2024 is over, finito, done and dusted. How will I rate it? Dunno.
I have written bits and pieces over the past year, and my objective in this post is to provide a brief and descriptive overview of 2024. That is, to provide a few numbers and let this year be the sum of its parts. I guess this was my plan for 2024 all along. No big ambitions. No noteworthy plans. Nothing ostentatious, and no nonlinear interactions between different aspects of my life. Or, in other words, for the first time in years … have no major things happening.
This has been the first year since 2018 with no significant changes in my life. No global pandemic. No moving between countries. No job changes. No career changes. Etc. Sure, a lot of things have happened, but it was a year of stability. Yet, it is funny how it can be a lot of work to not make things happen. In sum, I am happy with how the year went down, and I believe I am in a good place here at the end of the year.
A key goal for this year was to simplify things. I did a lot of cleaning in the beginning of the year, both in my digital life and my physical life. I deleted a lot of old files on Dropbox. I worked on simplifying my workflow. I threw out a lot of old stuff that I do not use anymore, and (relatively) new stuff that I did not care as much about as I had initially assumed I would. I deleted a lot of software, including RStudio, iTerm2, GitHub Desktop, NetNewsWire, Skype, Zoom, and Microsoft Teams. Similarly, I now keep my phone clean with a minimal number of apps, no messages in Messages and no photos in the camera roll.
I also decided to delete a lot of online accounts, including Instagram, Notion, Signal, Chess.com, Discord, Microsoft, mastodon.social, Last.fm, WordPress.com, Blogger.com, SoundCloud, and Bluesky. I am trying to remove social media from my life, but I did not get around to delete my Facebook and Twitter yet. I am not sure the world is a better place without such sites, but my life is. One possibility is to rely more on RSS feeds, but I also did some deep cleaning in my RSS feeds (from ~250 feeds at the beginning of the year to less than ten feeds now). I try to make more and more of my workflow publicly available, and here is the file with the few feeds I currently rely on. While I am sure I miss out on a lot now, I do not know what I miss out on and I do not really care.
I did consider going full Inbox Zero, i.e., not only having an empty inbox but also no archive at all. I talked to a colleague the other day who had deleted thousands of old mails and I felt very inspired. This could very well be a project for 2025. Similarly, I can see myself doing the same for a lot of files, including old photos. There is the risk of deleting things I will regret no longer having, but I do find it interesting to only keep the things I truly care about and ignore everything else.
I have not felt like writing a lot on the blog this year. I can boil it down to two specific reasons. First, I am doing most of my writing in the form of internal work these days – reports, documentation, code, etc. – and nothing that is made for a public audience. That is what I am getting paid for and what I care about. I have nothing to gain from writing anything here besides getting rid of whatever is on my mind. In other words, the role of this blog now is less about me sharing my thoughts with the world rather than archiving my thoughts.
Second, the more popular and advanced LLMs become, the less inclined I am to write. I enjoyed writing in public to a greater extent prior to ChatGPT and the like. I can imagine a lot of academics and bloggers – or people who write for a living in general – feel like that these years. The ability of LLMs to write well, and write better than most people (and definitely most academics), is changing how I see the relevance of writing. I can see a lot of posts I have written in the past that I would never have considered writing if ChatGPT had been a thing at that time. However, it is not only about the quality of writing, and if anything, it is all about the quantity and what we expect from writing now. For example, I agree a lot with the sentiment in this essay by Ted Chiang in the New Yorker: “The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.”
The first noteworthy thing happening this year in terms of writing was the publication of the 2nd edition of my Danish R book. I wrote a blog post (in Danish) on the changes from the 1st to the 2nd edition. I have a lot of ideas that could go into a 3rd edition, but do not expect it anytime soon (the sales of the 2nd edition could be better according to my publisher). Here is the book:
I wrote 42 blog posts in 2024 (including this one). This is less than a post a week and, in terms of my blogging in recent years, quite a weak year. For comparison, I wrote 33 blog posts in December 2022 alone (on topics related to effect sizes in political science, maps, models and meaning, Pret a Manger, Frasier, Seinfeld and Friends, etc.). My focus in terms of blogging this year has been on completing the drafts I had, and I am happy to say that – for the first time in years – there are no scheduled posts or drafts on my blog. It is completely empty. I cannot remember a time when this was the case.
The two posts I spent the most time on this year were An overview of ggplot2 themes and Unexpected events and causal inference. I have a lot of ideas to blog posts I would write if I had the time and motivation, but especially the latter is lacking. I can see that there has not been a single month since 2009 without at least one post, but 2025 could very well be a year with full months without any posts.
More importantly, I am satisfied with my work for the first time in years. I find it a lot easier to put most of my energy into my job, and relax when I am not working. In retrospect, the move from academia/consultancy to a product-based company should have happened a long time ago. I enjoy working with my colleagues, not only other data scientists, but also software engineers, UX designers, game developers, marketeers, etc. I can see some iteration of my career where I would have enjoyed a life in academia, but not everything can or should work out. Overall, while it should come as no surprise, and with the risk of sounding a bit bitter, it is interesting how beneficial it can be to surround yourself with people you can genuinely trust.
One of my plans for 2024 was to eat out more and, specifically, try out 52 new places (i.e., places I have never visited before). This turned out to be a lot easier than planned, and I quite early realised that I did not even need to keep count in order to make it. Here are the places I tried out this year (if no location is mentioned, the place is in Amsterdam): Café Kobalt, Oeuf, Van ‘t Spit, Orbit Restaurant & Lounge, House of Watt, SPA Wellness (Weesp), Café Amoi, Two Chefs FoodBar, Kailash Parbat, Van Mechelen, Genki Garden, Bar Botanique, Brouwerij Poesiat & Kater, Café Vrijdag, Lila, Beest Boulders Amsterdam, Orontes, Casa di David, Mitts, Kokohili, China Sichuan Restaurant, Tjin’s Exotische Broodjes, De Pizzabakkers, Bariloche, La Madonna Pizzeria, Lakhay, Bagels & Beans, Meram Café Oost, Vader Kleinjan Café (Rotterdam), Hannekes Boom, L’Atelier (Cabourg), La Sainte Catherine (Honfleur), Balthazar (Caen), Brasserie Du Forest (Bondues), Umashi (Odense), Gourmet Værkstedet (Odense), Anjappar, Oriental City, Plato Loco, De Vergulden Eenhoorn, Hard Rock Cafe Amsterdam, TonTon Club, Cannibale Royale, Indian Street Food & Co, Louie Louie, Yemen Restaurant & Coffee, Ons Backhuys (Weesp), The College Hotel, Restaurant Tehran, Wingman, Thuis aan de Amstel, TerraZen Café, Pizzeria Amarone, Bakers & Roasters, Mama Makan, Duende Dos, The Lions Head Gastropub & Brewery, Café Binnenvisser, Kaasbar, Showw, Burger Bar, Aloha Bowling, and Het Parool Theater.
The biggest change foodwise this year was that I reduced my coffee intake significantly. I now stick to a cup a day which is working well. There is some evidence of an association between high coffee consumption and the odds of dementia (e.g., Pham et al. 2022), and in general I believe it is an improvement to not drink too much coffee (when I was at my peak in 2024, I could consume around ten cups a day). I plan to stick to this habit in 2025.
I did not have a specific reading goal for 2024. I read more than a book a week on average, and I predicted that I would be well above 52 books at the end of the year, which I did. There is still a heavy bias towards non-fiction in my reading, but I picked up a few more books as audiobooks this year (for my short commute to work). Here is the number of books I have rated on Goodreads in 2024 compared to recent years:
Last year was somewhat of an outlier, and I am overall satisfied with my reading habits this year. A great non-fiction book from 2024 is The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris, Heartbreak, and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War by Erik Larson (what a great name – it is almost perfect). Books from 2024 that I planned to read but did not get to yet are The Art of Uncertainty by David Spiegelhalter and Intermezzo by Sally Rooney.
As always, some of the books I read turn out to be a waste of time. The worst non-fiction book from 2024, bar none, is Active Statistics: Stories, Games, Problems, and Hands-on Demonstrations for Applied Regression and Causal Inference. The book is convoluted to the point of being useless (a good example of how mediocre blog posts do not even result in a mediocre book) and the R code is “teaching” a lot of weird stuff, most likely unintentional (you should not find it relevant unless you have an interest in seeing how different packages and functions have been used to import SPSS files into R over the years). The book reads like it is written by an open source LLM trained on years of blog posts, especially when it comes to the structure (or lack hereof) and the R code.
I used to post a list of the books I have read in a given year (see, e.g., my posts for 2021 and 2022). I decided to not do that last year as it is much easier just to follow me on Goodreads. That being said, I am less and less pleased with Goodreads, especially since it is no longer possible to add books, so I do save a backup of my ratings in case I at some point in the future should feel like also deleting my account there as well.
For music, I still rely on Spotify, and my most listened songs in 2024 can be found in this post. I rely on a specific method I have used for several years now. I use a single playlist called ‘Musik’ (music in Danish). As soon as Spotify Wrapped is out, I remove all the songs that made it to my Spotify Wrapped from my playlist.
There is something funny about Spotify Wrapped when it comes out. When I go through the list of the 100 tracks, I do not feel anything special towards the songs, but that is exactly the point. I am deep into all the music I have listened to this year. Only when I get further away from the tracks, and do not listen to them regularly, I begin to associate them with the past, and a particular period of my life. So when I go back to the list from last year, I have a substantially different relationship with the list than I had when I checked it out for the first time last year. In other words, the Spotify Wrapped playlist is the personal soundtrack for my year. When I feel nostalgic about a specific year, say 2018, I simply go to that particular playlist.
The albums I enjoyed the most in 2024, that are also released this year, are The Love It Took to Leave You by Colin Stetson, Kiasmos by Kiasmos, LAFANDAR by Heems & Lapgan, Wake up and smell the petrichor by chazaiya, Night Palace by Mount Eerie, Chromakopia by Tyler, The Creator, Silence Is Loud by Nia Archives, Endlessness by Nala Sinephro, The New Sound by Geordie Greep, Bough by Deca & Dealz, Memoirs in Armour by Navy Blue, and The Thief Next to Jesus by Ka.
I watched 193 movies in 2024. In general, 2024 was a great movie year, and I got to watch a lot of good movies and some less good movies. My method here is quite simple. Try to watch more foreign movies and avoid new movies on Netflix like the plague. Here is an overview of the number of movies I have rated on IMDb over the past ten years:
Here are the best movies I have (re)watched this year (i.e., rated 8 or above on IMDb): 20 Days in Mariupol, 20.000 especies de abejas, A Cup of Coffee and New Shoes On, A Raisin in the Sun, Ah-ga-ssi, All of Us Strangers, American Fiction, An Cailín Ciúin, Anora, Au hasard Balthazar, Blue, Bound, C’è ancora domani, Challengers, Civil War, Dane-ye anjir-e ma’abed, Det sjunde inseglet, Die bitteren Tränen der Petra von Kant, Dune: Part Two, Elephant, For Sama, Gojira -1.0, Gunda, Hamlet, His Three Daughters, How to Have Sex, Io capitano, Kaibutsu, Keyke mahboobe man, Kuolleet lehdet, L’armée des ombres, La chimera, Lakposhtha parvaz mikonand, Life Is Sweet, Lone Star, Margaret, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, My Old Ass, Nin siu yat gei, Nu astepta prea mult de la sfârsitul lumii, Perfect Days, Poor Things, Rehana Maryam Noor, Roadrunner: A Film About Anthony Bourdain, Robot Dreams, Shahr-e ziba, Shayda, Sing Sing, Tatami, Taxi, The Act of Killing, The Corridors of Power, The Substance, To Die For, Tower, Vals Im Bashir.
I also watched some good TV shows this year. The best one was my rewatch of O.J.: Made in America from 2016. While an almost 8-hour long documentary (in which category it also won an Oscar), I do consider it a TV show. The documentary series released in 2024 I enjoyed the most was Den Sorte Svane (you do not need to be or understand Danish in order to find it interesting, but it helps). Other good mini series I watched this year include shows such as Connections (from 1978), Ripley and Baby Reindeer. Alas, I did not get to watch Say Nothing yet.
Among the better TV shows I watched this year are The Bear, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Parts Unknown, The Americans, Colin from Accounts, Couples Therapy, and Shōgun. I am still not done with the second season of House of the Dragon, but that will be a project for next year. That being said, I did not watch a lot of good TV series (I prioritised watching more movies), but that could change in 2025.
The game I played the most this year was chess (both online and OTB). I have played chess for many years and it should come as no surprise that I also played chess in 2024. There has not been a day this year where I have not thought about chess in some shape and form. This is not to say that my Elo rating is good (I am decent at best), but I enjoy the game. This year I have tried to keep up the motivation and make marginal improvements in my play. I tried to read a bit more about chess, improve my openings (e.g., stick to a few openings) and be a bit more strategic in my play (e.g., a bit more d4, a bit less e4).
I continued to play Vampire Survivors this year, primarily due to the new updates and DLC (this video can explain why I have played it for +100 hours). I also played Army of Ruin, which is very much a copy of Vampire Survivors. I would maybe even recommend Army of Ruin over Vampire Survivors. Army of Ruin is more polished and, at the end of the day, more fun. There are many different weapons, characters, trinkets, and charms to unlock – i.e., several hours of entertainment. The game is challenging without ever being difficult, with a lot of different builds to explore to ensure the game is not too repetitive. That being said, the few final hours put into this game was primarily to get all achievements.
Below is a figure with data from Steam Replay 2024 on my share of play time for each month throughout 2024. However, as Steam Replay does not cover all of December, it underestimates my play time in this month. The data shows that November was the month where I ended up playing the most on Steam.
The game I ended up spending most time on this year on Steam was Balatro (47% of my total play time on Steam). I like Balatro more than games such as Slay the Spire, and this article in PC Gamer is a good introduction to the game (and why it is better than other deckbuilding games). Other games I have played this year are Thronefall (my favourite tower defense game this year), Soulstone Survivors (the game was only fun for the first ~15 hours), Glyphica: Typing Survival, Plague Inc: Evolved (the opposite of Pandemic), Thank Goodness You’re Here! (this brief game is called a “love letter to Yorkshire“), 5D Chess With Multiverse Time Travel (a nightmare to play – see, e.g., this tutorial), Patrick’s Parabox (as I loved Sokoban as a child, it is no surprise that I really liked this game), Superliminal, The Witness, Beat Saber, DOOM, Stray, Citizen Sleeper (not as good a game as Disco Elysium, but still a great game), DiRT 4, and Mini Motorways (primarily due to the new updates in 2024).
I got new running shoes this year (my old ones were ~10 years old) as well as a smartwatch to keep track of my running. According to the stats, I am able to run a 20K in 1:51:11. I can imagine that I will be able to improve that if I feel like it. I am happy I decided to run a lot more in 2025, and this is something I hope to pick up again in 2025. I also picked up squash again on a weekly basis with some colleagues, and I plan to continue playing squash on a weekly basis in 2025. Finally, 2025 could be the year I try out yoga.
I went to the dentist for the first time in almost five years. This was one of the things I did not do during the pandemic (it was difficult getting an appointment in London and easy to ignore), and I am happy being back on track. In other words, this is one of the health habits I will like to continue in 2025, i.e., visit the dentist at least two times.
Well, here we are. What is the saying? Memory is a poet, not a historian. And time is moving forward in a brutal and relentless manner. I have little clue about how to make sense of the past, let alone the future. A recent study showed that life outcomes can be difficult to predict, and – at a personal level – that definitely seems to be true. Let’s see what 2025 will bring – if anything.
On that note, do not expect a similar post next year. The medium is the message.