2024 Year in Review

Dan Scott

31 Dec 2024 • 3 min read

This year's writing on The Drafting Table and general life updates.

In 2024, I wrote 9 posts including this one. That's down slightly from last year, but on par with 2020; my annual average from 2020 - 2024 has been 9.6. Having two kids under the age of four goes a long way towards explaining why I'm not writing as much as I used to (back in 2019, I had even started working on a book, which I still intend to pick back up in another season of life). To be clear, I'm just explaining here, not bemoaning/complaining. I really appreciate this essay by Paul Graham (which I may have shared before, but don't mind recommending more than once) where he writes about how having children changed him, and mentions that small children are "fascinatingly complex characters". They certainly are.

Here's the list of my posts from this year:

At the end of last year, I selected a theme of industry and adjacent topics (supply chains, technology, etc.) to focus some of my reading and writing on in 2024. I ended up reading six books about it, and so far have written two posts (plus my links posts included some content related to this theme). I still have 1-3 more posts planned (such as notes from the reading I did and a round-up of what has stood out to me from doing this series). In 2025, if I can get this series wrapped up before too long into the new year, I next want to take up a theme of knowledge and its curation.

In total, I read 20 books this past year. Half were novels so the books related to the industry theme comprised the majority of the non-fiction. I hope to write mini-reviews for some of these books in the new year.

In 2024 I got a new 3d printer and have enjoyed getting back in to 3d printing. I've made some dollhouse furniture, some stocking stuffers, and a sundial, among other things. I plan to write a post sharing my designs in the new year. Other DIY projects from this year were:

A kite: it used some dowels and vapour barrier and was slightly too heavy or didn't have enough surface area to really soar. It got off the ground, but not much more than head height. Next summer may see an attempt at version 2.0—iterative design for the win.
A floor lamp: I used a mic stand, a pendant light cord, and made a shade from a small metal bucket with perforations drilled in a geometric pattern.
A latchboard for my younger child's first birthday. Here's a photo:

Over on LinkedIn, I made a few predictions for 2025 that I'll also share here:

... LLMs and other generative AI (and predictive AI such as AlphaFold) are getting better and are likely to see more widespread use, investment, and continued pushing-forward of the cutting edge in the coming year. As Baby Boomers continue to retire in large numbers (and some Gen Xers are at least reaching the early retirement thresholds) experienced workers are going to be at a premium, and companies will rise and fall based on how well they've done at mentoring and knowledge curation and transfer leading up to this demographic transition. A lot of the gaps in the workforce have been filled via immigration, but 2025 looks like it could see us running an experiment whether cutting back on immigration raises the labour force participation rate or just leads to a lot of vacancies going unfilled. Reshoring is [another] trend I've commented on the past couple of years and with the US president-elect gung-ho for a trade war a reshuffling of where things are made could easily shift into high gear in 2025. If conflicts in various hotspots result in the seizure or sinking of tankers or container ships that could also promote shorter supply chains. ...
Trust—in institutions, experts, the media, and more—has been waning for some time now. One of the dark sides of AI is that it drastically lowers the cost of producing believable fakes. So trust is set to be eroded even further; the other side of the coin is that it will be a very valuable commodity where it still exists or can be fairly earned. I've commented to a few people that the 20th century will probably end up as a historical anomaly as a rare period where photographic or video evidence was ranked higher than credible witnesses of good character. ...
I'm wondering if recent non-confidence votes in France and Germany could presage a year of political instability in the EU. Whereas in Canada, I expect an election in 2025 to lead to a majority government (assuming current polls can be believed) and thus less (internal—external is a whole other matter) political uncertainty for the next several years.
An interesting cultural trend is a resurgence of attention to classical antiquity. Christopher Nolan is working on a movie adaptation of The Odyssey [for example]

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