Martin Thoma A blog about Code, Politics, and my life

New Year 2022 🎆

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Contents

It’s New Year’s Eve and — as always — I finish some things and have some plans for next year.

Review of 2021

Oh man, what a year. 2021 was — again! — dominated by the COVID-19 pandemic. This came as a surprise to me as we’ve learned that masks are really useful in April 2020 in Germany and the Pfizer–BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine was officially allowed in Germany end of 2020. Meaning we had a full year in which we got only 71.1% fully vaccinated in Germany. I see a lot of egocentric stupid movements around the world: QAnon trying to dismantle democracy in the US, the so called “Querdenker” in Germany who don’t believe Corona exists/that the vaccination contains microchips and is made by Lizard people, people protesting against wearing masks in France and the Netherlands. They also get legitimization, e.g. QAnon by many Republicans and big “news” outlets like Fox News or the “Querdenker” movement in Germany by the right-wing party AfD.

We still face several shortages, e.g. a microchip shortage. Hahaha, I’ve just noticed the irony of writing about crazy people who think they are used within the vaccination 😁 The global supply chain issues affect a lot of other stuff. I’ve heard of Aluminum, lumber for houses and paper for books, gas for heating. Energy in general. I wanted to buy a painted mini-fridge for a colleague and was told that they are out of stock for the next 24 months. Crazy. Two reasons for those shortages are the Suez Canal obstruction by the grounded ship “Ever Given” as well as the increased demand after the lockdowns. Corona again.

We also see inflation rise. We have seen several severe security issues such as Log4Shell, FORCEDENTRY, PrintNightmare, Silver Sparrow, the Zhenhua Data Leak, and the Epik data breach. There were several attacks on or issues with infrastructure such as Transnet, the Facebook outage, managed service providers, meat processing, New Zealand Healthcare, Healthcare in Ireland, the Colonial pipeline, Pulse Connect VPN, Microsoft Exchange Server data breach.

The floods in Europe hit a lot of people hard. In Germany, we had cities where the first level of all houses was completely underwater. There is a clear link to climate change.

While negative news is more dominantly on my mind, there was quite a bit of positive news as well:

  • Labor improvements: We see the Great Resignation in which many people quit shitty jobs. A workers union was formed for Google (source).
  • GameStop: Everybody likes David-vs-Goliath stories. Besides that, I’m uncertain of the effects of the GameStop short squeeze.
  • Breakthroughs in Science: Something around time crystals which I didn’t understand.
  • Breakthroughs in Technology / Engineering:
    • The Ingenuity Mars Helicopter is flying on Mars.
    • The James Webb Space Telescope was successfully launched to space this year. It will allow us to understand the origins of the universe, far-away planets, and galaxies way better.
    • Google successfully approached the chip floorplanning problem with reinforcement learning (source)
    • The Apple M1 Pro and M1 Max chips were released. It might not be as ground-breaking as the rest of the news here, but it might indicate a shift in processor design.
  • Whistleblowing: The Pandora Papers showed a lot of corruption and tax fraud/tax evasion. It’s positive as this helps to change the situation.

Personal changes that were important to me:

  • I moved from a shared apartment to a rented apartment. I now live together with my girlfriend 🎉 That was about time and I’m happy we made the move.
  • I switched jobs. I was working as a consultant for several years. The consulting company I worked for is pretty good, but I like having a stable team. I also don’t want to commute any longer. I was looking for a job where I can work from home as long/often as I want. Cashlink is remote-first, meaning I can come to the office if and when I like. This is amazing 🥳

And a couple of my stats changed:

  • I have 850 articles on my blog. Of those, 108 (+53) are published on Medium. I still love writing 🥰
  • I have 101,005 points (+15,733) on Stack Overflow and reached 45.1 million people (+7.6 million) with my posts (source). This is mostly due to the fact that I already have a lot of points. I’ve started to support people on codereview.stackexchange (1,145 points by 12 answers so far).
  • My engagement for Wikimedia Commons stopped. I wasn’t even aware of it, before I compared my current edit/upload count with stats from last year. I didn’t pick it up again 😞
  • The same goes for my contributions to open-source projects this year. I continued my work on flake8-simplify and applied it to openshot-qt. I’ve also done some maintenance work around openpyxl-stubs and propy3.

Old Year Resolutions

I failed with all my 2021 resolutions due to the pandemic, switching jobs, and moving in with my girlfriend:

  1. ❌ Run 20km: Oh boy did I fail on that one 😅
  2. ❌ Go on at least 6 hikes: Not even one 🥲
  3. ❌ Get back to bouldering

However, I’m not too sad about it. I still had a pretty good year.

Old Year Predictions

Let’s see how well I predicted what will happen in 2021.

The Bigger Picture: Politics, Nature and the World

  1. ❌ German Federal Election: I expect the conservatives (CDU/CSU) to reach at least 35% (it was 32.9% in 2017) — they only got 24.1% ❌. The social-democratic party SPD will not have more than 18% (20.5% in 2017) — they got 25.7% ❌. The greens will get more than 15% (8.9% in 2017) — they got 14.8% ❌.
  2. ❌ The Stock Market: I expect the S&P 500 to end between 4030 and 4180 points (+8% to +12% in 2021): The S&P 500 is at 4778 in December 2021. Crazy. That’s +29.1%.
  3. ❌ Unemployment: I thought unemployment would be a severe issue due to the pandemic, but it barely changed in Germany. It even went down quite a bit in the US. France, Italy, and Spain also improved. Why didn’t the pandemic have an effect on them?

Technology

  1. ❌ Battery Technology: The best Android phone still has only 5000 mAh and the iPhone 13 Pro Max has 4352 mAh. The Tesla Model S electric car claims to have a range of 637km, which is a noticeable improvement over the 568km record by Tesla Model 3 of 2020. There was some positive news around Lithium-Metal batteries for consumer applications and molten-salt batteries for grid-scale applications. I’m still waiting for getting those technologies industrial-scale production-ready.
  2. ✅ Self-driving Cars: No self-driving cars on German streets.
  3. ✅ Neural Network Size: GPT-3 had 175 billion parameters, but Megatron-Turing NLG has 530 billion parameters. Well over my prediction of 200 billion parameters (publication)
  4. ✅ Bitcoin (BTC): It was at 23,800 EUR and I predicted a new all-time high (ATH) of at least 30,000 EUR. The ATH in November 2021 was 60,847 EUR. Crazy.

About Me

  1. ❌ I didn’t create a GAN for my HASYv2 dataset
  2. ✅ I fixed issue #13 of flake8-simplify
  3. ✅ I had February as a Social Media free month. Was good, especially deleting TikTok. I lost too much time with that.

Predictions for 2022

The Bigger Picture: Politics, Nature and the World

  1. Climate crisis: I expect that politics in Germany and the US will focus on the economy after the pandemic and ignore the climate crisis.
  2. We will see more extreme weather events like droughts, strong rain, extreme wind, bush fires, heat waves…
  3. No more Corona: The COVID-19 pandemic will no longer be a relevant point of discussion in Germany after April 2022 🤞 I don’t think it will go away, but with vaccines and the highly infectious omicron variant I’m convinced it will become endemic. People will either be vaccinated or be recovered from an infection.

Technology

  1. Quantum Computing: IBM Eagle has 127-qubits. I don’t expect big improvements here, but I do expect big players like Google, Intel, or China to get to a similar range.

  2. Battery Tech and Fusion: I expect exciting news, but also no industry-scale solutions. They are just hard to achieve.

  3. Machine Learning: I expect generative models to be improved and used more widely, e.g. in games in which content is dynamically created or more free interactions with the world are possible.

  4. Crypto / DLT: I expect the market capitalization of crypto projects to grow a lot. It’s currently at 1.99 Trillion EUR (source) whereas the market capitalization of Gold is 11.6 Trillion EUR (source). I expect the crypto / DLT market to grow over 2.2 Trillion EUR in 2022. I don’t expect the Bitcoin ATH to grow from 60.8k EUR in 2022.

About Me

  1. Blogging: I will manage to publish 30 articles. I will share 3 more complex ones.

  2. Side-hustle: I will create one usable paid online service.

  3. I will finally finish two wood-working projects: A side table next to the TV and painting the drawers. That would make my girlfriend pretty happy 😅

New Year Resolutions

As I failed so miserably with my last year ones, here is an update:

  1. Run 20km. I don’t want to set a time limit here … I guess it will be running 10km and walking the rest 😅 — yes, again the same one as last year 😄
  2. Go on vacation 6 times. Does not have to be a hike, but some good memories.
  3. Go at least 20 times bouldering 💪🧗♂️

What I want for 2022

It’s pretty much the same as last year: More global cooperation to fight issues that affect all of us (climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, tax theft/evasion).

I want technological breakthroughs in battery technology 🔋 where we still only have Lithium-Ion batteries that give about 5000mAh for smartphones and about 600km of reach for high-end electric cars. I hope solar cells ☀️ get improved so that their efficiency gets well above the current 15% to 22%. There were a few articles around nuclear fusion — I want more⚡ And I’m still waiting for the killer applications of carbon nanotubes 😄

That’s my last article for this year — I hope for all of us that the next year is better than 2020/2021 😄 Happy New Year 🎆