Reflections

Reflections

I think I've achieved quite a bit over the past year. I definitely surpassed my past self, so I'm happy about that. I kept a sort-of mental note of Top 10 things I wanted to accomplish before I turn older again and I think most of them I have achieved, but only 1 in Top 3 I have achiev...

By Joe Bloggs

Published on August 6, 2024, 4:04 am

I'm not too quite satisfied with what I achieved, but it is what it is.

Top 3

  1. Get physically stronger ✅
  2. Start a company ❌
  3. Write a short story ⭕

Top 7

  1. Do something good for a friend - ✅
  2. Do something significant in the workplace ✅
  3. Grow professionally - ✅
  4. Go to Japan ✅ (already booked)
  5. Become a better godfather ⭕
  6. Learn Machine Learning Fundamentals ⭕
  7. Roadtrip ✅

Physical Health

Physical Improvement

On terms of physical improvement, I was able to achieve my target goal for lifting. In terms of overall physical fitness, it's a mixed bag. On one hand, my muscle mass and fat decreased. I developed muscles enough to be noticeable. On the other hand, my belly fat had minimal reduction. I still feel like I'm bloated most of the time. So for next year, my goal is to reduce more belly fat and continue developing muscle. I think reducing belly fat is easy and I'm just a lazy fuck when it comes to actually putting in the required amount of hours per day into walking. So my target for the rest of the year is roughly 3 hrs of walking everyday.

My goal physique still remains at dwarfmaxxing. But a different kind of dwarfmaxxing - physique that enables me to have a balance of agility and strength. I'm trying to aim for a weight range in the 65-70kg.

I haven't used any supplements for muscle building besides protein bars for most days. I wanted to take creatine just to experiment with it but I would have to put more time into researching the best one based on quality. I haven't used any steroids either nor had TRT. I want to push my physical limits first with natural food before any supplementation. Perhaps after 30 years old I'll start supplementing but that's still a few years down the line.

I'm currently using magnesium and zinc supplements though to help me sleep with some Vitamin D. So there's that.

On sleep

I've always had problems with sleep. It's not that I'm insomniac but rather I feel more awake at night for a short period b/w 11PM to 3AM. My sleeping pattern is consistent at being inconsistent. I can sleep at 3AM, wake up at 11 or 12, and feel refreshed. I can sleep at 11PM, wake up at 7AM, and feel groggy. My bare minimum for sleep is 4.5 - 5.5hrs per night of uninterrupted sleep. Somehow 8hrs of sleep for me leaves me an unsatisfactory feeling: I don't wake up refreshed and I feel the need to sleep more. Lately my sleep has been getting better because I don't need to answer to anyone but myself.

On general health

Generally I feel fine. I still feel bloated here and there but that's not really affecting me heavily. I feel sleepy during the day but that's more of my sleeping patterns. When I do strenuous activities, I'm able to perform enough that I don't start wheezing or being out of breath. So that's a good baseline for me.

Future Plans for Physical Improvement

So to sum it up, my future plans for improving my physical health is pretty simple:

  1. Lift heavier weights & integrate more calisthenics
  2. More walking
  3. Better sleep patterns

Career Progress

Another year, another experience down the line. This past year was more fruitful than I ever wanted, thanks in part to AI. AI helped me do stupid things faster and learn from mistakes faster. Instead of me wallowing over documentation and browsing google for a couple of hours, I simply type what I want in a structured manner and I get a working code that passes or fails. Well, it works, and that's the point - I have to analyze either way why it worked or fail. And for the most part, when the code was working fine, I was able to understand its logic.

So what additional skills or skills I was able to level up?

Currently, I'm not working for anyone. So I do not answer to anyone. Nor would I want to work for anyone at the moment. I have EI that I must use - that shit was taken out of my paycheck ever since my first wagie job, so I'm gonna use it. And I'm gonna use it to upgrade my skills so I can get a job at the US.

On using AIs for Coding

AIs are good at producing basic code. They're good for producing boilerplate-level code - which is 80% of web dev work. See, the problem with web dev is that when you're forced to use OOP, most of the code you will write are boilerplate. Getters/Setters/Mutators mostly are boilerplate. But the real art in programming isn't writing the code itself but thinking of the problem properly, knowing the appropriate tools/solutions for it, and then making sure that you have a good understanding of each subproblem that you can make the AI write the code and the code will work just fine.

AIs are still far behind in providing reasoning on the code they write. For people working on more sophisticated programming stuff, like embedded/systems, they'll notice this more often. Probably because there's very very few good examples of code for that area. AIs excel at web dev code because there's a lot of examples - especially for Javascript, PHP, Python, and Typescript. Which also brings a lot of the problems; the quality of the code are often bad and they're not idiomatic. There was a paper on arxiv a year ago where an LLM they trained on additional Java/C++/C/Haskell code showed improvement in benchmarks. WizardLM and DeepSeek solved this problem with the Evol-Instruct/WaveCoder/Deepseek-Coder stuff, and with Google's AlphaProof achievement, I'm expecting code quality from LLMs to improve. All that they just need is better prompting and improvement on the training pipeline.

I don't think AIs will replace coders. At All. Programming will be more of a refined art because we can just ask AI to solve the boilerplate stuff and focus on the more important stuff - no, the important stuff isn't deciding how thick the border should be, or what naming convention we should use, or if we OOP or FP should be standard. The important stuff is to ship stuff faster with less bloat and more performant systems.

On Learning Web Scraping

I've wanted to learn Web Scraping for a few years now but I always kept putting it on the backburner. I already know the fundamentals - using the appropriate selectors, using cookies for auth, and knowing how to navigate a web page programmatically using Chromedp or Scrapy. The problem was that I didn't know the syntax or procedures to do it using Python or Go. But guess what, AIs solved that problem for me. Now I can actually focus on the problems - the ETL stuff. And that's what I'm more interested - stealing data archiving data for my own use. And I'm interested in a lot of data. I'm a data hoarder.

The other part about web scraping is the process of automation. I know we can use APIs. But APIs are always gatekept by whoever provides them. Web Scraping allows you to scrape data in whatever manner you want [insert Virgin API Consumer vs Chad Web Scraper meme] and you're limited by your own creativity, and resources.

Web Scraping is very very fun. I have plenty of ideas - old and new - that I've always wanted to do with web scraping. And pair it with an AI? It's starting to get really really exciting.

On Learning Bash Scripting

Bash scripts are too powerful. You can customize your workflow with the right Bash scripts. And that's what I wanted to do. I open Terminator, I fire up my Bash scripts, and I get comfy. But the problem was skill issue - I didn't know Bash concepts that well nor did I know the syntax, but still, I know the basics. A Bash script is a program. I know how to program. I know how a program works (at least to the just above low-level) so intuitively I know how to program Bash script. So AIs helped a lot: I define the logical steps, they write the code for me. Then I refine/iterate on the solution until it's good enough for me.
All of my Bash scripts right now are made by LLMs.
A list of Bash scripts that I have:

There's a lot more stuff I can do with Bash scripts and turn them into Cron jobs to automate a lot more stuff. Also, the more I breakdown web services into problems, the more I realize that most of their components can be replaced by using Bash scripts locally combined with some scripts written in Python or Go. Especially for stuff that can be done locally.

On Being Jobless

Right now I'm unemployed. I'm technically a NEET. I exited my previous job on mutual terms, at least explicitly. Implicitly I was dissatisfied with how the work progressed - I kept addressing concerns and they kept being unanswered. The entire team was being set on fire because of just bad management in general. The team needed more people - with experience - and instead they wanted to dump more work on less people. I don't want to talk bad about my former employers because I want to maintain decency as part of an unspoken social contract. Unless they were unnecessary rude or assholes to me.

And for a long time, I've always wanted to be jobless. Not because I'm tired of working or I don't want to work anymore (both of those feelings are something I still have, but that's more of a tangent I would go on later) but because I've wanted to do one thing: Live the next year and go all in on my own terms, while collecting EI and learning new skills.

Sure, I could've kept my job and continued working on my own projects at my own little time, but after a day's work I don't have anymore left in me to tackle my own projects after dealing w/ work. Skill issue or whatever, it is what it is. And working on my own projects to learn stuff or Just Do Stuff makes me happier than writing code for a business that repackages shit and sells it as Decorated Shit.

On Career Future

Right now, I don't really want to work at Canada anymore. My only goal is either to work at the USA or Singapore. My reason for not wanting to work at Canada is mainly ideological and driven by feelings of disgust towards the Canadian government and bureaucracy. I wouldn't go into details about it here, but to sum it up: I prefer USA to work at because it's simply the best country to work at.

What industry would I like to work at? Who knows. My skillset is good enough for web dev. But I want to get into Distributed Systems and Machine Learning Engineering. I want to learn how to do stuff with a fleet of computers at my disposal. I want to learn how to setup ML ops - not using AWS/GCP/Azure - and run my own ML stuff. I want to learn how to build datasets - my own datasets - and train LLMs on it. That's it. Maybe I would create my own role. Maybe someone will approach me after they see my work. Maybe I'll just become what I finally wanted to be: Data Broker. An independent Data Broker.

So my focus has been to Just Build Things And Keep Moving. I owe Yacine a thanks for this one because he showed that it doesn't matter how stupid your process is, as long as you build things and take feedback, you'll improve. Big shoutout to him.

Personal Philosophy

Ok, I'll need another bottle of sake for this one. Let's start with my philosophy: Taoist-Naturalist Yangist. Politically, I'm a Libertarian Right. But my philosophy takes precedence over my political leanings. Therefore, my views on most issues are first evaluated by my philosophy then my political leanings. I always try to maintain consistency in deriving from first principles of my philosophy first before arguing for the course of my political leanings. For the most part, I value pragmatic approaches to issues; I'd rather not spend more than a day or two contending with people about my stances on certain sociopolitical issues. Abstraction derived from philosophy and political beliefs makes things harder than it should be. With my philosophy, the order of the beliefs matter because it makes the analysis of issues more streamlined. With sociopolitical issues, I take the approach of prioritizing my friends and family first. I believe that the atomic model of the family and the proximity of each person in a society should justify their beliefs. I like pragmatic philosophy because too much philosophy leaves to inaction, and irritates me.

I think over the past year, my beliefs have more or less solidified. And I have applied my philosophical framework as much as I can. There are probably a handful of cases where my actions contradicted my beliefs, but I can't really remember any of them. If I keep a tally of them but I know they must've existed, simply because it's impossible for a person to live on through life without contradictions in their actions and beliefs. It's what make us humans. The most pressing matters that have existed in my mind the past year are the following:

  1. Taxation

  2. Immigration

  3. AIs

  4. Canadian society

  5. Improving my work ethos

  6. Dealing with aging of my parents

  7. Separating my online and offline life

I wouldn't go into much detail about these in here. I'll talk about them on a separate post. I don't want to derail this reflection with them. Especially about the topic of taxation and Canadian society. I have way too much to talk about regarding these issues. You can give me 2 bottles of sake in a night and I'll keep hacking away at the keyboard endlessly until the sun comes up and my thoughts will still be left unfinished.

I don't really know how I should develop my philosophy over the next year. I guess I'm just continuing to follow the tenets of Taoism. Reread "Tao Te Ching" again. Perhaps read the works of Mengzi and do a systematic review of Confucianism. Maybe in due time I'll have parts of Confucianism mixed into my own beliefs. I'd like to expand more of my knowledge of Naturalism because I've always taken its first principles for granted and Henry David Thoreau was my first foray into it. Speaking of which, maybe I'll actually take time to read about Transcendentalism and see if it offers anything that will refine my philosophy. Who knows.

On Practicality of my Philosophy

For those that are well acquainted with Eastern philosophy, when I stated my philosophical beliefs, you'd have found a contradiction: Yangism contradicts Taoism. And for me, this is fine. Everyone holds contradictory beliefs in their mind - whether they're cognizant of it or not - but when it comes to matters of action, they let one or the other decide for them. For me, holding contradicting beliefs avoids this process because I'm forced to find a middle ground between both. By finding a middle ground betwen both, I follow Taoism. Thus it is where Naturalism comes in - it is of my personal belief, whether there exists a precedent to this or not, that Naturalism is the only correct philosophical framework.

By combining Naturalism with Taoism, I'm able to use it as a mediator to finding the dao that's most compatible with my beliefs. Using Yangism as the counterweight to notions of doing good for the sake of helping others, I'm able to form stances that are coherent to me but aren't necessarily ethical nor morally superior to others. And that's fine - perhaps I could be proven wrong, perhaps I am right, but in the end what matters is that I'm content to have developed a stance and voice it. This is my dao.

On applying my philosophy to my daily life, I think much work is needed. My actions in daily life aren't necessarily driven by adhering to the tenets of Taoism or Yangism, but simply following my instincts and emotions. It's more common for me to have bursts of productivity than having a consistent working schedule; I have been a degenerate that will play games for hours while listening to some lecture or interesting talk in the background instead of actually doing work, then the following day I will be just completely immersed in working to focus on some shit I need to do while listening to some erotica audio and get completely derailed when I get frustrated over something beyond my control or when I hit my skill ceiling. Maybe this is my dao that I intuitively developed. Maybe it is just a result of me not honing my mindset and body to properly follow my philosophical beliefs consistently. Maybe it's because throughout my entire life I've just coasted and always took the Path of Least Resistance and still became relatively successful.

On Refining My Philosophical Beliefs

I have a prerogative that I must refine my philosophical beliefs over time. Not necessarily change them but refine them - whether by re-examining my priors, finding better ways to apply them, or just simply incorporating a simple and small change. To me, having philosopical beliefs is like wielding a sword. The sword is the philosophical beliefs and the way you use it is how you apply it. Once your philosophical beliefs have solidifed over time, you have a pretty good base for a sword. You have a feel for what you can swing. But it will chip away over time if unmaintained - and even if maintained, it will be chipped away the more you use it. So you need to refine it. It seems unnatural to me that people don't refine their philosophical beliefs and they remain consistent at insisting that their beliefs are right and/or correct. The world always changes. So your beliefs need to adapt or your mindset needs to be refined. Or at the very least, how you apply your philosophy needs to be.

There's an infinite amount of knowledge in the world that cannot be fully understood and the ones we understand, we have problems on verifying whether we understand it correctly or not. And there are people that devote their lives into doing this process. So I will be doing a disserve to those people if I don't read their works or hear their opinions and cut through everything with my philosophy. And hopefully my mind doesn't get tired of this. Of course a lot of the philosophical ideas on the daily are average or even worse, useless, but that doesn't mean that one should ought to dismiss them without entertaining them. We have better technology than ever but shorter attention spans because we our mindset hasn't been trained to adapt to the influx of information that we see. Our brains aren't designed nor adaptable to process so much information within a short amount of time.

With AIs, I hope that it'll be easier for laymen and power users to refine their philosophies - by filtering information they want, using the AI as an aid for creating notes about knowledge they find interesting, or even using the AI as a sparring partner for debating ideas. There are many more valid use cases that we can use AIs for, some of which I'm not even aware; I just gave these ideas away for free because no one seems to be building products around them and instead everyone's focused on generating more garbage information to flood everyone's brains. I would say that Twitter is also a good place to find ppl with similar opinions or refreshing opinions, but you really have to wade through the garbage and the Sea of Coal to find them. Twitter's algorithm is incentivized to make you stay on the app and if most of the content is garbage, if you even liked a few of them, it will keep recommending garbage to you. So learn how to use keyword muting and lists curation effectively. The more you talk to people in the app, the more you'll hone your philosophy effectively, because Twitter is a social PvP app.

Final Thoughts

Overall, I think the last year has been good to me. Other than me moving my timeline of visiting Japan from Winter 2024 to Fall 2024, nothing else that I really mind. I was able to make my godkids happy but I'm not really attentive towards being more of a guiding figure to them. Unless they come up to me and ask me for advice, I generally leave them alone. I was able to help my friend finally confess his love to this girl and they're now a couple, with me being his confidant so I'm happy about that (other than me incessesantly teasing him about couple stuff). I've become stronger, I've become a better developer, and I've become happier overall. I was able to finally do a roadtrip with my family and I definitely enjoyed it - probably one of my new core memories from the last year aside from my Japan trip.

I think being jobless right now has given me a fresh perspective on things and allowed me to evaluate my current trajectory in life. There's a ton of things that I want to do. There's a ton of things I need to do. I need to sort them out and find Things That Matter. I haven't developed a proper criteria for that category either. All that I wanted to do is to get stronger, sleep better, move on my instincts, and experiment with stuff. I've done a lot of stuff the past year that involved AI - although not in the proper sense (HEH) - and I think the time I've spent on them was worth. I'm grateful to witness the progress on AI and use them for work and personal stuff.

That being said, there are a lot of things I didn't get to do the past year. And some things I regret not doing, some things I've regretted doing.

On Regrets

There are two types of regrets that I have:

  1. Things That I Regretted Doing

  2. Things That I Regret Not Doing

Some of the things can be put into both categories, but generally the idea is that there's a separation in my mind between those two stuff.

Ok, let's begin with Things That I Regretted Doing:

  1. Said mean stuff to people that didn't deserve it

  2. Stayed up most nights just wandering around the internet

  3. Let myself get lenient and lazy towards Things That Mattered (at the time)

  4. Let my anger get the better of me in some situations and formed negative opinions of others due to it

  5. Consumed more useless stuff instead of focusing my attention on things that would've been better for me

There's probably others I forgot, but ah well, it was best if I did.

Now let's get to Things That I Regretted Not Doing

  1. I didn't go on an overnight train trip towards MTL or AB

  2. Not applied for better jobs in the US

  3. I haven't started going in-depth into learning AI/ML

  4. I haven't even written more than 3 chapters for the book I've always wanted to write, and now my ideas for the story are slowly evaporating

  5. Not continued writing poems

  6. I didn't write a letter to her, expressing how I really felt towards her and how things could've turned out differently

  7. Not talking to enough new people

I think there are some stuff which can categorically overlap, but for me I'm pretty content with these things and how they're categorized. In the end of the day, regrets are regrets and the only move is to go forward and carry them as weights. And i think living a good life means that you have less regrets as you age, and most of your regrets having been lifted up at the last time you look up towards the endless sky.

Onwards

Another year, another level reached. I pray that this coming year would be better. I pray that I can finally be in the USA and working there. My main goal right now is to achieve that - everything will be centered around it.

I'll try to continue exceeding my past self until I level up again. I definitely have to push my physical limits stronger. Maybe my emotional limits too - but right now I have a fairly good grasp of my emotions. I'll definitely need to do better in terms of upgrading my skillset. I hope by next year I'm able to finish stuff that I've always wanted to do. Particularly, projects that I'm heavily invested at.

And hopefully I would have less regrets next year.