Weeknotes 143

Tories, inflation, exchange rates, taxes, energy prices, Russia, Italy. Bit bleak.

To cheer myself up I started a silly Ruby side project and streamed myself working on it.

I’ve never written code on a livestream before so I wasn’t sure whether it’d work at all, but in the end I had fun and nothing went very wrong. I felt very grateful that a few people showed up to watch so I could avoid literally talking to myself for two and a half hours.

Inevitably I now realise several things that could’ve been better. Most importantly I need to be able to actually see the live chat, because if I can’t respond to what people are saying then it might as well be prerecorded. It also hadn’t occurred to me that I should probably mirror the webcam, otherwise it looks like I turn the wrong way when I start paying attention to one side of the screen.

I think I’ll be doing this at least once more so I’ll try to fix those problems, and the rest of my list of minor snags, for next time.

One little annoyance is that YouTube’s autogenerated captions aren’t very good, so I spun up a GPU instance and used Whisper to produce a better transcript. The quality of the large model is pretty impressive overall — it gets things like “RSpec” and “OCaml” correct — although I needed to fix the WebVTT output before YouTube would accept it.

I cooked Ruby Tandoh’s hot and sour soup again for the first time since my last period of funemployment. Why don’t I make it more often? It’s delicious!

You’ll be relieved to hear that I did remember to switch to my new SIM card before my old plan renewed for another month. Now I’m in that liminal period of waiting for my number to move over and bracing myself for the usual FaceTime/iMessage activation hassle. It’s possible I won’t screw it up this time.

As someone who uncritically accepts whatever suggestions autocorrect makes, I’m really appreciating the ability in iOS 16 to edit iMessages after sending them.

In fact I’m already so accustomed to iOS 16 that I enrolled in the iPadOS 16.1 public beta so the new features would be available everywhere rather than confined to my phone.

It seems to run fine on my 2018 iPad Pro. Even Stage Manager basically works, although it adds a half-second delay when switching between apps and interferes with clicking at the top edge of the screen to scroll all the way up, so I’ve turned it off for now.

Having to tap “Allow Paste” all the time is annoying.

Well, as anticipated, The Rehearsal certainly did escalate. Without spoiling anything: it didn’t go in the direction I was expecting, and I enjoyed that a lot. It’s very funny and surprising.

When searching for reviews afterwards I saw a lot of speculation about how “real” it is. That’s a bit odd because I felt like the degree of reality was completely unambiguous, but maybe that says more about me than the show.

Homeland season seven has dangerously few ideas about what Carrie should be doing with herself. The latest episode, rather than confidently leaving her out and focusing on Saul like it wanted to, instead filled time by having her go topless on a webcam to appease a random 4chan dude who’d installed ransomware on her laptop. Undignified for all concerned.

It’s also very unclear to me what accent Brett O’Keefe is supposed to have.

I’m belatedly watching Station Eleven with the benefit of a bit of distance from (the worst part of) the real pandemic. I’m halfway through and enjoying it so far. It occasionally risks getting too mysterious and elegaic but the performances are great, it looks fantastic and I’m confident it’ll come together by the end. The occasional Last of Us vibes don’t hurt at all.

I vaguely remembered reading the book when it came out, and the characters & premise definitely rang a bell, but I couldn’t recall anything concrete about where the story goes. I checked the Kindle app and it turns out I only got 27% of the way through, which at least means my memory’s not that bad.

Some people might judge me harshly for being unable to complete a short novel before my attention wanders, but in hindsight it was clever of me to do this so that in seven years’ time I could enjoy the HBO adaptation without spoilers, so that’s good actually.