This year, the oracles advised me thus:
“Set calendar reminders for April 1, July 1, and October 1 to review progress. Adjust goals that aren't working rather than carrying them as dead weight all year.”
And I decided it was a good idea.
So, here goes my quarterly review.
The answer to the question “should I use an LLM for that?” is increasingly “hell yeah!”, for almost any given “that”.
In the last three or four weeks, as resolutions for the new year were slowly taking shape in my head, it hadn't even crossed my mind to draw inspiration from a source other than my own ideas (and from a few friends, like Fidel). To be honest, I wasn't excited about the resolutions I was coming up with: they felt narrow and a direct continuation of last year's. Then, three days ago, in the middle of the night, I suddenly realised that I am so present on the interwebs, and I have shared so much information over the years about interests, hobbies, accomplishments and failures of mine, that a chatbot should be able to “think” about me and expand my boring set of 2026 goals with some personalised suggestions that I could use!
This is my eval of the resolutions I made for 2025 plus a recap of the year through some apps I use.
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.)
(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!
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?”
It's strange that someone who loves books as much as I do reads only 7–15 books a year. There are two reasons for that.
The first reason won't surprise you: like virtually everybody else in the world, my attention span and my ability to focus on reading have diminished in the last two decades or so, as a side-effect of constant screen exposure. I'm not too concerned about this, though, because at least I keep on reading. Not only that: about half of my reads are difficult, stuffy, old books — and often on paper, where there are few distractions available. (In contrast, many people nowadays seem to read non-fiction only, or contemporary literature only. Some of my fellow nerds read mostly — or only — technical books, articles, or blog posts. And there are even people who seem unable to read text for more than two minutes unless it's displayed on a bright, colourful piece of glass.) But even I don't seem to be able to read for hours on end like I used to in my youth. On my ~2h30′ flights to and from Frankfurt, I usually read most of the time, but not all the time. I manage to read for around one and a half hours or so, and then get distracted by my phone — like everybody around me.
Inspired by my friend Fidel, I'm publicly sharing some of my resolutions for the new year.
This (turn of the) year I have not thought much about this nor made an actual list, unlike some other years. But certainly there are a few concrete goals in my head, some of which I already mentioned on my recap of 2024.
Here go some of the goals I can divulge, hoping to put some social pressure on myself.
The year comes to an end in a few hours, and some of the digital services and apps that I use on a daily basis started nudging me as early as one month ago about my various stats and achievements throughout 2024, with the hope that I'd boost them on social media. I'm old school and prefer blogs to walled gardens, and since I have not been writing here much as of late, I thought I'd use those stats as a way to recap my year.
So here go four apps I use a lot, and my “achievements” on them during the year — in increasing order of importance to me.