Author: James David (Page 2 of 25)

I haven’t participated in fantasy sports in nearly a decade now. I was kicked out of a fantasy football league that I was in with some people from college once they found out I’d be forced to auto-draft again because I would be in the desert in Namibia without internet access. They tried to get me to rejoin that league a couple of years later, which I declined, and that league no longer exists. After stopping fantasy football, I found my overall enjoyment increased. I could just cheer for my team and let that be that. This year, I hardly watched football at all. That is what happens when the team you support is terrible.

One of the methods of doing a fantasy football draft is to have a player auction. Each owner has the same total amount of money they can spend compiling their roster. Each player is drawn at random (within the relevant position group), and then the bidding starts. Allocating players this way creates many more dynamics for you as the fantasy owner. Do you spend big on a certain player? Do you bid in order to get others to use up more of their money on a player they particularly like? Do you just accept that you are going to be weak in one area of the team? I’ve always thought it would be more fun than the more traditional snake draft, though I’ve never been a part of such a fantasy league.

But what if I told you that the auction dynamic is actually used by a major professional sports league? It’s a league most Americans haven’t heard of, but it is watched by tens of millions of people every night for something like two months—the Indian Premier League. It is a T20 cricket league, which isn’t important for this post. What this post is about is that the league had its annual auction earlier this week. While it doesn’t rise to the circus that is the NFL draft, they hosted the auction in Dubai this year and with some fanfare. This year’s was a so-called mini-auction as there were fewer players up for bid. Every few years, though, there is a mega-auction before which teams are only able to retain a small number of players. It can lead to some wild resets of the competitive balance.

The players come in sets based on what positions they play and their status of whether they have played for their national teams. Each player sets a minimum price for themselves, and when their name is drawn the bidding starts. There are more complications than that, but even the order in which people are drawn within their set can mean a difference of hundreds of thousands of dollars given the way the auction dynamics unfold. There were also players this year who received no bids the first time their names came up and then saw a bidding war unfold when their name came up again during the accelerated portion of the auction later. I find it all fascinating to review.

If you want to listen to an in-depth story of the league’s history (and have around four hours in which to do so), you can find an episode of the Acquired podcast from earlier this year. Since it involves big business and Bollywood, there are some twists in the tale.

I read fiction in the evenings before bed. It is something I started doing during my Biglaw days in an attempt to help myself mentally unplug from the day and go to sleep. It hasn’t always been effective. Long books with chapters of around 10-12 pages are ideal. The Count of Monte Cristo was an early success and now sits on the bookshelf to my right as I sit typing this, but not everything has been a hit and I’ve become much more willing to give up on a book in the time since I began this habit. There’s something about slogging through War and Peace that will do that to a person.

I just completed my third of Dostoyevsky’s longer works, The Idiot. I read Crime and Punishment in high school and The Brothers Karamazov a couple of years ago, both of which found me at the right times in my life to be impactful. This one didn’t. Perhaps it was bound not to do so since the main character’s most salient features are his complete innocence and naivety. It left him a little flat on my reading, especially in comparison to Alyosha, a similarly angelic figure in Brothers K. Dostoyevsky wrote The Idiot earlier, though, so perhaps it isn’t a fair comparison. Regardless, the ending didn’t hit very hard when I read it. I actually suspect it will mean more once some time has passed as the deeper undercurrents of meaning which I enjoy so much in Dostoyevsky are very much present.

I’ve not always limited myself to the classic tomes of fiction (I read and enjoyed Trust a few months back), but there is something to be said for allowing the Lindy Effect to take its course. I’ve now started The Lord of the Rings. I expect to enjoy it more; at a minimum, the characters’ names will be consistent throughout. That is one quirk of Russian literature that can be difficult to follow.

One of the members of my church small group is currently a 1L. His first law school exam is tomorrow. I’d been trying for weeks to meet him for dinner but our schedules hadn’t lined up. Due to my early Thanksgiving celebrations and his returning early from Thanksgiving in order to study for exams, we were able to go out for dinner on Friday. It also marked a rare trip to Raleigh for me.

We talked about plenty of things as it had been a while since we’d gotten together, but the focus of the conversation was on his upcoming exams. Sitting there trying to remember what I did successfully and what I wished I could change about my own law school exam preparations, I can’t say that it surfaced the fondest memories. I habitually buried myself in the recesses of the international law library, a place without natural light and that could only be accessed by navigating the labyrinth of interconnected buildings of Harvard Law School. It was (and presumably still is) the sort of place where you could set a very sad horror movie. At least I wasn’t disturbed much down there; my only human contact would be with a confused janitor. That first semester, though, I tried to study alongside classmates. I did not recommend it to him. I also gave him permission, repeatedly for emphasis, that it is okay to not go back to studying on the same day when you have an exam in the morning. The goal is to be empty when you finish the test, especially with the way many law school exams encourage word vomit and continuing to type more and more until the allotted time is complete, and you need to recharge after that. Beating yourself up over not immediately going back to studying won’t help. I hope he takes at least that message to heart.

The restaurant itself was also very good, a mixed cuisine place with influences from across the Levant and the southern Mediterranean. It will be a recommended spot on the always in-progress restaurant spreadsheet I maintain. Going with another person was nice too because it allowed us to get multiple things and share them instead of me having to commit to a single choice per course. That, though, wasn’t the main point of the evening. The point was to give some encouragement to a young man who is now in the final stages of the marathon that is the first semester of law school and needs to kick hard to the finish.

I celebrated Thanksgiving with my family this weekend, with our big meal on Saturday evening. My immediate family converged on my parents’ home and the house I grew up in for the occasion. This timing was the result of two things, namely the work schedules of my brother and sister-in-law and the end of the modern firearm deer season in Kentucky.

We aren’t a family with deep Thanksgiving traditions. Dynamics and life seasons have meant shifts every couple of years to prevent any traditions taking root. To the extent there is such a tradition, it is that we have both turkey and ham as part of the Thanksgiving meal. There was also both a pie and a cake this year, and neither was chocolate so that I was able to partake in both. We can go ahead and make that a tradition if people would like, especially since my only contribution to the festivities was to be present.

This trip’s timing had a few advantages. For one thing, traffic was at normal levels so I made good time both going and coming. Second, I was able to stop and see my little cousins for a few hours on the way since they weren’t yet on a break from school. This benefit was much more important to me than the first. I arrived in time to have a few minutes with the youngest and then to greet the older ones as they got off the school bus. Now I have some new artwork with which to decorate my house and more positive memories with them. I did not, however, take any updated school pictures with me as the children looked rather too old in those pictures for my liking.

I cannot say it was a restful few days as I awoke early on two of the three mornings in order to be in a deer stand before daybreak, but it was a nice change to be amongst family and nature and to leave my computer off for a few days. That made for a chaotic Tuesday when I was back at work, but that was always going to be the case. Now it’s head down until Christmas week.

A few weeks ago I wrote about how some of the AI lessons I picked up at Rhodium would take up what I described as my “work free time.” Well, after procrastinating around setting things up, I finally entered the world of vibe coding this week. We’ve already built a few agents that we use for internal admin purposes, so I set out on a more ambitious project to build our first client-facing tool. It’s a brave new world when people like me now have access to tools that make me into a software developer.

In the space of about two and a half hours, with a kickstart boost from the leader of an AI community of which I’m a member, I had AI create a python script (complete with a desktop icon) to address a set of two discreet tasks that are part of our larger workflow of reviewing documents redlined by opposing counsel. The goal is to speed up an existing process. I’m not crazy enough to attempt to code myself out of a job. In that short amount of time, I created a beta version and produced a few outputs to facilitate internal discussions. This is still early days, but I may even show the output to a few clients who are attracted to the idea in the coming weeks to elicit feedback if people are open to the idea. There are going to be several opportunities coming up. As for development costs, they’re a rounding error even without me trying to be cost efficient.

Is the tool ready for primetime? No. Will it ever be a solution that could be offered as a standalone product? Probably not. Will I continue to iterate on it to make it functional for its narrow purpose? Absolutely. If I can save us 15-20 minutes each time we do something when we do that thing ~50 times a year then it’s worth spending a few hours to make that tool. And if I’m successful with this one, then I won’t stop at one.

If people want to tell me about some things they’ve automated with AI, I’m open to inspiration. It doesn’t even have to be something you vibe coded. Heck, it doesn’t even need to be work related. I know one guy who set up automations such that a text message to his wife gets drafted every morning when he leaves his house and all he has to do is approve and send it.

Sunday evening, I didn’t have curling due to ice maintenance. As this freed up my evening, I took my friend up on his invitation to join a group of people for dinner. Not that I actually responded to his text invitation, but whatever. It was shameful for me as I hadn’t responded the last time he had asked me to join this regularly scheduled outing when I had curling a few weeks prior. The reason was that he and his wife were expecting a baby very soon at that point and now I didn’t see a great way to ask how things were going. The last thing I wanted was to offer a reminder if something had gone seriously wrong. While I don’t think it was the easiest birth, nothing terrible actually happened and both baby and mother are healthy.

I’ve never been around a baby that young. The little guy wasn’t yet two weeks old and looked so tiny in his stroller setup. Even his brother, who is only about three years old himself, dwarfed him. He was sleeping so I didn’t dare touch the baby, but I could not help watching him. There is just something magical about new life like that. Maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I had to wake up every few hours to feed the newborn, but that’s not where I am in life.

After people ate, a few of us went outside the restaurant into a fenced area where the children can run around and play. The fascination of the evening was in seeing who could find the biggest stick to use in a futile attempt to fell a large tree. One child found such stick and the others became very upset when they were unable to find a similar stick. This one was the older brother of the newborn and a child I’ve gotten to know and who knows me now that we live in the same city, a child who indirectly influenced my own life when he was a baby in a stroller. His little world has changed forever, but he’ll adjust and be better for it.

I watch some strange shows and movies. I’m reminded of this every time I get into a discussion about what people have been watching lately and I (1) often have no idea about whatever the rest of the group is fixated on at that time and (2) am met with blank stares or slight horizontal shaking of the head as if to say not again. Even in these missives I’ve written in recent months about a few gritty foreign detective shows and an anime series.

Well, this weekend I partook in a foreign film instead of a television show. On the recommendation of one of my law school classmates, I watched The Seed of the Sacred Fig. This was a movie that was nominated for best international film at the Oscars this year and won several other awards on the 2024 circuit. The film was produced in conjunction with French and German organizations, but it is an Iranian movie. I watched it with the original Farsi audio and read subtitles. According to some of the reports about the movie I read while writing this post, footage had to be smuggled out of the Iran as the film is hardly kind towards the regime.

Figs aren’t really a part of my own culture so some of the imagery was lost in translation, but the film takes on themes of struggle, pressure to conform, the desire for freedom, control of information, gender dynamics, and more without ever resorting to beating the audience over the head with the directors’ own beliefs. The director certainly has strong beliefs and doesn’t hide them, which is why the film had to be smuggled out of the country, but the story always stays at the forefront of the film. In terms of plot, the film is set mostly in Tehran and focuses on a single family of four. The two children are young women, one in high school and the other in university. The father gets a promotion in the clerical court system around the same time that a wave of protests roils universities. When one of the girls’ friends is injured by police during a protest, this precipitates the family unraveling in a tragic though not quite predictable manner.

The movie itself has a feel similar to other modern Iranian movies that achieved some success in the West. It is a slow burn and there is a lot of dialogue with stationary cameras. It’s not that there are no action scenes in this one. There are. There just aren’t as many as the visual candy that makes up most contemporary cinema but leaves you empty afterwards. This one ends with an image that sticks.