Souls Like Strings

The Angel of the Crows by Katherine Addison.

This time Sherlock is very much on the side of the angels

I had a good time with this one; always been a fan of Sherlock and this is an interesting familiar-but-not twist on it. As usual Addison is better at teasing worldbuilding than paying it off but since this is a solo book that's much less disappointing than the Teixcalaan series and frees us up to just enjoy filling in the blanks with imagination. Reads a bit like a fanfic and apparently that's how it started, but...

• We used to share logic/components among our web products with an internal package
  • Which explains why when I went to investigate the inner workings of an actively-used legacy product there was basically nothing in the repo
• Troubleshooting an intermittent infinite loop which only occurs on mobile and seems to not send anything to Sentry is not fun
• Remember to reinstall your formatter after uninstalling everything to fix another issue
  • Also you need to reinstall it with :Mason, even if :checkhealth says it's there and fine (at least for my Neovim setup)
• When you...

Vacation vibes without the friction

Why

• Exactly as wholesome/cozy as it looks
• Great for short bursts of playtime
• A bunch of cool little quirky interactions

Why Not

• You're looking for action/a challenge

Impressions

TOEM is exactly what it seems; a chill, wholesome and whimsical journey which is more than the (admittedly fairly cool) destination. The gameplay loop boils down to enter biome -> help x people by taking photos of various things -> get enough stickers to move onto the next biome, which sounds simple but is carried by the sheer amount of...

Wanderers by Chuck Wendig.

Too real for my liking

An interesting premise submerged under ham-fisted writing and near constant political commentary. I agree with they guy's politics but I don't read fiction to see fictional worlds ruined by the same petty right wing bullshit the real world is, without even the benefit of any interesting changes in the setting. I did only make it a few chapters in so maybe later on there's something to make the constant commentary/events seemingly ripped straight from real life more palatable, but with so many other great things to read I...

• Usage-based billing might actually kill LLMs
  • After Copilot made the switch I burned through my limit in less than a week
  • Admittedly doing a lot of work on mobile SDKs where I used the LLM to have some idea what the code meant
  • But I think I'd definitely still burn it before the month is up
• Async code for iOS is way more complex than for Android, at least in Objective C (but tests in Swift for some reason?)
• Both our SDKs require steps before you can use their changes in the sample app
  • For...