Red Cat Ramen, episode 7

This week’s lessons: be very nice to the cranky-looking old lady, but go ahead and tell off the jerkwad CEO who tries to buy you out. Also, tigers shouldn’t try to eat half a watermelon in one go; something-something red-stained muzzle.

The real drama, though, is that Human-chan is starting to feel a little hurt that Waitress Cat is still not fully accepting her as family.

Cosplay Harem, episode 7

Our Hot Teacher is made of pure awesome. And I’m not just saying that because she’s willing to carve up anyone who threatens to reveal her naughty cosplay past. And as if that’s not enough, she gets a late-night fan-service call from Hot Elf of The Sisterhood Of The Traveling Pantsu, who refuses to believe that she threw away her “masterpiece” costume. Foreshadow me harder!

Verdict: I expected her to be my favorite character. I was not disappointed. There were definite LoLs.

Quest For Fur, episode 6

I have no idea what just happened, but I guess we won? Most of the characters I didn’t care about died, anyway. Gotta say, I wasn’t expecting Gandalf The White to be played by a smirking bishie catboy.

Verdict: why do I feel like this was just the prologue, and the actual story starts next week?

Dungeon People, episode 6

Our Miss Clay finally finds a reason to doubt some of her dad’s advice. In fairness, it was really bad advice. Anyway, now that they know how not to burn water, she and Our Dungon Belle can share a friendly meal. Then Our Gal In Black puts on the last suit she’ll ever wear, and we find out exactly why high-level female armor is so skimpy.

Verdict: still fun.

Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead

Pete mentioned an app called Zed, which bills itself as “a high-performance, multiplayer code editor”.

By high-performance, they mean that it needs to leverage your GPU to function at acceptable speeds at the challenging task of displaying a text file.

By multiplayer, they mean real-time collaborative editing with anyone in the world who you can trust to not wipe your hard drive. Because they can:

Since sharing a project gives them access to your local file system, you should not share projects with people you do not trust; they could potentially do some nasty things.

Down the road, they say, they may implement some form of security or sandboxing, because adding it later always works out. They use standard connection encryption, but they’re a bit cagey about exactly how bytes flow between your laptop, their cloud servers, and someone else’s laptop. Which means I should probably give the folks in IT a heads-up, since we all know there’s that one guy who’ll download anything that looks cool and shiny and mentions “AI” and “the cloud”, and there goes our IP.

Oh, yeah, they go there:

Zed supports GitHub Copilot out of the box, and you can use GPT-4 to generate or refactor code by pressing ctrl-enter and typing a natural language prompt.

I’d say more, but the web site was designed by 20-year-olds with perfect vision, and my eyes are already tired.

uc2p update

I went with Poetry for packaging everything up; it took very little to get it working, including bundling the fonts and making the code locate them. This freed me up to focus on ripping out all of the useless broken bits of Reportlab’s FontFinder class and replacing it with something that allows the user to sensibly select fonts at runtime. This also led me to review some new entries on Programming Fonts (TL/DR: I’m sticking to IO Terminal).

Speaking of which, I rebuilt IO Terminal from the latest version of Iosevka; there’s a lot of active development on it, enough so that I was 8 major revisions behind. I didn’t play with any of the new variants that are available, just rebuilt from tip-of-tree.

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