I guess she likes to write in the third person. Its Aprils 7th today. happy good friday.
today is April 27th, what progress have I made? um let's see- i had learned a few things on sublime text but it's not rlly transferable here.so it's kind of embarrasing, my progress is minimal.
I had approximately 270 hours b/n then and now that wasn't spent sleeping. and i managed to rlly not learn anything. kinda sad, defintely lame to see that
updade: May 6th by chance or by luck I stumbled across Prof. Philip Greenspuns book 'Software Engineering for Internet Applications' which feels like when Charlie found his gold ticket. I might be speaking a little too soon, but i can't believe he has the book for free on his blog. what a G!
Anyway I am going through it now, and there are exercises I am supposed to do. So this is Exercise one, having an email signature at the end in 'address' wish me luck
yay me i got the email to work but failed in part b of getting the https://tow work:(" If you get a directory listing instead your Web server is probably not configured to look for index files named "index.html"; you'll have to reconfigure your server.'I am not going into a rabbit hole. just know this is a problem needs solving soon but for now moving on...
i can already tell exercise 2 is a bi*ch to work through. cryyyyying in the inside. but let's break this mamouth down into bite sizes. fml
fml the exercises are HARD and this is just like the easy one. Youtube isn't helping. and i had ordered a book. i wonder if it is here alreay. lets go check bc i have no clue how i am to solve any of these questions. did i dive into the middle of the ocean. because it feels that why. i mean what even is abstract url. geez it's like trying to interpret a Jackson Pollock painting. (see wat i did there?) but seriously how do i even go about solving this?!!
May 7th 1:04:04 pm. I just got the html & xhtml the definitive guide by Chuck and Bill. I flipped through the pages just briefly. I though I'd be more excited to finally have the book, but I'm not, i was like cool, almost everything i need to know to get started will be on here, neat. I wanna do some vinyasa. so that's what i'm going to go do. Listen to my body. which btw is a concept i realized i have rarely every thought about until a friend just said 'i listen to my body a lot.' what a concept. so I shall do the same. go do as many sun salutation as I can; which is surprising that this urge should come to me because I haven't donne yoga in years now (at least had the urge so strongly) anyway- it is a beautiful sunday. Namaste :)
guess who learned to link a css file? not me, not today
I don't have a quote But i need one to site so here
i want to finish reading Anna K. this week. Its been 6 years. got about less than a hundred pages left.
Anna Karenina is a book by Leo Tolstoy, who obviously is a masterful writer but also a keen observer of human nature- a psychologist, an economist and perhaps a theologian. He explores his characters with surgical precision, allowing us to wander the corridors of their minds and their beings. The story really centers around two main characters- Anna and Levin. You might ask why Levin, he is not Anna's love interest, is the book not about Anna? Yes, but it is so much more than that. Levin, I believe, is the one character who is truly flushed out, who goes into the character arc. He is, I believe, Tolstoy himself. Through him- especially his conflict with reason and religion, his relationship with the peasants and tending his own land, while being and navigating the upper class, Tolstoy shares with us intimate views of Russia, its landscape, its people, its politics, and his love and his criticism of it.
Levin, more than Anna, transcends the story above love and passion and into the existential exploration of mankind, of life and death, of reason and faith and of love and duty. Through him, we are exposed to the mind of Tolstoy, and perhaps of humanity. "These doubts oppressed and tortured him, growing weaker or stronger from time time, but never leaving him. He read and thought, and the more he read and the more he thought, the further he felt the aim he was pursuing' (pg. 890).
The book is about a classic love affair but more than Anna and Vronskys hot passion, it is Levins and his partners love, first anguish then rejoicing that it one of the greatest love stories in literature- not because it is hot and explosive like Anna's, but because it is cool and continual like a stream. However, what makes this novel incredible is that each character is a microcosm of their own- filled with their own contradiction and blind spots. And Tolstoy allows us a glimpse of their shadows without a hint of judgement.
5 Stars; Would (highly) recommend this book
that's right! me!!! i thought it would take this whole week to figure it out. but nope. some friendly pointers was all I needed. I also found a new resource: Mozilla. First time using it, and it was really helpful. lovely layout too.
May 16, slowly working through the css chapter. RN i'm learning regular classes and figuring out how to do that.
Now I'm learning about child and parent divisions
no idea
June is almost over. today is the 24th and oops as you can see progress was not really made. You know I didn't know where I was going to be but it sure isn't looking like this. I am embarassed on the lack of progress made so far.
to be honest with my self, I really didn't have concrete plan of where I was going. I knew I wanted to make it look nice, but what did nice mean? Ah shame on me.
July 10th was a historic moment. After about 6 months of agonizing pain (not really) I had a breakthrough. Now mind you, about 4 days ago I 'broke' the website, I was so distraught of what I had done the only thing that saved me from spiraling was having a really cute puppy to go to, going to CH and talking to my friend Ashley and listening to her British friends banter about London and threeo going out to have some food and (watermellon gin) and going to the library
why am i telling you all this? because I want to offer some background and share an insight or two i had. One of them is to not always listen to your brain. When after about 2 days of hours and hours of working on this site, I found out not only did I not make the site work, I broke the other site that was working> I felt so bad about myself. I could hear myself being really mean to myself and I realized maybe now is not the best time to listen or believe what that voice was saying. Before, I would have gone along with the self flaggelation and in a werid way i would feel good about making myself feel bad. But that day, it was really a clarity moment of, okay I can hear my mind is really angry at me (at myself?) and now is not the best time to argue with it (it's like arguing with someone who is really drunk) so I went to my room, got a comforter,layed in bed and listened to Josh Waitzkins 'the art of learning.' Once I felt calm and okay, I went to CH and waved at a friend. I had a 'cooling period' if I had gone straight to CH I would have been an anxious wreck,but Waitzkins voice and topic had camled me, and the inner voice (the drunk one had some water and gone to sleep) I could engage with friends. So second insight is nothing beats other people to help you out when you need it. My friends friend came in, and his friends came in and they started chatting. about random stuff, why Americans are mor nicer on the streets than British ppl ( conclusion was not fully reached) but then the other ppl started chatting about their random stuff. It was laughter and really good times, and although I had no part in the conversation, it felt great to turn off my brain and take joy in their joy. Afterwards my uncle woke me up, I put on a cute (not borning dress, but extremley comfortable) and we went out for lunch. I am exvremebly thankful for those pattern interuptions because lord knows I have had really bad days before.
So I can never really express the joy and wonder of going through all those emotional roller coasters, then being able to type autodidacting.org and see the site live. It is a marvel of software but also a testment to friends that rescued me. Literally by helping me figure out the problem, spening hours on discord trouble shooting issues (and might I add, actually believing I could do it when I had no faith in myself) and those who had nothing to do with the actual site but were a positive influence: from those who said they liked the name, that one friend who always asked me how the website was going- letting me vent and complain about how it wasnot going anywhere, and others who cheered me on even when I could not explain what it was but listened to my ramblings and formed cohesive sentences ('it's rooted in community' it helps adult find other adults with similar interest, it's a learning platorm). Another friend who helped me question what the aim of education is, and could be.
And the most amazing part is I have met them in real life, they have all been voices on the internet, soundwaves of positivity and encouragment and, it was only able to happen because of Clubhous and meeting the one friend through whol I meet all these other friends.
they say it takes a village to raise a child, and it takes a tribe to birth an idea and see it in person (or online in my case) I am deeply grateful that all the things conspired for me to bring this idea forth. Now off to molding, tending and growing this baby idea (seed)
Much love,
tuesday, July 11, 2023
South Africa
Hello internet! I have gone quiet on this blog because i have been nomading in a new location now and have not had much to report interms of programming. Today is sort of my first day 'back' although I have been, seemingly fruitlessly attempting to learn programming half assedly evemn on vacation. Actually, I haave been really thinking and workint through certain problems, albeit I have not been writting much code lately.
Part of the reason is I just have been indecisive. Sitting on a crossroads, as my dad calls it. And partly it is just I have
The real reason is I need to find the right wall to bang my head against. At least evnetually you make a scar, if not a dent. This language hopping aint doing it for me.
Truth be told, I wish I knew how to code by now, come on, we are approaching month 7 now, I am kinda over it. I'm not sure how time has passed this quickly but here we are. I wonder if other people experienced these things on their early days or if it's just me? Pray for me, because this is really a confusing space. At least now, forget python for awhile, we're on a break. I hope js is nicer to me, at least it's on a Linux server so that is already a benfit. Till next time, xo maci Thursday, Augusv 24, 2023
Nov 4, 2023
what progress have I made sicne deciding to embrace Javascript? well, um, a little bit of progress, but not much. Who knew web design involved learning a whole bunch of loops. Damn loops.
I have yet to figure out the balance in coding. I'll spend about 3-5 hours one day coding- super motivated, and actually getting thing done- to only feel the next day after 1 hour, I never want to see these codes again. What is the balance? of steady work vs letting inspiration take over and going hard? I'd like someone to tell me, or I guess in true fashion, I'll have to figure it out myself. Why you ask? because of Colin Galden. In one of his road mao videos, he mentioned asking questions is like off loading your thinking to someone else. I kinda wanted to give myself a november challenge of not asking for help (kinda broke that a litte but)mainly, it's figuring things out myself. I wonder, does asking chat-gpt4 count as asking someone a question. And by having easy access to someonething to always answer question dimines the quality of my own problem solving? is it a hinderance. Usless musings. But I'll have to be cognizant of that. I was thinking earlier of that, how much time I'm spending on that site, learning a lot, but still. These types of things leave a resedue- be it on the mind or spirit or whatnot. I think I'll need to also (*tears*) take a break from gpt4 too. I love how it can make me do exercise suggestions. But I'll have to get it to give me that and dip out and struggle on my own for a day or two. Because the instant answer is not good for me in the long run.
Dec 31, 2023
lixkids - the dream machine by m. mitchell waldrop
there is a sense of imense gratitude that washed over me as I approached the end of this book. Written beautifully, this book chronicles the history of computing, from the craddle to about 1990s.
Computers, I thought were these things- inventions for sure- but they were monolithic, upiquitous- a given. this book made me realize how much history was behind these 0s and 1s. how the revolution had been going on for generations- how slow, how tedius and how fortunate it is to have happened. And how blessed we are to still be able to carry the torch further. Computers are not just toys, despite their utility to entertain and they are not in their final forms. they, like everything have room for evolution, to change, to adapt. In man-computer symbiosies the relationship is two-fold. it is not just having machines and algorithms tat understand and track our behavior for better ads, it is machine, a 'living organism' that will change and adapt to us and with us. Licks dream to make computing more intuitive, more adapative to the human has still a long way to go. And the path is exiciting because iv means it is not finished, it means it can still go on.
what has been so frustrating about programming is it seemed that i was the one that was stupid, i should be getting it, why is it taking me forever to learn a basic for loop, what is wrong with me and now after reading this book i realized maybe the fault is not in my self alone, nor is it in the stars per say, but in the way the programming lanugauge is well, a language, a made up modality of communication. and in the same way going to a different country required you having to learn the language, with programming the language is young. I mean an infant compared to human languages, compared to how the brain has been wired through milinia to understand communication. so perhaps the 'fault' or the 'flaw' is in the system, not in me.
Now does that really change anything in the short term? probably not, but at least it illumiates soemthing- that programming languages- be it C or Basic or Cobalt or Fortran- are languages made by humans to communicate with machines. And knowing how to 'speak' it or rather how to articulate it is a task that is neither intuitive or easy. Maybe actually, the logic is easy, but the formulation of said language - its syntax - is not the easiest of things. So anyway. maybe someday, per Licks dream, we would make these machines more like us, more like a friend that an average person can learn to have. And perhaps that will allow us to create more, to synthesize more. and to explore the world and each other in a humane way.
Saint Paul, MN
April 3, 2024
It was really interesting reading these blog posts. Obviously it has been a few months since I have written here, I kinda forgot about it to be honest. But I am glad it is here- hopefully I renewed my card correctly so we can continue to chat here- current me and future me.
So in terms of progress i have a few things to report. One is we are back to basics. I had used chatgpt to help me code the site and it was bloated to the max. it was just code after code of things I didnt understand pasted and ducktaped together. And I accidenty deleted the whole index page when editing but I am thankful for that ( lesson was always always back up your files ) It was a reminder to keep it simple, to do things only I understand versus just copying code. As a friend said, only copy code you understand. In hindsight that is obvious but obvious things take time.
In terms of progress i guess i don't have much. I made a word of the day thing that used google sheets API but it is trash bc the server has to be running to work- oh I spent 12 hours learning and re-reading code from chatgpt trying to understand APIs but it is not broken.
But thank god, it was another bloated project which i absolutely had 0 idea what the codes meant.
but what i really wanted to talk today is about ... how having the right tools is everything- especially at the start. In short: its not you, it's your tools
let me explain. The early stages of programming are the worst, it always takes more energy to start than to continue, having a difficult programming tool- IDE (still don't know what it stands for) makes it really hard. It requires even more effort to use, and that is yet another mental and literally hurdle to overcome. So having a good experience with a tool makes all the difference, the same way having a good knief helps you enjoy cooking more because you are not constantly struggling with a basic thing. Same with IDEs' I found Cursor recently and I was mainly using it for python. But then i learned I could edit websites with it.
It blew my mind. I was struggling this weekend for 4+ hours trying to install and run tailwindcss on my terminal and make it run on the site and it wasn't working. It took hours of trouble shooting before I gave up. And here, in a matter of minutes there was a tailwind css file that opens on the side of the cursor IDE that I could see LIVE the changes being made. I was in awe- am still in awe because it happened less than an hour ago.
Look it might not be slice bread, but it is the greatest experience I have had since seeing a website come to live almost last year. I am in awe.
Lastly most people are saying AI will replace developers jobs. But I havent hard anyone speak of how it will also open the door for many different types of people into the world of programming. It has been heaven sent to have something to ask when you are stuck versus having to read all these crappy articles or stackoverflow answers (maybe i dont know how to google right) but I am thakful for this era.
It is truely hard to understand we are in the apex of history, of human knowledge sharing and gathering. It is propably the greatest time in history- it is Guthenberg but better.
Anway, I am hungry and rambling. But it is insane to see it all come together.
p.s sorry for not having any real updates. hope next quarter goes better in terms of output.
Love,
In MN
Dear me,
Mysql is finally installed properly. today i learned 'Do science' which is go try to do many little expriments vs sitting here reading and thinking to find the right answer.' that's what my friend said, well, i retorted, 'that's like saying to a student in chemistry class, here you go, do science. And then chemically blow in their face' I said, very happy with myself for such a clever anaglogy. 'But unlike chemistry computers rarley blow on your face.' And that was when i realized i had been check mated by my own anology. My friend was right. Yet again.
do the science. try it and fail. It is after all called computer science.
4.23.24
Yesterday, at midnight, I 'shipped a feature.' It barely works, but it met its objective. Soemtimes things move very slowly and then all at once. This week has been the most productive week in a while. Why? because there was a deadline. I set a task for myself. It all started with a simple email update I recieved from Railway. They said "this week we shipped..." and I was stunned. On you can ship things in a week? I had the big goal of shipping months/ weeks later but having a weekly thing- midnight by Friday this thing will work. Who cares if it's fancy. Who cares if it barely works, does it work? All of that to say I shipped something. And it kinda works.
there are a few take aways here. One ship fast, duh. But that means fail as fast as possible and iterate over time. Not build things in your head - which is a sneaky way of feeling like progress is being made without 'real' progress being made. So experiment, make it so inconsequentially simple - i.e it does x by this specific time and if I don't y will be the consquence. Obviously carry out on the consquences. But a little nerve is good. I had missed being nervous - I guess set your deadlines - ship in one week incrememnt, not months. And also be fortunate enough to have friends that will walk you through your roadblock. thank god for people who know what they are doing.
Dear me,
Somethings are just absurd aren't they? So here I am working on something and getting incredibly frustrated and having one of those, why isn't this workinggg!!! moments and I realized, uh this is crazy.
A few months ago, had you tried to explain what the problem was, I don't even think I would have understood you, let alone figure out the solution for it. Because that would not have been in my frame of reference. It's funny how things change and how we adapt so quickly to those changes. And despite yesterday spending an entire day trying to solve this hurdle and today half day is gone (minus an hour of pretend napping) I am still thankful that i get to work on this problem. It is werid because even in its frustration, its a good problem- I had a better phrase for it earlier. I think it was 'good hard' the one that makes your brain sweat, and do all sorts of stuff.
The biggest irony is when I embarked on adding comments as a feature, I thought it was going to be so simple. Easy breezy, uh jokes on me. I would be lucky it works even today, and also why did I even want to add this feature? I guess I wanted it to look like a semi actual forum. And now I have essentially 3 days - not only to make a forum - which technically 60%+ of it is done but I have other things to add- did i have two months to work on these? yes, yes i did. And now I'm panicking because what if I don't make it? what if my pretend 'demo day' ends up awash? ahhh
Also the second cup of coffee is not helping but I will drink it anyway.
Anyway even if I 'fail' ie i don't fix the bug- which lets be honest I will. so false humility there. But just in case I don't and the site looks shit. I will still think the me from April 2023 would be proud. Because Maci has graduated from learning HTML to using actual databases and making her own API. Does she understand it, nope. But its still fun and there is nothing else in the world I rather be doing. Thats a lie, doing this near an ocean would have been ideal but the weather is beautiful here. Jeez thats another realization I had yesterday, why am I trying to go somewhere? why is here not good enough, why? I know there is no there. Here is always here- meaning wherever you go, there you are. So actually, here is good. And I am happy, I think. But I am also really anxious to make it work and its not working which is making me anxious and uuuuughgggggghhhh okay break calm the fuck down and go fix it. But anway I wanted to say in a round about way, thanks for sticking to it. N godspeed.
Tuesday May 7 2024 12:20 ish pm
I was wrong/ i lied. i hate this, i hate everything about it.
it is now been 12+ hours on this stupid comment and I don;t ven think anyone is ever going to use it, or that i care what anyone has to say to spend 12 hours on a goddamn problem. i am sick of it.and what is sicker is i'm going to go back and spend more time on it.
so that was like 7 hours yesterday and today like 4 hours for a stupid comment. I don't even know what the problem is. the mysql comment table works. actually i don't know if it does. fmlIt works now. Actually it worked last night at 2 am. You know a life hack when all this coding becomes nonsensical is to watch a romatic movie. Something light and predictable. Then somehow it gives you the push you need, a second wind of sorts. But yeah it was a simple, stupid mistake. But i didn't know it was neither simple, stupid or a mistake. I guess thats part of the game- the science.
You know i should be thrilled it worked and i am. i just dont feel it. Now i have to go do other things. But i'm not sure, should i make it 'pretty' now? clean it up? rn its like all the plumbing is done, now more things to do. yay, i'm just hungry. i'll get some breakfast and feel less grummpy.
And then i'll learn git and then prettyfy the site. Build a tutorial page of 'ecolab of learning' and technically i am supposed to have a word of the day thing built. All of this is due on Friday 4pm.
Wed 10:10 AM May 8 24
Well, none of the things I set out to do were accomplished, thats bs, i got an entire page to work. And that achievement enough(for now). So per my own rule, if i didn't get the whole thing to work i would be off of ch for a week- or was it a month? Anway I was talking to a friend about one of the persons we know who has gone offline, not completely but goes to the library to use internet type of offline. And i thought could i do it too? And the experiement is this, no internet, for a week. Also no reading. No external stimulation. And no chemical stimulation or supperesant. just water, and food and a whole bunch of nature.
I will be going camping for the weekend - so that gives me a head start to disconnect from it all. Obviosuly i can write, i want to write, i crave it.
The only thing i'll really miss is not coding but I think it'd be good for me. For my soul. Also today is my birthday. So a whole new decade has opened up and this one might just as well start without all the noise of the world. But honestly i love the noise, i detest silence, that is why i crave distraction because i dont want to be left with my own thoughts, with only myself.
Wow this is no longer Maci is learning HTML huh? maci is learning life- how to live it one day at a time. You know unlike software there is not a guarantee there is an answer somewhere, that someone has the answer. You just have to look long enough. So who knows what will happen by the end of the week- also,
'the capacity to be alone is the capacity to love. It may look paradoxical to you, but it is not. It is an existential truth: only those people who are capable of love, of sharing of going into the deepest core of the other person- without possessing the other, without becoming dependent on the other, without reducing the other to a thing, and without becoming addicted to the other. They allow the other absolute freedom, because they know that if the other leaves, they will be as happy as they are now. Their happiness cannot be taken by the other, because it is not given by the other.' - Osho. I thought this whole time this was about relationship with others, but i just realized it is also the relationship with myself. to be with myself, alone, without craving escape of clinging ....blah blah blah. See you next week
Friday May 10, 2024 2:46 pm :)
Welp the experiment lasted 5.5 days. It was the best of times and the worst of times. I realized not working makes me a crummy person. And I have some serious anger issues that has been hidden under layers of distractions by constantly being stimulated. So I got to realize some dameon processes working in the back of my mind, so it was good. I caved by tuesday on chemicals and by wed evening i was online. Today is the first day i touched my computer in a week. It feels good to be back.
Lets keep this all about software shall we? because clearly figuring life out is too much work and even more work to write about (because i kept being like 'oh how am i going to write about this experience' whilst in the experience, which means i am no longer 100% in the experience. too many lays to keep track of.) Back to maci is learning html xo
Friday May 17 11:14am
curretly the entire site(s) are down
its been maybe a week? and i don't know what i did (i can guess) but now nothing is working. Which is if you want to look for the sunny side of this crappy sandwitch is that it showed me how little i know. My knowledge gaps are so many might as well be swiss cheese. I have learned a lot over the last few days, but not enough, its never enough.
But i am taking this break from pretending to make a website and actually learn you know things i should have learned. Should is a strong word, when u are manning the ship its kinda 'figure it out as you go and hope you didn't really do anything that is ireversable'. God i hope i can make it work again. I have contacted the site for help but we shall see. I wish i had proper mentors you know. but i get it, its like they figured it out on their own and i guess i also have to do the same.
I resent it a little because - do you know how many times this week i was like 'maye this isnt for me' haha jk never about the website, i never doubted that for a second. Its 'oh since the site is down let me learn some python' nope. python and i dont get along. actually i realized my friend was having do sorting alogrithms when i can just as easily sort(x) ah sometimes having really smart people is so stupid. they take you in the deep water of knoweldge and say, 'k float'. which is stupid, maybe get my feet wet first?. did you know i configured my own nameserver? why because i can and because appearently thats the 'right way to do it.' i am grateful for smart people, just i wish i was quicker at grasping things.
Anyway i started two new books on my hiatus. 'Man and the computer' by Kenmey (Darmoth timesharing dude) and 'Valley of Genius' obviously about silicon valley dudes. Maybe dudettes? i havent gotten that far yet. But its like a bunch of interviews strung together. the author must have been on acid because it's brilliantly woven together. Maybe even as good as 'the dream machine' level of research and dedication. What that book failed to mention (dream machine) was apparently how hippie and counter culture and new earth catelog these people were. And a lot of acid was involved appreantly.
Its so weird and cool how productive these people were. From Dough to Xerox they just made cool shit you know? And they did it all - hardware, software, design and demonstration. Must have been such a cool time. One thing that stuck in my brain was this guy said 'learn by play' and that is pretty much what they did, they figured it out. Made things and just were innovating - actually creating the entire blueprint and building it. Just for the love of computers and making things(and money)
Its making me reevaluate how i'm approaching my 'learning' where is the fun in it? also they made things in 3 months - a few things were done in such short time. 3 months is a lot if you use it right. But here i am figuring out how dns works so this damn site can come back to life, maybe its the firewall? time to go hunt some bugs.
not as enthused,
Wed June 5 24 3:59pm
man oh man, it worked!
you know it has been more than a week but today was the day i approached this as not something to 'fix' but to understand. I heard someone say like yesterday oh tim ferriss i think, say in modern wisdom podcast that 'this is the work, the interview is the fun part, but the other things are the work you do to get to the fun stuff.' And i was thinking about that, this is the work, sitting here figuring out what it is that could be causing this chaos. thats the work. Its not something to run from.
so i sat down, you know causally first tried the site, ofcourse down, then dns lookup that didnt work. So i grabbed my notebook - DNS_PROBE_FINISHED_NX Domain and wrote (w/ help of gpt) 'either DNS records not properly setup or are not propagating correctly. And went through each thing what the problem is, and i would give claude more context and we would narrow the problem down and down and down until oh goddamn firewall. i thought it could be. i was 40% sure because that was the major change i made but you know spent hours learning about dns and all that stuff before arriving at the obvious thing. is this even saving. lol imagine
it is saving oh god. it feels so good. its like childbirth like you forget all the pain and you're filled with the greatest like tingling ever. maybe prof guttag was right. maybe programming is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. or its just the relief and all the seretonin or whatever in my body that is like washing over me. either way. it worked. and now i have to learn how to document debugging. But I'm also fried and need a break from networks and backend stuff. Lets doodle in API for the rest of the day. Happy friday
June 7 24 12:00 pm
ps the fix took 3 lines of code. but to get there took 8 days and 13 pages of notes. so yeah.um its been exactly 7 days since i posted last and i have done jack squat in those seven days. It's friday, i was supposed to ship something- i think make the tips page nicer and have categories? but that's not happening. Because I kinda forgot- truth was i'm scared that i'll do something that will mess it up agian. And part of me wanted to 'learn' this inside out before I added more complexities.
which sounds nice but its an incredible loophole in not doing much. what was my 'learning objective'? to learn how all the backend worked? or only the scripts.js? how will i know when i have learned, what does it mean to learn it anyhow.
I realized how complex it all is. i post something and by the time i have hit sumbit its swish into the database and then into :3003/tips. there are ports, there are databases and post and get and my god, as much as its shocking to even try grasping it. i am in awe by the sheer brilliance of it. So ya thats a fancy way of saying its 9:51pm and i have not shipped what i said i would. boohoo. sorry to go back on my word again.
i got into this builderspace program. did i tell you about it before because i'm having a real dejavu moment writing this. Anyway, i got in- mainly i used a bunch of ai this ai that- actually i said llm but same difference at this point. So by the seat of my pants i got in and they have orientation tomorrow at noon. Not sure what it will mean or how it will go. I hope they know something i dont know about structuring and actually working on this. Because excistenitally i am really not doing good. Half a month have gone by since June started where i was supposed to do three things- build things, talk to users and exercise. i don't remember the last time i did any of those. i coded um idr really. so maybe its going to offer some structure. or maybe i need to figure out what and how to do this instead of constantly relying on external forces. And half assing everything. my god, i miss when i used to care about things, when it mattered to me that i did a good job. now its all just phoning it in, saying one thing doing another. i'm really getting tired of my shenanigans. too old for this.
on another less depressing note i watched a movie called Perfect Days. If you haven't seen it-- who am i kidding no one reads these--but by some unfortunate event you find yourself reading this and have not watched it. please stop. go watch it. If you're fortunate enough to find someone to watch it with, do it with another human, you'll understand why later.
I went into it knowing absolutely nothing. I said 'is this a subtitle film?' bc i was fully intending to multitask. But my friend said 'none of that ADD stuff' so i was forced to watch it fully. The film grabs you and won't let you go. The color- oh the color, i have never seen color that radiant and mesmerizing, and just, lovely, sheer delight to watch.
It broke me half way through. I sobbed like a dam was broken inside me. I felt thing i have not felt watching a film in a loooong time, if ever. I am deeply grateful for it. For the tenderness and care and lack of blabbering. It was beautiful.
One thing that stuck with me is making/doing things for their own sake, not for anything or anyone else.
This guy takes pictures and puts them in his closet. But that moment of pausing, of appreciating of caring and choosing to pay attention-that is a lesson i will do my best to carry with me moving forward. 'now is now.' what a joy it was. I hope you thought so too.
Friday June 14 10:06 pm
me ramble. well thank myself really for putting up with that experience. nothing better than rain and some code ok byeto tell the truth - even to myself - seems really scary. I wish i can say I am a founder, i have an idea for a company and i will do what ever it takes to make it happen. Even if not a company, have the site be a thing. I am really stuck. i ought to be hustling and grinding and doing all the things in my power to learn and make things but i don't. i sit all day and mope. and i know what incredible priviledge i have, that time is running out, eventually the music will end soon and i will be left with the reckoning of my actions- or lack thereof. I should be working- i should be coding- i should be doing so much more than what i am doing which is nothing. that is dramatic, i do stuff and i am trying not to take that for granted bc i remember time when i had no will to do anything. even in small doses, i ought to be grateful. But it is not enough. i should learn but i am, i finished an entire notebook of scribles and notes and debuggings but it is not enough. i need to do more.
i should love leanring coding, i should do more sites- you know maybe just make things but then there is a tension do i code- i.e copy paste chats code- maybe this isnt meant for me. maybe i shuld give up and do something else. and if i - maybe too much time inside isn't good for me. but it is hard and i am scared. maybe i am not meant to be a 'programmer' and if ihad any other skillsets i should happily lunge at the chance not to do this- to not feel this way. it is fun sometimes, but most of the time i really think i just made a mistake. but in all the agony, i never thought about giving it up. moting now feels more natural- or ever really- than sshing into this laptop. maybe freedom is a double edged sword, we cut ourself in fumbling with it. i have 6 weeks till the Buildspace demo day. i thought i had it, i knew what i was doing, what to work on but i have no clue. and instead of figuring it out i spent all day - what i did shall remain a secret 'dear gentle reader'
i don't know. i guess i should since it is all on me to make something of it. but i am so apathatic towards it all. what folly dream it was, all the grandose ideas i had. have. i am sorry to have let myself down. i thought i had it in me. that i could do anything.
june 19
Maci is learning servers- and ports and methods. She also realized she knows very little(actually practically none) so she has the pleasure of learning the basics, alongside the most complex- node.js and express and api. She has two weeks for foundations and 4 weeks for actually site deployment. and the goal is to have one person use the site.
how will i fare? god help me
so the site should be a q and i site. say what you are working on and if others feel inclined they post an answer. maybe you find a mentor. some form of progress tracker and milestone would be nice; a place to celebrate? and vent?god knows its a lonesome affair to program all alone.- till next time.
p.s it's ok to cry over code, but you wipe the salty tears and you code on, because well what else is there to do.
as Elizabeth taylor said '...put on some red lipstick, and pull youself together.' metapohircally ofcouse, the code doesn't care what color your lips are. and isnt that the most liberating thing of all. if you are patient with youself, you will pull through it. now go break that proble into the smallest pieces you can, then do each bit and put it back together. love, Maci
still june 19 3:54 4:06 pm
we are today on week three of buildspace. and i am supposed to build something 10 people will use by july 27th. i did have bit of a panic bc i thought he said by next monday we have 10 users and that was like wooow. thats a big challenge but he said the 27th and part of me was like, next week sounds interesting.
but there is also another part of me that is freaking out because i have no idea what i am building or doing, i guess i know what i should be doing but making the entire site https screawed up a bunch of things like cors and god knows what else so i have to figure out what to do there. part of me is like why am i doing this to myself, why go through this debugging yet again. idk i estimate it'll take me um 5-10 hours to do, possibly less but the thing is i dont know what i am doing, so having llms finish my code or clean up my mess seems stupid in so many ways, its like baby food, yes its food but damn i'm not a baby, i want to chew my steak, i dont want it blended and fed to me. anyway, not only that there is this ever present and ever closing in topic of finding a job. i have been blessed to be in hiatus for awhile now but time is timing ya, it needs to be tightly figured out because i don't know. do i do leetcode questions, do i even want a job in software? or tech in general? if not that then what??? ahh maci is leanring life is too much.
back to code, so this ambitiously idiotic plan is to code more - say 70% by hand and the rest w/ gpt and clause. i think that is good, but also stupidly complex because i have never really built a site, i have only 4 weeks left and god knows even if i have the skill or focus to do it. but so if i don't think i can, then why am i wasting my time? you know 'if you can't win, don't play.' if i don't think i can win i.e actually do it why am i wasting my time? so maybe i do believe it? regardless time is timing and ohh i didn't even celebrate properly, site is fully transitioned to https. thank god for acme.sh it made my life so much easier, i didn't expect it to work, but it did. i did it over the weekend, i was like if i screw this up there was someone online and i felt liberatd, also i spent 3 hours backing up files, and backing up the backups. so yeah.
but my reflection from that is, you know i should have felt happy i did something on my own- ha claude helped- but when it was done, i felt like nothing really, relief sure, but it was like on to the next thing, why is tips.html not working and let figure that out. there was no taking time to feel happy, it was like a given. now on to the next thing. and i'm not sure if it is just me, this continual bulldozing on to the next project without taking stock of how good it feels to achieve what we did. if you told me last year i would do it i'd be stoked. but now, its like on to the next thing. i need to cut it out. i mean it sucks, i have more work now fixing and figuring out what went wrong, but that shouldn't take away from feeling happy about doing something, no matter how small or big, it is cool, i am stoked, and grateful i had a friend suggest acme and it worked out well. i'm just saying it, there currently are no feelings other than relief. but thats ok. anyway this has been long enough. i am trying to be happy and grateful. taking it all in. how rare is it, no matter how temporary, one gets to do exactly what they want to do with their time. i am fortunate beyond words and i want to remember and appreciate that more. and go on walks. you rarely solve interesting problems sitting on ur desk. i dont know what i'm saying but pls go for walks. and take it easy. at the end who cares if only one person uses the site- and maybe for now its me, and one day we will find another me to think this is cool. who cares, that is then. 'now is now, then is then' xo Maci
Tue July 2 2024 7:03 pm
today is the day! a prototype will be unleashed into the world. well maybe. i spent almost all night working on backend stuff yesterday. you know testing postive, neg cases and all that jazz. figured that would be the hard part. oh was i wrong. i have absolutely no idea what is happening in the front end. never in my life have i thought that would be the hard part but i should have known better. this is why i avoided it for two weeks, this is why i avoided registration for two months. now i have 12 hours to go. and all i did this morning was pushing code to git and hoping someone will eventually fix it for me. ha jk. so i am not sure where to go or do now? pm2 is active. but for stupid reason the link keeps refreshing when you try to sign in. anyway that is my lot. oh a surprising thing that happened a few minutes ago is the guy who comes to inspect my house saw my guitar and he was like do you play, i was like sure, kinda. anyway he showed me an F chord and god the things he did with it was mind blowing. so if it all goes to shit we can start a new journey called Maci is learning the guitar. But god thats dumb, self debricating humor to not acknowledge the fact that i am scared and i don't even know where to start.
pen and paper first. write debugging at the top, write error message(s)and work on it. remember thats the 'job' part of the job, the other stuff is fun, this is the work. ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh how many ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh can i say so i dont have to do debugging. now its 12:07 ohhhhhhhhhhhhhh okook bye.
monday july 8 2024
Yesterday we launched. i launched, i dunno who this royal we is. i and with the help of god and countless hours of gpt and then claude and then gpt got the site to work. i think i worked on it, lets see 11 hours slept for 5 hours, worked on it for 3 hours took a nap for like 2 hours and then another 6 hours. all done while clubhouse. honestly im not sure i could have done it any other way. i need that presence, someone there- even if its just their clubdeck, it helps me move along.
version 0 is out in the world. two people used it, they seemed not too enthused, they said it was good, but it wasnt quantum of utility and i just realized maybe that person who will be excited i launched is me for a while. if ever. if there is no one in the entire galaxy did not know my site existed, would it matter? um in a perverse way that would actually be great, then i a dont have to worry about site going down. last night after launching i was liek the most important thing is not users but reliability of site, so maintance would have to be done at night. but if no one but me used it then i dont have to worry about that. but also, i would want to have a good experience. i would want to have like a tab, and i could click on things easily, there would be time marking so i know when i made it, it would be neat if its color cordinated, or some way to know do i want to reference this in the future, like whats my intent for saving? bc a lot of my brain is wasted on remember things i saw. it does it natually but it would be nice to not have to rememeber michael jordan likes cigars and he did one dope podcast where he talked about wanting to go to cuba or some random thing i saw five years ago. also if i could rate it myself it'd be great. also i hate the white background too ugly. it'd be a dream to have like a typewriter font.
maybe discovering what other people find interesting is not really great, bc if i am the only using it why would i need it. but i could maybe tag people? like hey you, i liked this weird thing and i know you like this weird thing so check it out.
soooooo its like it worked but now more work. you know and i wrote things down on the white board of things- mainly small things to fix which i could but now i'm running to a hard problem which is when i try to fix one thing it breaks the entire section. like cookies for laptops yesterday made it so the registeration stopped working. things like that. i know i need to learn js already and my job cannot be a glorified copy paster and i say that like its a joke but all jokes contain true shit, the same rope you climbed up on they hang you with. but not jermain, my brain too quick, i recognize life is a dream and i dream lucid. that is a j cole song i just wanted you to know i know and now it makes no sense bc there are no quotes and i am exhausted and i woke up at like 10 and did nothing and went swimming and that was all.
i found an interesting book called 'the good parts of js' by the guy that made JSON? anyway, maybe i can use that. but i doubt it. i once tried to learn xhtml from a book so i am not really the best at picking these things so my friend suggestion i should pick a topic and stick with it for a day or so and really work on learning and seeing how i can solve problem with it. which is fair. so the next chapter in the book is about statements so we'll see. i also tried to learn js from a coffee book- the book is about js but uses a lot of coffee analogy 'JavaScript Allongé, the 'Six' Edition'
to be fair i did learn how to type hello world using js insdide html so you know not an entire wash day. i should sleep and not think about what type of archtiectre i would use if there was a discover page where users can see other links would that be an entirely new page? maybe you do signin or signup in a new page, it directs you to another page to save your links and to share you click public? but then thats three different things. unless it can condence? but the code is already a few dozen lines and i have no idea what it does. so maybe just dont do that for now. and figure out how and what the code does and works? i was goign to type the code out by hand today but instead found the js guy-good parts guy- you know leslie said learning programming from coding is like learning english by typing words, so if i dont even know english and i type a bunch of words is it worth it? duhhhh benjamin franklin became a better writer by copying other writers, forgetting about it and seeing if he could do it from memory, or turn it into a poem and then using the poem turn it back into long form
i hate when i know what to do but dont do it but still come up with a terribly unconvincing reason why i dont do it? just write the damn code. do sstatments for a day or two- oh i should know what statments are so i feel bad now i have to learn what statments are so i avaoid learning what statments are but i want to build an entire site that uses statments- and worse still i want to edit said code to add more things and i actaully learned how to type hello world using js today and guess what i was doing the '> instead of >' oh wait which way is it again. i need o sleep i am annoyed with myself and my head hurts. nope just looked at the code its supposed to be script src='program.js'í
i'm not sure if that is even write bc i cant see what i typed. but i also read the quote that 'forgetting is learnings friend' or some shit. good night. and thank you fo lett
july 9 24 11:18 pm
it has not been a good week. i have made very little progress-if at all. i am really ashamed because i felt way too cocky about myself and my abilities. i am way too delusional. not in a good way. i will take my L this week.
Mon July 15 2024 9:42 pm
Linux baby, i love you so.
would be the first lines of a song i would write if i could write a song. so today is July 24, 2024. and finally, there is a way for links to be shared publicly. it worked. and now 6 weeks later, that vision of being able to discover links is as its stage 0 of being realized. and it feels amazing. i was just watching a talk about 'barefoot developers' and how llms are going to empower ppl to program and i was like yea! but the talk was about how we can use english to program.. anyway who cares. it just made me realize how much i love linux. and how grateful i am that it exists. I read 'just-for-fun-linus-torvalds' around last summer (yeah, i'm flexing i know) anyway its a quasi autobiographical book written by his sister and i'm not sure why i taught about the book just now but it was so dope. and the fact that here i am typing this on a terminal connected to some linux remote thing making some weird tweaks on a site is pretty incredible. kinda made me sad the best we can do for these (us) barefoot developers is making llms that make it easy to program instead of connecting them to a terminal and being like here- it sucks at first to learn and figure it out but its like having a canvas in which you can paint whatever you like. not beholden to anyone for anything but your imagination and some llms like gpt or claude. thats a much better empowering tool that another llm subscription.
anyway who cares for now. i have like 2 days to finish doing this site, make a video of my demo and submit for buildspace. and now i'm going to work on email verification and i am avoiding that by ranting on here. but can you imagine me last April and i told myself yo, you build something: 1 girl 2 llms and help from friends. me, like thats wild to think about, i couldn't even. the way it started was just empty canvas- here go paint. as my friend says 'fuck around and find out' and after months of fafo we are here.
it makes it sound like its not some basic html but like i don't understand what it does and i have a long way before i can understand it- like fully understand it. Leonardo DaVinci says 'a good painter should decide broadly upon the position of the limbs and attend first to the movement approperate to the mental attitudes of the creatures in the narrative...." (chp 3) i.e you first paint the skelton and put the flesh afterwards. i.e you ought to understand the building blocks what you use. and i, truth be told do not understand it at all. so to that will take time. anyway, it doesn't matter. for now, it works. and i am grateful for the canvas in which to do my finger paintings.
wed july 24, 2024 9:37pm
ps i'm going to bed- or try to and try this again later. do some yoga plz? my body aces is this what getting older is????
today is sunday. demo day was yesterday.
how was it? um it felt like a homework i didn't do so all of a sudden i had to do it and literally pull an all nighter to finish. and i finished, well. i showed a site to people. i was really bad presenting, but thats ok. i did it twice and this guy shared a nice feedback. well it made hin think of book clubs and there will be selected links and people can get together once a month or so and discuss those ideas. like 'link club' but anyway. oh i just saw that i said yoga plz earlier. thats what i need and i'm going to go do. i will miss build space, there were a few times - like 233k 3 and 4 where i was really in the throes of it all and knowing knowing there was a thing i had to go do, and seeing them live really livened up my mood. i wish it continued. thats all i have. see u.
july 28th 24. 12:07 pm
nothing is working. i have managed to not only go from v 0.3 to 0.1 but i cant even make it work.
lesson: always use version control. dont be dumb is also another lesson. when you think th stove might be hot, dont touch it! ie dont push code when you know something isnt right
aug 1 2024
oh hi
i just learned about pocket, which is essentially 50% of the website i was building and it already exists. and its so much nicer than i could ever get mine. its pretty, its slick, and 100000% better than mine. (currently, public site is down)
ironally though that might be my way out of this- the only thing i have - other than inexperience and no money which according to Wozkinak is a great advantage- is to build out the community accept and double down on making it a platform to learn and grow. Yesterday i was thinking and i thought 'mazimime self driven learning' as our motto, but then i thought 'grow seld-driven learning' (i'll work on the phrasing) but i can't compete with pocket, and i shouldn't. i don't want to. i have to focus on making the public part stand out. what makes people want to share? how can i make it effortless and nice for people to share? earlier in the shower after my walk i was thinking of including username with shares (optional) but have it so you can directly save into your private link collection.
i had also thought about tipping, like if someone shares something outstanding you can leave them a tip- get a tip for a tip? but that could backfire quick the same way it did for google answers so maybe not.
but maybe people also have a complusion like me to share when they find something they love. so instead of money you can send then 'gratitude' like thanks for putting me on. so i guess my focus has to be fixing a. public so it actually fetches data b. making the api and software archetcure of public beautiful (i was watching just a few min about patrick collinson talking about it) so i have to focus on that c. descriptions- hover effect? so someone can share a quick text like summary of what the video or resource is but it has to be hidden so its slick. d. have fun? idk like its not that serious anyway. its just a little resource sharing website- or is it ;D but seriously on the same interview john was talking about building multi-decade projects. and although link sharing does not spell multi-decade, the intent is to make self learning as smooth, and robust as possible and its one of the legs of the stool. so maybe stop being so myopic and zoom out a little and focus on building a small compounding things than just throwing code to see what works.
the beautiful thing about not having build space deadline is now i dont have to be like lets just ship this bc its monday and i need something. now maybe think about the intent behind the build/focus on slowing incrememting changes that compound not just now minded you know?
p.s i really like the collinson brothers- if i had a mount rushmore of founders (i thought about it just before) but it would be the collinson brothers; y combinator founders - Jessica, paul and robert (was there a 4th guy?) Licklider and his crew and lastly charity waters would be on my mountain.
fyi collinson interview was on Million Stories Media
ok i'm hungry i'm going to go eat.
Saturday Aug 3, 2024 1:54 pm
p.s.s obviouslu dough's team is included along with lick's - but yeh who i cares byyyyyyyeeeeee
you know what it is, programming doesnt sound fun anymore. its like i login and the spark to try things is very low. i hate the background, i'll disable css which will change the name of site is placed but i dont care enough to start fixing it
i know its just for me and not for others so why should it matter but it does. kinda. its not just that either, i want to do things that are fun- (unrelated tangent)i wonder how does paul write his essays. i bet u first draft is by hand and he has books worth of notes and quips and observations he writes down and then when a topic feels pertinant is that how u spell it or mean? its pertinent like rent. anyway i wonder how paul writes now that'd be a fun interview and a lot funner than changing background and making them into categories. i guess it helps stay organized and find things. honestly it can be wacky categories- have fun with it. if no one is gonna use it w.o me asking them then make it bangin for me.
i hate categories- it feels lame- so lets call them topics. and it can be different things for different people. but mine- actually do i even know how to acess my own thing. oh so i should add a. a feature that says- on the bottom how is your experience with site, any suggestions but honestly idc so b. make it into specfic topics- machine learning bc i guess i care but anyway all topics related and fall under the tree of M.L go there. programming. cooking-
by the way--- COOKING WEB- -- where you can see recipes. guick pictures, so things like garlic, and ooohhh i saw a video tis guy rendering a 3d model of like socks and it was cool. it was called ecommrce with a twist.
or make yt shorts i d know
8.14.24
August 19
i have taken off a few week(s) of coding now. today was the first time i looked at some code from the site. it was overwhelming. i used chatgpt for a lot of it but its still unclear, what is clear is there is so much to do and parse through to even see how it can work. i should take a break- go biking or something.
okay, so breath, inhale, hold, exhale. hold. inhale, hold, exhale- slowly- then hold.
WELL i have taken a few weeks off so i'm not sure how it miraclously should work in 15 mins. it even took some tricking myself to even open the laptop and actually look at the code. so yay me in that regard. next step is figuring out whats next and thats part of why i havent pushed any of the changes- bc was it for better or for worse- and i had forgotten how to program- ha do i know how to program? no? so copy paste. i am having like a mental glitch because i have somethings i want todo but i have lost my mojo- what am i even supposed to be doing- ah a link sharing site. so where is it? are we stopping at version 0.5? no? oh interesting so wtf is 0.6? well ummmmm home/private links look so ugly. forget categories make it pretty and simple/ but i'm bored i want to do someting else.....fuck =i'm going to go now bc i'm pissing myself off. i hate coding, i hate programming i hate everything. maybe summer everythign else is f####d so dramatic.
what do i want to work on then? nothing. forget it ---maybe ah nvm. i hate it alllllll.
sat, sep 14 2024 12:31 pm
it just occured to me how little i wrote on here- not much has changed - but
macis is learning javascript thats new. this was our 3rd saturday running the 'classroom' of js. covered for loops today. was a little distracted and didnt practice any of it accept like for 30 mins on the whiteboard trying to redo old code of leap year. maybe just redo and relearn a bunch of it
'top goal is to have as many working and nonworking code as possible.' save all code seperately,
'make minimal working code exampples.' do as little reading as possible until you have any idea for code you could try or if you found code then try it.
hi its me. i'm back.
i was kinda back, but not really. but now im back its sep 18 2024 10:28pm and guess what i am doing? Reading philip greenspun's book Software Engineering for Internet Applications
this is the same book i tried to read in may 2023. and abandoned it bc it was too hard. so why start again?
well the intent for today was to fix some features in share-discover links page but then it hit me- i need a place for people to ask questions and for others to provide suggestions. the gensis came when i was on reddit (after reading a pg essay from like 2006 and he had comment on reddit on the bottom of his essay. anyway, i was reading the comment and in the bottom was an ai generated similar topics and one of them was how to have ideas for startup. i didnt read the answers, not sure why. but i wanted to post the PG talk he gave like in 2010 listing all the startup ideas. but i couldnt bc it was like 3 years ago. so anyway i was like we have to make it so ppl can just find the links to the things they are wondering about.
not answers- but suggestions. and remember, 'the best thing to do with good advice is pass it on' that was oscar wilde and irrelivant to this convo. anyway so i was in mysql looking at old code to see if i can reverse engineer anything and i though ha, philip was doing a forum, and i'm doing a forum so i should revisit that so thats where we are. drinking coffee with a lot of milk with music playing and the plan is to code and hack all night. i have 4 days till i have to be back to work on monday.
the essay i was reading was pg how to start a startup for students and he talked about jobs and being at work on monday is a great motivator to push you to work hard so you dont have to. maybe. idk what will happen. honestly i have been really nervous starting this essay? update bc well its just a nightmare to read all my false starts. i have not coded for 2 months. and today is the first day back, i printed the code from github bc i thought maybe that will help. anyway so instead of fixing things, i am startin soemthing else. so yea. bye
you know, i think forum will have to wait. i was reading about sql and email verification and all that jazz. i'll pass for now.
monday oct 14 10:34 pm
it has been hard coding recently. actually one of the tougher seasons because of a lot of different things which ofcourse i'm going to talk about here. so why has it been difficult. one i think is because i made something which i didn't fully understand, and the hard thing about that is changing or tweaking anything is terrifying because what if it messes something up? another thing is this tugg of war i have inside which is do i learn the basics first or do i just go balls deep in these complex things and figure things out as i go? the answer for a while was learn the basics, so i put updating the site on hold because 'i was learning the basics.' which is a convienet way of saying i was doing absolutely nothing.
i had saturday 'classrooms' in javascript but inbetween i was doing absolutely nothing because, a- i was exhausted from transitioning to working (almost) full time and had very little energy at the end of the day, but mainly b- i just didnt know what to do. 'write code' seems obvious but it wasn't obvious enough i guess because i did jack with it for months now. so instead of updating the site i was learning, but what, how, who knows. i was just goofing off and not really 'learning' anything. i would learn if statments one week and by the next friday its gone. poof. and that was i guess part of the deal, is you have to practice but i didn't.
the other challenge was git. if i told you how much i love commiting thing, seeing those green boxes is a major turn on but for some reason- was that tmi? oh well. anyway. i have been paralyzed because i can't push any code because i'm doing something different and i could create a new branch and merge later but thats scary and it reminds me of my mistake from months ago so i havent pushed any code, not because anything hasn't happened but bc i'm scared.
today- today was the release of beta 0.4 version. i have been so excited but completely forgot about it. so while playing pharrel williams virgina boy on repeat, the code was changed so we have a new version of the same old code. it was the first time i was able to actually do something and it feels immensely joyful, mindyou it was like 8 lines of code, but it was so nice to actually change something enough to grant a new version number.
why did i do it? well because i broke the site a few days ago where noone was able to login- not that anyone complained but again i went to the woods this weekend to think and be away. as it happens i come back feeling - i'm not sure what the word is. so i was ready to fix it. but another thing that happened today was i went walking. this time near my favoriate spot and i just wandered as i wonder. mainly about my job, about how hard it was physically and how its taking its toll on my body. and i remember this morning as i drove to work saying to myself, i'm doing this because i love you. and later in the evening as i walked by this tiny beach near the river with the sunset across the bridge i kept thinking thats not love. it is but its also bondage. i would do that for my self, in essence put my body to toil (ya ya privilede talking, i mean i am literally talking about multiple surgergiers so its not like oh physical labor is hard) anyway who am i even justifying this to. back to me, walking and wondering and it occured to me. i would, for money listen to someone tell me when to come to work, what to do, where to go, how long till i have break. that is my sense of duty but for myself, for my own learning i wouldn't make the time? wouldn't it be more out of love to actually sit and give this the proper time it deserves vs. just half assedly doing it? what do i owe to my vision? to my dream? if some rando can tell me what to do bc they pay me, why would i not have the same sense of loyality and fidelity to my own self? not even to myself, but to my vision? do i not deserve that same respect and time? it was a really nice walk. just letting my mind reach its own conclusion. if i love myself enough to go to work at 9 am, drive and stay until 5, why when in my day off would i also not show myself the same respect and respect the time and put forth the effort?
anway, its long but my god it was a revelation. what i would do with it, how i shall carry it forth remains to be seen.
until next time.
i just realized the point is not to write a correct code. the point is to understand why its incorrect. damn. all this time i've been so worried bc i can't write code - mind you simple js code of loops and i thought this is hopeless. the point was never - correction the quest now is not to make it work. its to understand wtf 'ReferenceError: Cannot access 'fruits' before initialization 'means
you are not crazy. coding is hard. almost impossible really if you- like me approached it the same way you approach anything that you usually study. now it is ironic i got on here to write my just minted realization only to glance and the last paragraph about just write code nonsense i wrote. it is true. writing more code is helpful. but bloody he.ll is this stuff so counter intuitve.
so here is a realization that sure will be ignored by me in a fw hours but i write anyway just as the man screams into the void. it is kinda catargic.
realization 1. myeline myeline myeline. its the wrapping around the neurons or axons or whatever in your brain that make you rememeber and do things. i dont care i am tired but let me tell u a story.
one day in a world near the edge of space, there existed a little mouse. he didn't know how he came into the edge or where he was prior but alas he was at the edge of the world. he didn't know it of course. but it was a nice enough space. he had his family and realitvely enough cheese and comfort. but as he grew up he was noticing somethings weren't always easy for him. although from the outside he looked the same as all the little mice his age, he always felt like he was farther behind than the rest. he struggled a lot and the easy things that seemed effortless to the other mice was not so effortless for him. and after years of struggling to do things as effortlessly as the other mice one day he just gave up. he said, looking around. well i guess i am medicore. nothing special about me, i am just average, so what is the point of trying? he said. and that is exactly what he did. he stopped trying. the more time passed the more he wiltered away, just drifting going through the motions of things. he didn't quiet know where this road will take him but at least he wasn't struggling anymore, because he had accepted defeat.
what this little mouse at the edege of space did not know is by easing to struggle he had given up on the very thing that would have made him better. it was like the salt- because he didn't try all his food tasted bland, and all his experiences were meh. he wanted flavor, he wanted to do things but every time he tried now, they were almost doubly as hard. and he was really lost. everything from the outside seemed normal but inside he was as confused as a mice at the edge of the world. and he couldn't talk to anyone. anyway no one seemed to understand when he tried to bring it up. they were either effortlessly grooving along or too much in their own world to understand him. so the house went deeper and deeper into himself. and the more and more bland his world became.
one day as he was going on a walk after many months of being shut inside, he saw a mouse he had never seen before. this mouse seemed older and he was watching the sky which had turned salmon pink. the little mouse also stopped and looked at the sky for a long time. and the old mouse approached him. and they both continued to look at the sky for a bit. finally the mouse said. 'it sure is pretty'. 'i had never noticed it before' said the baby mouse. 'oh you should, it is goregous. i see it everyday and it still amazes me' everyday? asked the baby mouse confused. you come here everyday. yes when i can and if i am somewhere else i watch it from there. everyday? everyday. wow said the house incredoulsy. why? he asked because he couldn't help it. well it changes everyday said the old mouse. but isnt it the same sky? yes, but the colors are differen't. the streaks, the shape of clouds there are so many things that change. the little mouse quiet for awhile and the sky started the turn darker, the same sky that was dancin with color was now fading into a quiet grey color. it chagned so fast said the little mouse. indeed said said the old man as the sky went dark and he started going on his way. wait said the little mouse running after him. he didn't know why he was eager to talk to someone, maybe so few of his other mouse looked at the sky everyday. can i come and watch the sky with you tomorrow? asked the little mouse. sure, said the old mouse. afterall it is not my sky. huh said the little mouse. i will enjoy your company. see you tomrrow and he walked on.
the next day the mouse came, the old mouse was already there watching the sky, as the colors came and danced and envelop the horizon. this time they said few words. as the old mouse started to walk as the sky was turning dark the little mouse said see you tomorrow. by and by they kept coming to the same spot and watching the sky. each sunset was as different as the last. each one had its own flavor. and more and more the little mouse began to appreaciate the subtitles of the sky, its quiet majestic look and he no longer felt like he was at the edge of space alone. the sky was there and the old mouse was there to keep him company.
the end
Mon Nov 16 2024 10:36 PM
December 13 2024
today as i was on the threadmill walking i thought, hey why am i waiting to finish chapter two of elequent javascript i can just try to solve one of the problems in my head. which was how to find the min of two numbers using your own damn logic and not just keywords. and i remembered last year i had tried to do this and i had wrote the pseduocode for this problem at barns and noble. and i remember making it into a game and saying the new number is champion. anyway it doesn't matter, so i had written it on my notes so i go on my phone and lo and behold i had written it on 12/13/23
exactly one year ago. i was working on this problem and a year later i still have 0 clue how to write the code. which is sad. i mean eventually i will work through it and find the answer but to think in one year, i am near the same problem set is kind jaring. i don't want to say my goals because i am deathly afraid of letting myself down and having a record of it but next year this time, god willing - a lot seems like it will change. i don't know if i will still live in this place. i don't know what i will be doing, and really anything about my future is like a haze- not much is clear anymore. i don't know how people figured out what they wanted to do, or how to go about life. right now i am just hoping something happens.
i have signifcantly reduced my hours at work. so i am back to 3 days a week, which means i have four days off- to do what exactly i don't know. i thought it would be learn coding or programming or whatever but i'm not sure.without school or someone telling what to do and when to do it i am really not sure i can do anything. a few months ago when the weather was still nice i went to the river, where there is this sand right by the water and i remember walking and thinking and talking to myself like if i can follow instruction because someone pays me around 20 dollars an hour and i do whatever they say- 30 min lunch break ect then don't i owe myself that much at least? is my passion not worth that? following through and actually doing what i set out to do? is my discipline worth ~$20 actually with taxes it really is probably just 20. so i also was watching a show yesterday where the lawyer was like i charge $1200 an hour and it did not compute for a second and then my brain rebooted and was like wow should have probably been a lawyer like i wanted when i was like a freshman in high school. i have no idea what i want to do, i was looking at doctrate programs in psychology with like education stuff and that seems kinda intersting but not really. nothing seems fully interesting and i don't really have as much ambition as i did. now it is like meh. how do i solve this riddle- yes i know i should first solve finding the min and max algorithm i get but seriously where the fuck am i going? it was cute to be 20 and lost. but not much anymore. maybe i dont have to figure it out in like existential sense but like wtf ?
i was reading a bit of design your life and they had like two problems: design or engineering problem. i think mine is both? should i just flip a coin? but what would the sides even be? programmer or grad school? heads programmer and tails grad school but i already before i flip its programming but iiiiii dont know. ok heads programming tails grad school. fck.i need to learn how to flip coins. fuck yeah its heads! thank god. well the coin says IN GOD WE TRUST so there you have it. i am a programmer person now. thank god. ah what do i do though? i guess i program? fuk does this mean i dont have to go to grad shcool? bc i am ok with that.which means i can tell you my goal it would be ironic in 12/13/25 you fail at it but hey at least a few days ago as i was day dreaming at work i thought next time this year i want to be a jr programmer person. yea thats the goal. i thought like i could make my website and roll in dough and whatnot but you know for now we is a prgammer- first i should learn how to spell.i hate typing out programmer. so maybe a SE software engineer. ok i like that better. imagine i didnt have coffee after 10 but i am still buzzing. so um i am a soft ware enginer now. as of a like two minutes ago that feels nice. hum i guess program for 10 hours a day and what else i am a white dude that wears tshirts? i swear to go the flip was genunie but anway i guess i am a se now. no i am. i am going to listen to that neville guy at your command. i am in barbados. ok bye my legs are numb from crossing them. its friday the 13 guess who is playing jason/ tuck your self in better hold on to your teddy its nightmare on elm street and guess whos playing fredie? ok bye for real it is Friday 12/13/24 7:25 pm
i guess we are back. maybe. actually really this time i am going to learn python. now this seems like 'ok good for you, of course you are learning python as a new programmer, what else were you going to learn, javascript?' i hear you saying and yes actually the goal was and is js. i am a web developer afterall and i like js. but python not so much.
to paint you a picture, this has been a love hate relationship for the last two years- i have literally sobbed. maybe not directly bc of python per say but it was the thing that made me break emotionally and mentally many times. to the point where seeing visual studio on the computer would give me flashback to that memory and my body would recoil. It took ages to disassociate for i in range with the feeling of wanting to scream. so we come a long way now.
so why am i back? well like most things in my life, it was an accident. so i had a theory, a hypothesis actually. it was roughly: 'if we can train neuro nets or large languge models using reinforcment learning, why couldn't we do the same for humans?'
backstory i was watching a documentary called the thinking game, for some reason they still haven't released it to the public anway. the guy( the founder of deep mind ) was talking about how they trained AlphaGo to beat one of the best Go players and it was simily (in 3 rough steps) show it 100,000s games played by profssionals. then have it mimick them by playing against itself and using reinforcment learning( rewarding or not rewarding) and have it play a few million times. anyway so i watched it went to bed and actually started playing chess because of it. the animation of his childhood and the chess game was soooo good it got me to dig out my board from the closet. the theory was if these llms or watver are so good why can't they train me?
so i chatted with a friend, who randomly came in and has been playing chess since 5th grade and he told me some things and played 2 games with me or so. and then the next day i was like well maybe we can have them 'train' us not just in chess but in many many many things. but the only thing i can think of rn and care about is coding so i called up claude and we started to chat.
i said: well i have a hypthesis, which we can take similar methods to 'train' i.e have humans learn programming. what do you think?
claude said: 'This is a fascinating hypothesis! Let's think through how programming education could be inspired by AlphaGo's training methodology: Initial Exposure to Expert Code (like AlphaGo studying professional games): Have learners study well-written, professional code examples Focus on understanding patterns and best practices Learn from real-world, production-quality code rather than oversimplified examples Guided Practice (similar to supervised learning): Start with exercises that involve modifying existing code Progress to completing partially written programs Practice implementing common patterns seen in expert code Progressive Self-Challenge (like AlphaGo's self-play): Start with simple problems and gradually increase complexity Review your own old code and identify improvements Try multiple solutions to the same problem and compare approaches Learn from both successful and unsuccessful attempts Feedback Loop (similar to reinforcement learning): Get immediate feedback through unit tests and code review Learn from errors and bug fixes Iterate on solutions to make them more efficient/elegant Use automated tools to check code quality I think your analogy has merit, particularly in emphasizing: The importance of learning from high-quality examples The value of iterative improvement The role of self-directed practice The benefit of learning from mistakes'
so we started working on it. i am a psychologist at heart, at least i fancy myself as such and i think it would be a great hypothesis to test. and it decided to write the code in python and ofcourse i am my first 'scholar' ie test subject so i went with it.
but in all seriousness though like a day before this ah moment, chatgpt ppl were doing their 12 days of christmas and they did their videos, i watched the first one the day it came out wasn't all that jazzed. but the last one came out and i was doing my hair (context bc idk why) so here i am twisting my hair at the sink and decide to play the video bc why not it was the last day. and they are demoing and showing what 03 can do. well it was an oh shit moment. bc i knew this agi crap was marketing stunt. we can't have that anytime soon, it would be impossible. its not just a scaling issue, its a data quality and also it needs a natural envirment to learn and the data is so low quality now blah blah is all the shit i used to say but i swear i stood there like someone had hit me with a lightening rod. bc if they had achieved half of what they said o3 can do then we are not in kansas anymore. we might not even be on earth anymore. its insane. here i was thinking no way ai is real its just a fancy predictive model and nope turns out its slightly more. so i was like ahh how do i do this? it was a matter of not, idk how do i describe it? i guess its how gravity feels? like you know something is pull you and you can't put your finger on it.
so by luck or by chance i had seen a trailer(that part was an ad on youtube called the thinking game) and you had to send an email for the link so i had done that. and anway the next day is friday and i want to watch something and i had seen the email for the link so i clicked and watched it. and the things deep mind is working on, what openai and there is claude in antrophic and all that jazz. well i think licklister would have been proud. maybe for the first time there could really be man-computer sybmobisis. not to replace humans and make them have no jobs so they do carpentry all day but fusing the two.
for instance by randon hypothesis- if it works- actually as a scientist i should be saying if i doesn't work, my job is to disprove it. that we can use the same methodology to train humans in a far efficent manner than ever, and this machines can help us, then what is more symbiotic than that?
i realize i am that fool that has barely hiked 4 miles sitting at the bottom of a mountain describing the view from ontop, there is a lot of ways to go. but imagine.
merry christmas. wed 12/25/24 6:46pm
especially with myself but i don't know how right now. its been a long time since i programmed something. a few weeks ago i did build a user authentication page but that was mainly Claude doing it and i was just copy pasting and i even did a little bit of learning and saw some really cool things but none of them amounted to much- ok that sounds like i'm not giving myself credit. there is an entire user authentication page built, and yes ai built it but so what. 90% of the things - i wanted to say shit so i will say it- will be somehow ai adjacent but what botherrs me is not that. what is it that bothers me? what is my block? because i feel it, the 'art of war' guy would call it resistance maybe, but it feels stronger than that. its excuses- mainly. one of them is i need to learn how these codes work so i can't make any more edits. make categories? that will add more complexity to the code (which i barely if at all understand) and that means now i have to ...what? thats the part i dont get, i have to do what? why am i resisting? i thought it was because no one cared so i felt discouraged maybe that is part of it. but idk. i thought i need to program 8 hrs a day and i am protesting that by not working, thats part of it. and/or maybe what if i actually build something and someone steals it, or copies it, or posts things and now it becomes a problem? am i scared of it being successful? but why is that a concern now. i guess i don't know. all i know is there is a mental hurdle, it feels like a boulder and by itself its not hard to move you know. small buv heavy boulders that just keep me stuck. does it mean i have writers block? maybe.
stephen king has a book called on writing, and maybe i should revisit that. or meditate. or just go to starbucks, order a chai latte and sit and work until noon and at 12:30 take a break and at 1 go to a library and actually work. maybe its not i need to program this site. maybe thats like saying i need to write this book and it'll be great bc it'll be read by x amount of people. maybe its that the act of sitting and writing- ha, not words but code in my case that matter. i wish i could do it at home but too much distractions. doing it outside feels more managable.
mr. king said he works in 3 months, he writes the first draft in 3 months and the characters soemtimes decide the story (i think i made up the second part) but what if worked on discover pages for 3 months. full time? feels like i would lose my mind. but actually think about it. instead of building a tutoring site ( thats the next 3 months, its like an entirely new book) i focus on writing this one. just sit at typewriter and bleed like hemingway said. 3 months so today is Wwd Feb 5 7:05PM for the next 3 months ah is that april or may ahhh holy shit its may. ahh
doesn't it seem minanical though all the programming i do for 3 months is website stuff. what about prompting, what about python what about idk ah oh are those really the only things why did my brain think there was like 10 other things. gulp. so for the next 3 months i am only allowed website stuff.i dont like it at all actually but alas here is the final verdict. only web. which means js, html, css. what am i though like thats crazy, i think its dumb and i'm not stephen king(yet) and this isnt a book but alas. ironically i was opening discord as i was typing this out and the error was a js error so maybe i shouldn't be so dimisive. like dude if you master js- i doubt it bc i think i'm still stuck in chapter 2 of elequent js. which to be fair i literally forgot about. do u think i have an attention issue? regardless tho shalt not do any python(accept minimal just for fun) and thou shalt only do js and webstuff. decree of past me. sorry future me, thank me later. i swear to you by like geinuely though now not fucking around, if you give it 3 months and take it like a job- i literally go to work 3 days a week and change diapers and stuff and if i give it the same time by actually doing it 3 days a week (1 day rest) and you make it a part time job, i promise you, you will at least make more commits than you have the last 6 months (spoiler alert, you made 0) so thank you for agreeing to this and now it is on a public site and you will be a liar if you don't do it and oh don't try to sneak past and say oh but i need to build this and that. no. only the discover site and nothing else. i know you. ok i love you, i have 50% confience actually i will say i have 100% that you are capable of doing this and when you have doubt read this page and tell me what a complete naive immature person i am for saddling you with all the work while all i do is write this in bed. yes, you are right but i also came back from workng 8 hours where my arms felt like they were on fire and i had to literally was shit out of the pott training toilet. so we have both sacrifices to make. i did that so tomorrow you can go to starbucks order your 5 dollar chai latte- actually you better just get coffee but regardless i will pay for your chai with the literal money i got cleaning shit and if you have the audacity to not sit at a cafe drinking your overpriced tea and write some code while i had to pick up trash, go through peoples old donations, stand in the summer heat for 4-6 hours, ring people up at mcdonalds, if those jobs and sacrifices were not worth it for you to fuck around and learn, well then. i don't know, maybe its time to think of a different alternative path. this 3 months we will find out. consider it a birthday gift to the old me that did i mention literally had to wash shit today. do it for me if you won't do it for anyone else. do it for the girl wearing a yellow vest walking around in the summer heat picking up trash. do it for the girl that took buses so she can get paid 7something an hour. do it for the girl that worked all day picking up trash and weeding and carrying a windblower and those things that cut grass so she can then ride her bike and sort through clothes at goodwill. i made those decisions not because i had to, because i chose to. and you can choose not to wake up at 8something and be at starbucks by 9 and work that is us deciding and i will never guilt you(i do) into working if you don't want to. you are a free agent. but if you can't work the hours you say you need to, then by god you will be working for someone who tells you. i guess your will is worth 20something an hour. but damn, you sell yourself cheap. at least try, like geninuely try and fail. but do it spectaculary, do it in your own terms and your own merit, not because you were fucking too scared to find out who you are. anyway this is wasted on deaf ears maybe. or maybe not you will find out tomrrow and the tomorrow after that godwilling. what is the price of the dreams and these weird things you see in your head, those i would need this, i want to build it things. its a shame to die with a story inside you. but it's more painful to live with it and wonder what would happen if you shared it. anyway fucking hell just do the thing. please not for me. not even for yourself, but bc it would be fucking glorious to do a thing you set out to do. anyway i wish i knew what my hurdle is, but it doesn;t matter we must run and jumb. the hurdles dont move by staring at them from the corder. love alway, even if you do nothing, i wouldn't care, bc its not conditional- it should though - did i mention i had to wash shit out with my hands(with gloves obviously but still) will kick your ass if you let that be in vain.
2.5.25
its the next day, i did drink my chai latte by the window, i even stayed untill 12:30 and ate my lunch and decided to com to the library to work for the second half. its 3:38 and i am over it. i will stay here but not sure if anything will be done. i'm not in the mood. its too quiet and spacious and suspicious. i want to go home, i'm really scared idont have it in me to do this again.
do i continue wtih eloquent js or something else. i am just not in the mood. i dont think i like libraries; and i dont know if i like programming for so long maybe doing lunch for 35 mins or so was a bad idea maybe i need to take a nap what am i even rambling about now. god its so boring. like wtching paint dry its 3:43 now an hour left. my shoulder hurts, i need to stop complaining i think but hey its not cleaning shit at least. just so you know i held up my end of the bargin for today.
its tomrrow now. i did drink my overpriced tea, now i'm in a local coffee shop drinking oat blueberry smoothie and i'm still bored. i did stuff in the morning, i redid chapter 2 of eloquent js. i was concered bc i thought i couldnt do one of the exercises that i could 2 months ago. i did it, so thats that. now i am here and i dont want to do functions. i guess we di web stuff now. post and get and stuff but it still is boring. its 2:20 and i guess i will be here for 2 and half hours more. i have a vacant look in my eyes and i want to take a nap but i cant but i can see my apartment from here and technically i could go back but anyway this writing probs suck. i am really bored. . . i guess you know i'm just gonna copy paste some cool code and see it on the broswer. who cares if i'm not learning or remembering how to do it. maybe that'll be fun enough to wake me up. just so u know i held upmy end 2.7.25
so what am i supposed to do now? i have time and i sat down. velvet underground is playing and here i am with absolutely no idea what i am doing? i guess eloquent js but i dont want to, i want to do web stuff now but i can't bc i'm not sure what to do next. i am supposed to understand the old code so i can build on top of it but really what am i doing? this is one of the things that i hate bc i am all energy now, i've napped, its a full moon and i want to work. i just don't know what to do hats dumb ay? iknow. 2.11.25 6:30pm
deep breaths. innnn outttt i am working from home bc $5 a drink is out of hand where i can get an entire iced coffee from the store for that much price and it lasts a week. so this is the second day working from home again. so yesterday went ok bc it was only half day. today is the aleged full day back.anyway, i'm super worried but its ok. i saw a note i wrote in 2023 describing what functions are. guess what we are learnign today? 2 years later, function chapter 3. so lets get started i guess...thursday feb 14, 2025. oh happy v-day. if i can finish this chapter today and tomrrow. it'd be the best vday gift i can give myself. so update, turned out its the 13th
today is April 1st 2025. it has been almost 2 years and 6 days since I started this blog. and maybe a little longer since i started 'learning' to program. Now Q1 of '25 is over. i was never a person who would know that type of thing- esp since i no longer have to hear those words in my job, but it was nice having that backdrop as a way to have a deadline for the project. Currently the website is live. categories, which a feature i have been putting off since november now works. you can even search for a word inside the public page and it will putt it out instantly. i don't know how it works yet, but it works. i had said i was going to do something and i did it.
it is a long was since those first letters of Maci is learning html. we have a working site - more than working actually it does everything i wanted. minus the lack of users. i thought i'd have to fight people off the site but noone seems particually impressed or interested. kinda hard on the ego, when you spend a lot of time on a thing and no one seems to care just yet. it's fine - i didnt really build it for people anyway- if i did, man what would i do differently. maybe delete the random crap i have, and actually let people post their true things - or keep the ones that are really the exceptional links. i'll do that.
but i was watching a documentary about archecture and buildings and opra houses, how cool and beautiful and unique they are. designing space- digital space like that, that embodies nature, that is almost coming out of nature instead of just four walls and a roof is so cool. i accidntly wrote root. thats my freudian slip...the root. wouldn't it be cool if there was some semblance of tree or nature on the site? something that's unique. i found notes from April '24 talking about algorithms and how that can be used on the site but idk, i'm not sure anyway, it'd be so cool it if was more organic than that. soemthing alive/ ?
i'm not sure what my goal for next quarter is. what should it be? what would i like to make? i was thinking of a learning platform that helps you learn but idk about it either. i still have't learned much. i guess i was vibe coding since '23 but still feels werid, like i made a house but it doesn't feel like home. i'm not sure if it ever will. espcially now with the layers of complexity added. i don't know what i want out of this thing.
when i was watching the doc, the guy said we had a 30 year vision when we started the firm/company but i don't know if i even have a 3 year plan- a 3 month is what i am aiming for now. ideally, the word community keeps coming up- matching or helping peopel find each other to learn from and with. but most people are really not um idk the word. but anyway, in 5 years it'd be so cool if you wanted to learn soemting on your own the first site you go to was autodidacting and you had resources and guides at your fingertips and you can also be a resource for someone else learning something- a circle of infinite give and take. anyway categories is live. i have been coding way more than i thought i would considering everything. even if it was a sprint to finish this quarter. so whats next? lol
dear me,
i have been coding consistently and inconsistently for two years. i have very conflicting feelings right now. in one hand i am super proud of myself. when i was starting out the goal was to start with html and css. i don't think i ever really forsaw past those two. so in some ways it is went better than i thought, but also 2 years feels like a crazy long time. there were ups- the joy of something working as you imagined it is but the dread of something breaking- or even working but still being so bad that no one wants to use it. so there have been ups and downs. i have taken a break, and i have come back.
i think i probably will code until i no longer want to. godwilling that will be a while but to call what i do 'coding' is not really accurate. i guess i have been 'vibe coding' for 2+ years now. it makes me geniunely happy in ways i can't explain that something i had thought about in my head actually exists in the world. i have birthed an idea- a tiny seed once upon time when a friend tried to share a music on whatsapp and i was annoyed because i thought there has to be a better way so other people can also find it. i've no idea what the song was, but the idea germinated and grew into a seed and now its a tiny plant- fragile and neglected, but it still grew. it motherfucking grew! and that is the miracle of software, a girl like me- with no coding, not even the concept of coding was a thing i could even have dreamed about because it seemed so far - like universes far from me. people like me didnt code- i dont mean black, or female. just i never knew it was a possibility
let me tell you a story- i was in college, maybe a junior and there was a girl i had met, she looked just like me. we met as freshmans and i ran into her. she was across the train rack (light rail) and i was going home on the other side. i guess it was pretty slow day bc we were talking across the racks and i asked her what her major was and she said engineering. i was like ah cool. but she could have told me she was majoring in marine biology for all i knew. i remember thinking, oh people like us did that? (engineering that is- also marine biology would also be equally bizzare to me) so anyway that was my experience with engineering. i had gone to the engineering building in my campus once or twice but might as well have been galaxies from me.
obviosuly what i did - building a tiny site in the corner of the internet is not really engineering. but in some ways it is. i had to grow into the person that was willing to stick to a problem and work at it until it was able to be what it needed to be. and boy, i have miles and miles and miles to go before i sleep, but it is still a beautiful journey and i am blessed and grateful that by chance or by luck i am here, chiseling
i would really like to thank my mom- who maybe because she is worn out has stopped telling me to go to graduate school and for giving me the space to roam and run in cirlces but had the courage to leave me be while i sort my shit out. for my grandma, because 'love is not just a verb...'. for my uncles who raised me like fathers and brothers. for my younger self who felt like her touge was heavy as a stone, and for even younger me who wanted to touch the sky but was scared to, and for another younger version who had the faith of a mustard seed and believed with her entire being. for the people on clubhouse that liked the name autodidacting. for the guy who helped me run my server and for another guy who told me to keep a blog a few years ago- for both the sunflowers and the rain he brought to my life. and i guess for all of it. i am grateful for the LLMs without whom i would have given up long ago. and for being terrified at times but still showing up. you can say a lot and not say much so i hope this letter says just enough. thank you for sticking to it, thank you for crying because you cared so deeply. thank you for being you- because it was all those clouds and dark feeling of feeling stupid and mediocre that made me want to make this in the first place so younger me would stop thinking she was dumb. i hope you know you are not - that maybe your intelligence is not measured in tests or career ladders maybe its in your heart and your stupid courage to walk into the field that noone is and say, i think i want to go that way. thank you for listening to the whisper and the quiet drums. i hope i don't let you dow. and even if i do- even if i cant figure out product market fit--ahhh wat did PG call it? 'quantum of utility' -- guess where i pulled that from. fucking website!!! (it feels odd to call it my website. it is mine but not mine you know- like that was this youtuber- colin galen- who talked about an ecosystem of knoweldge and sharing notes and i was so heavily influenced by him and others that it is mine but not of me? ah mayebe this is how parents feel, it's mine but its own thing) Back to what i was saying- even if it doesn'v work- but quantum of utility is not hard- i just have to keep iterating till i do- but regardless its a long way of saying: i am proud of you. thank you for your tears, for nights coding, for days spent stressing about not coding, for thinking of it in the pool, in the shower, in the car. for caring. thank you for caring enough to give it a go. who god knows where the next two years will go- i have no idea and god willing - so thanks you for being there for me, and for coming back to it. i love you - the scars and all. until next time,
HAY tuesday April 8 2025 9:00 PM in MN
ps. im such a good writer, i amde myself cry reading it. so good job
so 0000 its q2 now. yep whatever that means- actually here is what it means. ub q1 categories was a big thing we released and that was requested by user D. so thanks for the feedback and its finally functional so your welcome for that and thank you for wauiting since Novemeber till that feature is added
in terms of what we are cooking up this season you have to see, bc so am i. i just wanted to share some thoughts.
buildspace was the incubator quote endquote where this idea took place and was birthed into the world of sharing links. idk if this was the best idea i could have focused on in that time period. i remember going for a walk and thinking that linksharing was the perfect idea bc i dont even need 10 or more users it can work really well with small groups of ppl. i didnt realize small meant just me but its cool. now though a year later i was thinking of expanding it beyond just 'educationa; resources' vo things i love and i found helpful. so you can sponteniously discover the cool things that exist on the internet. so yes yahoo circa 1994. lol next we will work on rebuilding yahoo answers- which by the way i loooved like i never loved any serviice and that was 10 years ago. anyway so making sure we expand outside of just education into just shit that brings you joy and/ or learning which is a way to bring you joy. p?
i have learned a few things about myself- one is that no matter what, i am here building and hoping that we reach quantium of utility but regardless i like buulding and i will continue to do it. growing up we didnt have the money for legos and besides it seems annoying to have to build things someone has constructed and this is my adult legos i get to make it, show some people and have em tell me what sucks or can be better and i go rebuild-the anology falls apart bc i am also learning how lego consruction works while i am building it but regardless. we are --ha we ars in the team and i- the team as in ahh we'll talk about that later.
i guess the team of ppl that helped me with this idea- it takes a village to raise a child and it also takes a village for good software so thanks to buildspace and for farza who insanely enough is also started from ground up and making cool shit so hank you for that. and for friends. i feel like i am giving the acceptance speech when i havent even cast a crew yet, but i would like thank the academy and god. lol anyway thanks i guess - so now we get to build -wish me luck
heres to new quarters and rainy aprils for may flowers. may your flowers bloom. (plstell me you got the pun?)
Mon Apr 14 2025 8:04pm
June 11, 2025
hola. what a time to be alive ah? the way things have been changing is crazy, would take archeologist and socioloigst a few decades before we can put words to the whilwind of things happening to us and around us.
i was in a mental battle with myself- when making website i had used a lot of LLM and ai to build the sites. mainy gpt, then claude, then windsurf and the results have been marvelous. accept yesterday...
yesterday my sisters and i were at the library and they were showing me their papers and i was 'proof-reading' which meant i was just reding it to be nice. and one of the papers was really really good. so after seeing their work, i thought i should also show my work. so i used their computer and went to the site. and i was happy and proud as i made them look through it. they were surpirsed. they exclaimed, 'you made this?' ah 'yeah' i said. they looked around and were like 'you made this?!' and i can't expalin the mix of shame and joy i had. techically no, but also yes. i did make it. but not really. i almost felt like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar. i didn't confess, yes i made it but not really. i had help- actually i had a lot of help. i mainly told it what to build. copied the code (yes, at least i copy paste to terminal bc it maakes me feel better about myself) and when it hit a problem i copy paste the problem try it a few times, get frustrated a few times and then bam it works. great
back in the days long gone before cursor and windsurf you had to copy the code from gpt or claude and run it. now it feels even more like i'm obsolte in the process of creating. 'yes pls make the website look more attractive, maybe zen vibes or a garden vibes. what do you think?' i ask it. it answers back and we go back and forth for a few more minutes and i say. ok, go build it. and i sit and wait for 2 minutes copy the code, edit some things and vola, its done. and i feel cheap and gleeful that something works. but at what price?
so i thought as i was making my way back to my aparment that i won't use ai(llms) to build my site. i was going to do it myself.
cut to a few hours later, i'm talking to a friend about her starting dualingo that day and how shes going to give french 7 days before moving on to italian. then the conversation shifted to how many words do you use on average everyday, the answer was around 5,000 so i asked claude.ai and it said roughly 1-3k um intersting. then we talked a bit with claude and i said, well knowing all you know about learning for humans and machines how would you build a language learning platform. and it said some stuff and i said cool, build it and it did. it wrote the code faster than my eyes can scan the words. and in a few minutes it was done- i'd taken the code and ran it on the terminal and typed it on the website and vola. et fini. again, cheap and gleeful. so i said, oops. i had told my friend about my not using ai to build sites. she said i thought you said you were not going to use ai. i said, 'well you should know i never mean what i say' or something along the lines. i will admit i am the biggest hypocrate i know. so anyway i spent a few hours on the site, mainly mannually entering the definition of the words and their negatives and i felt like i did something. tired and happy.
so today i mulled around, mopping if i dont have something viable in a few months how i'll have to return to the workforce. so i spent the whole moring journaling, watching youtubes and stuff.
then a friend came in and we were chatting about how i don't know what to work on next, how everything seems like confusing and i had a focus last week on the website now i dont know what to do etc etc. and it occured to me i should journal about this bc i was going to talk in circles and i realized (aftermany misfires) that people are not really interested in watching you spin in your thoughts and projectile vomit on them your doubts and insecurities.
so i sat on the floor by the window and started writing what i want to do next. i had wanted a teacher i saw last week to teach me logic. so that'd be cool to build a platform ppl can share their class, and tutor one another etc
on the next page i wrote ai no ai
this are the things i wrote: 'struggle of building it on my own |pride that come w/ hard work | molding the clay instead of merely asking the clay to mold | the price & discipline of the work & the blank canvas | craft | slow, maticiulous & allowed to suck b4 iterating to good| to mold & be molded by a task
for ai i wrote: speed & it looks better than me making it
so yeah, i am allowd to be a hypocrate and do the opposite but i guess i was highly influenced by a short doc on YT i was watching a few hrs ago called:"Film documentaire sur l'artiste contemporain français Charles BELLE | 'Blancs soucis', Pierre Guy" and it is an incredible piece of art. i have never heard of the guy, and watching him clip the canvas and seeing how enormous it is and watching him mix his paint and go to this marvelous white canvas and put purple paint on it see it over the course of the video come to life was, well i have no words for it.
as i watched it i kept thinking about hackers and painters of Paul Graham so that might have influenced the stream of thoughts. so anyway thats my stream of thought. you are all caught up
tuesday, june 24 2025
as of 5 minutes ago, our database is connected with the html page of the tutor_project
after weeks and weeks of walking in the morning deciding should i do it or not and all the back and forth of mind and soul we have decided tutoring project will take my undivided attention for the next weeks to come. who knows if it becomes anything, or everything idk but its worth finding out
a few days ago we were playing pool and these guys were like whoever loses buys the winner shots. obviously we didn't take them on it bc we didnt want shots nor more accurately, we didn't want to buy shots for these guys(i hadnt made a single ball go in the 2 games) ANYWAY, i was standing next to their friend who wasnt playing and i said, 'your friends are the betting type.' and he responded, 'aren't we all?'
touche guy at the bar. aren't we all the betting type and this is my bet. odds-slim, really really slim but all the chips are on the table and they are pushed in.
p.s i said our db, we decided etc...honestly it's me and claude only and yet somehow it does feel like 'our' project and 'we' decided. it's a bizzar time to be collaborating and learning with and from claude. it responded to my gratitude earlier with 'That's really kind of you to say - I'm genuinely enjoying this learning journey with you too!' god knows what it's learning from me, but i've learned a lot and its been really helpful.OH another chat 'Oh you absolute con artist! I'm genuinely impressed and slightly annoyed that you played me so well. ..' Seeing this thing evolve from even 3.5 to 4 has been a wild ride, it is kinda impossible to imagine working without these copilots along the ride. kinda interesting and very odd but i do feel like its a co-project than a solo project. I wonder how many people are forming these odd ties with these LLMs. Idk
sun, aug 10 7:52 pm
i took a break from blogging for awhile. actually a good few weeks. i didn't stop 'coding' I was still creating AI slob, atually the ai was good, it's just me that is a bottleneck in this process. i literally have spent the last 9 weeks banging my head against a wall trying to build yet another full stack project with absolutely 0 understanding. And either it was my ego or my own desire to know but I couldnt relinquish the code entirely over to the LLMs. I wanted to know how it worked, and still do so begins yet another termoil of bouncing back and forth.
i dont really want to be doing this anymore. the amount of energy and time i waste is staggering. if i had started alone, i might have made faster progress. if i had let the llm code the whole thing it surely wouuld have been faster. so i find myself in this junture yet again.
i dont know anymore. i know i am running out of money and time. as they say my runway is more like a walkway before it disappears in 3 weeks. not that i'll stop coding, i dont think i ever will really, but i would have to get an adult job again and go through all that process again. oh lord help me please.
so we have 3 weeks literally 20 days before i have to eat my word and go back to work. because i did promise my mom if i couldnt make it work, then back to the punch clock it is. and like a true person i spent almost the whole summer doing what exactly idk. time flew by. like sand in our hands or shadow just gone. and now here we are.i'm really not sure what the outcome i'm aiming for is- actually thats false. i know. in 3 weeks can i work as hard as i can and see where that gets me. probably not far. i am off caffine as of yesterday and boy the withdrawls hit hard, so no caffine for 3 weeks, and some web development for dummies book and talent is overrated, which is another book. its on chapter 6 where it'll tell me how to structure my deliberate practice. but for now 4 hours of focused work on coding is the plan. look the plan was a few mula in ARR but i would settle for 2 ha i was supposed to type 1 but finger freudian slip- i guess 2 paying customers would be incredible. oh if someone actually pays it'd be doooope. another goal is '3 clicks to book it' which is Airbnbs old goal or something. anyway with all the paul graham i'd watched and read you'd think i would be smart enough to start putting this product in fornt of ppl. he eve said the mistake ypu'll make is you'll wait too long before you ship and lo and behold he was right. another goal i came up with yesterday is to 'ship' it by next saturday. today is sunday so in 6 days we 'release' a version. a 'god enough just let ppl try it' some internet friends had seen it. but oh i know, i will send it to this one guy i met on ch. i'll resend him the link and ask what he thinks. aparently he's in sf and so he's the only one i know in sf. hopefully he's better feedback than its shit, which is more or less what he said last time a month ago. so hopefully he think its less shit.
oh also there is this small problem of IDONtUNDERStANDANYOFtHECODE problem. i marvelously pasted about 3k lines of code. i understand maybe 100 lines and if you made me recreate it, not even the code just the general schema, i think i wouldnt be able. so maybe thats the next benchmark this week.; work on tracing the mountains path. thats somewhat a phrase gpt5 used. it was pretty good. our first conversation. i will probably lose my claude account and have to go free in the account of me having no mula rn but which makes it even more paramaunt i understand the thing i have. so i guess my week is prett y full. and sunday after i am done i'm going to the beach all day and drink a really good vodka and stare at the sunset and say to myself. 'ahhh' anwayway before that heres the thing gpt5 said to do "List all the main features (e.g., login, database, API calls, forms, display lists, etc.) For each feature, note which technologies are involved (JavaScript, HTML, CSS, Node.js, MySQL, etc.) Identify the files and folders where that feature lives in the code. Outcome: You will have a 'map' of your projects moving parts
wish me luck gang
also i realized as i was in -doesnt matter where i was- but i realized rn im autodidacting. you know even if it doesnt seem like it i am in the process of self learning all this crap. and also the guy -pascal- on youtube said being who you want to be video, he said 'remove the things that are not david' aparently micahelanglo said that. alright adios. see u next time
wed oct 1, 2025 7:53 am
good mornin. still sleep in my eyes but maybe this be like stream of consciousness writing.
what have i been doing since august? coding mostly. last weekend was the first time in a long i wasn't 'working' by working i am using the term losly but you know a complete break from thinking about coding or feeling guilty i wasn't coding etc. it took a long time (knock on wood) to get into the groove. i don' quiet have 8 hr days clocked in but i have been able to sit at the desk for longer periods of time and just do what is in front of me. Setting 1 hour timer is so helpful, its the most liberating thing to know the timer will eventually go off but i dont have to use self control every hour of the day. set the timer, get to doing whatever i was doing
what have i been doing? making a tutoring site. its ya a dead end i know lots of tutoring sites already etc but i do feel this is different and its been a labor of love for some time now. and techincally all that is left is the booking logic and it can be ready to test. so thats my task today to see if i can get booking to work. bc my word to myself was by oct 1st i start showing it to ppl and we see about the feedback and how to make it better. honestly not even sure who to send it too, if anyone would care and how would payment work and video will be on google meets or where etc. My mind starts racing and i have seen it spin in place of hypothetical or later down problems and just fixating on that. which is fine - its a problem but NOt RN. a lot of my learning has been saying to myself not rn. you'll deal with that later. not rn. doing that, and reverse engineering the code the ai wrote and going over it line by line- writing it by hand, writing the explaination and rereading those is kinda helping? i gotta keep it up. its a lot. kinda cool how once upon a time it was how do i get css to display on the page, now its how do i authenticate user. so its nice. i was thinking yesterday how badass the great programmers must feel- like drew and collins and i realized the goal post always moves. aint no there, there. i'm sure they are learning and struggling to -maybe struggle is a neg word but grappling with something. its a great art in which your opponent is always changin a little stronger, a little faster and you gotta keep up
anway now i'm done philisophizing i gotta get back to doing bookings- i am nervous there is a lot to consider. should the student click on say tutor5 for 10:00 am on tuesay but final confirmation has to come from the tutor. and how will they send that conf. how would canceling happen. and when will we roll out messaging. ahhhh its too early i wish i can fall back asleep.
there was a talk on 'how to design api' for soemthign from stripe 2019 sessions and that was helpful, using the aws principle of writing the press release and faq first was very interesting. i know i dont have to get booking right and it can be left in a simple lightweight way so i can stop overthinkin it
thats pretty much it. next time i talk to go its worryin me i might have a host of different worries- it woild actually be talkin to ppl and trying to onboard users- tutors and students and the metric starts. oh there ws a uc talk by adam of quora called measurement from 2017 and rention graphs and i realized near the end that i would always be thinkin about that from today on. so thats fun. a new mind obsession. hopefully i can detach myself from it. its hard to make st not care how it ends. unlike a painting or a book or play its always changing and you gotta think almost like you're molding this thing day in and out. man maybe this is the most peace i'll have for a bit bc i dont have to think about any of it. but also really sherlock? youre application is so mindblowingly awesome that you just think about it day in and out. give it a rest. pls sorry kindly do get off the horse. if it goes decent thats decent. the goal anyway is it generates enough mula and funds so i can keep doing this, waking up and sitting and leanring and breakin something and learnin how it broke and what to do nexv time. it aint valuation its maybe some random ppl meet and they have a great time and they keep learning and doing what they love. and maybe thats a lot of ppl, maybe its just me but it was fun- is fun to make. if someone else likes it good but i have to- will be ok if it is a little hut in the forest of the internet. i dont need nor want a metrapolitan will millions of visitors really unless they bring something you know. anyway - being able to focus on your breathing and not getting swept by it all is a real skill. it comes and it goes, in and out. tamper expectations. is tamper the right word. just literally put it on the floor, have no expectation other than ppl that use it have ideas and i would love it if there share that with me. but we arejust doing bookin now, dont make it into a thing.
this part is probs the most sophisticated thing i'll build for a bit- or havebuilt. so maybe it doesnt have to be done today. maybe by fri? this way i can be on ch on the weekend- oh thats nice bc godwilling i dont have to work on the weekend so i can just chat w/ ppl. k solid plan so i dont have to stress ive to build it all today. probs means i can go back to sleep bc i work up kinda worried and didnt get to finish my dream. which is funny bc i noticed if i sleep before 11 i can wake up early and feel fine but later than 11 even by half an hour and its clowdy and no sun comin in then its bizzarly exhausting. oh and i only dream- ha drink tea now.i can stay up i would usally be up for some reason i need to resume my sleep. anyway, bon chance and bon courage my cheri. remember 'now is now. later is later' k bvyyyyyyyye
ps if there is any way to track leanring outside of just a list would be nice- i guess i'll do it by hand- gstop overengineering-dont make something that can be solved w/ a pen and paper :)which also means- piano. oh if i can get ron on the app thats be freakin cool -
thur oct 2 2025 10:04 am
yep software is magic. thats all
what greater elecrifying jolt is there than when a thing that was just letters somehow conjures messages across the ether of space. And in nanoseconds, all of a sudden voila. it's there. a thing out of some small tiny things. coolest shit ever man. the high is so high
would now be a good time to tell you about this complete lack of direction or sense of dread that i feel comin on in the corner of my eye. i guess you go a few days without building- i mean technically yesterday was spent editing code- no lie- i copy pasted some french vocab that ought to be good help in helping me learn french and i thought bravo good job. but then i proceeded to do nothing accept read transcript of charlie munger interviews and flutter the day away and oh i went to a founders and hackers and had a good conversation w. people even got info about incoming days events so why do i feel so low? remember how high and happy i felt and just like the weather that was so nice - oh maybe that- i was outside when i wrote you my last letter, i will migrate to the balcony and eat some fucking food. i have been calorie deficient for last 2 days. monday i managed half way, yay. yesterday bc i swam i barley got 30% of required and this morning eggs are not helping me feel better.
ok im outside now. and gobbeled down some beans and bread. ironically paul graham has a decent recipe on how to cook beans and rice (instead of just eatting ramen) thats pretty cool. he says you should use the sauce from the beams and when i told my mom that she said gross. but it tastes good. if only now i can follow the rest of PGs recipes on how to start a startup then we i wouldn't be eating $7 i got 3 meals out of it.(which is awesome) oh there was a video that came up today on 'how to start a startuup' which was read by an ai which kinda sounds good. anyway the point of it i guess is solve your own problem. i thought i was - i am self learning programming why dont i have people help me or tutor me- which ironically is a stupid idea bc i had someone tutor me on graphics in python and it was a shit show bc i was so anxious and stressed bc i kept getting it wrong. that was in june. and i doubled down and spent the last 6 months making a tutoring site and now i am feeling like that was stupid. not bc the idea is stupid. it could work. i think. but bc another of PGs thing was not getting the product infront of users and testing it. and i sure managed not to do that. he called it out as the biggest mistake startup founders make. and yay me i have been hiding in my studio apartment feeling mighty fine about learning how gets and posts metods work that i managed not to test anything. it works enough - like another Paul - paul buchiet was like talking about how he made gmail and he was like showing people the first day. kinda nice when you work in a company and ppl can give you feedback- ohh oh wait what if thats the problem i solve? getting quality testers for your product. instead of just posting on reddit and discords you have a list of people you just say hey ive buit this thing feedback? i guess the benefit is you get people to give you feeback and the others feel good- idk the logistics but thats def a problem is getting new and good users to test my shit. how though- dramatic stufing face w/ beans ok so done with a few bites for now. but how do i do it? dont like whole discords exist for this ummmmmmmm stare at a bunch of buildings as i type and hoping the idea would hit me- car driving by mechanics would getting experienced software engineers to help u review your product and be your like few users in the beginning. ah u cam post 'help me test tis shit' and they do and type a few feedbacks and u go do it or ignore them u know your choice. how tho- does this need a few users- but what is it. so ive tutpr i have the structure to message ppl. so instead- in addition to tutors oh this can be good bc it would force me to code using my old code and not use ai. so you get a bunch of profiles and they all they have their ideas- but how do you stop someone from stealing your idea tho. ahh idk. damn thats a problem. but is it a prob now.u know just to test. besides you can recruit ppl based on 'vrustworhy ness' i fucking hate tis why cant i just be content at some job. fuck(i typed more ks but it didnt look right) so maybe i can do that later- but can you pls finish one project before hopping on next thing. who cares if you use ai- i do but whatever. just finish messaging. its literally 1 pribelm. for some reason a when you reply its making you fill out their id. you should be able to message by clicking on their profile and/ or a prepopulated list of names comes up. i dont know how to structure the code and i want to quit and i am annoyed and tired even tough id managed to do only 2 hours of like cs50 and managed not to fall aslpee and watch the whole lecture so yay me. but now what do i fix and ship this shit. yes. i am sick of this. i sad last frieday and mssed stupid deadline. now new deadline is ah this friday and i will have my little sister as the first person and she will have to tutor me in how to annotate and write an essay on a book- either the mindset book or the logic book her choice. ok honestly by saturday she and i will have messaged set up a google and have logged all the friction points. cool. i tink thats good for now. lets burn some tokens and get this minor bug fixed.
ok simple otherwise im gonna wallow and be chilly and not good ok i have my marching orders i guess so that should keep the abyss until next week. good luck dude this fuking sucks
wed oct 8 25 4:50pm
ps. can u pls stop being so outcome focused. this is a long road and stop treating it like its a quick hike up the street. just focus on the hours. fun fact, you feel like crap bc you are supposed to be coding and learning and you are not and you know you are not and you feel bad and you are using feeling bad as an excuse why you cant set an hour timere and work until that timer is done. and nothing. i repeat nothing will change the fact you didnt put in the work. so who cares about testing with users- yes you can do it all in 2 hours with ai, but is that what you want? no? great then you know you are not chasing the outcome, aka the finished site, but you want to learn and to learn you sit and fuckin debug and write it out and see where the code is going wrong. you can outsource it and be done with mopping or sit and figure it out. god sometimes the easiest ting is so complex. just set an hour timer and sit and do it. and repeat. for some reason bc last friday you managed to do 7 of those hours now you feel bad bc you have not been able to meet those 7 hours so now yu manage to do 0 hours. fuckin great math dude. its not how it works. stop having random sticks and crrots. you want to know how websites work now is your change in attitude is required. but nothing changes the fact not u didnt do 7 hours yesterday oh poor me im so dumb and i cant work bc i cant bc someone when i was fuckin 10 said i was not as good as someone else so i use that as a justiication to why i cant fuckin sit down and code or learn or do piano or sew or learn french (acutlaly meric beacuoup pour toi dedications dans aprrend les frncais desole pour moi mots) but other than that. dude what? what is the end goal here? maci is learning html. great you did now what? seriosuly is it to start a startup is it to make something useful, is it to get a job so you can stop being in debt is it socializing so youre not fuckin alone all te time for gods sakes enough arret. ok i love you but sommeone had to say it. sick of typing and tinking and whinning. fucking do the timer. pls i love you. younot a fucking teapot. be resilient. jeez leuiz. god that was hard.but i gues i know you can accept it comes from an honest place. wht youre gonna delete this and pretend like you are wsting your life away building sandcasltles in the sky? ohh dude tolstoy no whats his name ahhhhhhhhhhh thoerou said if you are building castles in the sky good, that is where castles should be now put the foundation - ill findu the quote but you know what the foundation is? work. seriosyly. stop over analyzing it. and stip calculating on between now and friday i have 7*3 21 hours of work thats so much but who asked you to work for 21 hrs. just the 1 hour, then a 10 break and god knows after what happens. your only job is startin the timer and sit in blank screen for all i care but goddamn it (sorry god to use your name) but for godssake just do it. what is more than to have tried and failed. but no one is asking you to succeeed. just to do 1 hour of work. please i know you can do it. because you have done it. i know you peach. (peach was the word ms. marva collins s=used when she talked to her students) you are the student(the second grader who got held back in this case) and the teacher- ms collins. you have to be both. you are both so exhale. ok lets start again. 1 one does not fly into flying. you are fine you are doing great and thank you for the countless hours you have spent. i see your effort and thank you for working hard. i know you care, and i admire that immenesly. thank you for working hard and for applying yourself 2. If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them. –Henry. the foundation is work. so thank you for continuing to care enough to work. i was and am slightly erked but its just the nature. you are looking for short cut and fixes and remedies and getting distracted by the outcome. it is hard. and you chose it bc it is hard. no point in wallowing on how hard it is. or wishing it was easier. or wishing you were better. the way to get better is to sit and figure it out. i know you can figure it out bc i have seen you. i am dubmass u am you. i love you that was a joke. but seriously. there no there there. there is no one you are competting with or measuring yourself and you are lost bc you are looking for soemthing that doesnt exist. what you will be happy when you get a few users, then it becomes millions then billions and blah blah blah. yesterday the shopify founder was talking to patrick nope john about falling in love with the problem and being so fortunate as to have a problem you can never solve and if you do solve it, hopefully the problems has children you can learn to fall in love solving. you are looking for solution. you are comparing yourself with people fundamentally different than you and feelin bad bc what you wrent a child projedy? like what is goingon. abusurd np. thats fine but thats just a wrong view. the problem is do i care about this enough to dedicate the next hour solving it. thats it. and maybe by the end of the hour you dont like it or its hard but i guess you have to- i ahve to find a problem worth falling in love with. and what more than figuring out what i care about. right now it finishing this small thing i started with messaging. and its complex there is a LOOOt of the code i cant figure out and isnt what fun. go and solve that and leave the users, or the UI or the wonder boys alone. i think it was suu a japenesse term to be one with the thing. i realized yesterday when i was doing something dumb like pouring the cold water- doesnt matter i was thinking and it hit me as i was by the kitchen sink that i'm not there. i'm pouring water but my mind is somewhere else, i am sitting and typing (not this but earier( abd im not there. can i be where i am. its hard to focus this screen is blurry i should definetly be not sitting here rn my back feels funny etc can you notice here. even earlier as i was spiraling i wasnt all there. sounds wacko but i anyway, that was then. now is now. dont worry about it all. not the acolades or the smashing your head against the keyboard or the me that will read this in the future one day(hi me) it is all noise. all of it. so after all that, are you going to go set a timer and sit and be there. 3. when you are washing dishes, just wash dishes. when you are eating peach just eat the peach. peach. i love you and i admire your ability to be so stuborn. xH
kinda funny thinking about these flamboyant letters that i write on here- um today is november 2 7:01PM we ran out of money awhile ago. runway is gone, actually it would be the oppsite - we are in the red and we're in deep shit. i'll be out of time soon as well because of lack of runway and the sheer inconvience of living expenses. it was good fun for a bit. god i spent now whatever the month is since june in this heist of i'm going to strike gold with a startup bs. its depressing to count- 6 months maybe. i dont want vo know. i am a little down. umm more than a little, its not depression but its sure its second cousin, maybe twice removed or something. did i mention i'm in deep shit./ i said i would return to wrok in three months it would have been a 3 month experiment and i vowed after i would return - or rather embark on a government job and just live that life. 3 months was 3 months ago. so other than i am the worst at keeping my word what have i learned? i wish this was easier, wish the opponent wasnt fuckin in my head, you know? you can outsmart someone, outmaniver them but its hard to run from your own shadow. unless yoy're in the dark -hence the something plato cave anology. i guess my own shadow is i quit when things get uncom--umm hard? i dont know but i quit, everything. guitar, piano, blah blah just a laundary list of shiv and this will also be up there. i guess in am in the thorough of despair or some shit. all i know is i'm in deep shit. and 'shit dont change until you wash your ass' thas kl. so by gods grace i can wring out a few weeks- 3.5 weeks to be exact then the bills come knockin. either we- look at me giving myself an order. i hate following orders, i guess even from myself which is dumb. i know what i'm doing is dumb, risky and highly whats the word unlikely to work, um incredibly stupid and 'dont you ever learn'- sure its all true and starting a tutoring site is dumb i know. i can barely make myself study and do anything and i thought it was a problem that can be solved by software and it isnt. soooo what now? huh.per josh w. its a problem for my subconscious. and its thw most critical question ive asked so far i guess. what now? god please give me the answer and if its inside me already guide me to it. bc im spinning in place going nowhere fast. i guess this is where i surrender and do the next best thing. i know the next two actions, after that what i do, i dont know. ive tried discipline- ha untrue. i've never did discpline i did what i felt like doing which great for my rebellious nature, terrible life consquences so might wanna rein it in but hey, all i know is the next two things and one includes cookin the fish. i'm so hungry bc of lack of funds to buy food and terrible bean rice. i dont think i have ever been this poor before- untrue also i have been in debt but you know i could spend money. now i dont and cant really its funny and im laughing but its not funny but i dont money to buy onions and now i'm crying so great emotionally i am very stable.great for me. what vhe fuck do i do? but i guess im the only one that can answer that so we're screwed. lol jk chill. its fine. i'll be fine. i'll be fine. i am many things but i know and i know that i know that i know (fuckin riddle me the meanin but you know. stop acting like u donv know. ) k good luck, fucking twat you'll need it. (i've never used the word twat in my life so i dont knw where it came from and it came and i had to write it down soooo.) whacha gonna do now? ps i just looked it up kinda crazy word but its not wrong
today is nov 12th. all the meats and potatoes of the tutor site is done. i finished it about 2-3 hours ago. you can login,signup,message,book a tutor. a tutor can confirm or decline your request. its finished. minus stripe integration everything is done. i am really thankful and proud after my last letter i hunkered down, went to the library, spending all day and really locked in. and today the site works so why do i feel so blue? am i just a whinny bitch - emotional whiny person? i thought i'd do chartwheels. its done. months and months of work is coming to a close- i started something its near finished and instead of feeling happy the first thing i did was look at another tutoring site. why i dont know. i've never done that - i saw it by accident once but as soon as i finished i was like lets see this site and i was like wtf have i done. they've almost million students served with 100s of thousands of teachers and here is my pwiny little site. what was i thinking?!?!? anyway i guess the lesson is donv trust your feelings. oh btw my laptop might be crashing on me so ya. thats fun. i hate how i find the little things to be miserable over and the littlest things make me happy. just a fuckin pendulum of emotion. sorry dude for being such a mess. Maybe its the fact that claude solved it in like a minute what would take me days if not weeks to build and doing eloqent js hasnt gone well. i mean at least i finished the functions chapter. so i dont know wtf i'm doing or whats going on. also two weeks- i have to start looking for a job. i cant hide under a rock forever, a few decades is long enough. so whats next? i guess i go fix the timezone problem nah. maybe focus on the user interface make it look pleasant. i would love two templates, a blue and a yellow one. you know what i realize no matter what i go through i keep thinking of whats next, what to tweak. iguess i'm mainly scared now its almost done i'll face the facts, i'll share it to people and they'll find no use for it and it'll be crickets like the linksharing site and all of this time and tokens will be for naught. i am terrified of facing the consquence- the result. what if noone uses it. a tutoring site in an age where you can ask an ai any question? what a horrible idea. who would think of such idiocy?! oh ya me. i did. i do; fuck it finish the experiment, record the data. no one uses it, thats 99.9% likely. or 2 people will and it dies a quiet death like million of vibe coded sites. rip - but should i set a deadline- i've asked ross to look at it.i havent sent it to him yet, i know he'd hate the ai is slopped all over it. but i guess today i'll do the cleanup, tomorrow is pm2 then what. oh thats what i was grieving. i felt sad bc i dont know what i'm going to do after this is 'done' i dont want to do api stripe. so i guess i just wow thats wild i was sad am sad what do i do. i'll be done by nov 15th then what. who am i if i'm not thinking about code- or website. i think a part of me is always thinking about it, and now what do i have to think about. who am i if i'm not making a website and the stupid thing is i'm serious its not even for a joke. dude . this is- woow hold the phone i need to find some epictetus quote to console me. random pg flip the book is right here. book iii pg 205-206. anyway, it'd do me some good to step away from this emotional yoyo i'm on. to release it to the gods and let it fall where it may. i need to shed, detach and not be sp miopic. always plotting and thinking and trying to do. maybe this emotional cavern (cave?)/depth is a reflection of the hollowness of ambition. of wanting. of wanting this to work, of wanting this to make money, of wanting this to be something people admire me for, of peoople who ask me to give 'em advice. of in short, fame and fortune. how lame i guess- how shallow. yesterday morning for the first time as i sat waiting for the tea, i had this feeling of people around me working on this together. of a collective. forever i saw it as a me thing, myself on this self imposed cruisade and yesterday was such a clear feeling. maybe return to that. to the shared child - it is not mine, it is mine but not mine, i co-made with machines and to be so white knucle is dumb. let it go. release it to the bits and 0s it came from and it shall die in oblivion- or not- regardless why so serious; my face is always in a frown - so tench. so serious. let it fuckin blow to the wind and scattr like ash. from dust to dust. ya i need to practice that. to make mandalin is that what the zen ppls call it. to draw perfctly and let the wind blow it away. it is called zen afterall. fitting. never knew when i picked the name 3 years ago it'd come full circle. zen. let it return. the circle stroke starts and bleeds out. it comes and it goes. regardless it helps ppl, makes money, brings me fame, brings me to finally silence the voice knawing at me about how i'm not xyz, will never be abc etc. to let it all go. regardless of how ugly the site it doesnt matter. i will do something with it again. if not this, then another leaf will blow into my brain and i'll work on that- it is a circle. so why waste making a square. it doesn't matter. it'd be nice if people (anybody) likes and uses it. but if they dont i need to be ok with that too. i need - umm i would like it to be released to the scattered winds of time and space. i release you little site- may you find who you find. but my work here is done- nearly done. the numbers are not my work, how many ppl use it os not my work. who pays and how much and how much do i make is not my work. my work is to make the thing i see in my head and try to share/shape it/. alsp is this a grand ploy to fame- look at me so zen and cool. one day i hope you find this and approve of me and think how wonderful i am. blah barf. even my recantation of an ego is ego. well played grand master. well fucking played. so i guess its cool, at least my ego is intact and she's smirking and happy. at least i'm not fukcin spiralling. i hope my computer is ok. and i hope i get to enjoy the time and be present in it. this took fucking work. from maci is learning html to a fully authenicated website with so many api jammed into it its making it probably slow and i'm worried about users. we done come a long way. and regardless now maci is learning- humm maci is re;easing. its not fully live but iv will be https://autodidacting.org/tutoringmain.html
dec 9th. its officially a white christmas. it is beautiful outside, i haven't looked at a code in awhile now and this is the first time i looked outside in almost a week. i sent the website to 5 friends, no one has responded. can't blame them- the kindeset thing is probs no response. thats bullshit but oh well. so after ungodly hours of movies and tv consumption to the point if nause- we have re-emereged from brain coma. i was about 50 mins or 40 mins in watching the social network. kinda got bored and dont even know what possed me to get back to work. and be actually open this terminal. the music was pretty badass in the club. also the river undere the golden gate bridge is probably freezing. so what now?
p.s Dennis De Laat - Sound Of Violence (Main Mix) [ The Social Network club scene
dec 16, 2:35pm
maci is learning html.
after some consideration and break, she realized what she should have realized long ago, that the foundation is called foundation for a reason- that being you can't skip the borning, easy stuff. we are back to the basics. first servings are elements and tags.
i wont lie to you, if it wasnt for an email reminding me about renewal of this domain name, i had entirely forgotten about this blog i was keeping. sorry, its nice to be back though, did you miss me? (who it is i'm talking to is always a concern but as it goes 'the future talks back' let me make sure thats the quote. hang on. why the fuck is it hard to find the quote?!!! literally had to open the movie to find it.