The Barbican is not a typical brutalist construction. The term brutalist refers to béton brut, which means raw concrete. I.e. you can see the shape of the wooden slats used as a cast. The concrete in the Barbican was finished by drilling to create a dappled pattern, which obliterated the shape of the slats.
There are also lots of post modern elements. For example, the columns of the girl’s school have pyramids at the top to resemble pencils.
The south bank has more buildings that are a purer expression of brutalism.
I was big fan of Scala a decade ago. The idea of a “scalable language” where DSLs could be built within the type system seemed super powerful. I lost my enthusiasm when the community decided they wanted to use it as Haskell on the JVM.
I’m hoping more recent developments, like WASM or Graal, provide a route for more flexibility when selecting languages. It’s nice to see Rust slowly become a serious choice for web development. Most of the time JS is fine, but it’s good to have the option to pull out a stricter low-level language when needed.
The first pension was put in place by Bismark as a way to "steal the clothes of the socialists whilst they were bathing". It was seen as the cheapest social benefit because life expectancies were so low. A popular policy delivered at low cost to the state.
That people are living longer is why the system is failing. It's an interesting thought experiment to consider whether any country would introduce a state pension now knowing how much they cost.
People are odd in terms of what they will tolerate. I prefer having a 15 mins stroll to pick up my coffee or food, for others it’s deal breaking.
The time argument is also weird. I find that I have a maximum of 6 hours highly productive work in me a day, perhaps an additional few hours of less productive work. A stroll or cooking recharges my mind. I envy all the people here who are working a productive 12 hour day.
I remember attending ACL one year, where the conference organisers ran an experiment to test the effectiveness of double blind reviews. They asked reviewers to identify the institution that submitted the anonymised paper. Roughly 50% of reviewers were able to correctly identify the institutions. I think there was a double digit percentage of being able to predict authors.
The organisers then made the argument that double blind was working because 50% of papers were not identified correctly! I was amazed that even with strong evidence that double blind was not working, the organisers were still able to convince themselves to continue with business as usual.
There are also lots of post modern elements. For example, the columns of the girl’s school have pyramids at the top to resemble pencils.
The south bank has more buildings that are a purer expression of brutalism.