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I’m proud to report that Eri and I are not complete parenting failures. Yes, that’s right: we successfully took the kids to the pool at least once this summer. It wasn’t the nicest day on Saturday. While it’s still miserably hot, the typhoon season has commenced and the sky is frequently overcast. As a result, we didn’t get to enjoy that sublime mix of hot and cold you get when you’re in a pool in summer. Still, it did mean the pool wasn’t especially crowded and we didn’t have to wait in the queue like I recall was the case two years ago.
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We then followed that up on Sunday by taking the kids to have another set of shichi-go-san photos taken (Wikipedia). I wrote about doing that back in 2023 when John was five. That’s how old Rowan is now and while Emma and John are technically the wrong ages, it’s nice to have some classy photos of all the children and this is quite possibly the last time we’ll do that with all of them as a group.
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I’m burying the lede, though, because the most important thing that happened all week was that I finally finished filing my loose documents. Many were literally years old at this point and should probably just have been thrown out but I feel better having these records organised and accessible on the off chance I ever need them. As an added bonus, our bedroom now looks like a bedroom again rather than the site of an embezzlement investigation.
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Rounding things out on Friday was the monthly basketball practice that I started attending back in June. I neglected to write about the practice in July but I went then so this is now the third time. I did get a cramp at one point but the highlight was a steal I made.
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After my success making Claret, I decided that it was time to finally see if I could use LLM-based coding agents to tick off another item on my programming bucket list: converting Janet’s C implementation to one in Zig. I regret to report that despite starting this on Monday, it’s still not finished. It’s been intensive enough in terms of token usage that I’ve temporarily upgraded to Anthropic’s $100/month level to make sure I can have it grinding away in a mostly continuous fashion. I think I’m about 80% of the way through and—at the risk of tempting fate—I think it’s going to work. Hopefully I have good news to report in the next update.
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Speaking of LLMs, sogaiu linked me to this talk by Gerben Wierda (YouTube). Wierda does a good job, I think, of explaining how the way that LLMs can make it look like there’s ‘comprehension’ when there really isn’t.
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I realised I hadn’t watched any episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds from last year (let alone this year) so now I have that on my list of things to watch. Oh, and Ludwig is finally back for a second season.
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Charli XCX released her Music, Fashion, Film album in June. I’ve been listening to it on and off for the past month and while it doesn’t reach the heights of brat, I do still like it quite a lot. I’m particularly fond of the melancholy of ‘SS26’ (Apple Music).
