Mark Carroll's Journal

I survived my first week at work. I went on-site in Edinburgh for the first three days, initially picking up my shiny new MacBook M4 Pro running Sequoia. The office turns out to be a pleasant dog-friendly space with the amenities one might hope for. Being a hybrid worker, I book desk space when I need it from the hot-desking pool. The desks are motorized adjustable desks that can become standing desks. There are very many onboarding things to do over the coming weeks, a lot to do and learn, and plenty of friendly, helpful people to meet. Despite the open-plan layout, it's not too hard to focus, not very distracting.

As usual, there's some wrestling with the Mac but, in all fairness, plenty of things did just work quite well. The most obvious wrestling was the usual: Mac users love to see things in blurry-text. Okay, all the problems I ran into this week arise because I have the temerity to plug the Mac into non-Apple hardware. For instance, the external monitors on the desks have low pixel density and recent versions of the OS have removed useful options for fixing that. I was able to solve the blur by installing iTerm2 and unchecking Anti-Aliased. Other pending issues include it applying the wrong keymap for my external keyboard and imposing some godawful acceleration on my scroll-wheel but they're in progress, I want to get some actual work done too.

Nice though the office environment is, being in transit for at least three hours per day makes me appreciate fully remote work: Wednesday felt as if it should already be Friday. I am currently taking the more expensive option: subway over to Queen Street, and the frequent faster trains aren't as crowded as I'd heard, quite tolerable. (Work has provided my laptop a privacy screen to limit viewing angle.) My current route to the office includes climbing the 124 News Steps which means I get the hardest part of my workday out of the way at the start. The bus would be cheapest except I'd probably want extra bus to and from the stations: at each end, the bus station is further than the railway. A compromise might be the limited rail ticket: I'd end up working long days but could probably just walk at both ends around the intercity portion. Belatedly, I also wonder if I should be masking for the railway journey: perhaps it's outstandingly the riskiest among my habits.

We have been somewhat lucky with the weather recently. We had a lovely day for when my two children visited for some walking and shopping in Glasgow city centre. We similarly had a lovely day for visiting Edinburgh, we finally got to explore the botanic garden. Our luck runs out this weekend: we had planned to go camping again. Last time went well but the weather forecast for tomorrow looks grim so we will get things done here at home instead.

In walking our dog L. we occasionally meet other friendly dogs. It has been interesting for me to observe that many dogs appear to know the rules of a game. Each round has them bring their faces near to each other and pause (tail probably wagging) then they both dart apart and run around or chase a bit before starting the next round. It appears to be very good fun.

I have been considering my choice of programming language for personal computing projects, for both employability and agreeability. People might say to pick the project first, then the appropriate language for it, but language would certainly be a part of why I can stick with a project. I shall have my carts and horses whichever way around I please. On my radar are:( Java, Python, TypeScript with React, Rust, Haskell and Idris, Elixir with Phoenix, and Gleam. ) I plan to try out projects and languages then let how engaged I am with them, how much effort it is to continue, be my guide. I can even try out the same challenges in multiple languages, see which I enjoy more.

A few of the songs seemed better when I heard them again in the final. Some of that was that the actual performances were improved over the semi-finals but I suspect that most of it was that I simply liked them more on a second hearing. Unfortunately, while some were agreeable enough, there weren't any songs that I feel a strong need to hear ever again.

After the song contest, it seems that I always comment on the difference between the jury vote and the popular vote. Each year brings interesting discrepancies between the two. I wonder if the UK's song selection process should, at least in part, return to including some kind of popular vote element. The current internal selection approach has proved poor at finding songs that win popular approval.

The Eurovision Song Contest has come around again and this year we paid attention to the two semi-finals. The first was striking in how many performers don't sing well. The second had a few decent singers but I wasn't wholly convinced by the selection that was put through to the final. Ireland's entry was pleasantly fun but it was also light. I was surprised that entries like Georgia's didn't make it through, given those that did. I suppose we'll see how the final goes on Saturday. Regardless, it was all quite an introduction to Hazel Brugger.

We returned to camping last weekend and were quite lucky with the weather, the loch looked beautiful on our first morning and we saw small fish in the shallows. I am out of shape or just worn out though, I was very appreciative of having limited duties with the teardown in particular. I slept well, wrapped in my sleeping bag inside a sleeping bag atop a new air mattress. The sunny afternoons could be warm but the nights still get chilly. While different absolutely, I was reminded of the relative cooling when I was outside Tucson in the desert after night fell. In a different life, I might have ended up living in a trailer in the Sonoran Desert but that's something the multiverse can explore on my behalf. R. is excellent at organizing our camping, I am lucky to get to follow their lead.

Having already complained about the IRS expecting expats to file taxes but often requiring them to have a US telephone number, I should note that I was lucky enough to set up my EFTPS account before allowing my US cellphone plan to lapse and I have remained able to use it since.

An interesting aspect of US taxes is how individuals have many options for how to file. Some of those choices affect and may even constrain future years. In my limited experience, this is in marked difference to the UK where, as an individual, if I must file at all then I just tell them what happened and they go away and figure it out for me and explain what they did.

As a US expat, a particular set of choices is how to handle my employment income. I can try excluding it using form 2555, I can try to get credit for the tax paid using form 1116, I can try deducting that tax on Schedule A, etc. (I itemize because I can deduct my mortgage interest.) Furthermore, I can combine these: e.g., excluding part of the income then applying another form to the pro-rated remainder. Then, I get to try out different form 1040 tax worksheets to see how it works out in each case. So far, I've not needed form 1116 but it's always worth checking. Annoyingly, a few years ago they changed the law such that I can't deduct UK council tax, though at least my reading of the US-UK tax treaty suggests that I can deduct my payroll-deducted pension contributions. (There's also a social security treaty that can be useful for self-employment tax.)

In writing here previously on generative AI I had wondered what happens to society when people can routinely lose themselves in artificial worlds of their own design. I had been thinking from the point of view of their being able to act out dark fantasies then adjusting to the real world where they don't make the rules and their actions affect others.

Anticipated by many works of fiction over the years, I was slow to consider what may be a good side of advancements in training inference models. There are many people who don't have enough contact with friends, perhaps especially the elderly. We may not be far from a point where they can have some artificial companion, patient and configurable, that offers interesting and helpful conversation on whatever topics the user wishes, even joining them actively in some pursuits, far beyond Alexa who can do little more than reading out the results from web searches.

Such companions may be considered a poor substitute for human contact but I suppose that there are probably funded startups chasing this very market.