Shiro Protagonist

I thought this was a cool combination of skills.

This is Shiro, the author of Gauche Scheme, a Scheme implementation you may not have heard of (and if you’re unfamiliar with Scheme itself, some of this post may be lost on you, sorry)

I was going to make a schemer/actor joke but I won’t.

(from https://practical-scheme.net/ShiroKawai.pdf)

P.S. yes, the actor profile checked out!

P.P.S. why the title? you’ll need to read the beginning of Snow Crash …

Of messages and Medium

I’ve gone back-and-forth with different “posting workflows” over the years, and had receded into “WordPress-only” over the last year.

Various recent alternatives:

  1. Completely migrate to Ghost: seemed a simpler long-term plan, but … inertia… and decided to stick to WP
  2. Branch out to micro.blog: did do this, for “micro-posts”, but then felt that sticking to “one place” would be better, and migrated back
  3. Thought of using Tumblr: yeah, no, Tumblr is a different kinda place
  4. Static sites: lol, no, this is where I started out, it’s hip but inconvenient, not doing that again

Meanwhile, I also feel the parent company Auttomatic is (largely) aligned with my values w.r.t. where the internet and content should be.

So, my inclination now is to stick with WordPress basically forever, while cross-posting a subset somewhere else.

Candidates for this “somewhere else” include (1) Twitter/X, (2) Medium and (3) Substack.

That way, WP can continue to be my “everything bucket” for posts, while I’ll try out these other platforms for a few months and see how I like it.

So … looking forward to … looking back on this, in a year or two 🙂

P.S. Yes the title is a cheesy allusion

Monthly recap: April 2024

A jellyfish on a beach along the coastal trail

Major update

  • Couple of great hikes: Wunderlich Park, and California Coastal Trail
  • Got done with some bathroom remodeling and painting without much disruption

Minor updates(s)

  • Returned from our India trip
  • New spot for good food: Mazra in Redwood City
  • Interesting encounter at Starbucks where I learned about “BioSemiotics”
  • Catching up with people
  • Good month at work, including a Hackathon that went well

Watched/read/made/listened

  • Reading/listening to “Clementine“, following a play we watched together
  • GCP has some good mini-courses at Coursera (well worth it)
  • Watched “Kung Fu Panda 4” with all of us and my parents in Gurgaon
  • Saw the first few episodes of the new “Avatar: the last Airbender” series on Netflix
  • Finished listening to “The Master and his Emissary” on Audible

Copilots on the cheap

Didn’t realize just what it takes to start out with a programming assistant — expect prices to go up a lot later!

Individuals pay $10 a month for the AI assistant. In the first few months of this year, the company was losing on average more than $20 a month per user, according to a person familiar with the figures, who said some users were costing the company as much as $80 a month.

Source: this WSJ article from Oct 2023