2020 June
Being unemployed with no income during a recession caused by pandemic is tough. I can still afford food for some time but beyond that I don't know.
I am now making my way towards building out the new version of Learn Anything as I finally have experience building out real world web applications.
This position I am in makes me sympathize with just how many people are in the state of 'barely making it'.
One other thing that it made me reflect on is just how unsustainable open source everything as a strategy is. I have a say thanks button on all my repos including this wiki. And there has been more than 100,000 people who came across my work or use(d) any of the tools I made. And yet I get only 2$ from one lovely person every month. It's kind of sad.
As another example, TJ Holowaychuk only has 36 sponsors and the impact the software he wrote or started to write is certainly worth more than 200$ dollars or so he gets a month. There are outliers like Sindre but that's about it. You can't be acting on pure virtue in this world, it's unsustainable and will lead only to depression and doubt.
And to that point, you can use the community of people who came across your tools and augment open source in a way that can lead to sustainable income. One person put educational videos under paywall using GitHub Sponsors as authentication. You have to be creative if you want to make money with open source. The reality is barely anyone will pay you unless forced too. I hope that changes.
For example even in my situation of no income and uncertain future that can lead to hunger and death, I donate monthly to Tekezo who is rebuilding Karabiner for new macOS.
In short, GitHub stars won't pay your rent but it can get the word out.
15
Just finished Morning show and it is amazing especially the last episode. Loved the ending song. Will watch Dark next.
20
TIL grime genre is a thing. Quite liked this song.
For past year or more, I pretty much only listen to instrumental songs like jazz and Nils as background noise.
I do have fondness for Russian artists like Shooval or Miyagi. Something about the culture of Russia that's just unique although I haven't been to Russia in over 10 years now.
Tracy Chapman is amazing too.
One thing I need to do is write a monthly scraper that will take data from Instagram/Twitter/LastFM/Letterboxd/Trakt/Goodreads & maybe more services and provide a summary of my internet activity for the month. As part of these look back entries. Would be wonderful to have.
I also want to move this journal away from wiki and onto my site and give it more color. Perhaps this wiki too will move to my own implementation in time. GitBook is awesome and I love the search with suggestions it provides but it does lack a bit of soul.
21
Alzheimer is a horrible disease. Not being able to recognize your own son is just soul crashing.
Need to take cardio more seriously. Running, biking & playing sports. Currently tennis is my favorite sport by far but it needs a partner and a court. As I don't have any court nor money to afford it, running/cycling it is.
Need to also start collecting more metrics regarding my health that is not just step count or number of hours of sleep.
Loved this article on weekly reviews. I can attribute the usefulness on looking back at your life in a methodical and routine way. Especially as a way to put light on what truly matters to you in the moment, what needs to be done to get there and what needs to be cut from your life that is not helping. And the goals don't have to be aspirational or world changing. What matters is that you care about it.
23
Very sad things happening. I am doing the best I can to be a cognizant member of society. I don't eat animals and don't travel by plane aside from essential trips. Don't own a car. Recycle everything.
One thing I hope to contribute to this world before I die (if aging doesn't get solved) is an incredible learning/ideas platform that will drive innovations across all fields. Including saving our planet and the animals living in it. Less talk, more building.
24
When I was in London I came across London Psychedelic Society. It's more UK based actually but they have a nice space in London that I didn't yet get to visit. I love people who tried psychedelics and love talking about them.
Extrawelt is awesome.
25
This year WWDC is incredible. I cannot wait until macs with Apple chips get released. The future can't come soon enough. Also Xcode & Swift integration is finally getting it together. Wish Swift libraries had pkg.dev equivalent generated with all the APIs and everything.
I have this bind that opens the look back entry for this month in sublime text and goes to bottom of page so I can write to it. Frictionless journaling at its best.
Inspired by Roam I quite like this idea of not focusing on structure but rather content itself and the links between. Structure is important and from all the roam wikis or roam like wikis I've seen, all of them were a mess and pain to go through. So structure is warranted not just for friendly visitors of your brain but for your own good too. Although I haven't used Roam or Obsidian or RemNote or the newly released Foam yet.
One thing I do like very much from this style of note taking is the notion of Today page. I don't like to assign dates to any of my notes as notes don't need this context. They are the source of truth as is. If the truth changes, change the notes. Also the version control and appropriate tooling (like seeing when a change to the line you are on was made) solves the issue of giving a time to a note. What I want to say though is this free style of thinking is super important. This kind of thinking aloud as I am doing here. Want to make it more routine like to just note things down in this way, not under any topic per say unless it does fit neatly into a topic.
This kind of thinking leads to consolidation of patterns/thoughts which is amazing. On iOS I do this kind of thinking via saved messages which I then later can transfer to this wiki or other parts of my digital life. I should do some videos to describe this way of conducting notes and ways to grow and more importantly use the wiki. Now that I am writing this, I think one thing is clear, these looks backs going forward won't be just 'progress reports' for my life but free form thinking. Unbound to anything. If something worthwhile gets thought in the process, awesome, I'll write an article or make a video. Or build the thing I thought about.
This foam tool though which builds off VSCode and provides such things as backlinks. I think I might try to build something like that for sublime text as plugin. Specifically to solve the problem of maybe integrating and reusing content from past look back entries more nicely.
Also those Imgur links, I want to build a media server of my own for my own media that I have control over and put it on CDN. As part of my release of my new personal site, I'll have photos.nikiv.dev released too to share various images I have curated and liked as well as my own photographs/art I made in a nice gallery of sorts. Especially as I feel super dirty to use Imgur to share images of pretty much anything I want in this wiki or elsewhere on GitHub docs etc. And I don't pay Imgur a cent although I do want to. It's just too good to be true and hope it stays that way. ❤️
Speaking of journaling and looking back. I have quite a lot of entries stored in Day One when I did Day Evaluations. Those were the days. I still love the format of What I learned: and Memorable things:. I'll try go over these past entries and note interesting things from the past sometime in the future.
On second thought, replacing Imgur service with my own might work well up to a point but Imgur will probably stay up after I die but my one will need maintenance and I am not sure who will be willing to do it. So Imgur it is or the hosted servers of the service itself (Twitter/Instagram/Reddit/YouTube/..).
medizzy sub was a fun thing to scroll through. Humans are rather resilient.
Most of my YouTube recommends have been various standup shows and I love it. Andrew Schulz is very funny. He also did a small TED talk where the message is basically no one has time any more so few people watch long things. So you need to hook people with short sized content and let YouTube or (the platform ™️) do the work of recommending you more things to watch. Which brings a nice effect of giving you control and feeling empowered over what you are watching. More intention (similar to snoozing). And the other more important thing is being your own competitor and being your true self. Which is getting harder and harder to do with everything being watched and where the littlest thing you do can be scrutinized by mobs of people. Want to do some standup myself some day.
26
Triphop is best. I need more Spotify friends.
28
Came across Andrey Volodin's work. His explanation of Metal & history of GPU was amazing.
Alloy looks neat. Will try it out.
Spotify never disappoints. The bind from Alfred Spotify Player to create a playlist from currently playing song is magical. Can cycle through different genres and feels with ease.
Shame that such a thing doesn't exist for websites at large. Be on a page, press a button and 'show more like that'.
It's an interesting case though that I hope can be solved with Learn Anything and it's database of interlinked & tagged sites. I suppose you can do it already perhaps with Pinboard. Query Pinboard for a website, find the most common tag for the URL & get another link from that tag. But I doubt that it will be possible API wise now as Pinboard isn't thinking about this use case. Nor will it be 'smart'.
I think I should focus on actually raising money for LA. Right now I can't even afford g suite as 6$ is too expensive to have a 'company email'. Which is quite sad. Nor do I have enough money to support myself and food costs money. Tough things.
I did come across Alex Ellis who had a nice idea of having a newsletter as part of a reward for being a GitHub sponsor. In similar way as Substack. That and the idea of having auth'd content like educational videos is enticing. I'm curious how it works for sponsors though, I didn't know you can send messages to sponsors as part of signing up for a tier but maybe they changed it.