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Rowan has always been excited to watch competitive activities. Since he became infatuated with soccer, I’ve been meaning to take him to an actual match. Going to a J-League match would make more sense but I wasn’t sure if it would rain on Sunday so I asked ChatGPT for options and it recommended a 2 pm game between JR East and Honda Suzuka in the annual Intercity Baseball Tournament (Wikipedia). Given the tournament is an amateur competition, the tickets were not expensive and I was able to get three seats (I dragged John along too) right down near the field in between home plate and first base.
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It actually turned out far better than I was expecting. Getting into the stadium took a bit of time but we arrived at our seats just as the game was beginning. JR East was off to a quick start, scoring three runs in the first innings. In the third, one of the JR East batters hit a home run. It was starting to look a bit one-sided but in the fourth, Honda scored three runs and forced a pitching change. By this point, the boys were getting restless and since I didn’t want to be home too late, so we made an early exit. JR East won 8-4 in the end (results).
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Before the game, I took John and Rowan to the Taco Bell that’s on the outside of Tokyo Dome. This might have been the first time I’ve ever had Taco Bell and I can’t say I’m in an enormous hurry to return.
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I mentioned two weeks ago that I had begun a port of the Janet programming language from C to Zig and that it was proceeding well. I was hoping to have more to report in the following week (i.e. last week) and yet observant readers would have noticed I didn’t mention any software projects at all. That wasn’t a portent of failure but it did indicate that the process was taking longer than I had expected. Here we are more than two weeks later and it’s still not done. I now have an implementation that I think basically works but with inadequate documentation. That’s what I’m working on now; we’ll see how that goes.
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One interesting aspect of the work has been the clear tendency of LLMs to personify. I’ve gone back and forth across a number of sessions reminding Claude Code not to personify functions, interfaces, runtimes, etc. My friend sogaiu pointed out that the obvious reason this would occur is that so much of the written text the large language models are trained upon is writing by humans about humans.
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I liked the YouTube video from Brent Forrester on how he wrote the Simpsons episode ‘Homerpalooza’. I’d like to believe there’s an alternate universe where I became a comedy writer and I enjoy how these videos let me vicariously experience that reality.
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Speaking of YouTube, in 2024 I wrote about the (I suppose) infamous video ‘How Star Wars was saved in the edit’ and the epic response ‘How “How Star Wars was saved in the edit’ was saved in the edit (sort of, but not really)’. Video essayist Christopher Bingham is doing a series of videos about Star Wars and he’s made his own, ‘Star Wars Wasn’t “Saved in the Edit”’ that is quite a bit shorter (albeit still 34 minutes in length).
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In exhibit 6,382,983 of how long it can take me to warm to an album, I wrote about Beck’s Colors back in 2020 (i.e. more than six years ago). At the time, I said the album hadn’t grabbed me like some of his earlier work. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I love this album now. I try not to repeat recommendations so this week I’m linking to the song (Apple Music) but know that I think you should listen to the whole thing.
