cat articles/furikaeri-2024
Looking Back on 2024
The year is coming to an end, so here is a short look back at 2024.
The year is coming to an end, so here is a short look back at 2024.
Life
In 2024 I was able to live at my own pace. Because we were building a house, there were many meetings and site visits, so I could not take a long overseas trip. Still, I traveled a bit both in Japan and abroad, and overall it was an active enough year.
On the health side, I hit my highest body weight so far. I started going to a personal gym partly to diet, lost 5 kg, and got back to a weight from a while ago. Ideally I would like to lose another 5 kg and gain more muscle, but that probably requires exercising properly rather than only going to the gym once a week.
And the house is finally built. We moved in right at the end of the year, so we have only been living here for about six days, but so far it has been very comfortable. The wood stove has been running almost all the time except when we are sleeping, and it is warm and excellent.
Work
At work, I was able to do a lot of what I wanted as a product manager and data scientist, mainly in information retrieval, on an AI-related product that started this year. I also worked with teammates who had expertise I did not have, and it was an enjoyable and fulfilling year. I think we built a fairly good product. It has had a quiet release, and next year I think it will probably be used more widely. More precisely, I want to help make that happen.
Technology and Hobbies
Since the second half of 2023, information retrieval has become much more interesting to me. I started working on it professionally as well, and as a hobby I created datasets, built rerankers and retrieval models, and published some useful outputs. Training LLMs is difficult with my machine resources, but it is possible to build models that fill a missing piece for a specific task. In Japanese, relatively few people publish this kind of work, so if the task is specific enough it is still possible to build a strong model. That has been fun.
In information retrieval, NLP, and machine learning, the more I work on them, the more knowledge keeps accumulating. There is still so much I want to do and learn. In 2025 I want to keep this area as a technical focus, build things as a hobby, and apply what I learn at work.
At the same time, I may have spent too much private time on work-adjacent technology. Most mornings and evenings were spent building models as a hobby. I also feel that life might be richer if I enjoyed a wider range of things outside work, so I want to pay attention to that balance in 2025.
Summary
Looking back, the year went by quickly. It feels like I did quite a lot and also like there is still a lot I did not do. I think I recovered the pace I lost in 2023, and I was able to do various things with a balance that suits me.
As always, I am grateful to my wife, who supports me in many ways. With that, I hope to see you all in 2025.