Dang I have a ton of photos of you naked
I'm waiting 2024
Just a quick year in review post because why not.
Personal highlights
Travel: Mexico City, Santiago, Auckland, Sydney, Tokyo, Osaka, Seoul, Barcelona
Moved: Montreal
Career: Amicably parted ways with the startup I helped found1
Wrote: Started this blog!2
2023 Recommendations
The Dawn of Everything (book)
A refreshing read after listening to Sapiens a few years back and getting grossed out by the empire apologia it contains. The notion that human societies followed a progression - from small bands of hunter/gatherers to agriculture and then, necessarily, by states - is at clear odds with the mountains of archeological evidence detailed by Graeber and Wengrow. Many early great cities (Ur, Teotihuacan, etc) either didn’t seem to have a kingly or priesthood dominant class and/or consciously rejected them.3
Hell of Presidents (podcast)
What brings me back to history is not that the events change, though new archeological evidence emerges all the time, but how the interpretations of those events can vary wildly between different people and (society in general) over time. Hell of Presidents makes even the loser presidents entertaining by describing what they represent to the historical moment, largely from a materialist perspective. Their more recent podcast on the the birth of capitalism and the modern state (using the Thirty Years War as a backdrop) is good but probably less approachable.
How Monopoly Enshittified Amazon (article)
Enshittification is a word coined by Cory Doctorow at the start of the year that describes the particular ways large internet platforms abuse lock-in monopoly power which ultimately undermine their value proposition. As tech money dried up in 2023, we have seen one company after another - Twitter, Amazon, Reddit, Facebook, Evernote - exhibit this kind of behavior. If you are at a loss as to why seemingly positive macroeconomic news has not resulted in any improved polling for the Biden presidency, I would point to this and the unrepentant post-pandemic price gouging.
Goals
Learn French, to the point where I can and want to speak it
Duolingo is an app for all time. But I’m starting full time in-person classes next week. Visit Seattle a couple of times
Make a couple of friends in Montreal
Some kind of ethical employment
Continue to write, but maybe get off Substack because they suck4
Predictions (?!)
I’ll put down just one: AI (read: LLMs) will be marginally better at the tasks they currently perform but that won’t stop their inclusion into increasingly critical systems. Good times for computer security professionals and groups producing software that doesn’t rely on direct user satisfaction (government, enterprise, help desk, education, etc). Bad times for virtually everyone else.
When LLM investment stalls out as a possibility for “the next big platform”, possibly due to legal trouble, the Apple Vision will be the next thing VCs jump on to.
You made in this far, so here have a dog.
If you see this language like this it is usually bullshit. But it’s honestly true in this case and was clear even before the Montreal move. They pivoted such they don’t need the old job I had, and I wasn’t interested in the same-level job on offer. ↩
I would like to thank everyone who reads this regularly. While I intended it as something to keep friends updated while I have been, one way or another, physically distant, the surprising (and growing) number that have started reading has substantially increased my motivation to write more. ↩
Hey, we could do that. It’s worth noting just how much the current system we find ourselves in (modern state capitalism) are at most 400 years old: a blink-of-the-eye in the history of the species. We just found some wood structures that are 476,000 years old. ↩
I have no paying subscribers and don’t intend to so in theory I’m just costing them money, but there are plenty of alternatives. If I switch it up, you shouldn’t notice at all. ↩
