Weeknotes 186

Cool, breezy and rainy this week. A perfect planet while it lasts.

On Thursday afternoon I went to my local brewery’s taproom for a solo pint and some light typing. It felt a bit naughty but completely blissful.

At one point I thought I’d made good progress on my WebAssembly interpreter by implementing the final few instruction abbreviations in the preprocessor. Aside from making some small things optional, this was mainly about unfolding instructions so that a flat list like i32.const 1 i32.const 2 iadd can be written as the tree-like (iadd (i32.const 1) (i32.const 2)) instead. Unfolding is a bit fiddly because it’s impossible to avoid the burden of knowing how to distinguish instruction keywords from immediate arguments, but it’s not difficult once you accept the inconvenient reality.

(Why the language supports any of this complexity — in a plain text format which nobody uses — continues to be a mystery to me.)

Anyway, I was all ready to push up this last batch of changes and walk away, but the ritual of going back through the commits and fleshing out their messages to justify why I did something in a surprising way made me realise I had no excuse for doing it in a surprising way and needed to do it unsurprisingly instead. So now I’m halfway through implementing it all again, properly this time, solely to satisfy the whim of some pedant (me).

I appreciate this is dull content. Let’s all be thankful I’m not doing it on a livestream.

All the tippy tappy has knackered the extensor tendon of my left index finger. The wonderful physiotherapist at my local hospital said I should avoid “lateral pinching” which means I’m now pausing before every grippy household task to work out whether it involves a lateral, palmar or tip pinch.

This new distraction is a little bit annoying but makes a nice change from the previous decade of thinking about the switch from power to precision grip every time I open a jar.

NOT INTERESTING BUT TRUE: I’d read that the upcoming iPadOS 17 drops support for the “first-generation iPad Pro”, so — understandably? — I’d assumed my first-generation iPad Pro wouldn’t run it. But a cursory investigation revealed that my 11″ 2018 model actually belongs to the third iPad Pro generation because its 2015 and 2017 predecessors had slightly smaller screens (9.7″ and 10.5″ respectively). I think we can all see in hindsight that this isn’t the clearest way of identifying hardware revisions.

Point is, I thought I couldn’t run the iPadOS 17 beta but now I am and it’s fine.

I rewatched Dune (2021) and got a lot more out of it than last time. I had fewer distractions and allowed myself to get swept up in the scale and tone of it rather than think too much about what was (or wasn’t) happening. Maybe I just needed to be in the right mood.

I’ll have a go at rehabilitating Blade Runner 2049 next.

The rest of Secret Invasion was a mess, culminating in a finale packed with embarrassing drivel. It had an impressive cast and it’s sort of inexcusable they weren’t given anything to work with. It’s taken me several more dud shows than necessary to realise these Marvel Studios TV projects are clearly no longer worth watching.

I’m sticking with Hijack Bauer because it’s fairly watchable minute-by-minute, but with each episode it becomes more obvious that it doesn’t have any ideas and consists almost entirely of generic BBC thriller padding. Are we sure this was completed before the writer’s strike?

The actor Kevin Eldon is good in it and does a bang-up job of explaining what you will need for this hobby (hijacking).

I’m also still hanging in there with Foundation because it’s visually impressive and seems like it’s probably sci-fi. Unfortunately none of its zero-stakes melodrama can find purchase in the shifting sands of its baffling narrative and that makes it impossible to care about anything or anyone in it.

It feels expensive, and on some abstract level you can tell they’re committed to the idea of making a centuries-spanning epic with an ensemble cast of characters, but in execution it’s unconvincing and incomprehensible. I honestly don’t even know which characters are alive or dead, or where or when each event is occurring, or who knows whom or who’s trying to achieve what or why.

Also, why bother establishing several strong women in the first season and then turn one of them into a sexbot in the second? Grow up.

Ember eventually sent me a replacement for my broken mug charger. Almost four months isn’t a great turnaround time but it was at least free at the point of delivery.