I spent last night in San Francisco on my way from Tucson to Seoul. This morning as I headed to the airport, I caught the end of a shouted conversation between a down-and-out and a couple of middle school-aged girls, who ran away back to the Asian Art museum as the conversation ended. A security guard told the man that he needed him to go away. The wealth divide so visible here just isn’t something you really see around Tucson.

I’m working on a new module for Propellor that’s complicated enough that I need to think carefully about the Haskell in order to write produce a flexible and maintainable module. I’ve only been doing an hour or so of work on it per day, but the past few days I wake up each day with an idea for restructuring yesterday’s code. These ideas aren’t anything new to me: I think I’m just dredging up the understanding of Haskell I developed last year when I was studying it more actively. Hopefully this summer I can learn some new things about Haskell.

Riding on the “Bay Area Rapid Transit” (BART) feels like stepping back in time to the years of Microsoft’s ascendency, before we had a tech world dominated by Google and Facebook: the platform announcements are in a computerised voice that sounds like it was developed in the nineties. They’ll eventually replace the old trains—apparently some new ones are coming in 2017—so I feel privileged to have been able to ride the older ones. I feel the same about the Tube in London.

I really appreciate old but supremely reliable and effective public transport. It reminds me of the Debian toolchain: a bit creaky, but maintained over a sufficiently long period that it serves everyone a lot better than newer offerings, which tend to be produced with ulterior corporate motives.

propellor sbuild?

BART does have an early Microsoft era vibe, between the Brutalist architecture and the retro-modern cars whose angles remind me of many a home computer console.

Comment by joey Wed 18 May 2016 00:26:14 UTC

propellor sbuild?

Indeed!

Comment by spwhitton Mon 23 May 2016 05:36:03 UTC