it for that) but I appreciate that it gives their discussions a different flavour to what you tend to get from journalists or academics. They’re also on YouTube.
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Tuesday was Mountain Day (obligatory Wikipedia link). Rowan and I ‘climbed’ (by escalator) the ‘metaphorical mountain’ of the new Yodobashi Camera in Ikebukuro to visit their sprawling toy floor. I generally try not to buy toys randomly for the kids but I couldn’t resist getting Rowan the Lego Creator 3-in-1 Aircraft: Race Plane (31160) and then, for Emma and John, the cheapest sets they had from Lego’s Minecraft collection (21583 and 21266). Rowan has now learnt why the sets have different age ranges. His manual dexterity has improved in the past few months but 31160 has a number of small pieces that require a decent amount of finger strength to manoeuvre into place and that’s currently beyond him.
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I mentioned last week that I had used LLM-based coding agents to work on an incomplete Janet project and I wondered whether I would use it to work on Persimmon. I did indeed do this and then I moved on to finally making my own Janet dialect. Back in 2020 (!), in the same weeknote where I noted that Joe Biden had won the presidential election (!!), I mentioned that I had written a parser I called Claret that parsed a more Clojure-like syntax into Janet data structures. Well, once I had the persistent immutable data structures available with Persimmon, I decided to make a standalone program that uses Janet’s VM but swaps out Janet’s immutable data structures for Persimmon’s. I’m not sure whether it’s a good idea or not but this more ambitious Claret is now up on GitHub.
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There’s a version of Lumines Remastered on the App Store and came away disappointed. I tried to play it on the iPad and I don’t think that’s the right way to play it. If you have a game controller you pair with your iPad this might be great but they haven’t bothered to code in support for hardware keyboards.
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Anyone who has played the first level of Lumines will be very familiar with Mondo Grosso’s ‘Shinin’’. I wondered if it was available to stream and it turns out it is (Apple Music).
