Previously on this blog: my objectives / adjustment; actual OKR #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7, #8, #9, #10, #11, #12.
If you are regular reader, you might know that this one is actually late. I should have written one last year in around July. Making an excuse for my laziness and forgetfulness is that I was busy struggling. And OKR or not is not that important.
2025 was not an easy year. It was not annus horribilis,1 but really not easy. Also, it was not just hard for me, but also for my wife. These are our health matters and I should not say more here. And because of that, my original OKRs actually become even more meaningless. What’s the meaning of publishing papers and contributing to open source, if I am not physically and mentally fit?
If you compare this OKR with the previous ones, I really did way less in 2025. Health can be an excuse. Another excuse was the first half of the year I was involved in some fruitless and humiliating salesman work. This experience made me question a lot of fundamental things, mostly about my work. The frustration became a major driving force to make me do something. This is not a blog for promoting what I have done as a way for virtue signaling (this is not Linkedin, damnit!); so I don’t need to tell you what I have done in the latter of the year to rectify some of what I think I have done wrong in the past. It reflects in my recent research papers. The ones that I have published in 2025 as well as the ones that are forthcoming.
Better than talking about OKRs, here are a few things about 2025 that I would like to talk about.
My wife and I developed a habit of going to the library of our city on Saturday. In my view, this is my way of saying “go fuck yourself” to the enshittified Internet, the annoying trend of AI AI AI, and capitalism in general. I finished reading a few German textbooks on the social sciences there.2 At least I know that those books are not slops.
Keeping the trend of 2024, I also played a lot of videogames. It’s escapism I know. But if you feel helpless anyway, then why can’t I escape for a moment?
I eat and cook a lot of Italian food. My wife jokes that I am reincarnating into an Italian. Anche io parlo d’po italiano. Il mio italiano è peggio del mio tedesco, ma non importa. Posso ordinare in un ristorante in Italia.
Let’s go to the main topic.
I don’t want to list out all of the posts. But I think the most significant two are “On the oligarchy of the Big Five academic publishers” (a 3000-word wall of text) and “Why I bought an unknown Polish e-reader”. If you really want to know how I think recently, here are the two.
There were minor updates to minty (v 0.0.5) in January and rio (v 1.2.4) in September. Also because of a research project, I contributed some code to the R package keyATM.
Thank you, my collaborators: Philipp, Rainer, Katharina, Max, and Paul.
Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022) used this Latin word to describe her 1992. No one knows why she did not simply say “horrible year”. But Royal reporters agree that she did not usually express her emotions and her choice of using Latin was to express her emotions in a subtle way. ↩
Reading the textbooks in German is actually a way to soothen my inferior complex. I never get an eduacation that is similar to my German colleagues. At least reading the books in the same language leads me to know how they think about these subjects. ↩