I want to share two stories of embarrassing ignorance about computers and the internet. Of my own ignorance, specifically. In retrospect, I think these vignettes paint a revealing picture of: a) how far we've come in software in thirty years or so; and b) what it looks like to be clueless as a goldfish about some subject.

At high school, around the mid-90's, some of us were discovering the internet — in particular the web, IRC, and electronic mail. (It's weird to think of it that way now, but the internet comprises, or enables, a set of such services; such as Usenet, FTP, Gopher, or the World Wide Web.) In those days I would go to an internet café, or visit a schoolmate who had a dial-up modem at home, and use mIRC to explore random Freenode channels, or fire up Internet Explorer to visit the handful of web sites I knew about. I didn't even have a mail account yet, but was starting to get acquainted with that too.

We bought our electric car in April 2022. It's a Škoda Enyaq iV 80. Its battery has 77 KWh of usable capacity, and its range varies from less than 300 km (at 125 km/h on the highway, fully loaded, on the coldest day of the winter) to 500 km or more (driving alone in the city with mild weather). (Yes, it changes that much.)

I reckon we paid a premium of around €10,000 over a comparable small SUV with a combustion engine. My back-of-the-envelope calculation back then suggested that cheaper fuel, simpler maintenance, free parking in (and free access to) many city centres (definitely Madrid), and lower ownership taxes would cancel out the extra cost after seven years or so. Perhaps that was still an optimistic estimate because it ignored the higher depreciation of electric vehicles in the second-hand market (batteries, which are the critical component and the most expensive one, degrade significantly over time).

Importantly, this is our only car. (I still think that is one car too many, but with two adults working and two small kids, it seems impossible not to own one.)

I love simplicity when it comes to software, and for web development I try to get rid of servers whenever possible. For all APIs, libraries or frameworks I use, I want to have a minimalistic HTML page that instantiates and sets up the bare minimum for that tool to work, and that I can load from localhost — no web server required. Those files I use as boilerplate and reference, cloning them for whatever experiment I want to do. Of course, web servers and build steps are great for all sorts of reasons, but sometimes you just want to play around or develop a quick proof of concept.

(More than) half of the year is over already, and I thought I should update you on my new year's resolutions for 2025.

Put some pressure on me!

⭐⭐⭐

I am a bit embarrassed to notice that this may be the first “biography” I've ever read. It probably is. I'm not sure.

Perhaps due to that lack of experience on my part, I was expecting something a bit different from this book. I had decided I wanted to read it for one simple reason: to (try to) understand what it's like to be really, really intelligent. I had heard all kind of stories about John von Neumann and about his feats. I wanted to delve into that, try to understand how exactly his brain was so different from a normal one. What it meant for him to be so much smarter than almost everyone around him. How he thought, what “extremely intelligent” actually means.

“As a child, von Neumann absorbed Ancient Greek and Latin, and spoke French, German and English as well as his native Hungarian. He devoured a forty-five-volume History of the world and was able to recite whole chapters verbatim decades later.”

Two years ago I realised for the first time that I end up making the “right” moves in life, but often I make those changes later than the average of my peers.

Owning a house, investing money, getting married, having kids… It's not that I fail at those projects, or shun those life decisions: it's just that sometimes I get to those places a few years later than would be desirable — judging with the benefit (and the bias) of hindsight.

That was stating the obvious, I guess. Of course you want to start earning money earlier rather than later. Of course you want to travel soon, so that you'll have more time to visit more places in your life. You'll probably end up marrying and having kids (like most people do), so why postpone it unnecessarily? And yet, for me, strangely, that was a novel realisation.

Armed with that silly “insight”, in 2023 I noted that

“now that I've spotted a trend in my life trajectory, it should be ‘easy’ for me to course-correct. […] That means making an effort to identify the next life goals, and acting quicker to get there. And so I have been wondering:
What are people my age starting to do now?
What will they be doing in a few years' time?”

Thinkers​

I asked Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini and Grok:

“What are the ten most influential thinkers in human history? What ten individuals made the most important contributions to philosophy? They should all be real people who actually existed, about whom we have enough information, who were original in their ideas, and who continue to be discussed and appreciated. Consider philosophers, theologians, social scientists, authors, and any other kind of intellectual.”

Results:

• Five mentions: Aristotle, Confucius, Immanuel Kant and Karl Marx.
• Four mentions: Plato.
• Three mentions: René Descartes and Jesus.
• Two mentions: Thomas Aquinas, Augustine of Hippo, Avicenna, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, Friedrich Nietzsche and Socrates.
• One mention (discarded): Buddha, Laozi, John Locke, Muhammad, John Stuart Mill and Mary Wollstonecraft.

(← See the third week)

⭐⭐ for the entire work; ie, the seven volumes.

I've written about In Search of Lost Time before (book #1, book #2, book #3, book #5), so I won't elaborate here. Some of those volumes I liked (#5 and #6) while others I found quite boring (#3 and this last one, #7).

It has been quite a journey of five and a half years for me, and one that I'm glad I made. I don't think I'll ever read another ~4,000 page-long novel with so many highs and lows, so many characters, and sentences so long and convoluted. OK, Proust: you're a genius. I'll give you that. Not sure if you could have made a better investment of your talent and the last years of your comfy life, though. And I'm uneasy about your moral compass and your values, to be honest (yes, I know it's fiction and that was not your life — wink, wink).

(← See the second week)