Published on 2025-12-31, 734 words
Of course, my biggest accomplishment this year was - with the help of many other people - raising a baby human who is now almost a year old.
Like many in the industry, the new tool in my toolbelt is AI, which really landed this year. (Or, maybe I was just a late adopter.) It’s gone from a curiosity to a near-daily tool for coding and writing.
My “AI Ethics” post from June still holds; the post you’re reading now was written “raw”. While that particular post was a bit of a ragepost, I have found a nice side effect of AI transparency is that it promotes sharing and collaborative learning across a team of AI users. I continue to strongly recommend to everyone to overshare prompts and experiments.
While at work I stick with big state-of-the-art models (working at AWS has its perks, such as basically unlimited Bedrock usage for anything work-related) - I continue to experiment with local-first LLM tools right here on my own RTX 4070. Maybe more in this space coming in the future…
I wrote a few blog posts - actually one big blogpost that I had to split up (2025-10-02, 2025-10-03, 2025-10-04) - about PrimeGrid. It’s not much of a hobby (there’s not that much active work involved, as I’m not writing any of the programs, just running them) but it’s fun to see results. My hardware found four prime numbers this year.
7177*22316670+1 (697,392 decimal digits)361467126131072+1 (1,121,724 digits, now 1351st largest known prime)745*24023044+1 (1,211,060 digits, 1048th largest)73597220262144+1 (2,062,251 digits, 359th largest)The broader PrimeGrid project made some significant discoveries this year, like the discovery of the largest non-Mersenne prime at 13 million digits, and the largest compositorial mega prime. My negative results and sieving, along with hundreds of other people, were a small part of these discoveries!
Back in 2023, I ran two marathons, but fell out of the running habit due to various excuses. Fast-forward to November 2025: as sometimes happens to people in their 30s, I stepped on a scale and saw a number I did not like. I have resumed running 3 times a week, with supplementary biking. Importantly, I gave myself something to train for (other than making the number on the scale go down): in April 2026, I will have the privilege of running a 15K with my dad, who is actively running (more than me) in his 60s!
I rekindled an interest in a classic PC game, Sid Meier’s Civilization 2 (1996). There is a small but active community between the CivFanatics forum and a Discord server.
As of 2025, there’s no way to legally purchase a new copy or license of Civ2. While there’s lots of interest - see this petition on GoG - there is apparently some copyright ambiguity that’s prevented a reissue. I luckily, ahem, “found an old CD” and fired it up. Unlike many games from its era, Civ2 runs flawlessly on modern computers; natively in modern versions of Windows, and in WINE for Linux or macOS. The programmers did a nice job of future-proofing the UI; it scales automatically and looks quite nice on modern high-resolution displays.
Some community members have been working on a open-source Civ2-compatible engine. I myself have been able to contribute a few simple features and fixes. While it’s still early, it’s impressive what axx0 and company have accomplished, and I’m very excited to be a small part of it.
As a creative outlet, I spent some time this year creating a mod for Civ2 - one based on another childhood favorite, Escape Velocity Nova. You can download it from CivFanatics or github.
The most interesting part of this project was adapting the ship sprites. I started with shipyard images from EV Nova itself, with some manual touch-up work after scaling down and recoloring to match Civ2’s color palette. I don’t have much practice with pixel art but learned some tricks like dithering (zoom in on the green rebel destroyers in the top left corner of the screenshot).
Pass! “A goal for 2025: Learn to animate” (2025-01-02) didn’t age well - I haven’t touched Manim since I wrote the examples in this post. I make no promises for 2026. I guess, except that race I’m already signed up for.