2024 in Review

Coming into 2024

Last year, I left my day job and started new projects. This year, I started new projects, then left all the projects behind and started a new day job.

I actually ended my EOY review before I started it last year, where I quoted Kung Fu Monkey, who took their own advice and only posted twice more in 2024. They were probably busy actually writing I wrote 56 posts, including this this shit.

Health

AKA becoming an old and the state of US healthcare…

Eyes

2024:

My eyesight started to degrade in an alarmingly rapid fashion. I went to the eye doctor towards the beginning of the summer and all they could suggest were dry eyes and to use drops.

Went to a different eye doctor—within the same chain—for this year’s checkup and this one was actually capable and got me into some mid-distance glasses for when at my computer and they changed my life. I suffered for an extra year for no reason. I often forget to switch back to my normal glasses when getting up from my desk, however, which is 😵‍💫

I just realized my right eye has already gotten worse since I got this prescription last summer. 😱

Foot

I haven’t looked into PT or some foot-specific exercises and stretches, but that’s on the short list. After the consistent failures of the medical field I’ve experienced in the last few years, I’m holding off on consulting a doctor at this point.

I ended up at PT and an orthopedic doctor. PT accurately diagnosed my issue as tarsal tunnel syndrome, but PT didn’t help. The doctor prescribed orthotic shoe footbeds, which helped a little bit. I had a follow-up appointment with that doctor, but after waiting in a room for one hour I left. There was also the issue of my self-bought health insurance expiring; I repurchased the exact same plan to get us through 2024, but now my foot was a preexisting condition that the new plan—again, just to reiterate, was the same plan with the same company—would not cover.

I got some new cycling footbeds with the highest arch support; those also seemed to help a little bit. But I’ve still found that I can’t ride longer than an hour or two without pain.

Riding recap

So my cycling was very consistent year-over-year, but comprised mostly of short (15-20 mile) rides around White Rock Lake in the mornings.

Milo rode more in 2024. We converted his 24” bike’s flat bars to drop bars. We made a lot of great memories on the bike. He raced in the state championship road race again. He set a new PR for distance in November:

Depression

I’m now relatively certain that I was able to get off meds in 2023 due to very consistent cycling and an accidental increase in magnesium consumption. I’m now taking magnesium daily, and if I don’t bicycle or take magnesium for a few days I can feel the ground get slippery beneath my feet. Figuring out the magnesium thing was a journey; I can share my findings directly with anyone who is curious.

Diving into AI

I finally started learning about the technical underpinnings of generative AI and vector databases at the very end of 2023, and starting in January I threw myself into the specifics that might help resurrect a product idea I’ve played with on-and-off since about 2009. It did not bring said product back to life, for a few reasons I won’t get into here, but it has helped me speak intelligently about the subject, as well as work on one contract that involved both a RAG toolset and the vision capabilities from OpenAI and Anthropic. I penned the title of a blog post early on, The Tyranny of AI is not AI itself, it is the lazy, rushed product designers with no imagination or sense of craft, but never got it even into a draft state. I did write You Might Think Using AI in Your Business Will Save You Time and Development Cost but You’d Probably Be Wrong and My Mostly Positive Experience with GitHub Copilot, intending the entire time to then finish with the Tyranny post, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The United States of Collective Dissonance

The US presidential election wasn’t about politics for me, it was about ethics, and its outcome is partially concerning in terms of the damage incompetent leaders can cause, but I’ve realized in the interregnum that the real grief I’ve experienced is around the realization that ethical values are now in the minority. Not just those values, they’ve always been in the minority; but even a shared illusion that they matter, if even as a collective fiction, seems to be gone. And the types of people and institutions who have historically encouraged their constituents towards some historical or inspired ethical framework are the very same ones dismantling, sowing confusion, deceiving. But hasn’t that always been the case.

At the heart of evil is the proclivity for deception. The essence of evil is to deceive, distort and confuse. It prospers by imitating that which is good and true, only to invade and colonise it with death.

– Mike Riddell #

I used to write quite a bit about these topics on this blog, but slowly stopped doing so many years ago. I won’t start now, at least not here.

Return to the real working world

A week after the above-described event, I started a new full-time job, one I am thus far rather pleased with. The company is currently in stealth mode 🥷

My experience leaving my last FT job, recovering from the burnout it occasioned, branching out on various projects, both personal and professional, then returning to FT employment, was oddly aligned with this vlog I recently stumbled upon:

Culture and stuff

These are things I discovered this year, not things from this year.

📽️ Bobby Fingers

📽️ Mystery Mind Maps by Raphael Treza

🔈 Falling Up by The Chilling Alpine Adventure

🔈 Ben Folds live

📚 Becky Chambers’ Monk & Robot series

📚 John Green’s The Anthropocene Reviewed

🎙️ Never Post, A Podcast About and For the Internet

Finally

make art in order to keep living

There is no logical path through that madness. We only get nauseous trying to thread those impossible needles. It’s poetry that captures what’s going on, because it points to the spaces between the lines.

fixing the world

The ideology of perpetual fixing is pretty cool I think. It holds that we’re always broken and yet always capable of repair. But there’s a warning in it: if we lose this self-identity, as communities subservient to our own collective repair, than we just keep breaking.

…Capital loves the image of the lone fisherman out on the stormy seas. In reality fisherfolk stay in when it’s stormy and when we break down we tow one another home and then tie together into safe harbor, mended lines lashing a broken boat to a working one.

A fishing community is always repairing its gear. Boat repair is 75% of the manual labor we do.

If we took this personally, if we were insulted by the fact that our boat can break down, we would be in fact preparing to sink.

you were meant to fill an ocean

everyone wakes up at some point in their lifetime
someday you’ll be changed, love
and find out what its like
if you can take it easy
you’ll find what love is like

anyone can ride