Weeknotes 146

I got in four more streams this week after taking last week off. My toy WebAssembly interpreter now has working floating-point numbers, more or less, with only a few bitwise and comparison operations left to implement.

I was happy that Monday’s stream gave me a chance to demonstrate what’s cool about the way floating-point exponents are encoded. The opportunity to enthuse about this sort of clever detail in a specification, or to refactor my sloppy code until it’s self-evidently correct, is definitely fun and therapeutic for me.

Progress is glacial — I’m 36 hours in and arguably haven’t touched anything WebAssembly-specific yet — but I’m enjoying chipping away at it methodically.

So far I’ve spent $42.05 on GPU instances to run Whisper. In a way that’s a lot of money for some subtitles, but the alternative is to caption them by hand (or leave them with the YouTube autogenerated subtitles which are worse than useless in many cases) and that would’ve taken me… well… 36 hours probably, so from that perspective it’s not so bad.

I’m using Linode at the moment and finding their GPU instances pretty unreliable so I set aside an hour to try Google Cloud Platform instead.

I quickly discovered that GCP has successfully copied Amazon Web Services’ eldritch enterprise dashboard philosophy which requires you to waste time figuring out what you need to enable, provision and authenticate before you’re allowed to press the one button you went there to press. That led to the eventual further discovery that you’re not allowed to use GPUs on a trial account anyway, so I can’t spend my trial credit to find out whether Whisper would work better (or at all) on GCP.

Overall: impressively bad.

Friday was busy, with a couple of remote meetings either side of a coffee at Prufrock with Tekin.

The vintage espresso was pretty good but, you know, not as good as a normal espresso. Still, a nice bit of fun.

More than one prospective project has ground to a halt and/or died this week, but another was born in their place, so I’ve got some actual work to do next week. Imagine.

I made the first baked potato of the autumn and it was as good as always. 🥔

I gave up on The Rings of Power a few weeks ago, but House of the Dragon has stayed pretty watchable. I think I’m even looking forward to seeing what happens next.

The clocks change here next weekend, but not for another week in the US, so this is me reminding myself (and, I suppose, secondarily, you) that we’re entering provincial human assumption season.

Given that this could (could?) be the final such autumn week, I intend to celebrate by showing up an hour late for every meeting regardless of its location.

Called it.