The Family Xmas Letter, 2022

Family, looking back on 2022

Last year's Family Xmas Letter was authored by several of the humans who together make up this Family. This year, in the spirit of inspiration and laziness, we tried replacing ourselves with a non-human/non-canine author, the state of the art ChatGPT, current darling in Artificial Intelligence circles. "Write the Family Xmas Letter in the style of brekkieusa.blogspot.com" we commanded this genie, to which it replied:

Yeah, try again, robot! This might be any other family's Xmas letter (in particular, some family that has gotten around to naming its new baby but not themselves) but it is surely not ours. No, ours goes more like...

QUBIT:

Schnog shot

Banned from Peebook for sh!tposting, Qubit decided to go halvsies with Elon Musk to buy Twitter. Though delighted to have yet more space where she can express her opeenions freely, she was disappointed when her business partner refused to rename it--yes, you guessed it!--Quitter. Unfortunately, while no one knows you're a dog on the Internet, it is pretty obvious if a dog is running it. Undaunted by her disastrous foray into social media ownership, Qubit launched several other ventures this year including TakeMeForAWalkX, The Boring Day Because Nobody Walked Me Company, Neuroticlink, and Tesla.

TALIA:

Testing station

Did you know you can get COVID tests in bulk? Did you know you can do it repeatedly, and that no matter how often you test after that you will never use them all up? Did you know that's why we have a barn, which is not only handy for storing COVID tests but also for storing COVID people? Did you know that it is actually nicer to live in the barn than it is to live in our house (see section on home rebuild, below)? Well Talia knows all this because she moved to the barn to be with her tests in early December and has scarcely been seen since. Perhaps due to decreased time spent with family-left-behind-in-house Talia is enjoying much success at work and has achieved her life goal of ignoring the mess in her closet.

FELIX:

Felix, attempting to escape from family

Part of being a teenager, as you may recall, is establishing independence from your family even while they continue to pay for everything, cook all your food, and drive you places. Felix, it must be said, is doing a great job of this. His formula: explain to your family, gently but firmly, that they "kinda suck," and then don't worry about the rest because, like the suckers they are, they will continue to love you. Kinda. When not busy playing to stereotype, Felix is editing metadata or gutting wild pigs or misreading cues from the many girls in his life or possibly, as an outside chance, climbing something. New this year: a mobile phone and, with it, our first annual count of phones destroyed...to date, one.

EL GID:

First-mover advantage

The thing about our second child is that he's the first. The first person to school every day, the first person up on the weekend looking for the TV remote, and, not least, the first person to ever open a golf course in Landers, CA. It's these kind of weird details that keep you readers coming back! And Gid's all about weird details. Why, this year alone he invented the fried-chicken-and-fried-fish sandwich, was complimented on his outfit by David Sedaris, and took possession of the biggest lava lamp you've ever seen. Details, details, the essence remains the same: teen trumpeter talks too much while wearing Walkman.

ALEC:

Hey, look at me!

"What shall I write about me?" the author asked his obnoxious assistant, to which the latter replied, "Very little." Fine, I'll keep it short: new stereo repair man, new sweater, new DVD release, new scars and broken bones (three separate incidents, sigh), new job as data whisperer, new willingness to drive Gid to school...NOT.

THE HOUSE:

Drilling 50' hole in our lawn as totally normal part of house rebuild process

Inspired by a misbegotten faith in our project management skills the collective You keep asking, "How's it going with the home renovation?" The honest answer is that it is going backwards. To build here in Fairfax one creates a design, finds a builder, jumps through a labyrinth of bureaucratic hoops, and conjures up, say, a million dollars, all of which we have done, more or less. However, to build in Fairfax next to a creek is much harder. Indeed, it may prove impossible, which is the question before us at the time of writing. We hope--and fear--there will be lots more news about this in the 2023 Family Xmas Letter...and will take no further questions until that time.

THE VACATIONS:

This year's vacations produced the best crop of photos ever (because mobile phone cameras keep improving). Here, the best of the best, all 100% unedited (because none of us know how to use filters):

To quote our AI assistant, "We hope that you have [sic] a wonderful Christmas and that the new year brings you health, happiness, and lots of love. With love, (Your name)."

Problem solving

Another of my occasional attempts to explain my work

I joined Autodesk in 2012 having chosen, and been chosen by, the Enterprise Data Management department. At the time, EDM worked almost exclusively with account data, i.e., the information the company uses to identify its commercial customers. As described in my first "here's what I do for work" posting, I began my work there, but Autodesk had decided to stop selling software by the box and to instead become a subscription business and that meant we needed to concern ourselves with a lot more than just accounts. So I created the broader role of Business Data Architect and went on to spend several years working in one domain after another, finding ways to make our product data and contact data and usage data, etc. more "fit for purpose."

In 2016 I moved into another sui generis role as a product manager for piracy analytics. This took me from improving the foundational data upon which others built business analytics to building those analytics myself. It was a great fit: I knew what our data was capable of, I'm good at developing and explaining analytics, and, to my frank surprise, I discovered I really like working with salespeople. This work was easier to explain--"I use data to find out who is stealing our software"--and tangibly productive: the amount of revenue gained from the leads these analytics identified was significant.

I was hired into and managed in the EDM period by a wise and patient person, mentor as much as boss. I was invited into my second role by another. That run of good fortune ended, however, when a new VP pushed out this latter manager and brought in another, who, lacking any practical knowledge of how to do the work, focused instead on convincing his superiors that the organization he inherited was full of incompetents. Though hardly threatened by this corporate cuckoo bird, working with him was intolerable, so I began casting about for my next role. An invitation soon came from the VP of Research, who was aware of my work on the MX3D bridge and who had read an internal memo I'd written about the ethical issues raised by data collection in public spaces. He invited me to join and then to take over our Data Ethics program. Now based in Autodesk Research, I ran that for about a year before creating and taking on my new role: Director of Data Acquisition and Strategy.

As mentioned above, a lot of my work at Autodesk has been driven by changes in how we sell our product, the so-called "business model transition" to subscription. My current work is necessitated by a comparable transition in how we make our product. Today, we create stand-alone systems of slowly evolving logic (AutoCAD, Revit, etc.) that deliver their capabilities via enormous chunks of software code. In future, those capabilities will be driven and delivered by increasingly capacious and intertwined machine learning models that evolve in response to the data fed them. Figuring out how to get, or "acquire," the data to build and grow these models is my job.

As more and more of the world is run on AI the job of data acquisition will become an increasingly common one. At the moment, however, it's a novel role, formally speaking, and there's not much explicit guidance on how to do it. That suits me just fine: I'm all about creating answers, especially when the question itself isn't even quite clear. Also, this is not, as they say, my first rodeo: the driving force is different but the job is not dissimilar to the Business Data Architect work mentioned above. For example, one of the key questions, then as now, is How much data is there and where do I find it? That was one of the first questions I tried to answer when I worked with our account data, using a single Sankey diagram showing where that data was created and consumed throughout our back office environment.

I think it's important that kids have some understanding of what it is their parents do with the majority of their time, so I seek opportunities to share my work with the boys (witness Felix crawling around on top of that Sankey diagram I just mentioned). With this in mind, I recently raised the question of "How much data is there and where do I find it?" with them. Specifically, I asked my boys how they would go about counting all the designs in Autodesk's computer systems. Their answers were illuminating, both of the problem and of their individual psychologies. Felix, displaying technical acumen but organizational naivete, said that it should be easy, you just needed to find the GUID (that is, globally unique identifier) for each design and count how many such IDs there were. Gideon, thinking as Gideon does, said that the key would be to find the person who was responsible for those computer systems and get them to do the counting.

In practice, the answer is a mix of both: we will need design GUIDs and mechanisms for counting them, and getting that will require working with our internal systems and data architects. These problems are always both technical and organizational in nature, so it takes a Felix and a Gideon to solve them. Fortunately, I'm both.

Twitter

Dan, in better days, building cloud infrastructure at Twitter

"9 years at the tweet factory. It was all about my coworkers for me. I'll miss you all and hope to keep in touch on the outside #LoveWhereYouWorked" tweets @dknightly earlier this week. Having an inside view of the impact of Elon Musk on Twitter has added a human dimension to this tech tragedy, but it was quite awful enough even without that. Twitter was infamous for its poor management, but despite that--and isn't it so often despite that?--a lot of good work got done there, not just in cloud engineering (how many Internet services offer global latency measured in milliseconds even when traffic jumps by multiple orders of magnitude instantaneously?) but also, and almost uniquely, in tech ethics. It took Musk to show us what really bad management looks like, management that isn't just obstructive but actively destructive.

People like Musk show up now and again, even at a reasonably well run company like Autodesk. I think of them as cuckoo birds: parasite poseurs, they cause employees who do belong to fall out of the nest and are only with difficulty pushed out themselves, by which time they have shit all over everything, creating a mess that more mature managers are left to clean up. The analogy is particularly apt for Twitter, of course, except that in this case the parasite is the Cuckoo in Chief. All the usual behaviors are in evidence--laughable insecurity highlighted by an ill-advised flaunting of ignorance, total intolerance of feedback, sucking up to your superiors--but the typical recourse is unavailable.

Some may disagree with this characterization, but nothing speaks louder than results: as of this writing internal Twitter services are visibly failing and it's just a matter of time (and events: I'm looking at you, World Cup) before the whole thing topples over. If you haven't already backed up your data I'd get on it, and I suppose you'd better click the links, above, before they die, too.

Godson

Young Yone

We have a godson, Talia and I. We knew him well as a peutertje, but then both we and he left Amsterdam, and our paths have not crossed much since. I hardly maintain long-established friendships with the many people I love who live far away, and have done very little to build one with this little boy who now lives in Tenerife. So this summer we decided to bring him closer.

Towering over actual little boy and not so big wife

Yone has grown up...not a surprise and yet surprising. He is 17, done with his secondary education, and happy to come on vacation with us. He brings with him to California a great sense of style, some very well articulated political theory, and altogether too many opinions about music, all of it new to us. Like many teens, he is also carrying some emotional baggage from pandemic isolation and too much time on YouTube. What he doesn't have is any saffron (Tenerife is, I was told by his mother who forgot to pack it, famous for a particularly pungent cultivar of this rare spice), but he makes up for this by doing most of the work when we invite friends over to meet him and to eat his paella.

Wood-fired, delicious!

We eat this and a lot more good food, have many fun adventures together, and do no permanent damage to him at all in the too-brief time he is in town.

While enjoying his company, I try to figure out what this now young man might need from a godparent. By coincidence, on the very first day of his visit, while driving out to Stinson Beach to enjoy the waves and have a "dingleberry" fight...

Boys will be boys

...we listen to a story by David Sedaris (S07E02) in which he recounts his experiences as a godfather. Sedaris's view is that the godfather's job is to give the godchild fancy gifts and the godchild's job is to be wowed by them. This despite the fact that in his experience the godchild is inevitably underwhelmed, leaving both parties dissatisfied. Still, my point of view when Yone arrived was similar: if asked, I'd have said we follow the Disney model, wherein the godparent exists as a distant entity who shows up at random/magically determined intervals to grant wishes and then disappears again.

To date, my wish-granting has focused on records

Yone, however, responds to Sedaris's story with horror: in his view, relationships where one person does all the giving and the other all the taking are by definition dysfunctional and unlikely to last. His dissertation on the topic is passionate and well reasoned, but upon reflection I realize it doesn't match my experiences. I have had many wonderful relationships that were one-sided. In my long and varied career in particular I have benefited again and again from mentorship. I count these people friends, and stand prepared to do them favors in return, but really there's little they need from me. I can only ever repay them by mentoring in turn.

Yone paying it forward

By the time Yone leaves--indeed, in the car ride to the airport--I've formulated my point of view and found a way to communicate it. I, too, have had a godsomething, I tell him, in my case a godbrother, one of my older siblings, who (among much else, though I gloss that over) has provided me a standing line of credit and good advice through the years. Yone surely does not lack for good advice, but it's easier to hear it from someone who is trusted but at a distance. And one can always use credit. So we agree on this: I'm here for that, and, of course, for another free plane ticket and lots more good food the next time he cares to visit.

Hasta la vista, Yone!

The Lake

Could save this for the vacation section of the Family Xmas Letter but surely will have more fab fotos by then, so a real-time (just back yesterday) glimpse of a week's vacation in the high Sierras.

 

We go every year, smoke permitting. Can't remember a better week than this.