Weeknotes 161

Hello February.

It’s not quite starting to feel like spring yet, but on a couple of sunny afternoons this week it was definitely threatening to. Bit soon.

Two streams, more enjoyable this time because I made good progress. I worked on tables which aren’t inherently interesting but forced me to shake out lots of details of how modules are represented at runtime and get imports & exports working properly. The interpreter is slowly starting to feel more real.

I’m increasingly convinced that I should be expanding abbreviations with a separate preprocessor rather than trying to handle them in situ. I was resistant to this at first because it has the potential to make the parser even slower and I thought I could probably do it neatly in a different way, but the complexity of having to support both abbreviated and unabbreviated abstract syntax at runtime is just not worth it. Besides, I keep trying to remind myself that performance isn’t important for this project, so I should listen to my own advice and do the clearer & simpler thing without getting hung up on hypothetical downsides. I might get stuck into that next week.

The cumulative psychic pain of everyone sentencing their Twitter bots to death this week was kind of sad. It’s a shame this is happening but I suppose it’s only the tail end of a larger, already inevitable loss.

As happened with “crypto”, it’s getting harder to find online spaces that aren’t overrun with “AI” discourse. That’s inconvenient because I’m so fundamentally uninterested in large language and latent diffusion models that I just don’t want to hear about them or see any more of their dull, ugly output. It’s impressive but not surprising that computers can do this; I wish we could move on.

But however tiresome the current round of uncritical “AI” cheerleaders have become, its detractors seem stuck in an equally silly mindset of clumsily-concealed Cartesian dualism which I can’t sympathise with either. So my coping strategy for now is to pretend none of it is happening and not engage in either direction. After all, “anything that gets invented after you’re thirty is against the natural order of things”, so that’s normal and fine behaviour.

I know I said I’d shut up about it, but briefly: episode three of The Last of Us was remarkable. I’m so impressed by the smart choices they made in adaptating this part of the game, and I was surprised by the more mature approach to narrative.

I really liked how they chose to incorporate Bill — who could so easily have become a redundant character — and I found the love story between him and Frank very moving, with great performances from both actors. Again they managed to have a character fulfil the same functional role in the larger story but, freed from the constraints of gameplay, changed the details so his part could play out in a different and more interesting way that better supports the underlying themes of the show. I’m enjoying it a lot.

I hung out with Aleks & Reema on Saturday, which was brilliant, and we watched Bros, which decidedly wasn’t. It’s a film I’d like to support in principle, but it’s so poorly written and performed that I can’t think of anything good to say about it.

I also met one James for coffee on Thursday, and another James & Roz today for a delicious assortment of edible plants. I’ve already hit my James quota for the month.

Wakanda Forever: aquatic bollocks.

My back is basically better.