2024 Review
Here’s a dump of stuff that happened in my life or that I found interesting in 2024.
Learning
I've been trying to learn Mandarin off and on for the past 2 years, with little retention. I stumbled upon space-repetition, read about it, tried it for a few weeks, and totally bought in. There were moments where I was surprised about a phrase or word that I could recall. At first I was using Anki, then I found Mochi, Mochi has a few bugs but overall is great software. Mochi has also enabled me to replace doom scrolling with something a bit more productive, thus, I use it everyday. Anyway, my Mandarin skills are probably comparable to that of an infant but progress is there!
Initially, I was just planning to use SR for language learning, but I'm actually using it for a bunch of things. When I start learning a new technology, when I find interesting random facts, trying to grok a new topic, or just any old thing that I feel like retaining.
Music
The Oracle Sisters. Joyous music.
The Nutcracker Op 71. This was the first time I've listened intentionally to the entire composition. It's amazing. Especially the Waltz of the Snowflakes and Pas de Deux. The composition is full of unexpected intensities.
Travel
In July, we traveled to China. This was the first time I met R's family. We explored Chengdu, Beijing, Tianjin, and Tangshan. The hospitality and hosting culture was most impressive to me. This was my first time leaving North America. I was pretty anxious but, to my surprise, R's family treated me like family.
Before we made it to China we spent a few days in Hawaii and Japan. In Japan, on our way to the airport, we watched the Celtics win the NBA championship on my phone.
I was intrigued by how often robots appeared in China. At one of the hotels we stayed at in Beijing, a robot would make deliveries to rooms. At a "Bo bo ji" restaurant near Leshan, a robot brought orders to tables.
In November, we traveled to Southern Italy as a quick getaway for our one year marriage anniversary, specifically, Napoli, Sorrento, and Positano, spending most of our time in Sorrento.
We visited Pompei and rented a fiat 500 and drove along the amalfi coast. Southern Italy is beautiful. The next time we visit I'd like to focus on unwinding and relaxing. Going to the beach every other day, cycling between swimming and reading under an umbrella on the sand sounds dreamy.
Didn't see any robots in Italy though.
Reading
I read the first three Dune books. Made it halfway through the fourth. My wife gifted me the entire series.
I read Despair (Nabokov) and made it halfway through Lolita. I read the prologue for A Fire Upon the Deep. I can't seem to make it through A Brief History of Intelligence.
At present, I am reading Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, and enjoying its unique perspective.
Technologies
I got my hands on a Jetson Orin dev kit. And had to flash it. Working with Jetpack and the sdkmanager is incredibly painful.
I started messing around with Swift again, testing apple's on device speech recognition capabilities.
private let recognitionRequest = SFSpeechAudioBufferRecognitionRequest()
self.recognitionRequest.requiresOnDeviceRecognition = true
I was exposed to the Phoenix framework and Elixir at work. Phoenix live view is really cool, especially the concept of sending diffs through the socket in order to determine what needs to update/re-render. Initially, I struggled with missing types in this ecosystem, but as you learn some of the features/pragmatic ways, you can have "type-checking" indirectly. Though, this makes it more difficult to onboard to larger elixir+phoenix code bases.
Of course, llm's. I'm most interested in seeing llm's on device in offline-first (or local network only) environments, but afaik there is a lot of work to be done to make this stable (resource consumption, overheating, etc).
I messed around a bit with egui. I don't fully understand all the advantages of immediate mode rendering but for simple layouts I've found egui fun and simple to work with.
And... Bear blog <3.
Fun stuff
Early 2024, my wife and I purchased season passes to a ski resort in New England. We've been skiing almost every weekend since early December. It's been a blast and satisfying to see R progress so quickly. We used to begin our days with bunny hill runs now we begin with blue’s.
The week of Christmas we went skiing three times and went to the Nutcracker ballet at the opera house.
Family visited us in Boston late summer. We explored some of their childhood places, went to Fenway (Red Sox vs Yankees), zaftiggs, and the Lexington battle green.
We took the tesla on a road trip to the midwest to visit family.
Health
I had trouble staying consistent with exercise and wasn't too mindful about my diet, resulting in some weight gain.
I took a long break from weight training and focused on running. But I found myself stuck focusing on “zone 2” without a proper base; unable to progress. Once I started running using the “this feels easy” principle I started to enjoy the process more. Recently I’ve started to slowly incorporate weight training for auxiliary purposes.
I switched to plant-based protein, started taking creatine monohydrate (again), started eating less dairy, and started eating lots of almonds.
Else
I attended the Robotics Summit in Boston. A little too corporate for me and not as many robots as you might expect. I met Tim there though. Tim is a cool guy.
Luckily, I got to see Disney's new bipedal in person. The movement is most impressive. How I long to see the RL pipeline it took to accomplish this.
I am prioritizing writing more and sharing things I am working on, mostly to be more mindful and detailed. I am also trying to engage more in discussions that I would typically shy away from, either online, or irl. I've found that engaging more in discussions have interesting open-ended results.
Also, November marked 5 years as a software eng.
If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I hope you have an interesting 2025.
