Mark Carroll's Journal

Our weekends typically involve a Saturday of errands, today's were car-based: returns and purchases at IKEA, deposits and withdrawals at the container we still rent (plus first carrying stuff down to the car), also stops at Asda, Matthew's, Primark, Boots. We came away from Asda with plenty of must-sell-today discount fish and meat, R. cooked us some for our evening meal. The stop at Matthew's was because we wanted some Southeast Asian rice, they have the more Eastern products; our local Foodasia has plenty of other rice but is rather more South Asian. Basically, our neighborhood is much more South Asian, the East Asian stuff is over on the other side of the city. Among all this, we were lucky with the soccer: we passed near a stadium but not when everybody was entering or leaving.

Our Sunday can be varied: we may go out somewhere more pleasant, like the beach (cold though they are here) or the park, where L. our dog can run around. I may have something else going on that day, like seeing family in Dundee. Tomorrow, I hope is like last weekend: I will stay home and catch up on all manner of non-work things. Though, some Sundays when I'm home, I am just tired and don't do much. I plan to at least get to open and file pending mail, file this year's FBAR with FinCEN, etc. That doesn't sound like much but, beyond work and necessary chores, it seems that it's difficult for me to have the energy to do much else. R. is very understanding of how we both have difficulty making time to get done all we feel we should or want. Like that stuff in the container, we need to do a proper sorting: we won't soon plausibly afford to live anywhere we can store it all.

Because I have sensitive teeth (or am a big wuss) my kindly dentist anesthetizes me before the scaling. This leaves my mouth rather numb for quite some time afterward.

This latest time, I noticed that I could still say some words before the anesthetic much wore off even if others remained a challenge. For instance, we don't seem to need our lips at all to say, succulent delicacy; I surmised that may be an easy utterance in ventriloquism too.

Lips remain helpful for drinking such that all the liquid goes down the inside of my neck rather than some trickling down the outside.

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 had a proper go on the cross-trainer after work. It will certainly suit for some while, on this first go it kicked my ass; I haven't been on one since they dropped the requirement for masking at the gym at work in Eastern Tennessee, after most people stopped caring about COVID-19. One of the nice things about starting again is that tangible progress is easily achieved for a while, I expect the same this time. Judging by my prior performance after enough workouts, I'll be kicking this machine's ass again someday but not for months yet. Someday I could graduate to a cardiostrong EX60 or somesuch but I don't expect to become that wealthy.

On the way east into Edinburgh, one can catch sight of the tall red-brick warehouse building marked Jenners Depository. This reminds me of a different tall red-brick warehouse building that my memory places on the way east into Truro along the A39. However, some looking online fails so badly to find anything of the kind that I have probably somewhat misplaced it. It's some consolation that some further poking around online reveals that what I saw on the train into work recently was Niddry Castle.

It turns out that the Kingdom of Fife's south coast is within fairly easy reach for us. We took a small trip and did our usual Scottish tourism of ruined castles and churches, and chilly beaches, this time mostly overlooking the Forth.

We tend to stay at Travelodges because they are cheap and dog-friendly. On sitting in the typical rather short bathtub this morning, I realized that perhaps adults are meant to only shower in them, rather than washing their body one third at a time, and that the bath feature is intended more for dogs and small children.

The weekend started out with some good weather, we returned home once the rain moved in properly.

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.

I mention a few recurring topics, probably because I still haven't properly addressed them. For instance, ( I remain overweight and unfit. )

I also need to get back to writing code in Haskell and in Rust. Quite how and when this happens, I am not sure. I do need ( to sort out my personal computing. )

R. is thinking about when and how we move to live somewhere else. For a couple more years yet, high school catchment area remains quite a constraint, though I can look around ( for where we might move to someday. )

I always seem to be living outside the US at times when being present could perhaps allow me to do the most good as a white English-speaking not-MAGA US citizen. It has been tremendously encouraging to learn what good people are doing there and disappointing how little coverage it gets in the news here. The history generator's settings keep tending alarmingly toward interesting times as the administration finds new ways to harm people.

Here's hoping that the Democrats retain something of a spine over reforming ICE. It was interesting to read some suggestion that, even before all this, the Federal law enforcement community had often seen ICE more as cosplayers than competent.

I don't manage to make time to update much lately but I can write a little about this and that occasionally.

Our dog L. is still doing reasonably better, which is reassuring. He's seemed quite well lately. I look forward to being able to take him for a good walk again. Right now I'm in the middle of my in-office days for the week so not much else gets done, of course others are home with him.

mst3kmoxie will graduate with M.A. (Hons) Art History so yay for them.

At work, I'm finally coming to the other side of a tricky project that's gone on for some weeks, I'm glad to be moving on to other, more usual, tasks, though today my current tasks got something of a specification change partway through. The tricky work is getting more testing now, I do hope that goes well. It's been nice to have limited timezone overlap with the person testing, then I can fix things before they start work and they get to test without me also fiddling with things.

Recently, I ran an errand which had me driving along a local road that had what seemed to me to be an absurd bicycle lane (on Google Maps), barely a couple of feet wide right in the door zone alongside the parked cars. If I were cycling, I'd not use it while hoping not to be annoying the cars behind. (When I passed, there were more cars parked further along the road than shown in the link.)

We saw Sinners (2025) and I didn't see what all the fuss is about. I tend to like the Deep South as a setting, and I like the blues, but I feel as if I've largely seen the elements before, it was easy to guess what would happen, the characters and plot seemed fairly thin; I just didn't end up much caring. I'm obviously missing something.

I've also been watching Pluribus (2025) which is an interesting concept but it does move fairly slowly, each episode doesn't come with quite the pace of developments that we get from, say, Fallout (2024). It's enough to keep me watching but, again, I'm not quite the fan that plenty others seem to be.