2024 is a different year, the war didn’t stop but going worse. All world the bounders are open and my wife and I managed to make our trip to Japan at end of the year. Japan is a nice place to visit, but we only have chances to do tourist activities not any normal citizen daily activities. We got a rental car and saw a huge amount of snow, anyway my 2024 is not all about Japan and travelling.
TradeInsight
After trip in Japan as long as I reached home, I have found that the subscribers amount reached 30. It is a small milestone for TradeInsight.info, it means there is a small amount of people really love it and want to pay for it.
A small advertisement, TradeInsight.info is a platform to provide insiders’ insight information to users, you can get both congress trade information and corporate insiders’ data from it. You can receive a prompt email after we fetch the trades from the congress and SEC websites, now we are working on providing more way of notifications.
A New Degree
Started from end of 2023, my wife and I joined a large NZ study group to study our master degree in Computer Science, more particularly, Applied Computing. She chose her favourite papers in Design and programming, I enrolled in my preferred in Machine Learning/ Neural Network, Data and BA, this is a free master program for NZ locals, from what I know, it is still free for 2025 and 2026.
People may feel surprised, people in NZ, a developed country, the interest to enrol in university decreases steadily.
The Diagram Above is from TheFacts.NZ^1
Free degree is a trial to fight against it in a way. We both had our degrees in our home country, I have a master in engineering, she has a honour degree in multi media and mass communication, this year, we both worked hard on it, and this was why we got a Japan trip at the end of the year.
Restructure / Redundancy
In my workplace, we got two rounds of restructure, we got one in 2023, now we got another two. I would say there are not much differences between restructure and redundancy in NZ, in a country that provides permanent contract of work.
- Some people are in the redundancy list, some of them just left the country and went to Australia for better salary and more opportunities.
- Some are disappointed, because they didn’t see the boss fought for people who were made redundant and left. One is a nice Russian lady, we worked together for years, she was so upset and does not event wanted to stay even one day longer. Some have been looking for new jobs after that.
- Others still stay, like me, not very happily, just because of lack of people and familiarity.
There is a bit of grey area, because new hiring was happening at the same time with different job title but same job description, technically new hiring should be stopped or should be provided to the redundant people first.
I was still safe during these two, however, I will talk more about this in the future.
LLM AI became bigger things
More and more companies integrate with AI and Large Language Models, which is good for AI industry and NVIADA stock holders, the only issue is that I have found so far is that many features or products do not require an LLM to power it, they can be done in a small machine learning model or a few lines of codes, so I must say, there is an AI bubble, many people may disagree with me, but this is from what I observe as an AI participants. The bubble will break one day, however, even it breaks, NVDA this kind of chips provider may get least impacted, the company which are selling the concept, stock price may go to 0.
My wife once asked me what is my opinion on next big industry, I told her Robots, one big challenges to have a home robot, it is that the robot cannot understand free text commands, large language models helped in this case, especially with Agent AI stack evolves, it basically resolved this kind of challenges, while there are other challenges as well, surely.
Summary
2024 is a busy year, and it is a chill year as well, why it is busy and chill at the same time, let me explain in next year.