Micro review: The Atrocity Archives (The Laundry Files, book 1)

I like Charlie Stross in general, I really enjoyed Accelerando, and many people talked positively about The Laundry Files, so I decided to give it a go.

I like the universe, where unspeakable horrors exist and governments have secret departments in charge of keeping the world safe. I like this premise already.

But it’s a well trodden trope, and what differentiates this from, say, Hellboy, or Man in Black§ is that it’s crossed with the “bureacracy rules the world” meme.

These aren’t your all-action cool guys with magic weapons and super boomsticks, these are the policemen at the embassy when you try to renew your passport. It’s a government job, it has its own quirks, but it’s not glamorous.

Given all these premises, I should have loved the book, but I didn’t.

I found it pretty predictable, the humor uninspired and a bit too much of the “I know about IT, so here’s a joke about it, wink wink” stuff.

This is a pretty long series so it may get better in later books§, but I’m not sure I’m going to give it another try.

Vote: 6.5/10, not great, not as bad as things from the dungeon dimensions.

On Dad’s neck

Some time ago, I realized my daughter had become too heavy to carry on my shoulders. I could still do it, but it’s no longer something I’d do trivially. She doesn’t ask for it anymore either, probably sensing it wouldn’t be a good idea.

She still holds my hand, tho, and I try to hold hers when I can, until she grows old enough to think parents suck or something.

Some time later, I was on a walk with my son, who’s two years younger, and I thought: I should carry him on my shoulders now, it might be the last time. So I told him to jump on, and he was surprised cause he’s a big boy now, but I told him it was for me.

And so I remember, somewhat, the last time I carried my son on my shoulders§.

I planned to write about this at some point, but then I never did. But recently, I was watching The Grand Tour, and Jeremy Clarkson mentioned how, if you think about it, there’s always a last time you do something, and usually you go through it with no awareness. It seemed an incredibly profound thought delivered by a random dude in a car comedy show.

Perhaps you know the last day of school, your last university exam, your last night unmarried. You don’t remember the last time you played hide and seek, or the last time you kissed your first love.§

It’s easy to remember when something happens the first time, you know it’s the first! But it’s hard to know when something will stop happening. You have to pay attention to what’s happening and tell yourself: this may be the last time I experience this, dear brain stop being in cruise mode and actually focus.

When I had my first blog§ I remember writing about coincidences, and someone (Nicola, perhaps) telling me: at your age you still believe in coincidences? Now that I’m older I’ve learned it’s much better to believe in the manifest narrative sense of the universe than in chance (or believe your mind primed to notice coincidences).

So a few days after Clarkson’s epiphany, I discovered the concept of ichi-go ichi-e (一期一会). Supposedly§ this means “one life, one meeting” and it points to the fact that every meeting you have is unique and irrepeatable§, and you should cherish it.

I like the idea, and it rhymes with a lot of old-wisdom-sounding modern advice about “being in the moment“. I think it’s probably good advice, but it’s really hard, and probably impractical.

Do I really care about meeting the bus driver for the last time? Should I really treat my team’s daily stand up meeting as if it was the last? How about lunch with my family? And what of dinner out with my wife?

I don’t have an answer, nor multiple answers. But I think it makes sense to try and think: if this was the last time this happened, would I do something differently?

And the other question is: would it matter? I remember when my father died, in a hospital bed, sedated, and I don’t remember the last thing I said to him, nor the last thing he said to me. I remember my mother telling me she hated those situations in movies where someone gives an “I love you” to someone on their last breath, or viceversa. If you haven’t bothered to tell them before, what’s the point of doing it now?

Maybe that’s the point of “as if it’s the last time”: think of what you should have done before, and haven’t done yet. It didn’t matter to my son that I took him on my shoulders a last time, and it didn’t matter much to me either.

But it’s good to remind me of all the other times I took him, my daughter, my brother, friends, and girlfriend on my shoulders. Maybe one day my grandkids, if I’m lucky. When that happens, I’ll update my memories once more, and think I did well to pick them up when I did, and to tell them I love them, and not wait until the last moment.

PS

the title of this post is “on dad’s neck” rather than “on dad’s shoulders“, because of a little poem my kid learned in kindergarden, and I’ll offer a modest adaptation here. The original always uses “on” where I wrote “from” but I think this scans better. Traduttore traditore.

On Dad’s Neck (Shoulders)

(badly translated from “Apu Nyakában” by Gáti István)

From Dad’s neck
You can see the neighbourhood.
No need for binoculars
Nor miracle glasses.
A thousand and one adventures
Promises the distance.
The newspaper vendor is a dwarf
From Dad’s neck.

On Dad’s neck
there’s a pirate tattoo.
A comfortable seat,
Better than the subway.
A hundred meters high
My legs float.
I can be a pilot
On Dad’s neck.

If Dad puts me down
Quite unusual.
The sidewalk becomes huge
Here I stand below myself.
A big dog runs.
I’m no coward.
But still…
Put me on your neck!

Integrating Wise and Google Sheets

I am a long time user and fan of Wise, since it was called Transferwise. I even used it to transfer money from Italy to Hungary (€->HUF) when I got married, so I’m emotionally attached to it.

It’s cheap, reliable, the app works fine and the site is simple and fast. <plug> Go sign up and earn us both a reward. </plug>

Anyway, one my few gripes with it is that I keep track of my finances in Google Sheets, and Wise does not have any native integration with it.

But it does support a generic form of webhooks. And what do you know, Google Sheets support webhooks! Kinda!

Setting up a sheet to receive POST requests

It’s somewhat insane that you can make a spreadsheet the database for a web app, but it works.

First, create a new sheet. You don’t need to do this, but I feel it’s saner to have a sheet which is just a dump of events, and keep your “important” stuff in a different one.

Now go to Extensions -> Apps Script and it will start up the scripts mini-IDE. Usually you use this to add macros or some such, but you can build a web app in there!

The code you need is something like this, put it in code.gs

// yes, this code sucks, I don't care.

function doGet(e) {
  var params = JSON.stringify(e);
  addRecord([[params]]);
  // you need this or you will get an error
  return HtmlService.createHtmlOutput("ok")
}

function doPost(e) {
  // make both POST and GET work the same
  return doGet(e);
}


function addRecord(values) {
  // use this for debugging
  console.log("values", values)
  // sheet name and range where you want to put your data
  range = 'Sheet1!A:A'
  // the id you see in the browser URL bar
  const spreadsheetId = "your spreadsheet id"

  try {
    let valueRange = Sheets.newRowData();
    valueRange.values = values;

    let appendRequest = Sheets.newAppendCellsRequest();
    appendRequest.sheetId = spreadsheetId;
    appendRequest.rows = [valueRange];

    const result = Sheets.Spreadsheets.Values.append(
      valueRange, 
      spreadsheetId,
      range, {valueInputOption: "RAW"});
    console.log('Result', result);
  } catch (err) {
    console.log('Failed with error %s', err.message);
  }
}

Beyond the oddity of the Google APIs, this is basically

  • listen to a POST request
  • add a new entry as JSON to a sheet

Once you have the code, hit the “Deploy” button on the top right, and choose “new deployment”.

In the modal that opens up, use the gear button to choose the kind of deployment, which should be “Web app”

Fill in the details:

  • set “Execute as” to your account, which will allow the app to write to your sheet
  • set “Who has access” to “Anyone“, so that Google will not require authentication. The paranoid person in me does not love this, but I don’t know of a way to secure this better. The URL is pretty unguessable tho.

At this point Google will deploy your web app and provide you with a URL, something like

https://script.google.com/macros/s/ABUNCHofGibberishWithL3tt3rsAndNUMB3rZ_LOLWATHAVEY0u533nThis-there4r3DaSh35t00/exec

You can even access this via a browser, and you should see the profound message that many developers have used to prove that God’s in his Heaven, all is right in the world: ok

You can also test a POST request via curl 

curl -d'{"wat":"wat"}' https://script.google.com/macros/s/ABUNCHofGibberish...

If all is working correctly, you should be able to see some HTML response.

Now, if you go to the Sheet, you’ll find that there is nothing there! I tricked you, but it’s so you can learn. If you want to use any of the myriads of Google services, you need to first include it in the project.

If you go back to the Apps Script studio and check out the Executions entry in the sidebar, you will see the logs of your request, and indeed, you should have an error like

Failed with error Sheets is not defined

Notice that checking this logs is your main form of debugging, get used to logging a ton of stuff.

To fix this error, go back to the Editor, click on Services and find Google Sheets, select the V4 API, and use “Sheets” as the name.

Now you can deploy this again (create a new Deployment, and notice you get a new URL). This time, you should get an authorization screen, and since your app is not approved, you need to navigate it it so it lets you past the OAuth screen.

Now you can try to access this again via browser and curl (remember to use the new URL!) and finally you should see some records in your sheet!

Configuring Wise

In the Wise web app go to Settings -> Developer Tools -> Webhooks, and create a new one. Pick the events you want according to the documentation, put the URL of your app in there and hit the “Test webhook” button.

If all went well, you should see a new event in your sheet.

Notice that Wise does not currently allow you to edit a Webhook, so if you want to update it you need to delete it and create it again.

Feel free to send them feedback 😉

Conclusion

I had no idea that Google allows you to use Sheets as the database for a web app, and I’m honestly impressed. The debugging facilities are not that obvious, and when you get an error it’s pretty hard to understand what went wrong, but it works.

Wise webhooks are not that obvious either, and it would be nice to be able to send test requests with various payloads, rather than wait one month to see if the deposit data you’re getting matches what you expect, but it works and it’s still better than many banks.

If you use this, or something better, or have suggestions for improvements let me know in the comments. Happy hacking!

On Madrid: you can(not) go back

NdR: I was in Madrid in the spring, and I’ve been sitting on this post for a while, and I don’t have much inspiration, but I’ll put it out anyway before I forget everything.

The modern capital

Madrid differs from other European capitals in a particular way: it’s a new city. People lived in the area since forever, but until the 1300s it was a village of a few thousands, and it was only in 1561 that it became the capital. And apparently, it became a strong presence in the state, but also a city full of rich people, and not much else. Apparently already in the 1600s people noticed this, and the expression “Solo Madrid Es Corte” came about, to be interpreted as “the Court can only be in Madrid” or “Madrid is just the Court” depending on your mood. People blame this for the following centuries of stagnation.

So Spain found herself§ with a ton of money coming in, a city with little pre-existing structure, and an absolutist monarchy. The perfect recipe.

So, visiting Madrid, I get the feeling of a modern era city. The palaces, the streets, the churches, the complete absence of weird antiquity leftovers. You’ could’d think there was nothing there before the renaissance.

And it’s also a modern city in the broad sense. The metro network in Madrid is one of the largest in Europe, the city is tidy and walkable, its cultural life seems packed, and they have a ton of people moving there.

There and back again

The first time I visited Madrid, I was seventeen years old, on the best school trip of my life. We were at peak teenagerness, inexperienced enough to enjoy everything, big enough to be allowed in bars and clubs, and dumb enough to do all the fun things without shame.

It was also the first time I was abroad somewhat alone. Sure, teachers were supposed to monitor us but we regularly escaped from our hotel and managed to do the things they wouldn’t let us do it. See the first paragraph.

I remember a Madrid that was full of fun stuff, bars, clubs, sexy shops, the Hard Rock Café full of friendly foreigners§, and big museums: El Prado, the Museo Reina Sofia, the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection.

I remember being disappointed at the small size of Dalì’s Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Pomegranate a Second Before Awakening, and impressed by the huge size of Picasso’s Guernica. And I remember being very impressed by a blue block of concrete, whose author or name I can’t remember.

The second time I went there, I was 20, for new year’s eve, at the exact time when Spain switched from the Peseta to the Euro, and Italy abandoned the Lira. It was a heck of a time keeping track of the conversions.

It was just me and a friend, maybe the first time I was on a trip of just two people, at a time when flights were still expensive, and we didn’t have much money, but we could save for a short vacation. I think we must have visited something, but I can’t remember anything. We went to see a football match at the old Santiago Bernabeu, and discovered ticket scalpers are a thing outside of Italy too§.

I remember bars, clubs, getting somehow in an Erasmus party and getting lost, shitfaced and alone, falling asleep on the metro line and going start-to-end of line two or three times.

We had dinner at a place that my friend knew, El Pastor, where his father had been a bunch of times. The lady who ran the place realized we were not prepared to celebrate midnight, so she gave us a bottle of sparkling wine when we left, and some grapes, which you’re supposed to eat in the last twelve seconds of the year.

There were few things shared between these two experiences, but I can’t say they were the same, and yet I felt the city was the same.

The city that wasn’t

I visited the city again this year, with my wife. I really wanted to take my wife there, cause I have so many good memories, and also it’s one of the few European capitals she hadn’t visited. She now wants to move there.

The city is still full of bars, clubs, and parties, but I’m no longer the target audience. I have become the target audience for El Prado, Reina Sofia, Thyssen-Bornemisza. I was again impressed by Dream.. and Guernica. I could not find the blue block of concrete. I’ve discovered I like Thomas Cole tho.

I think the city changed a lot. There’s a lot more tourists, and I think they had a massive influx of people from South America§.

It’s also somewhat more walkable than it was, or it seemed so, tho there’s still a ton of traffic A local friend said it’s too crowded, and he has moved outside of the city with his family, and commutes, when he doesn’t work from home.

The increase in tourist numbers has probably impacted how much of the city center has become a tourist trap, but I feel the city is big enough that it will take a long time before it goes the way of Venice.

Lost in traducción

One thing I found unchanged: people try to speak to me in Spanish, forcing my brain to try a language which I do not actually know and have never studied, but eh, romance languages something something.

I do understand some 80% of what they say, but fail miserably at answering back, which means I have a harder time than in countries where I could not understand anything of the language, but people speak English to me.

I can force people to switch to English, and that seems an improvement compared to 20 years ago, but I have managed to get by most of the time. Also, did you know you can use despacio and demasiado interchangeably and get what you want 90% of the time? I keep confusing them, and it doesn’t matter.

The recent breakthrough that Spanish “H” is often Italian “F” helped a lot (Horno/Forno, Hongo/Fungo, Hijo/Figlio in Rome, Harina/Farina, Hilo/Filo etc..). Yay for differential linguistics or however it’s called.

When I visited in the past, I did not speak English well either, and trying to get yourself understood was a major part of the experience. It was nice to relive that.

Can’t cross the Manzanares twice

It’s odd, going back to a place, and finding it’s not the same place. It’s also odd, going back to the same place and finding you’re not the same person.

I had a (Spanish!) friend who said she never wanted to see 100% of a city, cause this would make her motivated to go there again.

But it seems to me, even if you see 100% of a city, and you go back, you’re going to see a different city.

Perhaps this means you should not visit any new city, cause you can never say you’ve seen it, anyway.

On the other hand, you’ve seen a city, and you’re the only one who’s seen it that way.

You should visit Madrid, even if it’s not my Madrid.

Me and my fern

The apartment in which I grew up had a long balcony, and lots of plants on it.

When I was little, there was a big Cycas, and I hated it, its leaves would sting me or scratch me all the time. I don’t know why I was near the plant, maybe some toy had fallen behind it.

I remember my dad watering the plants in summer nights, my grandma (his mother in law) always said you should water plants when the dirt is cold, either morning or night.

I do not know if this is true, but I believe it. I have noticed there are many things I was told once as a kid and I have assumed to be true, and I think it’s a too late to challenge them now. So I water my garden when it’s cold.

We kept geraniums (or rather, pelagorniums? English is odd), basil, rosemary, ficus plants, and a host of succulents. Cyclamens were often present, as I always bought one for my mom, grandmas, and a specific grand aunt for Christmas.

After my father died, my mom cared less about our balcony plants, so there were more succulents. Also she got obsessed with pigeons shitting on the balcony, so an increase of spiky plants was a pro.

And we had ferns. In the beginning it was a single fern, I believe, in a big terracotta vase. Then at some point they became two, I seem to have a vague memory of my father splitting the plant into two big terracotta vases.

My mom died about two years ago. She got cancer, and was gone in a few months after finding it out. I count myself lucky that I managed to spend some time with her in those months, and to be with her in her last days. And I was happy she got to see her grandkids once more in that summer, even if she had gotten thin, and weak, and could not play with them anymore, nor take them to the beach.

Me and my brother had both moved out years ago, and I remember my brother first bringing up the balcony issue in the last days, or perhaps she was already dead: now the plants on the balcony would dry up and die.

I asked my aunts to try and water them from time to time, and I believe they did. As did I, when I visited the place, and my brother, when he did. At some point, one of the ferns died.

I noticed this spring that the other fern seemed quite dried up too, so I resolved to do something about it. I’d split the plant, and take some with me. Maybe my plant would survive. I see it now, in the subconscious choice of words.

A fern is a big ball of somewhat independent stalks, roots, bulbs. I researched a bit and formulated a plan: I would detach the whole plant from the vase, turn it over and pull it out, split the stalks in a few smaller vases, and replant them. Seemed easy.

But the fern had been in this vase for years, decades, perhaps since the dawn of time . The vase is so old the clay on the top has partially eroded. I used a long bread knife to try and detach the fern from the vase, I hurt my hands on a million old broken stalks. At some point I realized the vase had two big intersecting cracks on one side, and probably the fern’s roots are the thing keeping it together.

So I went with plan B: I would cut out chunks of the plant by cutting diagonally into the dirt, and pull them out using the stalks themselves. I managed to do it, and I ended up with half a fern in his original vase, with some new soil, two smaller ferns in smaller vases, and a smaller fern in a big vase. I put some bulbs in some vases too, maybe they’ll sprout.

And I took one of the ferns with me, thousands of kilometres by car, and I put it in our garden. I’ll move it inside later, maybe. My hope is that it will survive, it’s a rustic, robust plant which doesn’t require much. My mother was like that too, I realize, subconscious again.

My mom didn’t go for jewels, nor expensive clothes (but she liked quality clothes). She used to say to us, when we were little, that me and my brother were her jewels. She had a wonderful sapphire ring, and it was stolen in a house robbery years ago, and her regret was she almost never wore it.

Mom was serious, and severe, when we were little. And she always seemed angry with us. She seemed softer with the grandkids, and I don’t know if it’s because she was softer, or because she didn’t see them enough, or because I’m not a child anymore, and I don’t consider “you already had ice cream” a cruel statement.

I felt very guilty, being away from home in the last years, after my father died and my brother moved away. I am happy I told her this, and she told me I should not be. I still feel guilty, but less.

My mother always made us feel loved, unconditionally. I remember when I was about ten, and she somehow got in her mind I could be gay, and told me, if that was the case it’d be ok, she’d love me anyway. I guess this should be the default these days, but I’m not sure this was the case in Italy 40 years ago.

Since I had kids, we built a routine of calling grandma a couple times a week. During COVID, they didn’t go to school, and she’d read them stories via skype. The modern world is a strange place.

I used to call my mom often when cooking. How do you prepare this? Do I fry the garlic? How do I tell if something is ready? On one hand, to make her feel useful, and thought of. On the other hand, mom was a fantastic cook.

That’s when I miss her more. At some point, you realize you can’t ask your mom anything, anymore. Whatever you failed to learn, you’re not going to learn anymore, your chance is gone. Whatever you didn’t say, you can’t say. I am lucky, very lucky to have told my mother that I loved her, and she told me I didn’t have to say it, she knew it, and what’s the point of telling someone you love them when they’re dying, if you didn’t show them love before?

So, I miss my mom, a lot, and so does my wife, and my kids. But I have a fern now. I will try to keep it alive as long as possible. I’m not sure I’ll manage, but I have nothing else to do, and perhaps it will fill that huge, gaping void in my life, a bit. Or perhaps it won’t, and when the plant dies too, it’ll be a chance to cry, like writing this piece.

Micro Review: Smoke and Mirrors

This is the first collection of Neil Gaiman’s short stories.

I knew many of these already, having experienced them in various formats (I highly recommend you the Neil Gaiman Dark Horse comics collection on Humble Bundle) and I listened to this on Audible, read by The Author Himself.

He’s quite good at reading his own stuff.

Like many short stories collection, it’s a mixed bag: some are good, some are great, some are hard to evaluate, and some are just meh.

But it’s quite fun overall, and I would, and probably will, read it again.

Vote: 7/10, I need to get his other short story collections.

Micro Review: The Peripheral

When it came out, I started watching Amazon’s show based on this book, and I felt it was probably the best new Sci-Fi show to come out in many years. I didn’t have much hope it would end as good as it started, but I didn’t have the chance to be disappointed: Amazon show was cancelled after one season.

So I thought, well, I’m going to read the book. I’ve read a few books by William Gibson (namely, all the sprawl trilogy, some of the bridge trilogy, and some random stories), and I have a positive memory of that, although an hazy one.

So I proceeded to get the Audiobook version of The Peripheral, which in turn is the start of another trilogy§.

What the book is about

Spoilers ahead.

The Peripheral setting is a rural backwater in a future post-civil-war USA, which would be interesting by itself. But this is William Gibson, so there are layers and layers of interesting world building.

So the people in this world are contacted from an even further future where the human population has shrunk to minimal numbers due to some events referred to as “the jackpot“. Gibson hates being obvious so the jackpot is not a single event, (e.g. global warming, aliens) but an unspecified list of “many things went wrong and here we are“.

The post-jackpot world has developed two interesting technologies: one that allows people to operate a remote body (the peripheral of the title), and one which allows connecting to a point in the past. Of course, someone had the idea of combining the two, so they sent information in their past to build a controller that can operate a peripheral in their time.

Even this would be interesting on its own, but what makes it more interesting (Gibson!) is that every time a connection is made, time bifurcates, so the timeline in the past is not connected to the future timeline anymore.

So, what is the effect of someone with superior technology being able to act on a remote playground with no consequences? Well, a sort of colonialism, of course. Post-jackpot people even developed a vocabulary to detach them from this colonized pasts, so that they call each past a stub, not even granting it the dignity of considering a timeline.

In medio stat tedium

I have no complaint about the narration, but going through the book I remember why I have not read more of Gibson’s works. I don’t like them.

William Gibson is, in my humble opinion, a genius. A lot of what he writes is prescient, the themes are original, the world building is masterful. I want to know more about this world. I want to have more insightful thinking and exposition.

Gibson is also, for what I can judge, very good at writing characters. I can see the main character, Flynne Fisher, just ad I could see Molly Millions in Neuromancer.

But Gibson is, for my taste, terrible at writing plots. As I read to the end of the book, I tried to remember what happened in it, and I could not. As I remember, something happens that sets things in motion (future contact). something happens that closes the plot (bad people get what they deserve, good people are happy) but I have no idea about what happened in the middle. It’s just flyover country, boring stuff I need to get through to finish the book.

And I suddenly realized this is also what I remember of Neuromancer and Idoru. I do not know why. I have clear visions of specific scenes and paragraphs and characters, but I have no idea of what things actually happened.

BTW, I feel the Amazon show deviated from the book in good ways and was far more interesting, and it’s a pity it was cancelled. It had a heck of a good cast too!

So, if you already liked Gibson, go read this because you’ll love it. If you can get through a few hundred pages just for the sake of the world building, you’ll also like this. As for me, I won’t be reading the following books in the trilogy. Until In forget about this again, anyway.

Vote: 6.5/10, I wish this was a tv show.

Mini Review: The Road

I’ve watched a bunch of post-apocalyptic content when I was a kid.

I grew up with post-apocalyptic anime of the desert kind and of the non-desert kind (Italy in the ’80s was a weird place where everything animated was supposed to be for kids).

And post-apocalyptic movies were a staple in ’80s and ’90s: the Mad Max movies sure, but also The Salute of the Jugger, Waterworld, The Postman, 12 Monkeys…

I think this was mostly related to the fact that film makers back then had been really, really scared of atomic bombs growing up.

I think my generation was afraid of ecological collapse of some kind, but not as much. Might be the reason why we didn’t get a nuclear war, but we are getting an ecological collapse.

Mild spoilers ahead!

Anyway, The Road by  Cormac McCarthy is the story of a man and his son living in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to go south hoping not to die of cold.

It’s incredibly bleak. If you watched any Mad Max movie, the world is generally fucked up, dried up, and life only survives in a few spots dominated by violence and such. But you see, life goes on, it’s our current world which is fucked. We don’t consider ourselves a post-apocalyptic dinosaur story§.

In this book, life does not go on. Everything is dead. There are no surviving trees, no animals, no fish. Mankind survives on tin cans, and you know those will run out too, and so do they.

This would be sad and depressing on its own, but the hardest thing of the book is that this is the story of a father and a small boy.

The father knows they’re going to die too, and so does the boy. They go through the motions of surviving, but they know (or, you do) that canned food won’t last forever. Maybe they’ll find a cache of some sort of nutrition). But then what happens when that is over?

They have a gun with two bullets, and they have to choose whether to use them to protect themselves or kill themselves when things get too bad. But as a father, what do you do? You can’t kill your kid while there’s hope he won’t die.

And there’s always hope. In Italian we say “la Speranza è l’ultima a morire” (~ “Hope dies last”), and one wonders who died before her. The answer is You. You die before Hope dies.

So the father goes through the motions of living, teaching the kid that they are The Good Guys, and they Carry The Fire. The father does not generally lie to the kid, but you can feel he’d like to.

Well, I‘d like to at least. Lies are bad, but what do you tell a kid when he cries at night? I’ll be there for you, I’ll protect you forever, I won’t let anything bad happen to you. But you don’t have the power to hold that promise.

By chance, I also happened to be reading a different book to my son yesterday, and it’s an amazingly good book§, with many good stories, and one had this bit:

– how much does a teardrop weight?

– it depends: the teardrop of a spoiled kid weighs less than the wind, the teardrop of a hungry kid weighs more than the whole Earth.

And we sometimes forget this, but it is true.

This is a perfect book. It’s short, it’s well written, the story is gripping, the characters are three dimensional and faceted. I believe it’s also part of the free library for Audible subscribers, so if you have a subscription go check it out.

Vote: 10/10, I wish I had read this before having kids.

Micro Review: Permutation City

This book by Greg Egan  had been on my todo list for years, I kept forgetting it and rediscovering it and thinking it sounded great, but then not reading it anyway.

In short, it’s a story about virtual worlds, uploaded minds, the meaning of consciousness, what it means to live in a simulation, and how to know if you do.

These are topics which are very fashionable in the 2020’s, but this book was written in 1994, the author was way ahead of his time.

It is not a super-easy read, but it will give you a lot to think about. Some of that lot is deeply tragic and depressing, but I guess it depends on how you read it.

Maybe don’t read it if you’re depressed.

I listened to this in audiobook form from Audible, and tbh I hated the narration. But hey, maybe it’s just me.

Vote: 7/10, read it before uploading your mind.

how to fix “something wrong with LDFLAGS” when install Ruby on macOS

From time to time I have to reinstall something (often Ruby) and in the meantime my system has somewhat deviated from the last time and things don’t work just as well.

FWIW, I’m on an M1 MacBook Pro, and I use macports.

This time the issue showed up when doing rvm install 3.2.4

Installing Ruby from source to: /Users/riffraff/.rvm/rubies/ruby-3.2.4, this may take a while depending on your cpu(s)...
ruby-3.2.4 - #downloading ruby-3.2.4, this may take a while depending on your connection...
ruby-3.2.4 - #extracting ruby-3.2.4 to /Users/riffraff/.rvm/src/ruby-3.2.4.....
ruby-3.2.4 - #configuring........
Error running 'env CFLAGS=-O3 -I/opt/local/include LDFLAGS=-L/opt/local/lib ./configure --prefix=/Users/riffraff/.rvm/rubies/ruby-3.2.4 --disable-install-doc --enable-shared',
please read /Users/riffraff/.rvm/log/1716888782_ruby-3.2.4/configure.log
There has been an error while running configure. Halting the installation.

Inspecting configure.log I found this message

checking whether LDFLAGS is valid... no
configure: error: something wrong with LDFLAGS="-L/opt/local/lib"

If this happens to you you can track it down by going to the directory containing this file and looking at a different one, config.log, which contains both the command line and the test C program.

Common issues here are having something messed up in LDFLAGS or LIBRARY_PATH or the directory may not exist, but in my case the problem was

configure:9731: gcc -o conftest -O3 -I/opt/local/include   -L/opt/local/lib conftest.c  >&5
ld: warning: reexported library with install name '/opt/local/lib/libunwind.1.dylib' found at '/opt/local/lib/libunwind.1.dylib' couldn't be matched with any parent library and will be linked directly
configure:9731: $? = 0

for some reason I had a broken libunwind, probably leftover from some experiment or migration. The test binary actually builds and runs fine, but for some reason the configure script is not happy with the ld warning, although it seemed fine for other conftests

I solved this by doing

port uninstall libunwind # or do a reinstall if you need it

After which my build proceeded just fine. I hope this helps someone in the future.