“Leaving Cupertino feels like leaving a dream that got too clean. San Jose’s messier—but it’s mine again.”
— Wing

🚚 Goodbye, Cupertino

I’ve packed the last box.
Unplugged the desktop.
Took one last late-night walk past identical tech offices and empty sidewalks.

Cupertino served its purpose:

• Fast internet
• Quiet neighbors
• Ubiquitous boba

But by the end of 2024, I realized… I was orbiting the center, not living in it.

“2023 was the warm-up. 2024 is when the floor dropped out and the ceiling rose too fast to see.”
— Wing

🧠 They Got Good. Fast.

By mid-2024, we’re no longer pretending this is experimental.

• LLMs now write, revise, plan, empathize, perform.
• GenAI tools can render a cinematic shot from a prompt—or animate an entire music video.
• Multimodal models understand, summarize, and invent across text, image, video, sound, and code.
• Real-time inference is happening on consumer-grade GPUs.
• Local, open-source AI has caught up far enough to threaten the cloud.

And it’s all starting to feel… inevitable.

“By February 2024, ChatGPT was my second monitor. CursorIDE became my third hand. But even prosthetics get tired.”
— Wing

💻 Not a Valentine’s Post

This February wasn’t about hearts or roses. It was about prompts, diffs, and the quiet frustration of watching AI almost do what I needed—again.

CursorIDE entered my workflow with promises of tight integration, inline prompting, and smart code rewrites.
It was sleek. Fast. Magic, at first.

“In 1999, I built a Windows tower so I could play Quake. In 2024, I’m doing it so I can own something again.”
— Wing

🎉 New Year, Old Ritual

While the world counted down with TikTok filters and AI-generated fireworks, I was unpacking anti-static bags and clicking RAM sticks into place.

No champagne. Just cable ties.

Because this year—for the first time in a long time—I got myself a Windows desktop.