Weeknotes #19 (March 15, 2025)
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Things I found, read, did, and produced this past week.
Things I worked on
- I worked on TRMNL plugin to view prices of the Eevee cards across both the JP and EN sets Terastal Festival ex and Prismatic Evolutions: trmnl-sv-eevee-prices. My order of the actual device is expected to arrive in early April, but in the meantime, one of the Trmnl developers wrote a simulator trmnl_preview that mimics the device in a web browser.
- I updated my various apps on GitHub that use GitHub Actions to use pinned commit SHAs. Given git tags are not immutable, this will now prevent compromised actions from breaking my builds or exposing secrets. For context why I did this, a widely-used action was compromised (tj-actions/changed-files) this past week and if you use a high level tag like
action@v1, you are at the whim of an attack. In the future, GitHub is planning on having the ability to push an action to GitHub Packages and then the version is actually immutable.
Things I consumed
- Apple's flagship feature of Apple Intelligence, a more advanced siri with ability to interact with apps and know your personal context, is seeming to crashing to the point that Apple publicly commented it is behind schedule and are pulling ads promoting it. I personally think this is one of the features that may differentiate Apple Intelligence from the rest of the tools that exist right now, but if they can't even deliver this before late 2025 / early 2026, their competitors are going to speed past them.
- In some good Apple news, end to end encyrpted RCS messages are eventually coming to iOS. This is a much smaller scope feature so I feel this probably will come either in 18.5 or an early iOS 19 release.
- The Typescript team at Microsoft announced their plans on moving the Typescript compiler & language server to Go: A 10x Faster Typescript. As standard, a lot of people questioned why Go, and I feel Steve Klabnik who worked on both Rust and Rails among other projects said it well in a post Choosing Languages: "people choose programming languages for projects based on a variety of reasons. And sure, there may be better or worse choices. But you probably have a different context than someone else, and so when someone makes a choice you don’t agree with, there’s no reason to be a jerk about it."
- Apple TV's Severance had its penultimate episode this past week and the 2nd season finale will be upcoming this week. Its been a great show and will be sad to see it go again, but it has been one of those shows that I watch as soon as it is out.
- Goodbye Assistant, hello Gemini. Google is officially dumping Assistant for Gemini. The pre-LLM assistants all seemed to be in a rut and this resurgance now that we have a different foundation is pushing forward, but we still have yet to see if their full promise is going to land.