Weeknotes 147

Welcome back to GMT. It’s dark all the time now.

I’ve had lots of automated emails from Mastodon in the last couple of days.

Three more streams, taking me past the fifty hour mark. Fifty hours of drivel! That’s pretty good! Halfway to a hundred hours of drivel.

I’m making decent progress given the wider context of how long it’s taking me to get anything working at all. I’ve finally left floating-point numbers behind and moved on to actual language features like memory, local variables, loops and branches. That means I’m able to evaluate expressions which feel like programs instead of just complicated arithmetic, which is a small breakthrough.

I had a nasty bug with my implementation of floating-point numbers: when I was rounding the quotient of a rational number after scaling it into the appropriate range for a significand (i.e. a 24- or 53-bit binary number), I wasn’t accounting for the possibility that its denominator was 1. This case made it appear that the remainder after division (zero) was equal to half of the denominator (also — as an integer — zero), causing the quotient to get incorrectly rounded up if it was odd.

It’s a pretty fundamental mistake in the implementation so I’m surprised it took so long for a test to fail. It’s annoying both that I introduced this bug in the first place and that it took me a while to find it, but I’m glad it was so easy to understand and fix once I’d actually narrowed it down. I think that suggests I’m keeping my code relatively clear so far.

Anyway, floats are done and I’m firmly into the actual WebAssembly territory that got me interested in this project in the first place. I’m looking forward to the next bits.

The House of the Dragon finale was pretty good. The entire season has been a slow burn and it’s clear in hindsight that they’re mostly setting up future seasons rather than concerning themselves with having anything much happen in this one, but the last episode did move the plot forward in a decisive way and I’m interested to see where it goes next.

Seasonal spooky viewing included X, which is a very well-made slasher film with the right amount of nudging and winking — remember The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? remember Psycho? remember The Shining? — and Pearl, which is its excellent prequel. I loved Mia Goth’s fully committed performance in the latter, and it had a few incredible shots that elevated it way above my expectations.

REAL-LIFE HORROR STORY: I briefly turned my microwave off at the wall by mistake so now it’s back on its factory settings and every time I finish microwaving something it beeps for ages. I haven’t fixed it because I can’t be bothered to find the manual and work out how to do it again, even though I apparently can be bothered to do the more laborious task of complaining about it here.

I wrote the above on Wednesday. Every day since then the microwave has annoyed me more. A few times I cracked and started looking up how to fix it, but stopped myself when I realised it’d make the above note outdated. I suffer for my art.

PLANETARY HABITABILITY HORROR STORY: I’ve been for a bike ride every day this week, and each time I’ve been able to do it in a T-shirt. It’s October.

Contrary to appearances, I did some work this week.