My rural internet is slow, expensive and unreliable. None of the major providers offer service to our address, so we receive data over a local fixed wireless access (FWA) provider.

To see if there are better alternatives, I benchmarked my current FWA service against other wireless alternatives, e.g. Starlink and a cellular 5G / LTE.

tl;dr: Starlink provided the best speed at the best value.

Some methodology: I used Google’s internet speed test (top o Google) to measure download and upload speed, taking the average of three observations for each measurement. For consistency all measurements were taken from the same location (next to the Wifi hardware), using the same device (my laptop).

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I checked my laptop’s command history using a quick script written by ChatGPT o1.

pikaur easily tops the list, which makes sense considering 1) it’s how I manage packages, and 2) I run updates fairly compulsively. The gap would be even more damning if my desktop’s history was included.

Similar to pikaur, Python packaging is also highly represented. Graphed over time, it’d show an evolution from pipenv to poetry to hatch to uv.

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Books I read in 2024 that were actually published in 2024:

• On the Edge Nate Silver. The elections had me checking FiveThirtyEight more than I’d care to admit ¹, so I was curious to hear the personality behind it. And, Nate Silver narrates his own audiobook, laying on some delightful accents when quoting his interviewees.
• The Demon of Unrest: A Saga of Hubris Heartbreak and Heroism at the Dawn of the Civil War Erik Larson. The subtitle says it all. Larson contextualizes the advent of the American Civil War, which he ties back to the Jan 6th capital riots.
• Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World John Vaillant (more late ‘23). A retelling of the 2016 Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada fire. The thesis is that global warming caused by the petrocene age is fueling a new, more severe generation of fires.

Most of the books I read weren’t published in 2024:

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The first of the “twelve days of OpenAI” is headlined by the ChatGPT Pro announcement, a new premium consumer AI tier. ChatGPT Pro, a tier above Plus, is a:

$200 monthly plan that enables scaled access to the best of OpenAI’s models and tools. This plan includes unlimited access to our smartest model, OpenAI o1, as well as to o1-mini, GPT-4o, and Advanced Voice. It also includes o1 pro mode, a version of o1 that uses more compute to think harder and provide even better answers to the hardest problems. In the future, we expect to add more powerful, compute-intensive productivity features to this plan.

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On Nov 25th Anthropic AI of Claude fame published the v1 of their Model Context Protocol spec (MCP). I’ll let Anthropic describe it in their own words:

The Model Context Protocol is an open standard that enables developers to build secure, two-way connections between their data sources and AI-powered tools. The architecture is straightforward: developers can either expose their data through MCP servers or build AI applications (MCP clients) that connect to these servers.

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