Weeknotes 318

A rainy week with a little more daytime. Stress levels holding steady, but with some light on the horizon.

Three times at the gym. Two and a half hours of Revelation Space remain, which (to your relief) means I’ll finish it next week.

I saw my first Waymo on the ride to work. A grim-faced man sat in the driver’s seat, hands firmly on the wheel. The future!

In defiance of the rain I made it out for lunch at Corner Deli yesterday and Black Cat today, both wholesome and delicious. As always: I love this part of London.

I’ve started getting loads of spam from Zendesk subdomains: real companies sending legit messages along the lines of “your support request has been received”, but not initiated by me. They’re all going straight to my inbox because emails from Zendesk are usually important.

When I woke up this morning I had 68 unread emails, all from Zendesk. It’s almost nostalgic to see so much spam after decades of having it automatically filtered out. At least it’s not just me.

DYING OF THE LIGHT CORNER: It goes without saying that I don’t want to hear news or opinions about AI. I do not — physically cannot — give a shit. Yet the software industry has rapidly become so depressing and moronic that I am, for the first time, considering whether I’m even interested in computers any more.

There are two parts of my chosen profession which bring me joy: firstly the actual writing of the code, the life-affirming puzzle-solving thrill of it, and secondly the satisfaction found in the quality of what that process produces. It’s clear that neither notion has any value to the terminally slop-oriented ghouls who can only experience joy by playing middle manager to a menagerie of stochastic parrots, and they seem to be the ones who’ve won.

I can only hope there’s some kind of Pareto principle at play which causes the discourse to be naturally dominated by the biggest twats, because if the world of computer programming is now going to consist exclusively of dead-eyed LLM-addled p-zombies then I honestly don’t know whether I have the stomach for it.

I largely enjoyed Harry Hill’s podcast with Stewart Lee, effectively a long-form reimagining of a 26-year-old bit. I could’ve done without the protracted segment about castles.

I got a lot of pleasure out of Simon Anthony’s solve of Purple Lines, a fun puzzle with a novel twist. I spotted the underlying idea quite early because I wasn’t distracted by trying to actually solve it, but then it was fun waiting for Simon to cotton on.

The only thing that would improve Cracking The Cryptic, I think, would be if each video consisted of a man clicking a button to run an automated solver on nine sudokus at once. Just think how many more puzzles they could be solving if they weren’t stuck in the past!

IKEA’s multicoloured dual button and scroll wheel BILRESA three-packs were briefly in stock on Thursday and I ordered one of each. I don’t know what they’re like yet because they’re not being delivered until tomorrow for some reason.

I’m vaguely aware that the new season of Fallout has finished. I haven’t watched any more of it. Maybe I’ve given up on it.

I’d assumed the banana peel “bacon” in the Henry’s Kitchen vegan BLT must be a joke, but no, apparently that’s a real thing. Weird.