Working on that 2025 reflection post
Sunday weblog notes from January 4, 2026 that were compiled and shared.
Within this functional journal writing framework in 2026, I’m going to continue with the weekly weblog post structure. That means throughout the week I’m going to open a single Google Doc entry and write whatever is going to get written that week with the potential that during the weekend I produce the entry all at once or it gets written iteratively throughout the week. That is how this is going to continue going as we move forward. I think the weekly post format is better than the daily weblog effort. It’s more targeted and it means that you are going to get more than just a paragraph a day of content which intellectually seems like a better path forward.
Last week I took a week off from writing a weblog post. It was the end of the year and I just felt like it was time to rest and recover from the year. This week we are right back into the thick of things. We got some snow and high winds in Denver, Colorado during the winter holiday. We had such high winds that the gate and a couple of fence posts just blew over. Last week, I ended up having to buy a couple 4x4’s from the hardware store to replace fence posts. We got lucky that the weather was cooperating enough to allow pouring several bags of concrete in December. We had to get out the posthole digger and deal with some pretty chilly ground during the digging process. Ultimately, we built a new section of fence and the perimeter is now once again secure.
This is not the first time I have sat down and tried to write a 2025 reflection post. Some false starts did happen. Today I sat down to write out some end of year thoughts. Maybe I just don’t have any interest in recapping 2025. That is entirely possible. A bunch of people are probably just ready to move on 2026 and that is an okay outlook to have at this point. Maybe at some point in the future, I’ll be ready to write a more indepth reconsideration of 2025, but I just don’t see that happening any time soon.
I did spend a bunch of time (several hours) working on a paper called, “Post-Training Canonicalization via Continuous Multi-Teacher Distillation.” I even ended up with a draft of the paper over in Overleaf in full LaTeX format. I let the code for that one run for over an hour this morning and then sat down to watch the NFL Sunday morning pregame show on Fox using my OTA antenna. The broadcast signal looks pretty good and this is the primary way that I end up watching NFL football broadcasts. We pretty much watch whatever is on CBS or Fox and sometimes ABC. I’m going to circle back to the paper later this afternoon and read it again, but I need some time to pass to be able to pick it back up for deeper consideration. I need to figure out how to make a run pattern for the code that just uses 60 minutes of compute at a time so I can really dig into what is happening. Another alternative would be to buy some extra compute to test the code on a more powerful system.