Doesn't Feel Like Five Years Ago

Five years ago, the world was a really different place.

We were about to adopt Dink-Dink, or maybe we just had.

We were on our way back home from our first trip after the pandemic flipped our sense of time upside down and inside out, so Alley would need to return a week or so later to officially snag this little princess—the rescue org was going to adopt her out to someone else!

On a personal note, it’s tough to reconcile being with her for five years. On a more universal note, I keep stumbling over the covid/pandemic marker. Has it really been five full years since vaccines were finally made widely available, and the world’s commerce began to open back up?

Remember that one giant container ship that got stuck in the Suez Canal? That was just over five years ago.

Just a few months into this five-year stretch, Russia was busy amassing a hundred thousand troops at the border with Ukraine. In spite of very vocal warnings from the US that this was, in fact, going to be a full-scale invasion, and despite repeated denials from Putin, Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022.

This marked the end of the post-Cold War era in one notable way. A giant, nuclear-armed power had invaded a much smaller neighbor on a very flimsy pretext. Wars of conquest were supposed to be a thing of the past.

Inflation peaked at 9.1% year-over-year in June of 2022 thanks to the covid disruptions and the war, and while it has come down considerably (3.3% as I write this), it hasn’t ever really completely let up since then. We are in something of a new monetary era here as well as an entirely new geopolitical one.

This new era includes the Middle East, too. On October 7th, 2023, Hamas shocked the world by killing nearly 1200 people in Israel and taking more than 250 hostages. Israel shocked the world as well with the scale of its response: by now, tens of thousands of Palestinians are dead—roughly fifty times the number killed on October 7—and much of Gaza has been displaced.

The balance of power in the Middle East continues to shift as the US has now declared war on Iran, only they didn’t really declare war. Maybe. Are wars even declared any more, or do they just kind of start and then Congress (or whoever) just redefines it as something else from now on?

Between those two wars I mentioned, something really incredible happened: AI became useful to me.

During my lifetime, I’ve had exactly two moments where I found out about a new technology, and I saw immediately that everything had changed. This first moment was in 1994, when I was visiting Richmond for the first time, and the friend I was staying with had America Online.

I put it like this:

Then, that second moment happened for me, another one of those times when everything changed. This second moment was in November of 2022.

For the past 3.5 years or so, the way I get to the bottom of things has dramatically shifted into something much more accurate, and much faster. No longer do I have to accept not knowing. Even better, these tools are starting to do meaningful work for me, like helping me organize articles into books and build things with code, just to scratch the surface.

I’ve also written here every day for the last three years without exception. Besides the practice of writing itself—very good for me!—this has given me an amazing opportunity to practice researching every day, so I get to use cutting-edge AI tools and hopefully keep up with this rapidly accelerating world.

Five years, y’all. Does it feel like all this started five years ago to you?