Journal: October 2024
October 2024 journal
Monthly retrospective
I registered as an Apple developer and put ZenPDF on the App Store. I use it happily myself, but I am not sure whether others find it useful.
I read Wonder, The Vegetarian, A Long Walk to Water, and Because of Winn-Dixie, and am reading the 2023 revised edition of Animal Liberation and Bridget Jones’s Diary. The Vegetarian left the strongest impression, and I came to appreciate the importance of reading literature a little more. I would like to read more Korean novels.
I continue thinking about how to use AI better. My thoughts have become a little clearer, and I have an idea for a prototype I want to build.
Journal
2024-10-28
I finished Because of Winn-Dixie and started Bridget Jones’s Diary.
2024-10-26
I put together a few articles.
- A case for early returns: The advantages of early returns for comprehensibility and testability.
- History of deceptive patterns: A history of deceptive patterns (dark patterns) and related discussions.
- Dietary suggestions based on human evolutionary history: A rebuttal to claims of the form “humans evolved in such-and-such a way in the Paleolithic, so eating this way is healthy.”
2024-10-17
I finished A Long Walk to Water. Next is Because of Winn-Dixie.
The 2023 revised edition of Animal Liberation is out. The overall arc and major passages remain, but many sentences have changed (mostly shortened or removed), and many new studies and examples have been added. Even chapter 4 has a new title: “Becoming Vegetarian” in the original has become “Living Without Speciesism.” The title encompasses changes in one’s whole way of life, beyond diet alone.
2024-10-14
I changed my default macOS shell from zsh to fish. Since I hadn’t been using the shell properly anyway, I could switch without much effort.
2024-10-12
JustPDF was already taken, so I renamed it ZenPDF and submitted it to the App Store. I made it for myself, but now that it exists, I hope many people will use it.
I read The Vegetarian. I first read it when it won the Man Booker Prize in 2016, following the crowd, and read it again (following the crowd again) to mark the Nobel Prize. Perhaps because I have studied a little veganism and feminism in the meantime, I think I understood it a little better this time. I hope that in ten years I will be someone who can feel even more from it.
2024-10-10
A few more wiki improvements. I expanded “Related pages,” which previously showed only backlinks (now searching out to the third degree, ranking by score, and selecting the top 20), and grouped the results by category.
I decided against implementing embedding-based semantic search in the wiki. If it helps me find information even with a messy structure, I probably won’t improve that structure. Instead, I would like to use embeddings to give me hints about where and how it is messy and help me improve it gradually (and clarify my own thoughts in the process). For example:
- Find duplicate content across documents.
- Find semantically similar but unlinked documents and suggest linking them.
Sometimes the process (refining my thoughts while organizing the structure so documents are easy to find) matters more than the result (finding documents easily), and excessive automation often damages that experience.
I read the novel Wonder and watched the 2017 film. Instructive and moving. In the novel, after grieving the death of their dog, the family gets a new puppy and happily plays with it. I didn’t much like that scene: it seemed to treat companion animals like replaceable toys. The film omits the new-puppy scene.
I wrote up notes on Generative echo chamber: Effects of LLM-powered search systems on diverse information seeking, which I read earlier.
2024-10-06
I added SwiftData to ZenPDF and switched the compiler to Swift 6.0. I have fixed almost all the code AI made a mess of, and it now seems to have a reasonably sound structure. I have applied for developer registration to release it and am waiting.
2024-10-02
I paused my Swift studies and started learning SwiftUI. I watched the main videos from WWDC2019, beginning with the initial SwiftUI announcement (Introducing SwiftUI: Building Your First App), through WWDC2024.