The year 2022 is over and we begin a new year.

This felt like the first full “normal” year since COVID. As far as I can tell my day to day was not impacted by the virus in 2022. In reflection 2020 and 2021 bleed together into one long and strange year because of the effects COVID had on everyone’s life.

I skimmed my 2022 reading list. An Island To Myself was the best book I read. The worst book is The Hard Thing about Hard Things. While I rated Atlas Shrugged below The Hard Thing I think Atlas Shrugged while being a hot mess of a novel at least gave me something to think about. The Hard Thing about Hard Things did not. I’ve enjoyed logging my books on this blog and will continue to do so in 2023. In 2022 I didn’t read a solid “self help” style book. I have three sitting on my shelf. I will make it a goal to read at least one this year.

I’d like to post more updates to this public weblog. I do keep a sort of quarterly journal with more private thoughts and personal goals. I think at least three public entries a year is a good amount. I had basically zero posts. in 2022 which is pretty disappointing

The grammar and clarity of the writing on this weblog is fairly terrible. As a writer I have a lot of room to improve. I accept that the cost of improving is doing some bad writing.

2022 included more sail boating. I went from student to instructor fast as my local sailing club needs involved sailors to teach sailing. I enjoyed being part of the instruction. The problem I had was its difficult to balance sailing, work and family. Teaching sailing school is a big commitment. I get rewards from it in meeting new people and getting to sail more. I’m also hopeful it will help bring the sailing club back from the brink of irrelevancy. I get frustrated when I feel like its all wasted effort. That sailing is a dead sport of a older time before X-Box and Netflix.

I do feel like I made some new friends at the sailing club. This gives me a bit of a social outlet which is good since I work from home. Being home all the time can be lonely and this helps combat that.

This will be my last year living full time with my oldest daughter. She will graduate in the spring and likely head to college in fall 2023. This is a huge change. I still have two other daughters home so this doesn’t mean the end of parenting.

I have a few big picture thoughts. Mostly because I listened to a lot of Lex Fridman podcasts this year.

One of my disappointments of 2022 is I no longer believe we’ll have autonomous cars soon. I’ve noticed some key people of have moved on to new challenges. George Hotz has left Comma.ai and Andrej Karpathy no longer works at Tesla.

My perspective right now is that the seeming failure of self driving cars does not yet indicate a larger failure of AI and another impending AI winter. OpenAI’s ChatGPT product while not perfect is fairly useful. I’ve toyed with it a bit using it to explain text passages in a text book I’m having a hard time understanding. I’ve had it do minor code review as well. Its clearly useful. I do think its status as a “Google Killer” is unlikely. Right now I see it as additive to rather then replacing Google. As things like GPT3 find more and more practical applications I do see people using these tools more and more in their daily lives. Some of what I think hamstrings them is the scale and expense of building these things. I believe training ChatGPT took tens of millions of dollars and running the full model requires a great deal of memory. AI is at the “workstation stage” right now… What comes next could be interesting. We are likely at or approaching peak AI “hype” though. A lot of this could be smoke and not actually fire.

There’s some interesting Geopolitical trend lines that may start to intersect in 2023. Russia’s war in Ukraine continues to show the massive decline of the Russian empire. Its also triggering military build ups in places like Japan and South Korea. Can these countries rely on the USA to protect them from China? This is unclear. The USA and China appear to be more and more on collision course. I don’t think the status quo will be disrupted in 2023, but I worry we are one year closer to it happening.

2022 is the year I gave up on most crypto beyond Bitcoin. I continue to invest in bitcoin because I feel like its a valuable thing to have a unregulated medium of exchange between all people, but in practice we’re a long way off from this actually working. I’m hopeful the crypto story is not over, but only time will tell.

I’ve learned I’m fairly terrible at predictions. So I’m actually making any for 2023. My List of bad predictions in the past include:

• Donald Trump will never be president
• Why would you ever what an iPad?
• Self Driving Truck will be completed by 2020
• Bitcoin peaked in 2017
• countless others…

Have a great 2023!