2024: Year in Review

December 31, 2024

Attempted a 51 mile walk around the perimeter of SF. Many friends joined along the way, even for just a mile. I felt like a bus managing a timetable, picking people up and dropping them off. At mile 42, I made the mistake of sitting down for a few minutes, and my muscles tensed up and I legitimately could not walk. I gave up! But successfully retried it later in October, walking from 7 AM to 2 AM. Thanks to Patrick, Theo, and especially Aadil for joining me and the moral support! Because it was painful!!
Biked from San Francisco to Los Angeles with Nate, Elliot, Alex and Cooper. It was just an incredible 10 days. We were along the coast most of the way. I've done plenty of long bike rides, but never any overnight ones. My body was not used to consuming and expending so many calories. Saw a wild tarantula, ate so many meals in small town family-run restaurants, and was overjoyed to end the trip at the Westwood CAVA (why can't CAVA come to SF?!)
Jacky created a Socratica node in San Francisco. Every Sunday, a group gets together and works on passion projects for a few hours. It's been a really nice staple in my routine and grateful for the people there.
Saw the eclipse in Illinois with a bunch of friends. I usually don’t care that much about natural phenomenons, like landscapes or stars, but this was SO beautiful. I was tearing up. The light seeping out behind the moon. And the energy of everyone in a random field yelling out with joy.
Dealt with back pain. It hurt to walk and even lay down in bed for a few months. Really, really bad. Going to my doctor and a chiropractor didn't help. I thought it was pain in my tailbone because of bad posture. After Gytis forced me to talk to Claude in depth about what was going on, we narrowed it down to weak glute muscles, probably from sitting down for way too long at once. Did lots of stretches targeting the glutes and feeling great now! (if you slouch or sit for way too long, STOP! YOU WILL PAY FOR YOUR SINS EVENTUALLY! YOU ARE NEVER TOO YOUNG!)
Ran 4x4x24 (4 miles, every 4 hours, for 24 hours) with Will, Adi, and others.

Pursuit

Pursuit: 15 friends and I made an extremely elaborate, month-long IRL scavenger hunt all over San Francisco. Each of us worked on one of 11 clues. Over a thousand people played at least one clue, and over 200 solved all of them. (And to put it into perspective, each clue took 1-2 hours minimum to solve). It developed sort of a cult following, which was CRAZY! Enormous thanks to Athena, Danielle, Danielle, Theo, Patrick, and SO MANY other friends that graciously created clues, playtested, lent us equipment, gave their time, and the 12 local businesses that let us invade their storefronts. San Francisco is back!!!

Pursuit

Ice Spice flag: this culminated from a couple of realizations, with Shreyas and Anton: a) pink American flags with Ice Spice's face on them are mass produced, b) there are lots of empty flagpoles around the city, and c) you can just rent a boom lift for $100.
Solo traveled to Japan. My first time in Asia. Didn't really do touristy things and wanted to see what it was like to live there. Walked around for hours in random directions, tried a bunch of restaurants and went into so many grocery stores.
Freeze mob: with Shreyas, re-enacted my favorite YouTube video, where a mob of people froze in place at the same time for 5 minutes in New York. This time we did it with 100+ people in Golden Gate Park. People got creative with their poses.
Bayblade: had the honor of helping Arielle at her spontaneous beyblade tournament. She is a force. I did the A/V and livestreaming.
I can be spotted in this Daily Show segment. They didn't include anything I said (bruh) but it was really cool to see it finally air. This was taped in NY in 2022 (feels like a lifetime ago).
Moved into a wonderful new apartment with great friends.
Fast Food Index refresh: rebuilt my site for tracking the wildly variable prices of fast food across America. It now updates automatically, and I added a lot more chains.
Bop Spotter: mounted an Android phone high up on a pole in the Mission. It's running Shazam 24/7, and picks up songs people blast on the street below. The Washington Post wrote about it.
IMG_0001: I read this blog about how there are so many unedited, wholesome videos on YouTube with default filenames (like IMG_0001). So I scraped the web and found millions of these kinds of videos, and made a little website to watch them randomly. You really feel every kind of emotion watching them, and the spontaneity of never knowing what you'll see next hooks into natural human curiosity. Somebody called it a "dementia simulator." Astounding that over 600k people used the site the first week it was up. The Washington Post also wrote about this.
Citi Bike scraping: I was scraping the movements of Citi Bikes in New York for a future dataviz project. A few weeks later, the UHC CEO was killed and the police said that the assassin fled on a Citi Bike, so I scrambled to look through my database and find where he maybe went. I tweeted a possible dock he may have gone to (turns out this wasn't right, the police later clarified it wasn't a Citi Bike). The online mob came after me hard! It was very amusing and very frustrating. People joked I looked like the assassin (haha), and other people said I was the assassin (wtf). And The Washington Post wrote about this, too?!
Ord: made a novel iOS app that takes advantage of the gyroscopes/accelermeters in AirPods to give you turn-by-turn, spatial walking directions. Instead of hearing "turn left" like you would in Google Maps, you hear an ambient noise on the left side of your head, and the sound changes as you turn. It's really cool to me because it's a lot more passive. It feels like following a friend. My train of thought doesn't get interrupted by the sound. And it's a lot more precise, especially in the woods when you arrive at a 6-way intersection of unnamed trails. This is 95% done and will launch very soon. I got sidetracked with other stuff at the end of the year.
Numerous.ai, Mehran and I's startup, is chugging along on autopilot and is now a lifestyle business as of this month. Itching to start something new for the long-term. Not sure what shape that'll take yet. But I'm excited.

Writing this on a plane to Europe. Spending Christmas and New Year's with family in Spain. Will be in SF for 2025!