Weeknotes 177

London is very sunny but not yet overpoweringly warm thanks to the cool breeze. The parks are bursting with daisies, buttercups, dandelions and freshly cut grass; in the skies, swifts and swallows dart about after insects.

Glorious spring weather means much more time cycling around town. I usually cross the river at Southwark Bridge where the main sights are Tower Bridge, the Shard, Tate Modern and, er, the old FT building. One day I went southbound over Waterloo Bridge instead and it was breathtaking: you can still see east to the Shard and One Blackfriars, but also northeast to the City and southwest to Westminster and the London Eye. I never get bored of the scale of it. I should go that way more often.

Indoors I made lots of progress on desugaring abbreviations in the preprocessor of my WebAssembly interpreter. Instead of pushing up all sixty-odd commits together I’d like to batch them into a few self-contained PRs but I haven’t had time to write the accompanying prose yet, so from the outside the situation is indistinguishable from nothing happening.

I am at least convinced that the separate preprocessor is the right approach. It’s really satisfying to unpick all sorts of gnarly mess from the parser each time I implement a new abbreviation.

One observable side effect is that I found another problem in the language specification and tried my best to fix it, although as always I might’ve just misunderstood the details.

Working on the interpreter also gave me a reason to use git rebase’s newish -⁠-⁠update-refs feature which automatically moves any branches pointing at commits changed by a rebase.

I have several stacked branches — baz on top of bar on top of foo on top of main — and git rebase -⁠-⁠interactive -⁠-⁠update-refs main baz lets me revise any of their commits without having to fix up the refs myself afterwards. It’s usually a massive pain to do manually but this time I didn’t even have to think about it.

The new behaviour is so helpful that I’ve turned it on permanently with git config -⁠-⁠global rebase.updateRefs true to avoid having to type -⁠-⁠update-refs every time. I think it’s the most interesting user-facing Git feature of recent releases (2.39 and 2.40 were mostly internal improvements) so it’s worth trying out if you’re as compulsive a rebaser as I am.

I watched the entire PlayStation Showcase 2023 like a chump, despite Sony having nothing even vaguely interesting to announce.

The news of the TLoU multiplayer game being delayed doesn’t make me feel any better about it, aside from the slight possibility that it might be cancelled entirely. A “brand new single-player experience” sounds more up my street.

Silo trundles on. After a few crumbs of excitement and revelation it’s started to drag again. Maybe Wool doesn’t contain ten solid hours of plot. Oh well, there’s plenty of time for it pull out of the slump in the second half of the season if it wants to.

Rebecca Ferguson’s American (?) accent is all over the place. I suppose I shouldn’t presume to know how people speak in Hell, where this show will definitely turn out to have been set all along.

I went to the pub with James & Murray on Tuesday, like from off of the olden days. That was nice. Remember the past?

Tomorrow is May bank holiday three of three. Unfortunately I’m getting used to this; four-day weeks feel very humane.

Who will Daddy Roy kiss?