Mark Carroll's Journal

With R. and company away until August, I am settling into a new routine of simply keeping things going, including dog and cats, until the family's back home with me again. Given that L. our dog is not trained to do without people, I am with him, working from home, and not going to shops. Fortunately, he's a good little fellow. I have done inventories of my food and pets' food and all suffices.

I am highly appreciating modern appliances. I was well-appointed when living by myself in Eastern Tennessee, here the appliances are smaller and cheaper but still very useful. In particular, dishwashing and laundry become a breeze in comparison to how they could have been otherwise.

We had rotten weather for a few days, then on Wednesday morning it brightened up nicely. It's kind of middling again today, we'll see how it goes. L. is oddly reluctant to walk outside in various directions, I may try bringing some small treats along next time to try to coax him along. He can be quite stubborn but I would prefer to vary our routes. I am reminded of a dog I saw on television who would walk outdoors only in order to eat pieces of a trail of lemon drizzle cake.

I had a bit of a milk disaster last night. I have some plastic jugs of milk in the freezer to get me through the month. It coming near time to thaw one, I placed it out on the counter (milk seems to take a long time to thaw) and subsequent leakage revealed that the expansion had damaged a seam in the plastic. I left the carton dripping into a tall freshly rinshed jug overnight so we'll see how this odd fraction of milk tastes and for how long it lasts.

Work has gone fairly well in recent weeks, I am being quite productive, still very much with the help of AI code assistance. It's so capable, and advancing so fast, that I fear AI to be coming after many knowledge workers' skilled white-collar jobs irresistibly, and I wonder about my own career's trajectory given that what I'm best at is exactly the kind of thing that AI's becoming good at. This also makes it difficult for me to trade off its large potential and rate of progress against its current unprofitability, in considering how comfortable I am to have my meagre pension investments exposed to it.

Sound hasn't been working on my personal laptop computer for months. I assumed there was some problem, of course, but figured it may even just be that it's old and something came loose or whatever, it's had a rough life. It's always a mild relief when it boots successfully. I confess that the computer seems less worn now that R. wiped the display, cleaning off the awful crud I'd gotten used to.

Anyhow, to my surprise, I found I had sound again, then after a reboot I didn't. Intrigued, I started investigating. Eventually, I got as far as aplay finding the ALSA device busy, then creating a dmix configuration. Since then, at least so far, sound has worked again. Very pleasing indeed.

R. and I are back from a week's tourism in Paris. I enjoy how we continue to find ourselves agreeing often: R. certainly sees why I prefer Paris to London, it's so pleasantly walkable. ( I am always happy to go back. )

Being dragged reluctantly into the modern world, I ( tried using public transit via smartphone ticketing. )

For me, Paris tourism is typically some combination of walking and Métro around central Paris visiting various attractions and just taking in the environment. We hadn't prebooked much so we had some freedom to go as our whims and increasingly aching bodies would take us. The weather was generally good, I consider us lucky. We kept sufficiently on the beaten tourist path that I scarcely had to ( attempt to speak French. )

The gardens varied rather. Many of them seemed to be wide, dusty, pale gravel paths, lawns, conical shrubs, cuboid trees, statues, hedges with right angles, etc. We wandered through the Jardin des Plantes which at least had flowers, a variety of rather well-grown ones indeed, though no fewer right angles. I think the Japanese might be rather better at the kind of garden I like.

Paris has a considerable abundance of publically accessible magnificent buildings that I enjoy seeing and being inside. ( I enjoyed a few of the museums. )

In this visit, we did not ( eat out at fancy restaurants. )

Last night's return flight was from Charles de Gaulle into Edinburgh so we took our usual commuting route, the train into Queen Street, as part of our journey back home to Glasgow.

I routinely use generative AI in my workplace, my employer encourages it and pays for it. It works well, it's a definite help. At least for the meantime, it requires my expert supervision, close monitoring, to do good work but it's actually rather clever at times even if often rather dumb too. Where my work strays beyond my expertise, it fills in for me.

I have probably mentioned that I like the description of computer programming as mathematical engineering, it captures what I enjoy most about it. It's rewarding to devise and express good solutions. I love to create systems that do well at behaving in desired ways.

So, sometimes, for those parts of my work tasks to which I was looking forward, I've typically been working with the AI enough that it has the context to say, hey, you still have this bit unfinished, shall I do it? and I'm like, no, let me!

For the moment, I can still capture some crumbs of what I love to do. However, I wonder how obsolete that's becoming, the future's arriving faster than I expected. You could drop me back into the 1980's and I could be very happy writing software but these days nobody wants programmers who could hit the ground running in that kind of environment. Given the speed at which coding assistance has become rather good, I can't help but wonder if the 2030's will largely have only jobs for people who can direct the constellation of artificial agents well. That's a thing I'm sure I can do competently to support my family but … how much do I want to?

I love to learn about what clients actually need, figure out how I can meet those needs by creating software, then to deliver something valuable to them. But what I love most is the part of the process that machines may soon do maybe not quite as well but far cheaper than I.

I find myself looking back to things I once did and appreciating that at least I had the chance. I have loved doing simple things like feeling the hot, dry breeze in Death Valley, driving a rusty pickup truck through the Ohio countryside in the sunshine, walking along the beach in Aberdeen, and frequenting the AANI weekend market in Taguig. Or, in this case, the chance, repeatedly, to be paid to solve interesting problems by creating software by my own brain and hand. Of course, I can still do what I like as a hobby though it feels emptier if it just means that I am doing something the hard way. I also wonder how healthy it is for one's likes to be overly nostalgic. I have an elderly relative who probably feels as if the world has gone downhill since the 1950's. I don't want that to be me someday, I should find more ways to embrace the future.

I dreamed that I was taking some computer programming course where, in the classroom, I had to develop some real-world robotic mimicry system like: I draw and, as I draw, it stitches thread so as to reproduce the lines I'm drawing. We had a reasonable amount of time for completing the task because the class was a double-period, at the start of the day.

The dream transitioned to a different activity that I now forget more, where I was facing a related programming assignment but outdoors: I was approaching a small, ruined outbuilding where I was to perform some part of the task, not able to take long because some rather autonomous thing was out there pursuing me.

At work, I've been trying to finish off a non-trivial task that I started last month. There are plenty of aspects to get right: I am trying to improve the performance of a part of our code that comes in different flavors, is called in different ways, and can utilize various constituents. Generative AI assistance has been helping me along. Perhaps I have finally got it all to a good state, we will see what the coming week brings. I start next week by filling things out for our annual performance review cycle. I look forward to working on my next task which is a smaller, more usual one. I have been putting some extra time into the meatier task because it's important and has already lingered plenty; it will be a relief to finally tie a bow around it, here's hoping.

Today is my first day of leave from work for over the Christmas break. This morning we sent the boys off back home to Asia to visit family, now it's just me and R. I am relaxing on the sofa with our dog L. while R. brings some sanity to the kitchen storage. I already feel my headspace increasing and have been getting some small postponed things done. Many more await.

I am quite good at sleeping. Given the opportunity, I can do plenty of it. This morning, I dreamt we lived somewhere else and I spied a sizable swirly unnatural-looking Weather Thing approaching, and turned to R. to strongly suggest that we leave the house now and drive elsewhere.

Again, I thought back to high school where one of my math teachers figured Cartesian coordinates for the vertices of a regular dodecahedron and, looking at one, I wonder what the straightforward strategy is for doing that. I like to think that enough staring and turning would help make it clearer. Now, this is where I wish I had a large desktop system with lots of PCI-e slots for used RTX 3090's or somesuch: it's the kind of thing I'm happy to try idly chatting to some opensource LLM about. It's not as if anything's riding on the answer. Perhaps they're rather better at classic book suggestions than anything analytic though.

I also got to wonder about mobile telephony. ( How might routing work? )

My mention of idly chatting to LLMs reminds me, I have three sizable pending purchases in mind: such a desktop AI system, a small laptop for use while commuting, and a cross-trainer. The interesting question is how to prioritize them though clearly the first there should actually be last while I cross my fingers for the bubble bursting. Also, I'm reluctant to spend too freely until I'm more ahead of the higher-interest debt.

In the meantime, I've found that, as usual, BBC iPlayer didn't exactly help me discover that there's recent Later… with Jools Holland to provide me with a somewhat alternative musical backdrop, albeit a considerably mixed bag of such. I've been enjoying ex-BBC's Stereo Underground recently which is also nicely varied. Given that it often plays the music of my childhood, it makes me wonder: I think of all the energy of especially some of the more punk-ish songs, and how exciting life seemed to me at the time, especially with books filling my head with new intellectual worlds to wrestle with. There's something there I'd be interested to recapture, about possibility and choice, about who I am and what I pursue. I may not quite know which destinations make sense but one of the many wonderful things about R. is how supportive they are.

Late one evening back in July, I boarded a CrossCountry train at Edinburgh Waverley that then failed to proceed further. In the end, my journey was delayed by an hour so, under the Delay Repay scheme, I was supposed to be eligible for a refund.

CrossCountry's claim process wanted a QR code and and a ticket number. Unfortunately, I was using one of their flexi season tickets in their mobile app, which prevents screenshots, and the day's ticket wholly disappears once the day is done. So, I asked their customer service people how I can claim. I asked several times and got no useful response at all.

Eventually, I fell back to an effective last resort: post them a paper letter. This triggered a slow sequence of back and forth by e-mail but, last week, they finally paid me my refund. It's absurd that it took three months, and probably cost them as much to deal with me as the £7.55 they paid me, but I still don't have my answer as to how people with those tickets are supposed to claim.

R. and I sometimes head into Edinburgh on the train for in-office work, sometimes on separate days, sometimes together. Today, R. went in, and I stayed home and helped out with pet care. I hope that I am becoming more productive as I grow more familiar with my employer's codebase. I also look forward to getting around to personal programming projects at home but not quite yet it seems, still I have to figure how and when to fit that in. A task this evening is to schedule our influenza vaccinations. COVID-19 vaccinations are becoming a distant memory, it's a pity our BUPA health insurance doesn't reimburse them.

( Our expensive family visa journey continues. )

I read John Wiswell's Someone You Can Build a Nest In which was gentle and engaging. Whether in science fiction or fantasy, I always enjoy insight into a fairly non-human character. Definitely a nice enough way to pass the time. (Though, R. noted that it is far more gory than I had noticed, somehow that all passed me by.) I might be running out of television to watch, though. There is a bit more Chief of War left but it is far more buttocks than smiles and R. noted arrant ahistoricity in the portrayal of Zamboanga (languages, buildings, clothing). We are giving The Mayfair Witches a try on Netflix, R. read the books long ago.

A local Tesco Express convenience store has opened quite near us so we have a very handy source of heavily discounted food that must be sold before it turns into a pumpkin, assuming it isn't already one. So, among other things, we found ourselves eating sandwiches recently. With luck, the store will soon correct their loud alarm siren that warns whenever somebody outside walked near the customer entrance.

My illness ran the usual course of a cold, though it took its time somewhat. From yesterday, my head felt rather clearer, even though I still had plenty of physical symptoms. So, I could work, and felt like doing other things too, rather than just sitting and resting. I still have some congestion and a sore throat but they're just inconvenient, I don't feel anywhere near as rotten.

I'll head into the office today. Because of other things going on at home, e.g., I have a dental appointment on Friday morning, today would end up being my only day onsite this week, so I want to go in at least sometime, and in recovery I would think I am well past being infectious.

I am up in the middle of the night because something happened with the toilet cistern so it wouldn't stop filling. I don't know how it gets into that mode, it's easy enough to remedy temporarily, but anything non-trivial in the middle of the night wakes me up. What annoying timing, I already didn't feel great and now I get to be sleep-deprived before commuting for a full day in another city.

I'd feel better if I were already more productive at work. It feels as if I take a while to get to grips with each aspect of what they do and my colleagues already have much of that familiarity. And, whenever it feels like I'm getting nearer finished with a task, it becomes apparent that actually I am not. Nobody's said, goodness, you're dangerously slow here, what's your issue? but I feel it plenty just from myself.

Part of it is getting used to Java again but more of it that I have never used some of their frameworks (my relevant background is mostly Hibernate and Spring) and I am still learning how their code is arranged, and how people like things to be done. It's certainly clear that my intuition often doesn't match others', sometimes quite strongly; each time I misjudge that, more time is wasted. I don't see why I won't get there in the end but, a couple of months in now, I would already rather like to be contributing better than I am. In the meantime, I'll keep on plodding through, and hoping that others remain more patient with me than I am with myself.