My 2024 Reading List

Here’s another “year-in-review” post (I’m done, I swear). Over the course of 2024, I read 31 books. My favorite books this year were Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and The Cuckoo’s Egg (I wrote about visiting the author at his Oakland house). My least favorite was easily Palo Alto (it was one of the few reviews I wrote this past year).

Morning coffee prevents death, say researchers

Add this to my coffee confusion post from last year. A new study published in the European Heart Journal concludes that greater coffee intake (in the morning) was “significantly associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality.”

Hey, that’s pretty cool!

From the journal article:

In their study published in this issue of the European Heart Journal, Wang et al.8 analysed the time of the day when coffee is consumed in 40 725 adults from the NHANES and of 1463 adults from the Women’s and Men’s Lifestyle Validation Study. They noticed two distinct patterns of coffee drinking, i.e. the morning-type pattern, present in around a third of participants, and a less common all-day-type pattern present in 14% of the participants. During a median follow-up of almost a decade, and after adjustment for caffeinated and decaffeinated coffee intake, the amounts of cups per day, sleep hours, and other confounders, the morning-type, rather than the all-day-type pattern, was significantly associated with lower risks of all-cause mortality with a hazard ratio of 0.84 and of cardiovascular mortality of even 0.69 as compared with non-coffee drinkers.

This is fantastic news — wait.

I am one of those “all-day” coffee drinkers.

My top music of 2024

Last.fm has been diligently cataloging my music listening habits for nearly 20 (!!) years. Now that we’ve said goodbye to 2024, it’s time to look back at what I’ve been digging into. Compared to previous years, there are some interesting surprises. And stuff that is just absolutely the same as always.

  1. Dispatch
  2. Social Distortion
  3. Hot Water Music
  4. The Interrupters
  5. Red Hot Chili Peppers
  6. Angie Mattson
  7. Aesop Rock
  8. Guts
  9. Natural Incense
  10. The Juliana Theory

Dispatch and Hot Water Music have always consistently been in my top 3, (except for last year, where neither even made my top 10, weird). It’s no surprise that both of them rank up there as my favorite bands. I saw HWM earlier this year when they made their way back to the Bay Area.

Thanks to some iPhone photo memories, I was reminded of Angie Mattson early in the year — this is an artist who loved about 20 years ago and then literally dropped off the face of the Earth. Her music is no longer available on Spotify or Apple Music. I found a few videos that are still up on YouTube (who knows for how long), but other than the albums in my local library that Last.fm has logged, she apparently doesn’t exist anymore.

Social Distortion was coming back to town and I was so excited to see them. And then a few days before the show, I tore my ACL in a paintballing incident with friends (go figure, it was my first time ever playing paintball), and I could barely walk.

Fun times all around, really. Here’s hoping 2025 is even better — even though this year starts off with the letters W(ednesday) T(hursday) F(riday).

Previous years in music:

Comparing reasoning in open-source LLMs

Alibaba recently released their “QwQ” model, which they claim is capable of chain-of-thought reasoning comparable to OpenAI’s o1-mini model. It’s pretty impressive — even more so because we can run this model on our own devices (provided you have enough RAM).

While testing the chain-of-thought reasoning abilities, I decided to compare my test prompt to Llama3.2 and was kind of shocked at how good it was. I had to come up with ever more ridiculous scenarios to try and break it.

That is pretty good, especially for a non chain-of-thought model. Okay, come on. How do we break it! Can we?

Alright, magical unicorns for the win.

“Paint me like one of your French… err… humans.”

Earlier this year, OpenAI added memory to ChatGPT. If it thought something you discussed was notable, it would add that to its memory bank in order to make future conversations better.

If you’re a ChatGPT user and haven’t looked through what ChatGPT has added to its memory yet, do it! It’s wild. Here is a small sample of the things that it has remembered from various conversations.

Anyway, I decided to ask it: “Based on everything we’ve chatted about, can you create an image of what you think I look like? I want you to use your own creativity and insight into things we’ve talked about that might give you an idea of what I look like. And then create an image based on this.”

And it went to work!

Haha! I wish. I asked what the prompt for that image was:

“A creative depiction of a senior software engineer with a thoughtful and analytical demeanor. The person is sitting at a modern workspace, surrounded by elements representing their interests such as a laptop with coding screens, a bookshelf with a mix of technical books and sci-fi novels, a Betta fish tank on the desk, and a coffee mug. The individual has an approachable and intellectual vibe, with a relaxed yet focused expression. Their workspace is neat but personalized, reflecting creativity and problem-solving. The background includes subtle references to hobbies like running gear, a small display of game design sketches, and tools for crafting AI-related projects. Natural lighting with a modern and clean aesthetic.”

“Their workspace is neat…” — oh boy, if only you knew. Regardless, I’ll take it. Sure!

A Dapper Dude

We went to a local brewery this weekend, where they had a “Dogoween” costume party / contest. We took Benson and he wore his finest threads.

…he may have only placed 15th out of 16 dogs, but he will always be first place in our hearts.

That Grand Slam…

Game 1 of the World Series, Dodgers vs. Yankees.

You couldn’t have written a more amazing ending. Freddie’s hit will live on in my dreams for the rest of my days! Just unbelievable.

(I’ve already rewatched this like 34 times today)

Dealing with the inevitable mortality of our furry friends

A few years ago, I made the “mistake” of reading The Art of Racing in the Rain. Before that point, I lived my life in blissful ignorance that our dog would die someday. (To be fair, that’s not entirely true — years ago, I posted a tribute to our old family dog, Axl.)

For the last decade or so, I’ve been randomly posting about The Best Dog in the Universe: Benson. (Every dog is The Best Dog in the Universe, but especially Benson.) We’re fast approaching our 11th anniversary of adopting him. He’ll be 12 in March.

These days, he’s looking pretty grey in the snout, but he still exudes puppy energy in the mornings. When the whole family wakes up, he gives us (VERY LOUD) good morning barks. He prances around the house. His tail sticks straight up and excitedly wags back and forth. And he looooooooves our girls. And they love him. Honestly, it’s one of the best ways to start the day.

A few days ago, I was loading him into the car and noticed that he could no longer fit between the car seats as he makes his way in the back. That’s strange. Couple that with some weird eating habits and I figured it was high time to pay the vet a visit.

Oh, boy.

What started as a simple visit quickly turned into a horror show. The vet was concerned about a potential tumor or some sort of heart disease that was causing fluid build up in his abdomen. She gave me a referral to an emergency pet center where they could do a more thorough examination and any necessary procedures.

I take the old boy down there and it is just not good news.

Ultimately, he has congestive heart failure. It’s caused by a tumor growing around his heart (which is nearly as big as the heart itself). They also did a procedure to “drain” him — removing 5 liters of fluid from his body.

The prognosis isn’t… great. They gave me some meds, specifically Lasix, to help make him feel better (and potentially prevent fluid buildup again — we won’t know if it works for another few weeks).

Loading him back into the car was significantly easier — he was much lighter. No joke — he was 20 pounds lighter (confirmed on a scale after we got home)!

Anyway, he’s back home now. After a few days of resting, he’s back to his happy self. Some replies to a post of mine of Threads mentioned that their dogs lived an additional 2 to 3 years, but with Benson’s tumor, we realize we’re on borrowed time with this dude and it just breaks me.

Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS

We went out last night to check out Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS from our driveway. Once you knew where to look, you could just barely make it out.

However, your phone’s night mode camera brings in enough light that it really pops out. (Sidenote: it’s insane you can pull this image out of a phone)

The kids thought it was pretty neat, too!

Our youngest had a very hard time processing the fact that we’ll never see this particular comet again (according to this JPL page, it has no defined orbital period — meaning that it is on its way out of the solar system).

I believe this is the third comet I’ve seen:

“Nexus” by Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari’s latest book, Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, was a fascinating (if sometimes overwhelming) journey through human history that explores the power (and the peril) of information. From the first markings inscribed on stone walls to the potential all-seeing eye of artificial intelligence, Harari takes readers on a sweeping tour of how information and stories have shaped human networks — and, by extension, civilization.

The central idea in Nexus is that information is one of the key forces that connects people, enabling us to cooperate on a massive scale. Harari illustrates this point with a bunch of historical examples, from the canonization of the Bible to the use of propaganda under totalitarian regimes. He argues that information doesn’t merely represent reality; rather, it creates new realities through the power of shared stories, myths, and ideologies. This gives us some insight into the forces that have shaped society—sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse.

One interesting part of the book is Harari’s thoughts on the relationship between information and truth. Harari references a Barack Obama speech in Shanghai in 2009, where Obama said, ‘I am a big believer in technology and I’m a big believer in openness when it comes to the flow of information. I think that the more freely information flows, the stronger the society becomes.

Harari calls this view naive, pointing out that while openness is important, the reality of how information is used is much more complicated. He argues that information isn’t inherently the same as truth; it’s been manipulated countless times throughout history to serve those in power. This kind of manipulation is especially evident in the recent rise of populism, which, as Harari explains, is all about the belief that there’s no objective truth and that power is the only reality.

He explains, ‘In its more extreme versions, populism posits that there is no objective truth at all and that everyone has “their own truth,” which they wield to vanquish rivals. According to this worldview, power is the only reality. All social interactions are power struggles, because humans are interested only in power. The claim to be interested in something else—like truth or justice—is nothing more than a ploy to gain power.

Harari warns that when populism uses information purely as a weapon, it ends up eroding the very concept of language itself. Words like ‘facts,’ ‘accurate,’ and ‘truthful’ lose their meaning, as any mention of ‘truth’ prompts the question, ‘Whose truth?’ This theme feels especially relevant today, with misinformation and propaganda shaping public opinion in big ways.

Harari gives a sobering take on the rise of AI and how it could impact our information networks. He says, “silicon chips can create spies that never sleep, financiers that never forget and despots that never die” and goes on to warn that AI, with its power for massive surveillance and data processing, could lead to levels of control and manipulation we’ve never seen before—potentially an existential threat we need to face.

For me, Nexus was a thought-provoking and engaging read, though at times it felt very alarmist. While Harari’s concerns are definitely worth thinking about, I think adaptation is key: these AI systems and tools are here, and we have to learn how to use them and live with them — like right now — today!

Overall, I’d give Nexus 4 out of 5 stars. Harari offers a sweeping narrative that makes you think about the role of information in our lives, and the choices we need to make as we stand on the brink of the AI era. It’s a worthy read for anyone interested in understanding the historical roots of our current information age and what it might mean for our future.

Nagging appliances

We recently replaced an old dishwasher with a new swanky modern one. Of course, it comes with an app that you can install.

Surely, this is the future that my ancestors could only dream about!

I love that there is an automated notification about not using my dishwasher sent immediately after my dishwasher just completed a cycle.

Volcano sighting!

I was recently in Seattle for work and finally saw The Volcano from our office.

Fun fact: Seattle has to be the place I’ve most visited, outside of where I’ve lived — I’ve visited for work under 3 different companies, plus various trips to visit friends.

The flight from the Bay Area to Seattle is a wonder of geologic sights and I often found myself staring out the window and snapping pictures of All The Volcanoes! (My poor seat mates on this Southwest flight probably thought I was quite strange).

Anyway, here is Mount Shasta.

HWM at the GAMH

Obligatory crappy iPhone photo from attending a show.

One of my favorites: Hot Water Music at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco last night, celebrating their 30th anniversary.