End of year reader questions

Last Thursday post of the year! This is in celebration to us surviving 2024, and also me getting mostly over that surprise bout of food poisoning.

And a couple of people sent in some questions that would be interesting to answer. So here we go in no particular order.

How do you see your role or interactions with data changing in 2025?

Due primarily to the organization needs at my work in Cloud related stuff, I've been leaning harder into the UX portion of my job title than the Quantitative piece. Sure, I'll do the usual quant-y research and analysis activities but I don't think things will change over the usual stuff. For the next few months, I'll probably be working less hands on with data and more getting teams to understand their user experience better.

That said, I'll probably be touching some dirty classifier models and using the occasional LLM to manipulate things, so I can at least claim to be "up with the times"... right?

If someone gave you 6 months paid time off work and you had to use it to make a video game, what kind of game would you make?

Ooooh... I'd probably utterly fail at finishing a game without a significant amount of help, 6 months of pay or not... But I think the one game I would really like to see make a return, even if I had to sit up and do it myself... is a remake of the classic Sim Ant! That said, just looking at the Wikipedia post on the game while writing this, apparently someone has put a spiritual successor game out in 2024, but it's an RTS and I want just a sandbox sim like from my childhood

If you could time travel to the past, what advice would you give to your younger self?

I'd probably tell myself to keep working on learning how to write mathematical proofs until it finally clicks, because it is a fairly fundamental skill that I've bumped up against at various points in my life that has always made me wonder what lies beyond that barrier. I don't think it'll have any particular effect on my life or career trajectory, since industry rarely has to write proofs, but hitting that wall does put a limitation on how deep you can go into mathematics.

But otherwise, the fact that "life has a way of working out" was something I have always sorta relied on in my rather haphazard journey into adulthood and a career, so it's not something I think I need to tell myself. That's allowed me to live a life relatively sheltered from excessive pressure, even if it means not having a plan. I do give that advice to others quite often, so I'll mention it here.

When you are gonna stop fixing things in the house?

Um, I wish I knew. At this point I'd be happy if we finished in February and I can finally unpack. But the list of "things to repair/upgrade after the big job is done" is already growing... *cry

What new hobbies are on the docket for 2025?

Once the house is done renovating and I can finally have my office/workspace, I have two things I want to do:

First, unpack the resin 3d printer I've had for 2 years but never used because I didn't have room for it, not to mention the highly toxic chemicals involved aren't something I wanted with a 3 year old kid zooming around. Now that the kid is older and more responsible I can start using it. That'll let me print out casting wax models of what I hope will be jewelry settings and stuff. At least that is the dream. I'm pretty 'meh' at CAD/Rhino3D.

Second, I've been too busy to work on jewelry work, but with room for a tiny bench, I'd like to at least get much much better at working with silver soldering and making the little findings and things to hold the various stones I have lying around in storage.

Finally, all the above metalwork stuff is because I want to get back to the gem cutting machine and do some fun designs. I definitely want to try making a set of dice out of the synthetic spinel and ruby boules I have lying around. I still have to figure out how do the numbers though... the one example I've seen involves a sand/bead blasting setup which I do not own. They're pricy for what would wind up being a one-off project. If I go this route, then I'd have to come up with a bunch of uses to make it not a one-off project tool...

Or maybe I can use a tumbler and abrasive media...

Wait, I also need a vinyl cutter to do accurate masking for the sandblasting... and if I go down that route wouldn't it be worth it to get a vinyl sticker printer? Or skip the blade cutter and go for lasers!

Okay, I definitely don't have the budget to go down that route, but this is how I wind up with a giant list of hobbies.