This week, procrastination. I had a deadline of midnight on Wednesday to submit my first proper assessment for the OU maths degree I’m doing. I’ve been a bit lax about it - the first two courses are very much subjects I’m familiar with and pretty fluent in. I had a day off work on Tuesday to really work on the assessment. Come 8pm on Wednesday evening, I hadn’t started it. Stupid, and I knew it - easy marks to be had. I finished it but turned in something I wasn’t at all happy with - not enough time and a long day at work beforehand. It’s a pattern I thought I’d kicked.

I am an advanced procrastinator - I am really at my most productive when the pressure of a deadline hits. Unfortunately, not usually on the work associated with the deadline. I spent Tuesday working on a project I’ve been playing with for ten years: a compiler for a graphics language called Nile. I wrote about that here. I made a good amount of progress.

I can’t tell you why my brain works like this - don’t feel sorry for me, but sometimes I wonder why I make things so hard for myself. I was so tired the next day at work, and the office was so hot, I had to skip off a bit early and finish the day later at home or I’d have passed out at my desk. Not good.

What was good though was that the youngest stayed over this weekend. We are currently struggling through the Mission Impossible films - we’re on 6 or 7, maybe 8. We cooked, we ate, we wound each other up, played boardgames and chatted. On Saturday we went with an old friend and their son to the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge.

It’s more of a product/industrial design museum than a computing museum. It’s fun to see old evolutionary dead-end devices and germs of successful ones, to play old video games. It’s a bit misleading though seeing so many colourful and interesting devices when the computing world I remember was mainly beige plastics. But there was definitely a vim to the designs of yesteryear that’s missing today. The irony is that we can probably make interesting things more easily and cheaper than ever. Both the kids enjoyed the 70s office recreation with ashtrays, floppy disks, slide rules and fanfold paper.

The kids hadn’t met before but of course, they immediately became firm friends through Minecraft chat. Truly that game has been a gift to the world.

The youngest suffers terribly with car sickness and we had to abandon the Uber on the way home to prevent an untimely explosion. We got soaked walking the rest of the way to the station but a big vegan brunch on Mill Road fixed us up. A damp bus ride home though, and cold, wet-through shoes.

Bought some fabric. Definitely going to make a quilt.

Grab-bag

  • Why AI is eating the world, interesting as always from my friend Sulka Haro. “If the premise holds, treat code as a consumable and put your durable investment where human time accumulates. That means the brand, the trust you’ve earned, the state your users have built up with you, and the people who know each other because of you.” Having lived through the painful hierarchy inversions of the first web boom, this won’t be easy for anyone, especially the developers who were briefly kings.
  • Dan Luu says we should be more ambitious with the software we build: coding agents make projects that used to be uneconomical practical. This hits on why I’ve been dusting off my more abstract, crazier projects. https://danluu.com/ambitious/
  • I hate to say it but I find this pretty readable. https://dtinth.github.io/comic-mono-font/ It’s like when someone on your arch-enemy list does something unimpeachably nice and it ruins your day. Found it here: https://dev.to/drhyde/the-typeface-you-didnt-know-you-wanted-and-were-trained-to-hate-5f3f