Weeknotes #105

I am writing these notes between a five year old’s birthday party and a 67 year old’s birthday dinner. It remains to be seen which one is the more chaotic.

Our aforementioned break in the Lake District was great.

It takes me at least two full days to unwind so a four-day break has a good rhythm to it. Unlike E——, I didn’t quite get to the point of braving the al fresco tin bath but I did manage to stare gormlessly at the fells surrounding Ullswater.

Despite never being successful, I continue to try to repair broken plastic toys. I’ve tried super glue (cyanoacrylate), poly cement, UHU all purpose adhesive, 2-component epoxy and even Butanone/methyl ethyl ketone (MEK) as that is supposedly used by LEGO “Certified Master Builders”. None of those repairs have lasted very long but, in an unintended display of bloodymindedness, I haven’t totally given up yet.

After watching a video of someone cutting and polishing a morganite stone into a 294 caret gem, the sheer amount of epoxy they use to secure the stone to its “dop” has made me wonder if I should simply use way more glue. I’m currently waiting for attempt number five on a toy car to cure so stay tuned.

Speaking of polish, my tinkering on re2 continues, this time trying to parallelise the 113 individual checks run on every pull request as much as possible while also ensuring we cover:

1. The six supported versions of Ruby
2. The eight supported ABI versions of RE2
3. Users using a system version of RE2
4. Users using the vendored version of RE2
5. Users of one of the nine platforms with native, precompiled gems
6. Users on macOS
7. Users on Windows
8. Users on Linux
9. Users on FreeBSD

I’d still like to clean up the Rake tasks and potentially set up a CI job to test the precompiled gem on Windows x86 but that may involve using a second CI service.

In the past few months, we’ve seen an uptick in bad behaviour from “verified” bots: specifically, a bot from Bytedance hitting our website 18 times a second and, last week, a bot from Google hitting us over 50 times a second. I’ve had to introduce rate limiting rules specifically for verified bots and I can’t help but suspect unbridled enthusiasm training large language models is involved somehow.

This morning, our entire family enjoyed sitting with Boots Head Lice Shampoo in our hair for 30 minutes before a thorough comb with the Mumsnet-approved “Nitty Gritty”.

In case you weren’t already aware: parenting is a series of body horror experiences.