It is difficult to write this year's retrospective without just scrawling "2025" a bunch of times and signing off. And I have to admit, I said something similar in 2017. 2018, too. Also 2020. But it's the first time I've drawn from that well in a few years. I wonder what happened?

Not that I have all that much to complain over for myself. Job, still have. House, not falling down yet Though the steam boiler gave us a real bad scare last week and probably means next year is a very expensive rehab job. Heat pumps. Maybe house siding, because I wanted to do that before I did the heat pumps. I can hear the money flying out of my bank account already.. My lovely wife and I rented a house in the middle of nowhere and it's whipping snow everywhere. She's off skiing, because the mountain is open on Christmas Day and the next couple days are going to be too cold to enjoy going out, while I sit at the dining table and both dogs alternate between watching me and the snow flurries.

So no problems here, not really. Which is why I find it galling and more than a little self-indulgent to be writing this and biting back the frown that wants to take over my face. But before I started this I did promise to spend more time on things that are interesting than on the political shitshow in which we currently live, so let's take that one for granted and think about something else for a bit.

Health stuff

Self-Improvement Through Modern Science type of year on that front.

First, the eyes. I've been blind as a bat for my entire life, with quarter-inch thick glasses even when I bought the spendy thin lenses, but in September I got implantable collamer lenses put into my eyes—the first major surgery of my life aside from a broken shin in college. I wasn't a candidate for LASIK or PRK; having a -10/-11 prescription meant I would've needed corneas the size of ham hocks to abrade them down to a workable point. Instead the opto was just like "how about we cut open a hole in your eye, stuff a lens inside, and fix it that way?".

Yeah, sure. I'm tired of glasses so thick that trying to see through a camera viewfinder means I can't see the edges, I'm tired of rain and snow, I hate getting up to take a leak in the middle of the night. Fire up the cutter and let's get at it It turns out I am the worst pre-surgery patient alive, and only the patience of my lovely wife kept me from being even worse. Then the drugs kicked in, though, and the light show during the surgery is literally indescribable..

The results? I am typing this at the aforementioned dining table without a pair of glasses, which is something I haven't said for, what...34 years? My left eye is nearly perfect now; my right has enough astigmatism that I have a pair of glasses on order to deal with some very minor blur, but in practice that's just looking at a TV at a distance or trying to read black-on-white text on tiny labels and the like. If I was less of a weirdo, I might not even notice.

It wasn't cheap; $8,000 and not covered by insurance. LASIK would've been half that. But the recovery time was "a couple days" and I was driving in four. Night vision is no worse than before People report variance here, but for me, I suspect that having a monster prescription, plus all-day-wear ending up with inevitably-slightly-gross lenses, made for bad enough night vision as it was.. I get some light circles—not haloes, but rings at a distance—from bright point lights at night, where it reflects off the lens in my eye, but I don't find them distracting. And color accuracy is a lot better without having anti-reflective polycarbonate hanging off my nose and yellowing the world a bait.

If your eyes are That Bad, I think it's worth considering. It's certainly changed things for me.

Second, the waistline. Hopped on the GLP-1 train like half the people I know, and much like all of those people it's working. I don't need to re-hash the whole thing; they work, everybody's right, it's a miracle drug. I topped out in my twenties around 255 pounds before I aggressively keto'd myself down to about 210. I wanted to maintain the keto thing, because it does work and it is the kind of food I like to eat anyway. However, every time I've ever lived with anyone else, it has been Extremely Difficult to pull off keto because other people like rice and starches and I turned into a goblin if I tried to not eat them while they're hanging around. So, over the last 13 years I've inched back towards 230.

My GLP-1 of choice vaporized that urge. For me, it is not enough to erase hunger or enjoyment of food This sentence was interrupted by an IKEA KAFFEREP "cookie with almonds". I regret nothing., but it makes the noise go away and that's almost as novel a feeling as waking up without glasses and being able to see.

Maybe it's my mind playing tricks on me, but I think I enjoy food more when it's not shouting at me. I've been on them since the start of October (I picked "a month after the eye surgery" as the day to start), so 13 doses in and down 19 pounds. Little slower than most people, and a little surprising given that most days are at least one two-mile dog walk, but I'm not in a hurry.

But I do need to buy new pants, because none of my clothes fit now.

Professional stuff

My day job is lead architect for The Phone Company's next-generation API platform; our next-gen API identity and access management (IAM) stuff is under my umbrella as well, overseen directly by somebody I trust implicitly and have worked with for over a decade. Because that IAM stuff is so well-handled, I've had a lot more room this year to look up and around, and to think about where to go from here—both personally and professionally.

So yeah, I work for The Phone Company. But they also want to be The AI Phone Company. This makes talking about work, and thoughts around my industry §, without splashing four kilowords on AI...difficult. Especially given the layoffs going around being directly attributable to AI, AI, AI. My team cut something like eighty percent of our contractors and I suspect our 2026 velocity to improve because I am coming down off the mountain, throwing everything I've learned so far about LLMs at our problems, and helping my colleagues learn to do the same. That sentence feels ridiculous to me, but I'm also confident that it's true. Weird.

As mentioned in another piece on this neglected blog, I spend a lot of time trying to teach some of what I know about large language models to other people I also talk a lot about it on Bluesky for similar reasons. I think this stuff is knowable and I want more people to know it, because I worry about what the dislocation it will cause is going to look like.. And learning new stuff, too; we are still firmly in the "five blind men describe an elephant" phase of this whole thing. But in so doing, I keep finding myself describing not "LLM stuff", but just basic thinking stuff. The sort of things that I jused to get dunked on by my professors in college when I was lazy about in an essay. To be effective at All This Stuff, you can't just know what words to whisper to Claude. I think that might actually be the least important part of it. That's a thing you can learn as you go just by trying something, looking at the output, and changing your inputs to try to address them. Basic problem solving, right? Look at thing, change inputs to thing, observe outputs. But what I am learning, and this isn't a day-job observation it's an everything observation, is that this is a skillset we just don't select for. Maybe can't select for, even.

That makes it powerful, but it also makes it inscrutable, and I don't yet know how to know what it can definitely do versus probably do versus can't do. And to me that suggests a need for caution. It grinds at me that other people read that it means "fire 'em all".

Because "if I have to explain it to you as if you were an LLM, why am I not explaining it to an LLM?" is true.

But so is "an LLM can't answer that, that's why you have subject-matter-expert humans".

I have some pieces for this site in various stages of completion that'll explore this more, and I don't want to think too much about it for now, so we'll come back to that later.

Other stuff

Woodworking ended up taking a backseat this year because of various other interests popping up. I'll get back to it. There's still a cherry tabletop for a sideboard table sitting in clamps in my shop, and I did knock together a much nicer dust collection system this year, but just didn't get around to using it much; prime woodworking time got taken up by getting my eyes lasered open.

The 3D printed woodworking tools business, however, has kept ticking on with barely no attention needed aside from assembling them and throwing them into boxes. It's not a ton of money, but I enjoy the positive feedback. People saying "I didn't use a blade guard over the spinning 10" cutter right in front of my hands until I got this thing" is a good feeling, and it pays for a few other toys and experiments.

Speaking of 3D-printing-purchased tools, after significant debate the LLC behind the woodworking tools business bought a laser cutter. My thinking was to be able to expand into other areas: templates, jigs, etc. based on being able to laser out 1) bigger and 2) clear parts. But it turns out that the laser mostly drives me insane.

A 3D printer is not the most accurate tool in the world but it at least has meaningful reference positions because it prints out things relative to other things. Lasers can cut relative to other things, and that's obvious enough, but a big selling point is also being able to do stuff like engraving onto materials. Which you can do. But what's nearly impossible in any reasonable way on the xTool P2S is to do so and guarantee squareness relative to other stuff. Want to cut a square out of a bigger sheet and engrave on it? No problem. Want to engrave on something you can't cut (like, say, a 1" acrylic block)? Trying to actually find a reference angle for it is a mess; xTool's software only lets you align with terrible fisheye cameras and it can't even run a visible-light pattern over it first so you could see what would actually get cut. I didn't think I'd miss the dimensional accuracy of a 3D printer, but here I was.

Anyway. Quick and incomplete hits from the last few months at least, no research done, these yearly posts are just off the top of my head:

• My lovely wife and I collaborated on a Christmas gift for a friend of ours using the aforementioned cursed laser cutter: a set of coasters with laser etchings of all her dogs (and, because she dog-sits for us, ours). Gabby did the line art after I blew a gasket trying to etch photos; I bodged the laser into having something close to a right angle and then applied wood finish to the pieces. Came out great.

• Visited NYC for the first time since COVID. I want to get back to traveling for pleasure in 2026. In 2024 we went to Hawaii and that was a blast, and there's a lot of the country I haven't seen yet I miss international travel even more, but In The Current Political Climate I'm not sure about that..
• Finally made the jump from my beloved Panasonic Micro Four-Thirds to full-frame cameras this year. Taking pictures on a Nikon Z6 III is almost cheating and the fact that I can just throw around a 24-120mm f/4 as a daily driver lens is obscene. I've gotten into vintage lenses a little bit too—favorites being my only-slightly-radioactive SMC Takumar 35mm f/2 and my Helios 44-M6.
• In my continuing effort to not redo my entire house's HVAC, I found these window heat pumps. A couple years ago Frigidaire had a model much like these, but these are quieter, more efficient down to the lowest temperature Both work to 5° F, but the GE units blow hotter air when it's colder., and do not weigh a backbreaking amount. And right now, on Christmas sale, they're $399. A few of these are pushing off the aforementioned Replace The Steam Boiler disaster, maybe another year or two.
• The Society of Indexers published a very confident white paper saying that AIs could not possibly either perform or assist in performing indexing—like, back-of-the-book indexes—because ChatGPT Or Claude, or Gemini—assuming a little good faith they did try a number of different chatbots, but it does seem as though they never stopped to ask whether a chatbot was the right tool for the job. (spits) couldn't take an entire book as a file upload and return something useful. I built a proof of concept and liveblogged it on Bluesky in four days. The line from that proof of concept to actually Doing The Job is not that long; I don't want to compete with book indexers for a shrinking market, but like. Don't tell folks it can't be done. I have a blog post coming for this one.

So, yeah. A good year for me, mostly. But it doesn't feel good, and I've mostly dodged that in this piece. Part of why I like to write these, for myself and now publicly, is that taking stock of the year feels different than living through it. And it would be dishonest not to acknowledge at least in passing why even a good year feels bad. Misery-merchant types, both in the government and in our social spaces, have done better than most this year. This week brought comparisons of "human warehouses" to Amazon Prime from the federal government in ways that should mortally offend any thinking and feeling person. This is bad enough and a betrayal of what I grew up being told (by Republicans) this country's about: an imperfect society trying to be a better one. Which is pretty far from this. But, dogged and determined to Make Things Worse, the smug-prick commentariat piled right in afterwards to act surprised that feeling people were surprised. After all, wasn't America always like this? Hateable America, cause of suffering everywhere? The Great Satan of every single-neuron tankie prick?

Don't mistake me when I say that, though—I'm not equating the two. One is crime, deep and immoral; the other just fails at being vertebrate enough to stand for anything but they've got Bluesky accounts and want to farm engagement from rage. Both show as symptoms of something we have got ti fix: the treatment of real life like it's social media. We have to shake it if we're going to get out of all this.

So despite everything, so long and fuck off, 2025, and the same to everyone who ate well off of the events of the year. The clock ticks for you, and we will fix what you have broken.