Dilip 28 Dec 2023 ======================================================================== 2023. It's the end of 2023. I thought I should first tell you all that I'm alive, I'm still here and I'm doing alright. 2023 has been crazy for me, a lot of things have happened - some good, some not so good, and so, it's time to review this year. The big stuff. ============== The most significant change for me in 2023 is that I changed jobs. I still do the same thing I've was previously doing (embedded systems, autonomous vehicles, etc). The new job is fun, I don't think the new team is as social as what we had at the old job. But the old job no longer exists, that company itself no longer exists - so it doesn't matter I suppose. One of my best friends got married and another of my best friend is about to get married. That makes me the last person in our graduating class to be single, and boy am I single. There aren't any dating prospects on the horizon at the moment. I have no idea how any of this will resolve itself, and I'll be lying if I said I am completely at ease with the way things are going right now. My parents spent some time with me this year and it's probably the best my relationship with my parents has been in a decade easily. They've learned to treat me as an adult and I've learned to ignore them when they're being unreasonable. Clearly everything isn't perfectly ok with us, but hey - this is a great place to be considering the past decade. Finally, I have started thinking about what I want my next career move to be a little more seriously. I'm a builder at heart and I know I want to keep building things that people want and need. I've been playing with the idea of starting my own firm and building products myself and running my own business. I've spent over 8 months writing code (and throwing away a lot of it) looking for a good business opportunity that I can meet with my skills. So far, no real breakthrough but I remain optimistic. The little stuff. ================= I read a bunch of amazing books this year. Complexity by Mitchell Waldop is probably the most influential book I've read in 2023. It's an old book with old ideas, but they were completely new to me. I can strongly recommend it. The next most interesting book I read was probably The Box by Marc Levinson. It's a book on intermodal containers (think shipping containers) and was far more interesting than my initial expectations going into the book. Finally, I managed to read the UK edition of Forge of the High Mage by Ian C Esselmont and it lived up to the rest of the series. I had a ton of fun reading it. In terms of music, I discovered that I like Lana Del Rey this year. Yes, I've been living under a rock, I hadn't checked out much of her work before and she is very very mainstream. Despite all of this, I really like her work. I get where she is coming from. She feels authentic, a very rare trait in song writers these days. If she is faking any of this, she's doing a real good job of it - so much so that I'd be skeptical that anyone can fake soo many nuances so convincingly about aspects of a lifestyle that only a few people actually experience. Frieren is absolutely the best thing on TV this year. It's an incredible anime with fantastic execution behind it. The stories are beautiful. The characters are layered and complex. The relationships are delicately handled. It's a work of art, highly recommend. I do not recall anything else from this year as being particularly memorable in terms of television or film. ChatGPT-4 is obviously the most significant new technology in 2023. In terms of actual use and impact, the only other new technology I can think of that had the same order-of-magnitude impact was probably github copilot. This technology is real, it matters a lot and do not let the free chatgpt-3.5 version sway your opinion on this technology. This is the real deal.