Here’s another “year-in-review” post (I’m done, I swear). Over the course of 2024, I read 30 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).

• Carl’s Doomsday Scenario (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #2) by Matt Dinniman
• Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky
• 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created by Charles C. Mann
• Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI by Yuval Noah Harari
• Caliban’s War (The Expanse, #2) by James S.A. Corey
• The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder by David Grann
• Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler
• Assembling California (Annals of the Former World, 4) by John McPhee
• The Lost World of the Old Ones: Discoveries in the Ancient Southwest by David Roberts
• Eruption: The Untold Story of Mount St. Helens by Steve Olson
• Dungeon Crawler Carl (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #1) by Matt Dinniman
• Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris
• The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage by Clifford Stoll
• City on Fire (Danny Ryan, #1) by Don Winslow
• Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West by Dee Brown
• Troy (Stephen Fry’s Great Mythology, #3) by Stephen Fry
• The PDA Paradox by Harry Thompson
• The Happiest Man on Earth by Eddie Jaku
• California: An American History by John Mack Faragher
• The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer
• Extremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Musk’s Twitter by Zoë Schiffer
• The Tetris Effect: The Game that Hypnotized the World by Dan Ackerman
• Death’s End (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #3) by Cixin Liu
• The Dark Forest (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #2) by Cixin Liu
• The Three-Body Problem (Remembrance of Earth’s Past, #1) by Cixin Liu
• Flying Blind: The 737 MAX Tragedy and the Fall of Boeing by Peter Robison
• Reading The Rocks: The Autobiography of the Earth by Marcia Bjornerud
• Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann

EDIT: Fixed hyperlinks. GoodReads changed how their reading challenge page is displayed and I did not update my parsing tool to account for this.

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.

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:

• 2023
• 2022
• 2021
• 2020

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.

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!

I’ve been in Seattle this week for work. Today marks 9 years at this ol’ place! Not a bad view from the office.

I also gave a fun talk on AI — “Using LLMs for Engineering Productivity”

Made a poster with the kids and we’re ready to track things on the Big Board!

EDIT (Nov. 6): Fuck fuck fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu

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.

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)

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.