I recently read A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki. The story is told through two narrators, Nao, a teenager living in Japan, and Ruth, a Japanese writer living on a remote island off the coast of Canada with her husband, Oliver. Ruth finds a diary written by Nao, through which we learn about Nao’s story alongside Ruth and Oliver. (Spoilers to follow!) Throughout the book, I found Nao’s story to be the much more compelling one.

Two years ago, ChatGPT burst onto the scene. Since then, there has been a lot of hype about ChatGPT and generative AI more broadly, as well as discussions surrounding how this technology will change work as we know it. One of the more surprising takes I’ve seen floating around is the idea that AI1 will allow workers to work less by virtue of increasing productivity. I think it’s pretty unlikely that this is going to come to pass.

I recently came across some interesting stories about data that I thought were good examples of how data can be misleading. The first story is this thread on X (Twitter), in which Ben Schmidt critiques a recent tweet/Financial Times article from John Burn-Murdoch.1 John cites and extends analysis from an economics paper that argues that books have begun talking less about “progress and future” and more about “caution, worry, and risk” over the last 60 years based on data from the Google Ngram project.

Happy new year! Today, I thought I’d share a list of books I’ve enjoyed reading in recent years. I last posted about my favorite books in 2019 and I’ve read more books since then, so here are some more of my recommendations. I hope you find something you also enjoy reading from the list. Fiction The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller - A retelling of Homer’s Iliad, it’s a captivating love story set in Greek mythology.

I use a note-taking app at work called Obsidian, but only recently did I get around to learning how to use more of its functionality. For the uninitiated, Obsidian is a note-taking app that uses markdown, which is a markup language that’s simple to learn and readable.1 The advantage of a markup language is that it makes your formatting explicit in what you write. If you’ve ever struggled with manually adjusting unexpected indentations, spacings, etc.