I feel a bit detached from my resolutions for last year. Like I have to drag myself into considering them. A quick review.

1. Health

I’ll give myself a “does not meet expectations”. It sounds bad when I put it like that, huh. Well, I was below my 189 weight target for 4/12 months of the year. Yearly average 189.3 so it wasn’t a complete disaster. So, maybe given your typical performance review grade inflation we’d call this a “meets expectations”, but the sort of meeting expectations where you hint that you really do expect more out of them.

Basically, I can tell I’m backsliding. I need to step this back up in 2024.

2. Astronomy

The seticore software I’ve been working on is running at a few different radio telescopes around the world. We have a publication for the SETI work at Green Bank (West Virginia) here and also one for the work at the VLA (New Mexico) here.

Not one for MeerKAT unfortunately. The MeerKAT pipeline isn’t as operational as I’d like it to be. I feel like progress on this is mostly out of my hands, at this point, though.

3. AI

I’ve been working on an AI project that I’m really excited about. My mental energy is going into this right now. I haven’t actually launched something usable as I was hoping to. I feel like I don’t quite know how to set goals, or how to tie progress into goals here. But I want to write that sentence in a very positive, mentally engaged way. Maybe this requires its own blog post.

4. Spanish

I completely cannot read Ficciones in Spanish. This is just many levels above my Spanish ability. I’ve continued to Duolingo and got a few books of varying difficulty, but after trying I realized that not only can I not read Ficciones, I can’t read things that are a more casual-adult level.

I don’t really feel bad about this as much as I feel like I completely underestimated how hard I would find this to be.

This year I have plans to travel to both Mexico and Costa Rica, so perhaps I’ll try to chat more with the locals, use my medium Spanish skills in a rewarding way. I’m going to kind of downgrade this as a goal, though. More like something to just do for fun rather than something to remind myself to work on, any more than the Duolingo notification ping. Honestly that is a pretty good compromise, just spend a couple minutes daily keeping it warm and reminding myself that foreign languages exist.

5. Secret resolution

Went great, really fantastic. Trust me.

Now what?

I really want to make this AI project work. I want to be focused. It feels like a mistake to put anything else at “resolution level” for 2024. And yet I have a hard time setting specific goals, or even explaining the current state of things.

I’ve been delaying the past few weeks talking about resolutions partially because of my inability to express this well. The best I have is, in lieu of “specific 2024 resolutions” I would like to express that I intend to focus on AI this year, and I promise to write another blog post by the end of February about this AI project.