Weeknotes 202

Hello! Welcome to your quotidian yet reliable update.

My back is slowly returning to normal. Gym attendance has been dismal so let’s not talk about that.

I had an extremely long day on Thursday, culiminating in beyond-midnight beers with Joe in the nostalgic ambience of The Reliance. The evening was curative for the soul but the body felt it the next morning.

Ben sent some useful information about my Ruby parser confusion. At the August dev meeting there was a discussion which indicates that a) there’s now a Prism-to-YARV compiler in CRuby and b) “using an option, [Kernel#eval] will use the built-in [Prism compiler]”.

I don’t know how to read these tealeaves but it sounds like it’ll be possible to enable Prism for at least some code evaluation in Ruby 3.3, and that perhaps this’ll generate enough real-world data to justify switching everything to Prism and removing parse.y entirely in some future release. So: there is no decision yet, and we should expect to see the battle play out over the next minor version or two depending on how this phase of the experiment goes.

You’ve probably watched the new Bobby Fingers video by now but I’m linking to it just in case. Technical ability aside, he continues to deliver a specific form of unbridled human creativity that I’ve never seen before.

I’m conflicted about the upcoming PS5 version of The Last of Us Part II. For the sake of £10 I’ll definitely buy it and I’m looking forward to poring over the behind-the-scenes content and huffily ignoring the roguelike mode. But its existence heightens the worrying impression that Naughty Dog doesn’t have anything going on except endless remakes and remasters of existing games.

They’re almost certainly working on something new beyond the cursed multiplayer TLoU game, but the secrecy is becoming counterproductive.

I’d resolved not to complain about Alan Wake II any more because it was getting relentless and who cares what I think, so I was reassured when the latest Zero Punctuation Fully Ramblomatic episode summed up my feelings perfectly.

“AI”, like “crypto” before it, really brings the chancers out of the woodwork.