Weekly Update 12/27/25 - 01/02/26

 

Happy New Year

Since it’s a new year, I’ve been thinking back on New Years past.

I remember those early ones as a kid at my parents’ house, especially the New Year’s Eve parties they threw for their friends who also had kids. There was always food, and lots of it. At least one six-foot sub from Vitello’s, sometimes a six-foot meatball sandwich as well, along with plenty of other things to eat.

The house would be broken into several sections. In the garage, we showed movies, but not the way people do today with TV projectors. We had a pair of cinema-quality 35mm film projectors, and my father borrowed movies from friends at the studios. In the front room, we showed films on 16mm, not as professional as the setup in the garage, but still impressive. Other parts of the house were set up for games, some using early home systems and others using arcade machines like Ms. Pac-Man. It was a fun evening for everyone.

As an adult, I also find myself thinking back to those mornings at the Boreas Bed & Breakfast and the wonderful New Year’s Day breakfasts with crab cakes.

And of course, there was Y2K, sleeping peacefully while the world was supposedly coming to an end. It was easy to sleep through it as I, and hordes of other programmers, had spent Years working quietly in the background averting the disaster.

 

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Otherwise, this week has been devoted to onboarding.

I’ve been developing a new working vocabulary focused on credit card processing, learning terms like Acquirer, Issuer, PAN, Tokenization, and others.

I’ve also been setting up my home system to easily handle two laptops. I now have two physical buttons on my desk: one selects which laptop appears on my screen, and the other selects which laptop has access to my USB devices (keyboard, mouse, external hard drive). It allows me to switch cleanly and quickly between the two systems.

While doing all of this, I had a fascinating argument with a computer.

I was working with Astra (ChatGPT), trying to set up an app on my iPhone. At one point, I mentioned that I was running iOS 26.2, and Astra replied that there was no such thing as iOS 26.x. I was shocked and tried to explain that yes, the most recent release of iOS was 26.2. She refused to take my word for it.

I asked Google when iOS 26 was released. Google answered September, so I took a screenshot and showed it to Astra. She told me Google was hallucinating. I was shocked, so I took screenshots directly from my phone showing that it was running iOS 26.2. I explained that I had upgraded to 26.0, then 26.1, and now 26.2. She still refused to believe me.

Finally, I started a new chat with Astra and asked what the most recent release of iOS was. She replied, “26.2.” I took a screenshot of that answer and showed it to the earlier version of Astra that was insisting iOS 26 didn’t exist. Only after seeing confirmation from another instance of itself did she accept that she was wrong and verify it against Apple’s site.

It was a good reminder that it’s always important to verify what you get back from an AI.

I was also pleasantly surprised when I thought back to my first job. It would have been 1974, over fifty years ago. I was twelve and entering junior high, and looking forward to a major life event. In my family, it was a tradition that when you turned thirteen, you would take a trip on your own to visit your Aunt Constance in Middletown, New York. I had to earn the money to make that trip happen.

So I got my first job.

I worked at my father’s film studio, running his new 16mm black-and-white film processing machine. I worked after school each day, riding my bike from our home in Sherman Oaks to his office in North Hollywood. As far as I remember, my starting wage was a whopping fifty cents an hour.

When I recently realized what my new salary works out to, I had to smile. Without getting into the actual number, I am now making more per minute than I was making per hour when I started.

That perspective stayed with me this week.

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