Weeknote #67 (20260104-20260110)

meta

Re-entry: this week was a really long year, y’all.

did

  • Back on the rower on Monday …and then again on Wednesday; also made it to the gym twice, go me
  • With some assistance from TheWife, I rebuilt our storm-damaged fence; we also cleaned up some of the debris pile from the partially demolished tree house that’s been hanging out in the yard for a year or two. Unfortunately, that work came to a rapid end when I stepped on a rusty nail in one of the boards — fortunately, the urgent care visit was pretty quick…

read

  • “2025: The year in LLMs”

    I also think we’re going to see a real split in the tech industry (and everywhere code is written) between people who are outcome-driven and are excited to get to the part where they can test their work with users faster, and people who are process-driven and get their meaning from the engineering itself and are upset about having that taken away.

    This framing was helpful for me in terms of understanding some of my thoughts in this area, although I still think it leaves hanging the obvious question (at least, obvious to this process princess): if you don’t understand the process that built your software, how do you trust that you actually have the outcome you wanted and not something else?

  • “2025: The Exit Interview”, by the frequently-cited-herein Dank Sinker, resonated, as the kids say:

    I’ve spent some time over the last week reflecting back on this year, and the word I keep coming back to is “unrelenting.” It has been an unrelenting year from start to finish. Unrelenting at a global level, unrelenting at a national level, unrelenting at a local level, and unrelenting at a personal level. Every single time I thought there would be a break, some new level of hell would rise up.

  • Via Dan “Flutterby” Lyke, “AI will compromise your cybersecurity posture”

    LLM-based systems are insanely complex, both on the conceptual level, and on the implementation level. Complexity has real cost and introduces very real risk. These costs and these risks are enormous, poorly understood – and usually just hand-waved away.

  • I’ve also been trying to get back into reading some books (I know, whoa, crazy talk), via the The StoryGraph’s January reading challenge. I’m currently rotating between Tiny Habits and Lauren Ipsum, trying to do at least one chapter in one of them every night

  • My unread bookmark queue currently sits at 200

watched

  • The New Airs cover U2’s “With Or Without You”, which is just lovely
  • TheWife and I are still grinding on Criminal Minds; currently in S13
  • TheWife, Mx19, and I kicked off a Lasso re-watch, but I doubt we’re going to make it too far before the kid heads back to school

cooked

Back to a more normal cooking schedule:

  • Tuesday: cronchy tacos
  • Wednesday: roast chicken, green beans
  • Thursday: tuna fish sammies

looking forward to

At this point, I’m honestly not sure what I’m looking forward to…