Brian Keng

  • 2025 Year-In-Review

    Personal

    Family: The big news this year was the birth of my second daughter at the beginning of the year! I was fortunate to be able to take a few months off to help with the baby. I experienced the usual things: sleep deprivation, explosive poops, and touching moments that melt your heart. The big difference with my second daughter is that on average her temperament is a lot more relaxed. She sleeps relatively well, she’s pretty calm around strangers, and she’s pretty happy all around. I couldn’t ask (or imagine) for a better family life with kids at this age. The first year with a baby is always tough because babies are so dependent on you but nothing new to write home about. The only thing I’ll mention is that I have even less free time than I did before. I’ve been told this many times, but to experience it viscerally now is something else. It’s pretty much the theme of these reviews in recent years but to an even greater extent. I’m proud to say I’m feeling pretty good about the time I’m dedicating to my family.

    Friends: I can’t say that I’ve done much with my friends this year. It’s mostly been about family and work. I keep dreaming of a day when I do more socializing with friends but it’s still outside of my reach for now. Young kids take a lot of time from you, and this is just the place I am in my life right now. I’m blessed to have some old friends whom I can ask for forgiveness. Let’s hope that I can make a bit more time for this in the new year.

    Fitness: Mid-year I’ve started a new fitness routine. I’m now very clear on my fitness goals: longevity and injury prevention. To that end, I’ve found compound calisthenic exercises a really good match because they serve both purposes. I’ve been training chin-ups for a while now and adding a full range of motion from a dead hang has really helped. Just hanging in general is also great to decompress the spine and strengthen grip. But the game changer for me was when a friend recommended gymnastics rings. They are so versatile, help prevent injury, and build incredible strength. One key feature of the rings is the stabilization that is needed, which work all your small stabilizer muscles and in turn prevents injury. Similarly, it’s much easier to go through your entire range of motion, which is also huge benefit for injury prevention. On the rings, I’m doing a front support, assisted dips, and push-ups so far. I’m just hanging the rings off my chin-up frame so I can’t do anything too exotic for the moment.

    Continuing on this calisthenics trend, I’ve also started doing ATG split squats, which is basically doing a very deep, forward split leg squat. It works the entire range of motion, which again helps with stabilizers and joint health. I’ve added a bit of weight as I’ve gained strength to add more load (generally, it’s harder to work legs with just pure calisthenics), and I’m feeling pretty good about it helping me toward my goals.

    Besides the added strength, one theme all these exercises have in common is that they work the entire range of motion with some weight. I’ve found this is the most effective way to stay loose. Static stretching loosens muscles temporarily, but if you’re not loading muscles through a range of motion, they just go back to what they’re used to. The genius of calisthenic exercises is that they are a form of weighted dynamic stretching that teaches your muscles to stay flexible. It’s the perfect combo for me: strength, flexibility, and injury prevention all in one exercise! Besides the above exercises, I sometimes will do various lighter calisthenics while I’m playing with my daughter on the floor, mainly for flexibility. It’s still pretty new for me, but I’m optimistic that this could be a long term routine for me.

    Health: A couple of things to call out here. First on nutrition: I’ve been trying to switch to a more protein heavy diet. One of my biggest problems is that I have a tendency to overeat, which often manifests when I’m hungry (or sometimes bored). I’ve found eating a lot of protein is the easiest and healthiest way for me to prevent hunger. It also has the added benefit of promoting muscle growth. Now on most days, I have a protein shake in the morning, which adds 35g or so of protein to my diet. I’m aiming for at least a 100g, and it’s really hard to hit without a supplement. I should be aiming for more, but it’s a bit too inconvenient at the moment.

    Along with a protein shake, I’ve also been taking creatine. This is a very common supplement for improving endurance during weight training (to train longer, thus build muscle faster) but I don’t work out that much so it’s not that relevant for that purpose. What I am very interested in is the cognitive benefits. Apparently there have been recent studies that show increased cognitive performance, especially for sleep deprived individuals, which seem exactly appropriate, for say, parents of newborns? It’s hard to say if it’s working well since my baby is a relatively good sleeper (not perfect though), but I have observed that I have been able to function okay even though I’m a bit sleep deprived. Anyways, creatine has been studied for decades so I’m not too concerned about any negative side effects.

    The second item about health to discuss is my skin. I’ve had, what doctors would say, is clinically mild/moderate eczema for my entire life, although at times during my youth it’s both felt and looked much worse. For the most part, it was fine and I could manage it. However, in the last year or two, it seemed to have got much worse. It’s probably some combination of getting older, COVID, and other random things. Lucky for me, I have a dermatologist in the family who has been helping me through it.

    In the last 10 years or so there have been amazing advances in drugs for eczema that have made a huge difference in my skin condition. None of these were available when I was suffering as a child, and I’m blown away that this chronic skin condition can now be managed so effectively. The first drug that has made a huge difference for me is a biologic called Dupixent, which was approved in Canada in 2017. Since it’s a “large molecule” biologic, it needs to be injected and requires some work to get approved through insurance, but it’s made a huge difference for me. The minor inconvenience of injection and procurement is a totally reasonable trade-off for me. Conceptually, biologics target specific biological pathways that cause the disease versus the broad effects of other types of drugs. Why would you want to use a hammer when a scalpel will do? Science for the win!

    Dupixent resolved a large part of my symptoms but I still had persistent inflammation on parts of my face and scalp. Two things I discovered. First, I developed an allergy to a common chemical found in personal cleansing products called MCI/MI. It turns out this is super common in hand soaps, shampoos and other rinse-off products. In fact, the shampoo I’ve been using for decades has it! You would think that I would’ve developed resistance to it, but it turns out it was the opposite. This chemical is banned in leave-on products in Canada, but still exists in rinse-off products. It’s added because it creates a good lather, but it is well known to cause issues for many people’s skin. Second, my allergic reaction to this chemical is pretty bad and long lasting, and the only thing that seems to help (after cycling through a few different creams) is a relatively new cream called Zoryve, approved in 2023! It boggles my mind that if I had this issue a few years earlier there wouldn’t be anything available to help me. Medical science progresses and we only seem to notice when it affects us or someone close to us. Thank goodness for modern medicine!

    Writing and Hobbies: Haven’t really done anything in the past year given all the above. The only thing I’ve been spending spare cycles on is AI, which I have a new section dedicated to below.

    Professional

    RBC Borealis: In addition to the change I mentioned last year, RBC has publicly announced that they are targeting to generate $1B in enterprise value from AI by 2027. Naturally, RBC Borealis is playing a big role and my teams directly ladder up to this goal. As you might expect, this puts a lot of pressure on everyone to get aligned, focused, and executing. This past year in many ways has been more of the same but to an even greater degree with even more cross functional work and coordination (as you would expect from a top level goal). It’s been a very enlightening experience working at this scale across Canada’s largest company (on some measures) and delivering AI at scale. There have been lots of both learnings and wins even in this first year. One thing I will say is the challenges that come from having an organization going all-in on AI is much better than the alternative. RBC may not be building frontier models like OpenAI and Anthropic but it’s still incredibly rewarding implementing AI to drive real-world value and all the messiness that it entails. There’s still a bunch of time until 2027 so lots more work to do.

    Rotman: The biggest change in the coming year is that I’ll be handing off my deep learning course to another instructor and starting a new course on LLMs. It’s been a big challenge developing material because the space is moving so fast and any existing material I had it mostly out of date. Coincidentally, I’ve been developing most of the material in the back half of the year on account of the baby, so the material I think is reasonably up to date (with more to develop after I finish writing this post). It’s still a few months before the course starts, so there’s no telling what’ll happen between now and then. The nice thing about the course is that I get to really soak up the fundamentals for LLMs, which helps in many other areas of my work. The main challenge is finding time to create the course, which has been mostly on my vacation time where I have time during the day and help with the kids. I don’t mind much because it’s pretty fun learning and coding, especially with the help of AI (more on this later). Let’s see how the course goes next year but I’m optimistic that it’ll be good.

    Events:

    AI

    I think most folks know that AI is a big deal. Whether that’s just using ChatGPT to write better emails or using agents to automate all your work, it’s already causing some small pockets of disruption. My thinking, which is not original, is that AI is going to be a big deal like the internet was a big deal (at least). Similarly, I don’t think it’s all going to come in the next few years. I think we’ll be feeling its effects for decades to come (similar to the internet). One big difference is that the AI systems are improving at an alarming rate such that even a few months can make a big difference in their capabilities. This makes keeping up all the more challenging, never mind figuring out where to invest your time.

    I haven’t been on the bleeding edge for the most part. Throughout the year, I’ve been passively keeping up with the news and developments in the field as part of my usual media consumption diet. Periodically, I’ve been applying it to my non-RBC work (since the bleeding edge tech is usually not available right away), for example, in developing my Rotman course. Through these two sources, I’ve been trying to judiciously invest time in learning some of the consensus tools and workflows that have proven effective. Here I’m simply going to jot down some of my current thoughts on AI, which I’m positive will be out of date by this time next year. Still it will be interesting to see what changed by this time next year:

    • Daily LLM Use: My daily driver for most of the year has been ChatGPT. It simply is the best product out there. Model wise, it’s good but I’m unsure if it’s the best. Most of the frontier reasoning models are all really good and most won’t notice a difference unless you’re pushing it really hard for complex reasoning. Lately, I’ve been test driving Gemini 3, which is also good, and feels a bit snappier in reasoning mode with decent answers. I’ve mostly replaced searches involving knowledge with LLM usage and it’s been great. For example, I was learning about biological pathways for eczema and building a mental model of how each drug works. Another example is in my course, I use it to help with first drafts for an outline and even bullet points slides. I still make significant edits and revisions after but it’s so good for overcoming blank page syndrome. The ability to go back and forth is so helpful to clarify and really extract the key idea from a topic you are working on. I think most people are already on a path to using these products so my recommendations for them would be: (a) pay for a subscription — it’s worth it for the increased quality and limits, and (b) use it a lot — leveraging these models is a skill and you need to get more practice on where they are effective, and need time to incorporate it into your workflow to be efficient.
    • Bubble: Lots of talk of an AI bubble, my thoughts: maybe, probably. The problem is that it’s very hard to action on this hypothesis (more on this in the next section on investing). Two things can be true at the same time: AI is the next big thing, and investment in the AI space is irrational. For myself personally, I’m going to continually invest in this space both professionally, and personally with my time and investments. The trick is to be smart about it. I’m not going to follow up on every new random AI thread that comes up, just like I’m not going to pay ridiculous valuations for companies. It’s okay that I’m not on the bleeding edge, I’m happy to be on a leading edge even if it isn’t bleeding. Most importantly at this point in time, as long as you’re able to mostly keep up, it’s better than most are able to do given the pace of things. Perfection is the enemy of good.
    • Agents: Recently agents have become a buzzword. Agents are basically software applications that combine LLMs that can interact with external systems via “tools”. The more advanced agents tilt toward autonomous operation by doing this in a loop. Similar to the above, I think this is a big deal, and at the same time is overhyped. The problem with LLMs and thus agents is that they are non-deterministic, which makes it incredibly difficult to build robust applications. Reliability is underrated and I think people will find that engineering reliability in these systems will be incredibly difficult. My guess is that the outsized value of these applications will be when we can build them robustly in places where they only work a fraction of the time now. Thus, the analogue with the early internet is probably a good one — early internet applications took an immense effort to build and delivered a fraction of the value compared to their modern counterparts. I think we’ll be able to say the same thing about LLMs in a decade or two, but until then we’re stuck in the “assembly” stage of LLMs.
    • Claude Code: Recently (like in the last few weeks), I’ve started playing around with more agentic workflows for personal productivity using Claude Code (not just coding). A couple of my friends have been much more on the leading edge compared to me, and I had FOMO on what I was missing out on. So far, I can see the value but it’s not free — at this point in time it requires setup and investment in changing your workflow significantly. For more details, check out this article on Product Talk (and follow on ones), which details a good starting point.
    • Coding: For actual coding, I’ve mainly been sticking with Cursor. I’m sure the other solutions are good, but I don’t have time to experiment with half a dozen new coding apps. Cursor definitely is one of the leading ones, and I’m very happy with the workflow, which is a combination of traditional development with agents worked in. I still like to be in control of what happens and that feels a bit easier with Cursor. In terms of models, I noticed a big leap in ability with Claude Sonnet 4.5. Similar to the IDE, I’ve mostly been sticking with Anthropic models because I know they are known good. I’m sure there may be other ones that are a bit better but I don’t really want to spend time trying to micro optimize when there are more macro things about my workflow that need to be worked on. Cost is not really an issue for me because I’m very happy to pay whatever $10s of dollars it takes to save more time.
    • Disruption: It’s clear that this technology will displace a lot of existing jobs. Just like the word processor replaced specialized typists, and spreadsheets replaced human “computers”, LLM technology will replace a lot of types of work. The main problem is the speed at which it’s happening. There will be job displacements and people will have trouble re-skilling into new jobs. The one saving grace (at least this is my hypothesis) is that for most jobs it will not be a wholesale replacement. AI may end up replacing X% of a job (call it 40%, 60%, or 80% whatever makes sense to you), but that does not necessarily mean we will need X% fewer jobs (although it surely will be less). First, at least for the foreseeable future, most jobs are a complex mix of different tasks. AI may be good at replacing X% tasks, but there are still 100-X% that it can’t. So I suspect most of these job areas will still be around but the shape of the work will be incredibly different. That’s why it’s so important for everyone to learn this technology, it’s not that it’ll outright replace you but rather someone skilled in it will replace you. Second, in many industries, we’re seeing Jevon’s paradox arise, which states that as a technology makes things more efficient, the demand increases significantly, potentially even growing the sector. A thought experiment in the case of the law. I imagine there is a net overall increase in the legal work that is going on now via casual use of ChatGPT. Moreover, I could see overall more lawyers doing more specialized and perhaps previously currently not cost-effective legal work. So while the cost of legal work may come down (except for highly specialized ones), the volume may go up dramatically. The shape of the work will change dramatically, but it doesn’t mean the death of an industry. Of course it’s not a given, but there may be more industries than expected where the latent demand for that service is gated by price, which this technology unlocks. The future will be interesting.
    • Fun: My eldest daughter is very much into art, and we’ve had a blast playing with Google Gemini’s Nano Banana image generation model. It generates images fast, and it just keeps getting better and better. I’m hoping there are many more use-cases like this where it’s not all about productivity, but rather connection with those you love.

    Investing

    As with others, this has been a good year for my portfolio. It’s easy to look smart when the stock market keeps going up. For a value-minded investor, it causes me a bit of anxiety though. As I mentioned last year, I’ve been starting to invest in (reasonably priced) technology stocks where I have more conviction and only if I can get in at a good price (which is rare). These picks have been responsible for my outsized gains similar to the rest of the market. With record profits and dominant market positions, it’s hard to argue that they deserve higher valuations. Still, valuations feel a bit high with lots of froth around AI. This year I didn’t do much except a couple of defensive moves: one lucky and one remains to be seen.

    At the beginning of the year I began to get more and more worried about the tariff situation in America. By a stroke of luck, I bought some long dated PUT options against some of my largest positions. These paid off handsomely after Liberation Day in April. It was a small position but it was nice to take profit from some of the volatility. I used options because I was totally unsure whether the market would continue to go up further or potentially go down. My hypothesis was that the outcome would be bimodal with the looming tariff threat either up or down, so I bought the PUTs as insurance. My big mistake here (in hindsight) was that I didn’t put the resulting profit to work in the market. I was waiting for a further slide after the initial correction but that never materialized. Timing is hard.

    In the later half of the year, many of my tech stocks had bounced back and reached new all time highs. I’ve been slowly trimming my positions in these stocks but only the ones I felt were obviously getting ahead of themselves. My test is: am I pretty sure that I’ll get a significantly lower price than today in the future? It’s only a heuristic but I’m pretty confident at some point I’ll be able to get back in at a lower price. Now whether I’m smart enough to do that later is another question. But for now I’m hedging my bets and taking some off the table to have more dry power when the inevitable correction/crash comes. Note that I still have the majority of my portfolio invested, I’m just taking a bit off to move into a more defensive position. The future will tell if it was smart or too early (i.e., wrong).

    Insights and Learnings

    A bunch of random insights and learnings I’ve picked up during the year:

    • Say How You Feel: Something that perhaps is idiosyncratic to myself is that I’m really good at putting my head down and powering through challenges. This is good in many situations, but less good with your personal relationships. Something much more productive at home is to say how you’re feeling (without any blame). My wife called me out on this and she was absolutely right! I naturally will not complain or express my feeling, instead bias towards just fixing things. It’s still a work in progress but I’m finding it much more satisfying to share how I’m feeling and get the support and love from those around me instead of bottling it all up.
    • Wide Variance in People: With the birth of my second daughter even at this young age, the difference in personality between my two daughters is so stark. This was a visceral reminder to me that people are built so differently. How they think, react, and interpret everything can have such a wide variance. I’ve come to the realization that most people probably don’t think like I do, which is hard to internalize because I only ever experience thinking like myself. But now with this data point of two kids from the same parents in the same environment being so different, it’s so obvious to me that there it exists more broadly in the population. Obviously this should affect how I engage with different people, which I’ve been learning how to do with my kids, and in other relationships to a lesser extent. Still a work in progress.
    • Childhood Memories: An insight (among the many) that I got from reading Dr. Becky Kennedy’s excellent parenting book Good Inside is that although most cannot remember a lot about their childhood, it still shapes them in many unconscious ways. For example, when you make a mistake, do you feel like it’s a challenge that you want to overcome or shame that you did something wrong? How do you react when someone yells at you? Do you yell back or just turtle up inside? A lot of these behaviors are learned unconsciously from childhood. This really hit home to me how important parenting is to a child. It’s not the individual memories that you’re trying to form but rather unconscious processes that they learn. Easier said than done when you are tired, angry and covered in spilt milk, but it’s a learning process for both parent and child. I’m still a novice but working towards becoming better each day.
    • Two Things Being True: Another good insight from Good Inside is that two things can be true at the same time. Cognitive dissonance usually gets in the way of us accepting that the world is complex and that conflicting ideas can and do exist. It’s possible to be a good parent and have your child have a meltdown in public; it’s possible to make bad investing decisions but still have large gains; and it’s possible to feel grateful for what you have and still want more. If we can acknowledge that conflicting ideas can exist at the same time, I think it relieves a lot of the burden we all carry around.
    • Sleep Aid: One of the joys of being a new parent is being randomly woken up in the middle of the night by your baby who hasn’t yet developed a consistent sleep schedule. What usually ensues is a form of acute insomnia where you are dead tired but can’t go back to sleep. This also happens to non-parents due to stress, caffeine, or aches or pains. I’m happy to say I’ve found a good sleep crutch to help me fall back asleep: podcasts! I drop an AirPod in one ear and put on a mildly interesting (but not too interesting) podcast, ideally with a host with a soothing, monotone voice. There are specialty channels specifically for sleep too. I set the sleep timer on my podcast app and I almost always fall asleep before it stops playing. This works for me because it gets my mind to stop racing while also allows my body to relax (which usually are interrelated). I suspect if I was really good at meditation I could accomplish the same thing but podcasts are a lot easier. Even if you don’t quite get to a full deep sleep, it is still very helpful to rest your body and relax your mind. It’s much better than getting ever more anxious that you can’t sleep. Interestingly, this is basically the same technique my parents use to go to sleep except they use the TV. The only downside is that I feel like I’ve started to develop a dependence on it. I’ve been trying to only use it when I wake up at night. It’s not the worse thing but I’m okay with it for now until the baby grows up a bit.

    Next Year

    There’s a lot to look forward to in 2026. I’m excited to see how my baby grows up and how I can have ever increasing amounts of playful interactions with her. Similarly, I’m so excited to see my older daughter play with her as the baby becomes more interactive. On the professional side, I, along with everyone else in the industry, am interested to see how this AI hype cycle plays out. I’m looking forward to see both how the technology advances, but also to see how valuations play out. Being a value investor, I’m always waiting for the next crash so that I can be “greedy when others are fearful”. Overall though, I’m just trying to enjoy the journey with all the ups and downs, and most of all be grateful for all the blessings that I’ve been given. See you in 2026 everyone!

  • How I Read in 2025

    As you may have seen in previous year-in-reviews, I’ve been on a lifelong quest to read more because I think it’s one of the most efficient ways to acquire knowledge. Unfortunately, in the modern age it’s hasn’t been so easy. When I was growing up, it was mainly TV, then the early internet, and now it’s social media and all those addictive algorithmically optimized apps. At the same time, I’ve started a family and have a more demanding career so I simply have a lot less time to read (I’m talking minutes at a time, not hours anymore). Given all of these constraints, here’s what I’m currently doing, which I feel is a pretty productive workflow for me:

    • Physical books are out, mobile devices are in: It took me a long time to embrace reading on a device, but it’s the one thing I have with me all the time. And the only way I can read now is sneaking in reading 15-30 mins at a time, so availability is key. Perfect is the enemy of good as they say.
    • Reduce distractions on the mobile device: I’ve turned off most notifications (and all sound related ones) for a while now, and additionally I’ve installed the Opal app to set more precise screen time rules. Generally my rules are no “junk media” (e.g. social media, Hacker News, Reddit etc.) in the morning and before bed, and limit 30 mins on social media and 30 mins on games (mostly Go). I still allow YouTube, Netflix etc. anytime because I count them as long form video, which usually is not as much in contention with my reading time. The one danger here is that up until now I’ve been staying away from YouTube shorts (e.g. Tiktok) content but have recently been watching more as I’ve needed more distractions in the middle of the night while tending to a newborn. Going to try to cut this as soon as possible, shorts are just way too addictive.
    • Buy e-books without hesitation: Generally, I’ve been pretty liberal with buying physical books because it’s usually worth it. However, I’ve been more stingy with e-books because I hadn’t fully embraced reading on a device. But now that I’m all-in on device reading, I basically will just immediately buy e-books if there’s a slight hint that I might find it interesting. If I really like the book, I’ll also buy a physical copy (for that warm fuzzy feeling). I’m at a place financially where I can indulge in this area, and I’m happy to pay more money if it helps me learn. I almost exclusively use the Kindle app, which I don’t have any complaints about, and buy everything from Amazon simply for the convenience.
    • Read many books at once: I’ve kicked the habit of just reading one book at a time. The way I see it, it’s just like watching TV or YouTube, you don’t often just watch a single show or channel at a time. Sure, occasionally you might find something you want to binge, but most of the time the mind wanders, gets bored, and you need a break to regain that excitement you get from watching something for the first time. It’s the same with books: I often find I can easily blaze multiple chapters but slow down as the novelty effect wears off. Give it a few days to a couple of weeks though and that feeling of excitement is restored. This process also gives me more time to digest the material. Although I’d like to be the kind of person who can have a singular focus to read one thing non-stop, I’ve reflected enough to know that that’s not me. Better to work with my monkey brain than against it.
    • Taking notes: I mentioned it before but I find it’s incredibly important to take notes while reading. It helps me digest and absorb the content better. As per this excellent methodology for learning something well, I mainly highlight key passages I find important, and then try to summarize it in my own words. The Kindle app has a good way to do it where I highlight a span of text and then attach a note to it. It’s a bit clunky on my phone but good enough is better than nothing at all.
    • Reviewing notes: Up until recently, I’ve had a bunch of highlights that I’ve accumulated but didn’t do anything with afterwards (because I almost never go back to look at them). That’s changed though with the Readwise app where it sends a daily digest of highlights/notes that I read through every morning. It can easily import all your highlights from Kindle or any other numerous sources. I’m not serious about trying to study them, but it’s nice to review important ideas I’ve highlighted in the past periodically. Now that I have this review, I’ve found myself highlighting multiple paragraphs so that I’ll have the context when reading later. This is one of the nice benefits of a digital format where you don’t have the friction of having to physically highlight a lot of text.
    • Send all other content to a reader app: Coincidentally, Readwise has recently launched a Reader app. I know there are others but since it comes with a Readwise subscription (in fact, the reason I signed up is because of the Reader app), I’ve found it perfect for my use-case. I can automatically forward all my email newsletters to the associated Reader email address so they show up in one list. For other media like web articles or PDFs, I can just send it to the Reader app from my mobile browser. The actual app has some nice features like auto AI generated summaries at the top, taking notes, converting PDF to text for mobile-friendly reading (which is decent enough), and asking AI about an article. The thing I like about it the most is that I have a one-stop-shop for all the things that I want to read (minus books). This allows me to pick and choose what to read based on my mood. Again, this is playing off my tendency to crave novelty, and the more I have conveniently located in one place, the more likely I’m going to find something that suits my mood. At the same time, having a dedicated app allows me to get into a deeper reading state vs. the web browser, and along with the PDF-to-text feature, I’ve probably deeply read more of these media types in the last month than I have in the last year. Having a single interface with these features also allows me to choose how fast I want to read it (e.g. fast skimming, AI summaries, or slow absorption). It’s a big win for me all around.
    • AI for Directed Learning: As I mentioned in my latest year-in-review, I’ve been very impressed with how accessible LLMs have made knowledge. I’m now very regularly using them to ask questions about everything. Recent examples include the biological process of a prescription drug I’m on, detailed questions about government programs, and tips for dealing newborns to name a few. The nice thing is that I can chat back and forth with it to really drill down to a satisfactory answer, which is, well, satisfying versus a static wiki page. I’m mainly using ChatGPT out of habit since that’s the first one I signed up for, but I’m pretty sure other frontier ones are just as good. The other feature that I’m loving is OpenAI’s Deep Research mode, which can write a report up on random specific topics I have. It’s included in the $200/month plan but I’m sure that price will come down (or it’ll get better), and I’m happy to pay if it can actually improve my knowledge. I’ve found that it basically can generate a Wikipedia-level article on whatever topic I want. It’ll scour the web, and put together a coherent report (that’s a bit wordy). I then take this report and email it to my Reader email address to get it into my app. The only downside is that it’s only available on desktop right now, so I have to generate the answer and then manually copy and paste into an email. I’m really seeing a lot of value from AI to help me acquire knowledge and I feel like I’m mostly just limited by my curiosity (and time).

    So that’s my basic reading workflow right now. The most recent changes have all happened in the last few months, which include my current paternity leave, so we’ll see how well they work when I’m back to work full-time (with two young kids at home). But as an example of how well it’s working: the Reader and Kindle app were 3rd and 6th most used app from last week. The other spots were all taken by video (YouTube #1, Apple TV #2, Netflix #5) or the browser (#4). The video apps are a bit anomalous because I’m at home mostly holding the baby so I spend a lot more time watching videos right now, but I’m amazed how high reading apps are on the list! I’m continually trying to improve my setup so if you have some ideas, feel free to drop me an email, I’d love to hear if you’ve found something that works for you.

  • Asking an AI About Me

    After writing my latest year-in-review, I realized that I had already done eight of them! It feels like yesterday when I started writing them. Given that this body of writing is probably the most personal and raw prose about me on the Internet, I thought why not put it into an AI and start asking questions? So I copied all 8 blog posts (31,000 words in total) into ChatGPT (The “o1” model was the only one that would let me copy that many words in), and started chatting with it.

    My first question was “Given the above context about Brian, summarize his personality in one paragraph.” Here’s what I got:

    Brian’s personality shines through as a thoughtful, introspective, and growth-oriented individual who consistently balances ambition with humility. He values lifelong learning, embracing challenges like learning to sing, speak Mandarin, and deepen his technical expertise. At work, he’s driven to build effective teams and deliver meaningful results, all while reflecting on how to improve both himself and his organization. His commitment to family, the joy he finds in being a parent, and his awareness of the trade-offs between work and personal life reveal a caring nature that integrates professional success with personal fulfillment. He is analytical yet empathetic, methodically pursuing goals and viewing setbacks as opportunities to refine his understanding of the world.

    Not bad! Hits some of the key points that I would say about myself like being a lifelong learner, thoughtful about trade-offs, and analytical. Given what I have written, it’s all pretty obvious, but it was a good synthesis of it. Interestingly, I don’t really characterize myself as empathetic, but maybe I am? I think I often have an awareness of how people might be feeling, which I feel comes more from analytical reasoning than intuition so maybe that’s what the AI picked up on.

    Next question: “Tell me something about him that he did not explicitly say.”

    He never explicitly mentions it, but he consistently adopts structured, almost systematic ways of tackling every challenge he faces. Whether it’s learning Chinese through daily flashcards, investing with a probability-based framework, or iterating on team processes, he shows a natural inclination toward methodical, data-driven progress rather than relying on flashes of inspiration or ad-hoc efforts. This tendency suggests he gains as much satisfaction from refining the process of learning or building solutions as he does from the outcome itself.

    Also pretty good because I make big efforts to be systematic in my way of approaching things. If you read what I wrote, it’s probably not a big insight but still pretty accurate. The part about gaining satisfaction from process of refining instead of the outcome is pretty good too. That I feel is a bit deeper of an insight where you may have had to reflect a bit to get it out of my writing.

    I started asking a whole host of random questions, more curious about how the AI would respond rather than actually looking for insight, here are a few interesting ones with some commentary:

    • “Tell me 5 things he can improve on”: I got back social engagement, stress management, clear boundaries, delegation and oversight, and leisure and creativity. Some of them are a bit generic, but the one on social engagement was spot on. I think that’s one area I’m not actively prioritizing but probably could have the highest leverage for me.
    • “What kind of life partner would best suit Brian?”: It hit on a lot of themes from my writing on someone who appreciates my need for quiet time, supports my values, and someone who will nudge me toward balance. Good advice, even if pretty generic.
    • “Use a popular personality test framework and evaluate him based on the context above.”: Using Myers-Briggs, I got INTJ (Introversion, Intuition, Thinking, Judging). I don’t think I’ve ever taken this test but the overall explanation makes sense to me.
    • “What investing advice do you think you could give Brian given his style?”: It took some of my lessons learned and thought up some things to help manage it (e.g. investing checklists). It also had some generic advice like diversification. Not great but impressed it got some specifics in there.
    • “What’s 5 phrases that can be used to describe Brian.”: These kinds of prompts are great for brainstorming. Most of them are close but off. I usually use it to brainstorm and then mix and match. My favourite one from this response was “analytical yet introspective thinker“.
    • “Which philosophy does Brian match best with?”: Stoicism, no surprise there, but I don’t think I’ve written about it explicitly. Pretty good for the AI to understand it.
    • “Which books would you recommend him to read?”: All popular books on topics that I write about with suggestions like Meditations by Marcus Aurelius, Principles by Ray Dalio, Deep Work by Cal Newport, Range by David Epstein (haven’t heard of this one), and Atomic Habits by James Clear. Not bad for a superficial list but probably misses the range of things I’m interested in.
    • “What about fiction?”: Mostly came back with a bunch of sci-fi books. I’m not a big fiction reader so I’m sure some of them are good, but at the same time I do have more diverse interests. Again, the AI is spitting out the ones that are most associated with someone of my personality without consideration other data. If I gave more context, I’m sure it could give better recommendations.
    • “What about 5 TV and 5 movie recommendations”: Again mostly sci-fi / computing. It definitely has bucketed me into a certain segment. It’s based on the writing from my year-in-review, so I can’t fault it too much.

    My first conclusion from this exercise is that it is way cool! To be able to even get responses like this probably would require someone knowing me for at least a year. It’s so cool that I can just plop in a bunch of my personal writing and it gets to know me, even if the insights aren’t deep.

    The other obvious conclusion is that it is solely basing the responses on the writing that I gave it. And while the answers were generally in the right ballpark, my writings are not sufficient to define me. I’d like to believe I’m more multi-dimensional than the public prose that I put on the internet. The answers I would say were not deeply insightful but were directly reasoned from my writing. It’s not going to replace a therapist, but it’s still useful as a Socratic tool to ask questions about yourself.

    One last thing I’ve been thinking about: is the AI just telling me what I want to hear? Is there is a horoscope effect going on? On the one hand, it did give specific references to things I said. On the other hand, the AI is explicitly trained to give human preferable responses. Given how agreeable it is, and how scalable has become, there are a lot of dark use-cases with this technology. However, I’m an optimist and I think the good will outweigh the bad (I explicitly don’t think we’re not even close to the Terminator scenario).

    There is so much boring, low-priority work that needs to get done but doesn’t. I want to live in a world where I don’t need to fill in PDF forms, where I don’t have to figure out how to use vlookups in Excel every time I need them, and where my mom doesn’t need to ask for my help with computers. These are modest but each one of these things adds small amounts of friction to the world and make it objectively worse. And while these problems don’t matter that much, there are millions of problems like these that can be solved with AI, it’s just a matter of time. The future is going to be awesome! (Although this doesn’t quite address the source of our biggest problems (i.e., people) but that’s a topic for another day.)

  • 2024 Year-In-Review

    Personal

    Family: My home life is pretty similar to the year before with me trying to spend as much time as I can with my daughter. While it can be frustrating at times, there are at least many joyful moments too. The trick is ensuring that I’m in the right state of mind and body to play (young kids are almost always in this state). The usual rules apply on health, sleep, and fitness. Of course the big difference this year is that we’re expecting another one! Surprisingly, we’ve done much less preparation for this next one. It’s likely a combination of having already gone through it and being super busy with my first one. I’m not quite prepared for the sleepless nights, and I either don’t remember what they’re like or I’m in denial that they will be coming, but no one is ever really prepared so I’m not too worried. More recently though, I have been looking at my daughter’s baby pictures and getting excited by how cute she was at that age. I’m going to take a bit of time off work so I’ll be able to enjoy the glorious first few months of human life. Wish me luck!

    Friends: Similar to last year, I’ve done quite a poor job of keeping up with my friends. I’m pretty bad at chat, and don’t really use anything like Facebook or Instagram so I don’t have a great way of keeping in touch. The one thing I did this year, which was my wife’s idea, was to have an actual birthday party where I invited my closest friends over. This was incredibly fun and a great way to generate new memories with them. With the new baby coming, I likely won’t get much leisure time but hopefully I can at least find a yearly event like my birthday to get together with them. The blessing of having old friends is that you can easily pick back up with them from where you left off. I’m so fortunate to have a group of friends like that. Family is still my top priority so I’ll ask for a bit of forgiveness from my friends and count my blessings that they still hang out with me.

    Fitness: This year I started up again with (approximately) weekly sessions with personal trainer. As my life has gotten quite busy, this is pretty much the only outlet I have to exercise at the moment. Luckily, it’s really good. Even when I’m dead tired, he pushes me to have an intense work out. I’m noticeably stronger, feel like I have more muscle, and have been injured a lot less recently (although my weight has climbed up a bit). I’ve hit some personal records for some of my exercises, so no complaints here. The goal now isn’t to push my performance, but really to gain strength and prevent injury. I’m going to want my body functioning well when I’m older, and making sure that I have enough muscle mass is one key factor that I’ve identified. Maybe when I get time to play sports again I’ll change it up, but for now this is more than enough for me.

    Health: I have a minor healthy issue that I’m dealing with that I’m not ready to talk about publicly. It’s more annoying than anything but does degrade my quality of life a bit. Luckily, there are multiple physicians in my extended family so we’re working through some treatments, which I think are moving in the right direction. Somehow I suspect that the issue somehow is related to age. It’s quite alarming that your body can suddenly behave differently as you get old (e.g., getting allergies). Luckily modern medicine has a lot to offer (if you can find the right type of doctor). Otherwise, thankfully there isn’t else much to write about related to my health.

    Hobbies: Basically I haven’t done much this year at all. Things have been so busy in all other aspects of my life, this is on pause indefinitely. It’s all about prioritization, and right now this is just not high on my list.

    Blog: This year has been pretty slim on writing. I did two blog posts on my technical blog and this is the only post for my personal blog. Again, priorities. The lack of blog posts however were mainly driven by being busy at work (see below). Nothing much to say here except that I hope I get more time to write next year because this is my main vehicle for learning new things.

    Professional

    RBC Borealis: One of the big changes at work is that we did a reorganization that created a new department called RBC Borealis that is a combination of the old Borealis AI and another data and analytics group within RBC. Along with the reorg, I also got a promotion to Senior Director, AI Solutions, leading a much bigger group of highly talented people developing cutting-edge AI-powered products and capabilities for the bank. As with most reorgs, it has kept me quite busy and I’ve had a lot less time for many things like my blog, but I’ve made sure that it hasn’t significantly impacted my family time. This new opportunity has been quite exciting for me because it’s a new role leading a bigger team (thankfully with a ton of support) so I’ll have the opportunity to learn more and do bigger things — exactly what I’m looking for.

    Rotman: On the teaching side, the big change I mentioned last year was adding new material for LLMs. It went well enough but like most new lecture content, it needs to be tweaked. Even though I added the material last fall, one year is an eternity in this space so I’m afraid some things are a bit out of date already and will require some more iteration for the course this spring. I’m still quite excited about this space and improving material for the course is a good excuse to learn more about this subject. I also helped run a couple of events with folks from Microsoft (listed below). It used to be a big deal finding speakers and organizing these events but now that I’ve done it so many times, it’s just a normal sort of thing I do (to be clear Rotman has a wonderful events team, all I work on is the content and speakers, not the logistics). I’m doing more of both in this school year so I don’t expect too much to change.

    Events: Here are the public events that I was involved with this past year. Most of these are either through work or Rotman, which I suppose is par for the course unless you are active in the scene (which I am currently not).

    Investing

    It’s been a good year again whether you’re trying to pick stocks like myself or invest passively. Similar to the market, the gains I’ve had in my concentrated portfolio are in tech stocks that I bought at opportune times. Recently, I’m still slightly ahead of the S&P 500 (my benchmark) but it fluctuates a bit. I’m still ahead over the long term by a bit, so it’s still sensible to keep doing it myself.

    The key to my success (or luck?) has really been buying stocks at reasonable prices and just holding on to them. Superficially, it’s not that hard: buy low and hold. The hard parts are really around buying the right company at a fair price and not selling.

    Buying the right companies at a fair price is the fun part. Searching for that outstanding business is incredibly rewarding for me. I love learning about how they make money, what’s so special about them, and how they respond to competition. My process is likely quite less effective than the industry analysts out there with me having less data and less time dedicated to analysis, but I find joy in it. I’m doing better against my benchmark and I like it so I think I’m still coming out ahead.

    The fair price bit is something that I do a lot less quantitative work on than I probably should. My approach really is just having a reasonable metric that roughly correlates with the company’s value then buy when it’s an obviously good deal. I’m a bit of a cheapskate when buying stocks or maybe a better term is that I’m quite risk averse. This mostly has protected me from buying too high, even when it’s not so great a company. The way I see it is that I’m quite a bit more ignorant than the average professional analyst, so if I’m going to buy something I want to make sure I have a big margin of safety. It’s quite an imperfect approach, but given the time I dedicate to the whole endeavor, it’s worked out to a satisfactory degree.

    Recently, I’ve been investing much more in tech and growth stocks as I’m getting a better sense of how their business models work. Most of the time you do not get to buy companies growing at 30%+ per year on discount, more often than not you’ll instead pay nose bleed valuations for them. The trick is to buy them when they’re knocked down to a more fair (but I wouldn’t say cheap) price, which in itself is hard to determine. It’s not easy though since whenever they get knocked down, the media surrounding them is super negative. It’s hard to be a contrarian when you see the price drop by half (especially if you own the stock). But I’m kind of weird in that I get excited when stocks drop a lot. I also like it when they go up too, but also get more disappointed because I’ll have fewer places to deploy my cash. I’ve observed that this isn’t how most people think about investing, which is probably why most people really shouldn’t be actively investing themselves.

    Related to that point, the last part of my investing process may sound the easiest: holding, but in fact, I think this is the hardest for many people. Seeing one of your stocks drop by half is pretty hard on the psyche. On the flip side, when your stock goes up 50%, it also takes equal (if not more guts) to hold it. Again, as Buffett always mentions, you need to have the right temperament or else it doesn’t matter how smart you are. Luckily, I have a bias for thinking rather than action (which is not so good in others situations) and this really helps me from making any sudden moves like prematurely selling low. The real money is made when you can hold companies through their low points to when they rebound to new highs. If you bought at a reasonable price and it’s a quality company, you’ll usually do quite well.

    My moderate success over the past 18 years has more or less used the above process (a lot less so when I started out though), which has become more refined as I learn more about businesses and how they work. There’s still a long way to go but that’s the exciting part! There’s so much more for me to learn and that’s really one of the joys of life!

    Insights and Learnings

    Here are a bunch of random things that I should’ve written blog posts on but I’ll just jot down here for posterity.

    • Attachment: I’ve observed that some people have a lot of attachment to things e.g. cars, toys, clothes etc. I don’t really have much of this attachment, relatively. I don’t really care much about most of my material things except to the extent that they are useful. I really like useful things. It might be my overly pragmatic disposition but it’s how I am. I think this has served me pretty well in that I have relatively modest wants for material things and it’s helped me be a bit more rational than others in this area. On the other hand, I think some people do get a lot of joy from their things, which I’m missing out on. I get more joy from learning new ideas and about how the world works. Everyone’s different I guess.

    • Sleeping: I recently discovered a great method to fall asleep when I wake up in the middle of the night. It’s so obvious I don’t know why I didn’t think about it before: listening to podcasts with my AirPods. It’s usually pretty easy for me to fall asleep at the start of the night (assuming I don’t consume too much caffeine) but my problem is that I often wake up in the middle of the night and am not able to fall back asleep. It’s usually because I start thinking about work or some other recent problem. I’ve tried several meditation-inspired ways to relax but it doesn’t work for me all the time. Of course the best way is to avoid the root cause all together but that’s not practical at my stage in life.

      The other idea I read about is that it’s better to stay in bed instead of getting up because at least it gives you some rest. It’s not as effective as deep sleep, but something is better than nothing. With these ideas combined, listening to podcasts helps distract me from other thoughts, which in turn helps my body relax. If I don’t end up actually falling asleep, at least my body gets some rest. Most of the time though (unless it’s close to wake up time), I’m able to doze off to sleep within an hour or so. At some point in a half-waken state, I take off my ear buds and fall into deep sleep. I don’t need to do it every time I wake up in the middle of the night, but it’s a good tool to use when I’m having a particularly difficult time sleeping. I like this method because it’s not aiming for perfection (in terms of sleep), rather it’s aiming for decent, which is much better than all the anxiety from the occasional bout of insomnia.

    • Being More Present and Procrastination: I think most are familiar with the advice that you should be more present in the moment. Easier said than done. I’ve been trying to do this more with my daughter. It’s hard though when I come back from work exhausted and wanting to zone out. The usual advice applies here of getting good sleep, eating well, and exercising regularly. However, one insight that I had about this subject is related to procrastination: if you can just get over that first hump of actually engaging in an activity, e.g., playing with my daughter, it’s much easier to stay present. It’s just like doing homework or some task at work, if you can just start the activity (as opposed to feigning a start while looking at your smartphone), it’s much easier to get into it. Obvious but it’s another frame of mind that sometimes helps me get off my smartphone and overcome that initial activation energy.

    • Novelty Cravings: One interesting thing I’ve noticed is that my brain craves novelty. It appears in so many places. For example, I think the main reason I like to follow the news and social media is to find new things that are happening (I’m using the Opal app to help control it). I have a huge backlog of books that are both more interesting and useful than the news but I still spend more time than I should on it simply because the news is new. For investing, I also realized that I’m anticipating the next quarterly earnings call because there will be some new development that I can learn about. This also shows up for me in anticipation for a new TV show or game that is coming out. The novelty is what I’m craving. Luckily, I feel that it’s mostly in these harmless areas that I get my “novelty fix”. I’m generally pretty good at being patient and optimizing for the long term, but I’m only human so my monkey brain needs to be fed from time to time. If this is the worst of it though, it’s not so bad.

    • Parenting: Something I realized (as I think most parents can relate) is that I don’t really know what I’m doing. My daughter is a very different person than me (which is obvious even at this age), and the surrounding environment has changed a lot too. So you would expect that the parenting approach should also change. The main problem is that when I’m tired and exhausted, my default instinct is just to revert to the not-so-productive parenting style I grew up with — that’s all I really know after all. At the same time, parenting is more of a real-time activity, it’s not something where I can take my time and do a careful analysis especially when it’s two hours past bedtime and there are crayon drawings all over the wall. Luckily, my wife has a much better intuition than me on productive parenting so I’m learning from her on how to deal with my daughter. I learn much better viscerally in these situations so I feel I’m slowly becoming a better parent.

    • AI and Information Access: I’m obviously deep in this AI space and I truly feel like we’re in a revolution. It was exhilarating in the early days of the internet (even though I was just a teenager) to have unlimited access to information and have any answer at my finger tips. At least that’s what I used to think. It’s only now with modern AI tools like Perplexity and ChatGPT that I really feel like I have the answers at my finger tips. I literally can ask any question and get the answer I want in the time it takes me to type it in. This is in contrast to clicking through half a dozen links, wading through a ton of ads, and piecing together the answer myself. It really has lowered the bar for information access. It’s so much easier to ask about questions outside my own domain like fixing up stuff around the house, or repairing my car. It’s also a great tool as a companion to reading where if I come across some idea or term I’m not familiar with, I can immediately ask the question with minimal disruption. I’m sure the different apps will eventually have all this built in, but it has already been a big productivity gain for me. The great thing is that we’re still in the early days, five or ten years from now AI is going to much more integrated in our lives and I can’t wait!

    • Experience: I’ve come to realize that there are a lot of skills that are hard to obtain (at least for me) without experience. I would put most people related things in this category like leadership, parenting, and relationships. Reading about these things just does not do them justice. This is tough because to be great at these activities, you really need the right role models. A joke (that is probably closer to the truth than fiction) is that the main way most managers learn about management is by watching TV! This points to a sad fact that we have poor management training. But more so it points to the fact that many activities can only be learned through experience. One thing I’m glad about is that early on in my career (and life) I put myself in uncomfortable positions with smart people so that I would learn faster. Startups are a trial-by-fire experience where you get an accelerated lesson in many different skill sets. I also did similar things in public speaking with Toastmasters, and to a lesser extent with other activities in my personal life. Right now I can point to two big places where I’m again in an uncomfortable position. The first one is obviously parenting, it’s totally new and I’m growing in ways that I could never have imagined. The other is at work where I’ve been put in a new role where there is a lot to learn. As you might be able to tell, one of the most important things for me is learning and growing, and you only get that if you are put in new, uncomfortable positions from time to time.

    • Lottery: It might surprise some folks to know that I occasionally buy lottery tickets. Logically, I know the math doesn’t work out (this is actually true even if the naive EV is positive, for many reasons including this one), but the chance of winning is the not the main reason why I do it. The tickets are mainly used as a fun exercise to think about what I would do if I were to become financially free (which I would hope is sooner rather than later). I’ve honestly been struggling a bit with the answer because the immediate thought of just doing leisure activities all day seems like it would be dreadful after a while. Sure, I’d like more time to do my hobbies, exercise, improve my relationships, but a core part of what I’m all about (i.e, learning) would be severely reduced. Despite all the stress and time spent at work, it is a great place to learn new things, not only because I get to ship leading edge AI solutions, but also because I have some world-class colleagues. Even if I was financially free, where could I as easily get that? So in the end, I’m not sure that I would be doing anything that different at this point. Things change so that may be different over time, but that’s the point of the whole exercise: to stop and reflect upon it.

    • Love Letters: I’ve started writing a love letter (via email) to my wife on her birthday. Day to day I’m not the most romantic person, and it’s even tougher when you have a four year old causing chaos around the house, but I thought it would be the least I could do to show my love for her. I think it’s also special to be able to look back on them decades later and remember the earlier times in our lives. Time passes by so fast that I’ve found it more and more important to document things so that my future self can enjoy my present. It’s a form of long term thinking if you will.

    • Journal: As I mentioned in a previous review, I also write a letter (via email to an account I made for her) to my daughter every year. I keep a journal of notes about her throughout the year too, which I also send along. This year, I changed how record these notes. Instead of just plain text, I’m using the Day One app to journal now. In addition to text, it lets you attach pictures and videos. After looking through my notes, it’s just so much more interesting to see a curated and annotated set of pictures versus just the raw notes I took. The app makes it really easy to select pictures you’ve taken, tag specific dates, and write a blurb about what happened. Exporting is available in several formats (although I haven’t really tested it yet). I now anchor my journal entries in photos I’ve taken, which also encourages me to take more photos so I can have more journal entries. At the end of the week, the app lets me attach photos on the date they were taken and then write a short blurb about what happened. The nice interface greatly reduces the friction needed to takes notes, which is much more important now that my life is more hectic. I just started this year so I’ll let you know how it goes.

    Next Year

    In 2025, the big thing I’m looking forward to is the new addition to my family, which I’m sure will change the dynamic at home quite a bit. At work, things are changing quickly and my new role is also going to keep me as busy as ever. The challenge for me will be trying to manage everything outside of those two things. Who wants an easy life anyways? Looking back, the most rewarding experiences in life weren’t the easy ones, rather they were the ones that I was fully invested in, regardless of how hard it was. I’ve never been one to shy away from a challenge, so I’m just going to keep moving forward into 2025 learning, growing, and most of all collecting beautiful memories along the way. Good luck in the new year everyone!

  • 2023 Year-In-Review

    Personal

    Family: Similar to last year, my home life has primarily been focused on my daughter. And while it feels like that’s the only thing I do, if I think about it, that’s exactly how I want it to be! The last few years have passed by so fast, and it’s obvious to me that if I don’t spend a lot of time with her when she’s young (and wants to spend time with me) I will regret it. The one challenge though is balancing time with her and everything else. As she’s getting older and doesn’t necessarily need to spend 100% of her time with her parents, I’d like to dedicate some time to other things like date nights, hanging out with friends, hobbies etc. Overall though, I’m pretty happy with the amount of time I get to spend with my immediate family (maybe less so with my extended family though), and it’s directly in line with my insight last year about quality time.

    Friends: Speaking of friends, I’ve done a pretty poor job of hanging out with them. For most of my close friends, I probably saw them maybe once or twice in person, usually for some occasion like a birthday. I’m hoping that I can do more of it as my daughter grows up, and (hopefully) will start to accept a non-parent baby sitter. In any case, I’m grateful that I have a bunch of old friends where whenever we hang out we can just pick up from where we left off. Still, I know I can do better but I’m still trying to find the right balance. Finding this balance is probably the hardest thing for me as I get older.

    Fitness: In terms of fitness, I’ve been taking baby steps. I’ve committed to doing some form of exercise at least once a week, and I had a six month streak going before I injured my back recently. I’m slowly building up my cardio and strength but I’m realizing that I should be shifting my goals. Whereas in my 20s, I wanted to be stronger and faster to be better at sports or do some moves (e.g. back flip), now I want something different: to be injury-free and not be in pain.

    One thing that I realized as I have been getting older and more sedentary is that I have more muscle tightness and pain, am more prone to injury and, am taking longer to recover — the trifecta of old age. The muscle tightness is the most noticeable issue on a daily basis where I wake up and all my muscles are tight. I think this is primarily a function of old age. When I was in my youth, I didn’t feel like warmup stretching did much for me. Now, I’m acutely aware of how tight my muscles are and how much looser they can be after stretching. So I’ve mostly been doing a daily stretching routine to ensure that I’m (mostly) functional. Ditto for moving my muscles. It’s not enough for them to be loose, I’m much more acutely aware of “use it or lose it” rule with my body. So getting some form of movement (and range of movement) have been important.

    The other thing that stretching and movement helps with is injury protection. This is particularly important for my core, which historically has been pretty weak. I attribute my back injury directly to a weak core (and overuse from lifting my daughter all the time). The sad thing is that it also takes a lot longer to recover. I would sometimes get injuries in my 20s and after a week or two I was back at 100%. Now, not so much. I’ve been going to a physiotherapist recently, learning exercises to strengthen key stabilizer muscles, and being much more mindful of how I perform actions. I can’t just power through everything physical anymore, I have to be smarter about how I use my body, compensating reduced physical prowess with hard-earned wisdom — what other way is there to age?

    Health: Besides the minor injury to my back, health wise I’ve been pretty lucky. Luckily, COVID did not have any lasting effects on me. My weight has been pretty steady, which is a win in itself given my sedentary life. I’ve mostly learned to cut back when I overeat from time to time, creating a sort of homeostasis state for myself. Mentally, I’m feeling pretty good too. There were various times that were stressful during the year due to (self-inflicted) increased workload, but nothing too prolonged or intense compared to my startup days. Having a great partner at home, interesting work, and a young daughter to keep me on my toes, I feel like I’m exactly where I want to be right now.

    Hobbies: My hobbies from before my daughter was born have all been put on the side lines. Music lessons has not been a priority for me, and since my daughter doesn’t like me playing anymore (maybe because she has a better ear for music? lol), I don’t play that much either. That’s all right for me for now since I’m sure I’ll be able to get back to it later.

    On learning Chinese, it’s also taken a back seat. I’ve stopped my biweekly lessons because it’s simply too busy on the weekends. I’m trying to work in some more organic Chinese reading into my schedule with an app I downloaded but I’m still struggling to make a habit out of it. I do get a bit of practice with my extended family but that’s more maintenance than active learning. My hope is that my daughter will start going to Chinese lessons soon and I’ll schedule parallel lessons for the both of us! (I’ll let you know how that works out.)

    Blog: I have been able to keep up with some amount of blogging. I wrote a nice post on Charlie Munger soon after his passing on this blog. I also managed to eek out three posts on my technical blog, mostly because the posts weren’t as long as the previous years monster posts. My technical blog has been my highest priority “hobby” because it overlaps with my professional development. As I mentioned in the past, I can directly attribute key career opportunities to it, so it remains a top priority. However, that’s mainly just a positive side effect. I use the projects on the blog to learn and code, and it remains the one outlet where I get to do “real” technical work (not management or leadership), so it’s one of the few techy oasis’s in the rest of my busy, hectic life.

    Professional

    Borealis: I had quite a busy year at Borealis where I led the Incubator program where we ran more than half a dozen AI projects. The purpose of the Incubator is to get projects off the ground from concept to delivery. Around half of these projects have matured with lots of potential to make a big impact at the bank. One of my colleagues asked me a question I hadn’t thought about before: “Was this my best year (ever)?” And thinking about it, it quite possibly has been the best year of my career, at least from a value delivery point of view. It wasn’t without some stress at times but it was made a lot easier from working with lots of smart, dedicated people on meaningful problems for the bank. Although there is a ton of hype around generative AI and how it’s going to transform society, there are many less visible use-cases within non-technology businesses that could massively benefit from AI (generative or otherwise). My career, in retrospect, has been delivering AI solutions (in all its iterations from symbolic to ML to generative) to some of these less well known areas of the economy. It’s not as sexy as working at OpenAI or Instagram but it’s an important niche where most of the value of AI is going to be from. Maybe I’ll write more about this some day.

    Rotman: This past year at Rotman has been quite similar to the past years with the one exception being the boom in generative AI. On the teaching side, we all had to scramble to see if we should be doing anything differently now that everyone has access to ChatGPT. My approach last year (February 2023) was to assume students were going to use it BUT to make them accountable for any errors, penalizing them more heavily than usual. I think the policy only had a minor effect in the end. Some students used it, others did not, and, on average, the grades were similar to previous years.

    I’ve got a few things that I’m experimenting with this year in this era of ChatGPT. One obvious thing that I’ve had to do is to add material specifically geared towards modern generative AI (I had some GAN stuff before but that’s a lot less relevant). How can one of my students confidently say they learned AI without knowing both how to use ChatGPT and how it works (at least conceptually)? I’m most of the way through the material and I think I have a good overview for the students that covers most of the topics, but who knows what the state of the art will be by February, it’s all moving so fast.

    On the education side, I organized a panel on generative AI last May that was really thought provoking (at least for that moment in time). Much more discourse on LLM’s have been had since then, but at the time there were many issues from jobs to regulation to risks that were discussed. Even now, many of the topics and points are still relevant although, obviously, there is a lot more depth and understanding of how LLM’s work now. Generative AI is still in its infancy so you can expect that I’ll be organizing more related events next year.

    Events: Here are a few public events that I was involved in either through Borealis or Rotman throughout the year:

    Investing

    My portfolio (like most of the market) is quite a bit higher this year. As with most value investor portfolios, I’ve been outperforming the market in the last little while since the end of the COVID boom. Overall, I’m probably beating the general market by 2-3% over various long term horizons depending on how your count things, which is pretty satisfactory overall. I’ve all but given up on trying to get Buffett like returns because, quite frankly, I’m not as good as him (obviously), and more importantly, I simply can’t dedicate the necessary amount of time. However, based on the last 17 or so years of my investing career, I believe I have good evidence that I can consistently outperform the market by a few percent, so I still think it’s worth it for me to keep investing, especially as my portfolio gets larger.

    The other part of the investing process for me is that it’s so interesting! The myriad of businesses out there are so complex and tell an important part of the story of civilization (if I’m being romantic about it). This gives a ton of motivation to learn more about how the world works. I dare say that I’m getting better at it too, although I wouldn’t call myself good at it yet. After so many years of casually investing, I feel that I’m in the conscious incompetence phase, possibly on my way into conscious competence in the next little while. The stock market is such a humbling place because it is in many ways a great reflection of reality with no safety net. You either make money or you don’t. And in a true reflection of reality, sometimes there is hype and you totally fall for it, and sometimes you can still lose (because of timing) even though you were right in the end. It’s hard to fool yourself (in the long term) because there is a quantitative measure that you have at the end of the day.

    My only saving grace from my incompetence is that I’ve taken the idea of margin of safety pretty seriously. I’ve developed a habit of really only buying into a position if it’s obviously cheap (but still have got it wrong many times). This has protected me in a lot of places from buying into crazy overvalued stocks only to see them fall a gut-wrenching amount (but still have experienced this situation more than I’d like to). I know that I’m ignorant, so I really want a big buffer to protect myself. Of course, this means that I probably miss many more opportunities than I could otherwise take advantage of, but it’s easier for me to sleep at night. I’m still optimistic that I’m getting better at investing but it’s a lifelong journey, and it’s still quite possible that I’m still fooling myself — that’s why it’s interesting (just like life)!

    A few random thoughts about investing this year for posterity:

    • I trimmed down a few of my larger positions (including Berkshire) earlier in the year to rebalance my portfolio hoping to take advantage of some deals. Most of those trims were getting rid of leverage (LEAPS options) to reduce my risk. As usual, I sold too early but better safe than sorry.
    • I was able to take advantage of a couple of deals throughout the year affecting individual stocks but there was no general downturn, which I had hoped for. Despite that, I still have about 20% of my portfolio in cash or equivalents in case something does happen in the next little while. This is usually the position I’m in as I’m still accumulating and I always want to be able to jump on a good deal (if it’s obvious to me).
    • My biggest position is now that fast growth company I took a position in last year, which is up almost 100%. I’ll say that most of that is luck. But the more I learn about this company, the more I like it, especially at the price I got it at. It’s hard to say that it’ll be the next Microsoft/Google/etc. but it definitely has some potential to be. One of the ideas that I’ve been crystalizing in the last little while is to buy companies that have upside optionality for cheap. There’s probably some reasonable mean expected growth rate, but you want a skewed distribution to the right with some fat tails. As long as you buy at a reasonable-lowish price, then you protect a lot of your downside risk as well.
    • On that end, another insight that I feel that I finally have internalized is to buy great businesses and be happy holding them forever. Took me long enough! Honestly, Buffett and Munger have been saying this for longer than I’ve been alive, yet it still took me 15+ years for me to deeply understand it. On the one hand, these are the businesses that have the longest potential for growth, making it so that you only need to sit on your ass and watch them grow. Who wouldn’t like that? On the other hand, great businesses have relatively fewer problems. They navigate downturns better, outcompete rivals, and generally have less sources of worry. The corollary here is that, I’ve stopped being tempted by cheap opportunities even if it is a potentially decent business. It’s quite hard to buy them cheap and figure out when to sell them. Now I’ve shifted (for the most part) my focus to buying companies I want to hold (nearly) forever. I’ll repeat this again: took me long enough!
    • The one thing that I really have no mental model of approaching is when to sell. A couple of my investments in Chinese stocks have been a big flop for me so far. Yet at current prices they seem cheapish and they still have dominant positions in the Chinese market. So should I sell? I don’t really have a good framework to think about it. In the absence of having a framework, my default action is no action. So I continue to hold. Maybe this is the next level of my investment journey where I either have enough detailed research to be confident one way or the other, or I really bite the bullet and realize that I don’t know enough (and maybe never will) about these businesses to stay invested in them. Being consciously incompetent, I guess I’m not there yet. Check back in with me next year.
    • The sudden rise in interest rates have also motivated me to take action on where I’m keeping my cash (both for investing and my rainy day fund). There are some high interest savings ETFs where they essentially park your cash at banks but provide an interest rate pretty close to the overnight rate (both in Canada and US) versus essentially zero at my original big 5 Canadian bank brokerage account. The one detail is that you can only purchase them at non-big 5 Canadian bank accounts since most of them don’t allow you to trade since they are worried about deposit flight (I presume). This wasn’t too big a deal since I’ve been moving more of my new savings to a different brokerage because the FX fees at my big 5 bank were killing me because I predominantly invest in US stocks. This should also help my performance relative to the index because I hold a decent percent of my portfolio in cash, and have been getting basically no interest on that cash throughout my entire investing career.
    • One important tactic that I’ve been using to do more research (that I can fit into my schedule) is to use the Quartr app. It’s a really convenient way to listen to quarterly earnings calls and other investor conference presentations. It’s obviously not the same as reading a transcript and/or watching a video, but it’s much easier to fit into my day during a drive to work or brushing my teeth. So while the consumption of information is less focused, it does help with passive acquisition. In addition to podcasts, I’ve been working quarterly conference calls into the rotation, which has been a good source to indirectly learn more about various businesses and industries, even if it’s not super efficient.

    Insights and Learnings

    In this section, I’ve jotted down a bunch of insights that I’ve had over the year. If I was more serious about social media, I would probably make each one of these its own blog post or tweet, but I’m not. In general, I’m pretty bad at social (including the in-person kind) and besides, who has the time to do this throughout the year? In any case, I’ll leave them here for posterity in a more raw form than I would have otherwise done, hoping that it will be useful to you (or my future self).

    Multifactorial Problems: Something that is almost obvious in a complex world is that the causes of most things are multifactorial; not understanding this is the fallacy of a single cause. Most of the time, it’s much easier mentally to say, “oh, it’s because of X”, or “Y explains it”, and very likely that’s part of the reasoning, however, it’s unlikely the whole story. It’s so hard to tease out the causal components of why things happen so it’s important not to fall into this trap. I’ve also found that this leads to a false sense of confidence where I feel that I know more than I should. Acknowledging ignorance is a good way to stay humble and avoid overconfidence, which is optimal for learning. Lately, when something like this comes up in conversation, I’ve been agreeing with the X or Y cause, but also adding that, it’s probably complicated and a multifactorial problem. I’ve yet to hear someone disagree because it’s almost always true when you are thinking about any non-trivial problem. A small but meaningful trick to help you try not to fool yourself.

    Boundaries and Constraints: Earlier this year I was listening to Tim Ferris interview Seth Godin, and they touched upon an important idea of defining your (true) boundaries and constraints first then thinking about what’s possible. Part of the motivation is that if you just imagine what you want, you will be overwhelmed because you can probably do anything (but not everything). Starting with your (true) boundaries and constraints allows you to reduce your solution space to search for things that are truly important for you. In some sense, this is like inverting the problem. Reflecting on where I want to go, the biggest constraint at this point in my life is my family. This is my number one priority and I’ve decided to rearrange most other things in my life around that. This obviously limits me in some ways, for example, greatly reducing time with friends, or aggressively pursuing “career success” (whatever that means). But in the end, this is exactly the tradeoff that I want to be having now, and this framework helps me accept that I can’t do everything but at least I’m doing the important things.

    One Question When You’re Feeling Down: A question that I’ve been getting into the habit of asking myself this year when I’m feeling down or upset is: why? The most frequent answer: being tired. There’s this acronym you learn in management training called HALT, which stands for Hungry, Angry, Lonely, and Tired. It’s there to remind you that we are all humans, and we are very often not in a good mood due to one of those basic causes. I can attest that pretty much every tantrum that my daughter has is due to one of these causes. And at the end of the day, adults aren’t that much different than children, just better at hiding (or ignoring) the reasons for being upset.

    For me personally, being tired is usually the main reason or amplifier of the other three feelings. I get angry more easily when I’m tired; I get more lonely when I’m tired; and I’m generally more upset when I’m tired (I overeat when I’m tired, which is another unhealthy negative). Asking myself this question usually doesn’t make me not upset but it does help a bit because identifying the proximate cause (even if multifactorial) helps me understand that it’s a temporary feeling. If I can get a good night’s sleep (at least for me), it’s magical how many problems that solves. Whatever anxiety, worry, or problem I have seems so much less intense the next day, and I’m able to face it more easily. So this little trick has helped me cope better with the inevitable times when I’m down. Hopefully it helps you too.

    Improving Sleep: Ever since I’ve started working full time, I’ve had on and off problems falling asleep at night (or waking up in the middle of the night and not being able to get back to sleep). Most of the times I can’t sleep I can attribute to two primary causes: caffeine and stress. The caffeine part I’ve dealt with for a while by limiting myself to one Coke Zero at lunch per day. I’ve switched to decaf and/or caffeine free drinks for coffee or Coke. I occasionally drink a bit of caffeinated tea or a second can of Coke Zero, but generally I consume a limited amount of caffeine. Whenever the coffee shop mistakenly gives me a caffeinated drink, I always end up awake in bed cursing myself for not double checking. I now know the feeling of being awake due to caffeine, which just feels like my mind can’t get into “sleep mode” (even if my body is tired). It just keeps going despite my best efforts.

    Stress is another hard one to deal with because it’s harder to control than caffeine. Thankfully, I’m not working at a startup where stress levels were through the roof so it’s a lot easier to control nowadays. One simple trick is to not work in the evening. Having more “space” (or time as it were) between your work and sleep (including vacations) is probably one of the best ways to deal with it.

    Despite having a more balanced work life now, even a bit of stress can prevent me from sleeping. This manifests in me feeling tension in my muscles or being too hot. One intuitive (but maybe not scientific) explanation I heard was that, if you think about it, to fall asleep, by definition your muscles need to be relaxed. You don’t have tension in your muscles when sleeping (mostly true), so you must be able to get to a relaxed state before you get to sleep.

    One trick that I’ve been practicing on and off for a while (but am using much more consciously now when I have troubles sleeping) is to lie flat on my back, start to take deep breaths, focus on them, and alternate on each exhale thinking to myself either “relax” and “sleep”. During the exhale, I’m actively trying to relax or “sleep” my muscles. That is, I’m trying to consciously relax my muscles or put them in a “sleep” state (whatever that means to you). Each exhale, I usually can make a small amount of progress where I feel my muscles go into a more relaxed state. I usually try to have my body remain completely still at the same time to help things along. At some point, some of the very relaxed muscles go into a different state, which is hard to describe, but it’s almost like a numb-sleeping kind of state. If I can keep this up long enough, my mind usually starts to drift off to sleep with a relaxed body (assuming not too much caffeine).

    Sometimes I’m very tense so it’s even hard to use that trick. In those cases, I picked up another trick from a video about the 4-7-8 technique (although, I remembered it as the 4-5-7 technique), which is basically breathing in for a 4-count, holding your breath for a 5-count, and then breathing out for a 7-count. I usually only need to do this a few cycles to calm my body a bit, then I can move onto the trick above. I don’t use this trick exclusively to go to sleep since it requires a bit more conscious effort so I haven’t been able to doze off while doing it.

    I explained some of my methodology to a friend and he said that it sounds an awful lot like meditation. I guess it is? I don’t do much explicit meditation, but boy do I like to get good sleep. So I’m happy to adopt any techniques that can get me better sleep.

    Reading on a Screen: Something that I’ve spent a lot less time doing recently is reading. Due to the ever changing schedule with my daughter, I’ve been finding it hard to find a consistent time for reading. And although I still prefer to read on paper, pretty much all the books I’ve actually read this year have been on my phone via the Kindle app. The convenience of always being there means that it’s just more accessible than paper when you’re strapped for time. I’ve just come to accept that it’s better to read on a screen than not read at all.

    The other big hurdle I’ve gotten over is to just buy the same book twice, one physical and one Kindle. I like collecting books even if I don’t read them right away (or ever?). In fact, I’ve probably bought more than a dozen physical books that I haven’t even touched this year. But if I really want to start reading it, I’ll just buy another copy for my Kindle app to get me over that friction. The cost of buying a book or two is just so massively out weighed by the potential benefit, that it’s a cost that I’m very willing to pay (even if it’s not the most efficient). What is the point of having money if not to be more productive (actually reading), have more convenience (second copy on Kindle) and/or have a warm fuzzy feeling inside (physical copies).

    Parenting: One insight that has become so obvious to me now as a parent is that there is no one right way to parent. This is frustrating from both the perspective of your child because you want to do the “right thing”, but also from the perspective of judging other parents and their kids. The important part about the former is to understand that all kids develop at different paces and have different strengths and weaknesses. It’s very unlikely that the one or two explicit choices you make about your parenting style (vs. the hundreds of unconscious ones, including genetics) are going to make that big of a difference. All of this is to say that you should find something that works for you and your child, and simultaneously accept that your kid is uniquely themselves (and not compare them to other kids as hard as that might be).

    The latter point about judging other parents, this is a tough one too because for most of us (including me), our ego is tied to our kids, and feeling good about the choices we made for our kid (even genetically), makes us feel good about ourselves. Some parents even feel the need to evangelize their specific way of raising kids, convinced it’s the best. Going back to my first point: there is no “best way”. It’s hard but I think the best thing we can do for each other is just let parents choose what works for them without all the judgement (outside of obvious abuse scenarios).

    Parenting Books: Two books that I’ve read this year on parenting which I thought were insightful: How to Talk So Little Kids Will Listen, and The Opposite of Spoiled. The former is more targeted version of the classic book How To Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen so Kids Will Talk, which I’ve previously read with similar content but targeted for a 2-7 age group. Although there are multiple parenting styles that all probably are good, the ideas espoused in this series is closest to how my wife and me are approaching communication with our child. It’s quite a different style than I was raised on, which is closer to traditional Asian style parenting (not quite a Tiger Mom style though), and this book has really shifted my default ideas on parenting (based on my upbringing) to something that seems to just make much more sense to me.

    The other book, The Opposite of Spoiled, touched on several really important topics of raising kids not-spoiled (there’s no real word for that). My family was not wealthy when I was young, and I learned a lot of lessons on how to be frugal, work hard, grateful etc. through that experience (although some of that I’ve actively tried to unlearn but that’s a post for another time). So how can you raise a child who maintains those values but in an environment where money isn’t as scarce? There isn’t a universal answer to this question but this book gives many examples and ideas of how you might go about that. If you’re interested, I suggest you pick up the book and give it a read.

    Sensitivity: It’s difficult to understand how others perceive the world but it’s becoming more obvious to me that I experience the five basic senses much less intensely than others. For example, I like looking at nice things like natural scenery but it doesn’t really do that much for me beyond the moment. My sense of smell (and I think taste) seem to be less acute than others around me. I’ve also noticed my hearing is less sensitive than others, and similarly, at least compared to my wife, anecdotally I have a higher pain tolerance. It’s hard to know if it’s more a physical or a mental thing, but it’s definitely a thing (probably multifactorial where they both have feedback loops into each other).

    What’s interesting is that things that might excite others like extreme sports or traveling to exotic destinations do a lot less for me. It’s often hard to untangle the social peer pressure to want to go to these places versus how much they actually made me happy. Don’t get me wrong though, I enjoy going to Europe or Asia, but honestly, I value the people I’m traveling with much more than the places I go (although again, it’s hard to say if it’s just due to the way I interpret the world or some other things that are going on). That combined with my natural introvert tendencies make it so that my ideal vacation is easy going with family or really close friends, which fortunately could be most places in the world.

    Taking Notes: I watched this video from a philosophy professor named Jeffrey Kaplan who did a nice video series for his students on how to be a good student. One of them was about taking notes that I thought had a lot of good ideas in it. In the context of reading some dense text like a philosophy textbook, he suggested actively summarizing every paragraph, then every fifth paragraph or so summarize the summaries that you made, and then keep doing this recursively until you have a summary of the chapter or book. The main idea is the best way to understand something is to put it in your own words, that is, literally try to make a summary of it. It improves comprehension and recall, and it has the side effect of producing a good set of notes to study from. It’s definitely slower but he makes a compelling argument that it’s more efficient in the long run even on a total time basis.

    I never thought about taking notes so systematically when reading, rather I just jotted a thought down any time I read something interesting. This is useful for some types of reading. But the active summarizing note-taking method he explains is better for really dense text because often my mind will wander while reading. Worse yet, I finish reading a section and totally forgot what I read. I practiced using the method for a while, just doing every paragraph, and it was definitely helpful but also more mentally taxing. This also made reading a bigger task, eventually reducing the amount of reading that I did. I ended up going back to just taking notes more casually except when I explicitly wanted to digest something in more detail. This is probably the right balance for now until I have more time to spare, but it was useful to have another trick up my sleeve for better learning.

    What You Do: I’ve been casually browsing through Kevin Kelly’s Excellent Advice for Living, and he had this really good insight that I thought was really important to reflect upon:

    You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

    Reflecting on what I spend my time on, it’s basically been family, learning (technical, investing, misc), and work. Those are the major dimensions of who I am right now, which is pretty much how I want it to be. As I wrote above, I hope to have more time for friends later on, and maybe hobbies or interests, but right now family is the number one priority (with work being a necessity). Hopefully, what you do is also as intentional?

    Next Year

    In 2024, I’m mostly expecting more of the same as 2023: family time, work stuff, and a bunch more learning. Thankfully the pandemic is mostly out of my psyche and I can look forward to more normal things like vacations and spending time with my daughter. Looking back on the last few years and what’s going on around the world, I can’t help but be grateful for everything that I have. Life’s never easy for anyone but I feel that I’ve been given a good roll of the dice so far. And while the last year was a more “normal” year without any big ups or downs for me, I’ll be happy taking as many more of those that I can get. Wishing you and your family a happy and prosperous 2024!

Top Posts

A Little Bit of Slope Makes Up for a Lot of Y-InterceptJuly 25, 2015
Scott Adams’ Financial AdviceJanuary 25, 2015
Grandma's RuleFebruary 22, 2015
2025 Year-In-ReviewDecember 25, 2025
A Slot Machine RiddleDecember 11, 2012

Past Posts