Mark Carroll's Journal

Living in Aberdeen, seeing the grand things around the city centre, it was notable that many of them dated from the Victorian era. I suspected it to be no coincidence that the Victorians saw the height of the British Empire's exploitation of its colonies. With the wealth of others, we built our shiny things. The bridge I walk on to work is nineteenth-century.

In the meantime, Britain declines. Local councils now struggle to provide even basic services. The health system is becoming several kinds of joke, despite the dedication of those working within it. Even those graduating with good undergraduate degrees typically can't get a job that pays well enough for them to be soon on the road to buying a house within reach of the job.

Furthermore, our population is aging. As we end up with fewer working people, and more people needing assistance, the situation can only worsen. Given that our history puts us somewhat in others' debt, I would like to imagine that we could kill two birds with one stone: welcome young families from the British Commonwealth so they can live and work here, providing services and paying tax, ideally building new towns and cities too, while probably also sending some money back home to their families.

Of course, what I describe is not far off the immigration policy we had between, er, around WWII and Margaret Thatcher. We've seen how the Windrush generation has been treated since. Further, populist anti-immigrant rhetoric abounds so we're not about to be saved by welcoming workers from overseas. So, what's the plan? We could make domestic families have lots of babies (not that they can afford anywhere to put them) or we can erode the health service far enough to stop the old people from living for too long.

Looking at the high prices, poor services, and xenophobia, I'd be happy to self-deport. However, for the meantime there are kids in education that I don't want to disrupt. Once everybody graduates, I wouldn't fault any of us for moving elsewhere. In the meantime, I can continue to hope and vote for change, both in the UK and the US.

After I got over my cold, I seemed to get another, for the following weekend, which would fit with my contracting them on my commuting on-site days. For my latest day on-site, I realized that, for Reasons, I used my ScotRail card to ride the Glasgow subway, and my Glasgow subway (really, Strathclyde Partnership for Transport) card for riding the ScotRail trains. I'll be going back in on Monday via a less inverted arrangement. I use smartcards rather than cellphone apps because I dislike being reliant on my telephone and its apps all working.

I finally got around to watching the Japanese anime The Colors Within (2024). It's a gentle, sweet drama about teenagers finding each other.

I watch various rubbish so this is a low bar, and it's not the first movie I've liked that scores unremarkably on IMDb, but I'd say it's actually the best movie that I've seen for a while. It's not puzzling or challenging or anything, it's just nicely done and it made me happy.

I have been frustrated that I am not yet more rapidly productive at work. Yesterday was another example but my legs started off achy and, as the day wore on, it became clearer that I was coming down with some kind of a cold, and that my throat was not feeling good. Then, I didn't feel sleepy last night and stayed up late.

In the end, I slept. This morning, I woke up feeling quite rotten, especially my head, so I got out of bed in search of medicines and drinks. Having rested, I now feel a little better. I have even taken a bath and now feel up to actually dressing instead of lying around in my pyjamas.

At least we didn't have grand plans for this weekend. I expect to be feeling somewhat improved by Monday.

I had an interesting chat with a pensions guy. He pointed out that the historic performance of even relatively conservative pension funds exceeds the APR on my mortgage. So, given that my paid mortgage interest is tax-deductible on my US taxes, and that I have the tax efficiency of being a higher-rate taxpayer who can pay pre-tax salary into their pension, indeed it probably makes sense to direct any spare money (e.g., annual bonus) into pension instead of mortgage. I have other debt too that I shall prioritize but it is nice to have that bigger picture.

Frankly, I think that I should take some risk in pursuit of faster growth. My pension savings are inadequate at the moment. My suspicion is that gentle, conservative pension investing would leave me still without much of a pension. I would like to think that I have another good couple of decades' of full-time work in me; perhaps that duration, plus not soon rebalancing toward blue-chip bonds and suchlike, might mean that I actually receive a reasonable pension in the end, we'll see.

Just on my walk to work this morning, twice I had to dodge tourist groups blocking the entire pavement. I thought that I had avoided this in escaping Cambridge, England, but apparently not. Not being attired for leisure, I occasionally have people ask me for help with local navigation. At least, a no-steps route at the Edinburgh end worked well for me today and took little longer. I don't feel enormously steady on many-steps and can experience some vertigo so it would seem foolish to make a frequent habit of them.

In considering the prospect of moving house a little south, it occurred to me that Glasgow's buses are best avoided and the south-side trains will go up to Central, not Queen Street from where the better Edinburgh trains depart. If I want an easy commute, it behooves me to remain near a subway station from which I can easily transfer at Buchanan to Queen Street. I wonder if there is any prospect of finding a garden flat (so better for L. the dog) in our youngest's school catchment area within easy reach of the subway; it seems a tall order.

At the last part of my way home tonight, I stop to pick up the car from a local car park. I left my parking space clear because the electricians are fixing a light above it. I did so on a previous day when there was word of their arrival, on which they helpfully spent their time partly on other activities that did not require cars to have been moved. So, second time lucky, one hopes. That first was a while ago, their work was interrupted by an unexpected-by-us holiday on their part.

Pensions guys presented to us at work and got me to thinking: I have a mountain of debt at a reasonable APR and I am in a high income tax bracket. I don't have much in pension savings so old-me will be in a low tax bracket. I expect that my debt grows faster than my pension. However, I can pay pre-tax money into my pension. So, better to direct spare post-tax money toward the debt or pre-tax into the pension? I wonder if a cranking of approximate numbers yields an obvious correct answer. It would be nice to not think about secondary factors like less debt means better APRs or that I can deduct paid mortgage interest from my US taxes.

Years ago I implemented a composable simulation language into which, were it handy now, I could easily plug these questions for a year-by-year simulation. Back when working on demonstrating that technology's application to financial planning, I was amused that such inevitably led to the question, when do you plan to die?, so this pensions question is a nice exception in that I can simply optimize for starting far-off retirement in the best position.

When people talk about using generative AI for writing software, they often liken it to getting help from a junior developer. For me, the bulk of the cost is in reviewing the generated code: for anything that is to reach customers of a reliable product, I want to be sure of what the code means and does. From that perspective, it seems worth noting to me that there's an important distinction among kinds of junior developer.

There are junior developers who are variously confused or careless and, at least until those issues are addressed, they are little use for anything more than rapid prototyping. Separately, there are developers who, while they lack knowledge and experience in software development, they are already disposed toward mathematical engineering: they are analytical, clever, and precise in their work. Code from that kind of junior developer is much more welcome because, as a reviewer, I don't have to spend as much time covering for various kinds of mistake. Their code already makes some sense even if it could be better.

Additionally, if coding assistance is coming from a static AI model rather than from a person then I can't incrementally get better results. With a real person, they can learn from constructive feedback about how they could have written the code differently.

It has been some days since I made an entry here. While R. works on making some ube (purple yam) cake, I can write up and share various tidbits. R. is pleased to have found salted duck eggs at a good price earlier today in what passes as the closest area Glasgow might have to a Chinatown.

( I watched some science fiction. )

I found myself in an odd mood for more mellow electronica lately, Alexa managed to play me things like Synergy's Ancestors and Jean-Michel Jarre's Computer Weekend without getting songs mixed up.

eBay irritated me. I bought two of an item, then found ( it difficult to request a refund for one, then the other. )

At work it's interesting to see how I have a pattern of afternoon meetings at the moment, given that I work closely with US-based colleagues, though we do also have engineers in Pune. Back at Zilliqa my meetings tended to be in the mornings, as I worked with people in the Middle East and Asia.

( I found that I have various money, and I read some science fiction. )

( I am still experimenting with commuting for days that I work on-site. )

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. For working from home, 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.