Weeknote #53 (20250921-20250927)

meta

I went and looked and I’ve actually been doing these for, like, 13 months, not just over a year — not sure how that all adds up, but the first one of these was way back at the end of August, 2024. I guess I’ll keep it up for a while longer…

did

  • We (TheWife, a friend, and I) went to Octoberfest at Bryn Mawr on Sunday
  • The week started with a great deal of frustration, trying to rebuild Emacs from source; later I found a message to emacs-devel outlining a fix, which let me work around the problem
  • Continuing the weekly theme of “bad time to touch a computer”, one of the hard drives in my Synology NAS failed on Monday
  • I also had to replace the battery in my office UPS — making it not only a bad week for computer touching, but also an expensive week
  • My attempts to document commis hit a speedbump, which I ended up working around by making my code worse, so the bolt-on docs would work.
  • Work this week was mainly me gritting my teeth and grinding through writing four annual evals — I got them done and submitted on Friday, which was my goal, but I didn’t accomplish a whole lot else this week…

read

  • Against the protection of stocking frames.

    I think it’s long past time I start discussing “artificial intelligence” (“AI”) as a failed technology. Specifically, that large language models (LLMs) have repeatedly and consistently failed to demonstrate value to anyone other than their investors and shareholders. The technology is a failure, and I’d like to invite you to join me in treating it as such.

    …and then it gets better

  • How I, a non-developer, read the tutorial you, a developer, wrote for me, a beginner

    So on point, it burns just a little:

    I first started doing Very Simple Thing with Snarfus, but the more I used it the more I saw the potential! Despite the jaggle of the chromus, it’s really multi-purpose. And that’s what led me to argyling the pintafore with the quagmire instead of the hoobastank!

  • Altoids by the Fistful

    Oh my god I’ve had this day under exactly the same circumstances:

    It feels like I am performing surgery using a scalpel held by a boardwalk arcade claw machine, complete with the constant squawking and shitting of project management seagulls.

    …but, now having read all the way to the end, maybe not the exact same day (still resonated, to be sure…)

watched

  • TheWife and I continue to grind though our Criminal Minds rewatch, currently on S4

cooked

  • Tuesday: sausages and hot dogs
  • Wednesday: thai basil chicken
  • Thursday: tuna fish sammies
  • Saturday: crunchy tacos, as well as starting a batch of chicken stock

looking forward to

[redacted]