Let's try something new - quarterly update. I found great joy from reading ones from マリウス , so why not? I don't want it to be a week-note type of list, as prose is from humans and lists are from machines. I want such updates (name may be subject to change) where I mind dump things, which never grew into full posts. So, instead of a 5 sentence post, they will be 5 sentences in a combined post. Personal Health What I've been up to this year? Well, mostly I've been sick. The Kid is old enough to be sick less often, but when he does, he brings the best viruses with him. I wanted to write this update a few weeks ago, but well. I'd rather be healthy than published. Speaking of The Kid. We are continuing our Montessori education, as we accepted to such school. Let's just hope he won't grow to be a Musk of something. But, returning to health: since I'm an old, sickly person with a high cholesterol level, I needed to return to eating healthier. No more cakes on the go, no more sushi rice. I have, however, rediscovered a love from a few years back: natto. A friend showed it to me and it was superb. I now order it and eat it a few times a week. It tastes as good as it looks! Phone and reading My love towards the Hibreak is only growing stronger. I find no downsides of not being in Apple/Google duopoly. Yes, it's an android, but I'm using only FOSS applications. My random usage of social media on the go went down to zero. No Mastodon, no Google YouTube. It's a purposeful device: I can use it as a communicator, and I can use an e-book reader. The latter is going extremely strong! It took a while, but now I pick a book for a page or two just waiting in line. Reading became just a regular thing I do though the day! It's less taxing than looking at TechCrunch, but it's much more stimulating. Books are a good idea. Who would have thought? As for future plans: I was going to pick up Dune and FINALLY read the entire saga, but this has to wait. I got into possession of In Search of Lost Time , which I aim to dig into. I'll mix it up with Dumas, so I'm in my Emily in Paris phase. Just less dumb... I think. I haven't seen a single episode. Ergo: then plan: is Dumas -> something small -> Proust -> Something small and back to Dumas. I also take much fewer photos. Not having a good camera on me all the time is a nice thing. I picked up my old, trusty Fuji X-100S as you may have noticed on how bad the photos look in recent posts. I need to finally learn to measure light... Random other things I rebuilt my pantsu-collection with a few Wrangler Frontiers. They are the best fitting jeans I've ever used, and now I own 6 pairs. No random hole will a problem and one of them is now my house pantalons. Screw sweatpants. I also returned the PS5. It was an eventful period where I became disgusting gamer. The games were nice, but now I'm back at PS4 and I fail to see as a significant downgrade. We have peaked long time ago. I strongly prefer to use PS4. Computer stuff Thinkcentre I replaced my Lenovo Thinkpad with an Lenovo Thinkcentre. I don't leave the house, so I don't need a laptop. MiniPC is very small and fits the desk nicely. But, most of all, it's an all AMD system. This makes rocking FreeBSD a pleasure! No more breaking things due to Nvidia driver incompatibility. Things just work. Lathe In between being ill, I rewrote this page. The old version had posts written in plain old HTML. Some post-processing (like images) was necessary, so I put myself into regexp hell. Not that those were big regexp, but they are big enough for not to want to update them ever. This means I needed something in between me and the HTML. Markdown was a no-go, as I hate it. It's good for small notes, but anything bigger? Nah. The answer was clear: LISP. Who wouldn't want to write in LISP? And so I wrote a LISP-like processor in the old python-based generator. It worked, it was fun to write in, but it's also terrible. I had no idea how to parse lisp, so I made it something with parens. The POC was there, just the implementation needed to entirely change - it was a a great example in how to not to do LISP. And so I am writing a small Lisp parser now. I'm not aiming at being full common-lisp compatible, but still I try the API to be as correct as possible. Now, this will not be real LISP: I use arrays under the hood, not CONS. But all defuns, setqs, and so are already working. This is my first project on Go and I have to say that I love it. It's a modern language and environment, so writing in it a lot of fun... unlike some other languages, but more on them later on. The project I call Lathe will be open sourced in the coming weeks. This site will also be fully migrated over coming months, but it will require some translators. I am able to write then in Lisp now, so it will be fun. The biggest missing element of the puzzle is Macro support, but that's not needed for first release. All this comes with a huge asterisk: I have no idea how to write Lisp. I am not a Lisp developer, and I am learning as I go. Here, it's the cherry on top. I like what I'm writing, I like that I'm learning, and I like how I'm writing. Go is now my friend. The things some people will do just to not have to deal with Markdown nor Hugo. Masto-mailo-inator I got my first feature request! I am officially an open-source developer. And by that, I mean: unpaid. I plan to add import from export next month, as currently I am fully focused on Lathe GPG I also started using GPG again. You can find my key on keys.opengpg.com Work Well, I'm still employed, which is great. It's over a decade in the same company! However, there are two things which changed in the first quarter GenAI I am not hiding this, but let's make it official: I use LLMs at work. Not because they make me more productive, nor because they make me happy. There is one reason: I am expected to. It's a sign a great technology where most people either reject or all together or are forced to use. My team was moved to a different product, which is written in Java. I already miss Ruby.... They say that in the (age of ai) you don't need to know what you are doing, but I disagree with it on all fronts. I see it in my own experience. While, yes: I am able to generate hundreds lines of code, but I find to be terrible. I always tried to understand what I'm doing, and I was even praised for it. Using Claude makes it extremely difficult. It's a new language, new framework, and yet we are expected to ship features within the first couple of weeks. Some teams are proud of skipping the standard few-month-long rump up. I think they are managed by dangerous morons. The code is still essential - it needs to work, it needs to it a reasonable fashion, and it needs to be readable. Whatever vibe coders say about prompting the next google, they are lying to themselves. Opus 4.6 is the best coding model out there (as I've read on multiple occasions) , and it still requires anal level of hand holding. While mostly everything it creates is a more-or-less correct java code, it's rarely good java code nor a properly designed system. It makes random changes, makes incorrect assumptions, just plain lies. To give an example. We are integrating this service with another service. I wrote code which worked on localhost, but not on server. I try, debug, use curls - nothing. Finally, a few sessions laster I learn that it never worked. I didn't double-check the local curl, and I trusted Claude when it said that everything is working. This was a learning lesson, and I will never trust a clanker again. It will lie, to make me happy. Even if means not doing its job. Lessn learned: never, ever trust a clanker. And the debugging, oh my god the debugging. It reads a million files, runs tests, does magical things - and boom, solution. So I ask a basic question (what about...?) . Of course, you are right - the moron replies, let's burn yet another 20 USD (LLM is a short for LLM Like Money) . It can go for like this few dozen prompts, back and foth, and still sometimes it will return to incorrect assumption from half an hour before. It will ignore requests, specs, do random things. It's far from an intern... The fact stands: it's a better java developer than I am. But I am a terrible java developer. I never wrote any line of Java before! I have no idea how it will play out, as I see it with all my colleagues (and, most likely, the entire industry) have no idea what we are doing. Something looks like it's working, and we are expected to ship it. Not that there is any hard requirement, but it's a race. Layoffs are a regular thing now, and it's a dumb idea to be on the naughty list. I'd not use any SASS in the comming years, as I trust them even less than I used to. Now, I have a great manager who understands that understanding is essential. I am able to slow down, and learn - little by little and with obvious expectatins of stil shipping stuff. But I am lucky to have him, and who knows for how long. Java The other thing: I am now a Java developer. Oh, what a terrible life it is. The language is... OK, at best. Nonetheless, is extremely stagnated. The developer experience is abysmal! I have a working theory that IntelliJ is the worst thing which happened to Java folks. They have zero insensitive to fix things, or work on adding modern things. There is CLI, but it's a pita to work on. There is an LSP, but it's barely working. Both are under-invested, as IntelliJ is there, keeping the entire ecosystem in its dark ages. I try to use Emacs, and with the genai is almost nice. More on this later. But, I understand why people use this godforsaken IDE: people use IntelliJ because other people use IntelliJ. It fixes a million things which should not be fixed in an editor, but in the ecosystem. Toying with (Go) at the same time just shows how primitive Java is. And there is Spring . If anyone comes to me and whines about how much magic is in Rails , I will point them here. This and Lombok are much bigger obstacle to learn to read code than the language itself. It's better to have experience in Java than not to have. We are living in the age of layoffs, after all. But it's a miserable life. RTO And, starting next month, I am expected to be twice a week in the office. I don't have a long commute (15 mins?) , and I'll be able to drop The Kid at school on the way. This changes nothing: the idea of office should be left in the past. Emacs My beloved editor deserves a special method. Since I'm again actively coding (after hours mostly) , I finally set up LSP, consult and all that jazz. At work, I'm rocking Agent Shell. And Ready Player One became my music player, and I moved to using mu4e for my email needs. I also finally managed to get X11 forwarding over SSH working. Therefore, I get my private Emacs (with emails, rsses, mastodons) at my work Macbook. This will be a short guide in the coming weeks, but it's working over the local area. We'll see if RTO won't make it more challenging...