2025

Pic is from an architecture tour in Chicago. It was a bad day for seeing the tops of buildings, but a good day for Silent Hill vibes.

Published: 2026-01-04

Rough year. We'll see how the next one goes.

Top of mind is the big, glaring, unfinished goal from 2025: the book in incomplete. One chapter remains. I will get it done or die trying.

Favorite Stuff

  • Samsung Galaxy Watch - It does cool watch things like tell the time, but the reason I love this thing is that it wakes me up by gently vibrating. I suck at sleeping. I'm not a morning person. I hate alarms. I hate fumbling around with my phone. This thing? None of that. It feels like waking up naturally.
  • ChimpStackr - I use this while taking pictures of very small things. It's free. Open source. Works well. No complaints.

Favorite New Topics / Areas of Study:

  • Queueing Theory - I've always approached software as an experimentalist. How do you pick a good size for a thread pool? Who knows! Just run it, record what happens, plot the results, and pick a value. Queuing theory changed that. It allows you to make predictions. It has changed how I design (and monitor!) software.
  • Agda - I finally started. It's harder than I expected, but deeply rewarding. I'm still too much of a newbie to do anything useful (proving very basic properties takes me hours), but it's slowly coming together. I'm excited to get to a point where I can use it to work through other math books.

Favorite Shows and Movies:

  • The Holdovers - This was good. It's exactly what you expect it to be while also being much more. A few scenes caught me off guard for how closely they hit.
  • One Battle after another - I initially skipped this not realizing it was from Paul Thomas Anderson. The posters look like a generic action film. Once I finally watched it, I ended up watching it again that same week.
  • The Rehearsal Season 2 - Not everything in the season works. In fact, I've forgotten most of it, but the finale pulls it together in a way that is sobering and contemplative and sticks with you.

Favorite Game

  • Astro Bot - the real game starts when you reach the Vicious Void. Speed runs of this are a blast to watch.

Favorite Trip Taken

Goldendale Observatory. I've lived in Washington for almost a decade, but this was my first time going east of the Cascades. I didn't know it was semi-arid. You'd never guess from the weather in Seattle. Everything from Yakima valley down to The Dalles is beautiful. The observatory was great. Looking through their telescopes was neat, but the main joy was just being outside somewhere dark enough to see the Milky Way. I was surprised by the amount of satellite activity.

I now understand why people complain about wind power as an eyesore. They're fine during the day, but at night the skyline of Yakima valley becomes an armada of blinking red lights. It looks like standing in a server room. Maybe you get used to it, but I was deeply saddened to have such a beautiful environment poisoned. Tear them down and stand up a few reactors.

Musings on AI that probably won't age well

It's useful for some things. It's harmful for others. I increasingly have no idea how to square what people are saying AI can do with what my lying eyes are seeing AI can do. Small, common, "stack-overflow-able" tasks seems like the sweet spot. Anything else and I spend more time arguing with the AI than it would take to just do it myself. I would love to see what the people who say LLMs "write 90% of their code" work on all day. I don't believe them. My 2025 take: If you need AI to regurgitate, it's great. If you need it to understand, you're fucked.

This world changing technology is sure making everything feel worse. It's crammed into every facet of our life. You don't get to choose. Eat the slop, you pigs. Automated phone trees were bad, but at least you could mash buttons or shout until you got a human. The rise of corporate "AI" gatekeepers makes me seethe. Remember when Amazon's customer service was a thing people would praise? Now it's a chat bot. Want to schedule a local plumber online? Chat bot. Try calling on the phone? AI "Assistant". Tour an apartment? "AI Leasing Agent." It would be great if it worked, I guess. Who needs humans anyways? But today it doesn't. It's a yet another layer of corporate bullshit you have to wade through to get to someone who can do something.

I'm not looking forward to the next few years as a software engineer. The job boards are demoralizing. Everyone wants a slop factory. Everyone is terrified to be seen as not making a slop factory. It's nice that the Ideas Guys have move on from "it's a chatbot that..." to "it's an agent that...", but if the future of "engineering" is writing for-loops that "executes" markdown files until the errors stop, I think I'm out.

People and AI

I was unprepared for the amount of contempt I feel when I realize I'm talking to an LLM through a human middle-man. Don't do that to people. Don't do that to yourself. Have some dignity. There's no point to you otherwise.

LLM-ing your way through corporate nonsense is fine. That writing was never important. But people who use AI for their personal writing strike me as vein and hollow. Everyone copes that their LLM usage is special and worthwhile. "Oh, I just have AI do the first draft because I've always been more of an editor." "Oh, I already now what I want to say. It just speeds up the process." I saw a guy on Hacker News describe his "writing" process as "moderating a discussion with ChatGPT." Kill me. What kind of people are these? What is the point of this "productivity"? What do you get out of copying and pasting?

Humans are degraded by ease. Mentally and physically. Offloading the parts of creation that require effort seems like a great way to pause your development as a human. But it's 2025, and these things have only been around for a few years, so who knows.

Positive reflections on AI:

It's like having a Google that works again. AI is phenomenal at information retrieval. It's also really nice to be able to ask questions so dumb that I wouldn't otherwise ask them if a human was involved. If my ChatGPT history ever gets leaked I'm going to have to change identities.

Plans for 2026:

  • Finish the book (for real this time)
  • Take time off. Travel somewhere.
  • Drink less. It has become a vice.