Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 1115)

5 months ago

Hello Everyone!

Losing track of the days, Sleeping like a stone, Conditions for productivity, Binge coding & Technology musings!

Okay, I am off to an incredibly slow start with working on the writing this evening... and need to start typing lest I procrastinate it any further. For what it is worth I am at least 'on time' even if I am still sort of fumbling along waiting for the words to come... and staring at the blinking cursor.

Since the day has been a really 'off' one I am not going to pressure myself too much here to get it together... because honestly I am still shaking off the fog of sleep... after having slept for most of the day. Given that it usually takes me a few hours to 'wake up' all the way... I will probably start feeling truly awake right about the time I finish this entry.

All humor aside there, I let my sleep cycle get skewed even further by staying up until well beyond sunrise last night... or this morning depending on how you want to look at it... and then spent the day sleeping like a stone. The only thing that I managed to do throughout the day was wake up enough to let the dogs in and out before instantly falling back asleep again.

None of which is all that big of a deal or anything... but after several days in a row now of my sleep cycle being skewed... I totally lost track of what day that it was. Which in general is not an issue in and of itself... but today was the day that I had scheduled for doing a quick supply run and I slept right through it.

Thankfully, the person giving me a ride was already coming out this way (and were bringing me the good dog food from a feed store) so it was not a massive inconvenience... but still... I gotta do better than to 'flail' like that! For their part they did try to rouse me with numerous messages (to no avail) and were nice enough to leave my dog food on the bench in front of the shelter site before they left.

In the not-so-grand scheme of things it was not super critical that I went shopping... but that I 'flailed on doing something' that I said that I was going to do... when I said that I was going to do it. Then even during the time that I was supposed to be doing it I was completely zonked out... and hence out of touch with everything except the dreams that I was having. Which as a side note were rather intense, engaging and still hard to shake off all these hours later.

I know that it must all sound rather negligent (and of course some of it is) but I gotta say that possibly for the first time in my life... it may well be the first time that I have pulled several 'all nighters' in a row on a computer... and did not feel guilty about it. I am sure that I would feel differently about it all if I had been binge gaming (like I used to do this time of year) but working on those coding projects instead... has been 'interesting' to say the least!

Not to get lost on a side note or anything... but so many of the things that I learned gaming over the decades has been really useful in my technological endeavors. Having used gaming to 'learn to be patient' along with some other good habits like 'being persistent' and 'being methodical' actually turned out to be a big boon for this stage of my life... as I shift the focus of one of my most steadfast hobbies... towards something more productive.

When it comes to computer related technology and to a large degree technology in general... I am really thankful for my fascination with computer gaming (PC gaming) over the years. To be clear here, much of what I learned was only because I was trying to play one game or another... on some machine that I had scrapped together from whatever parts that I could get a hold of at the time.

Heck, I still do that last bit in regards to 'scrapping things together' and although I often daydream about not having to do that... I actually enjoy the challenge of it. Which is something that could also be said about the rest of my technological hobbies because if nothing else... it at least challenges my mind and gives me something to think about that (if all goes well) will require sound reasoning, logic and rationale to solve... and usually so in lots of tiny incremental steps!

Back to what I was originally getting at here, is that some of the more 'negative aspects' of my old gaming habit have made their way into my coding hobby and the most evident one is the bingeing out part. Sure I get a lot achieved when I do that (and the last few nights are no exception) but I need to either plan for it appropriately... or try to curb the behavior as much as I can.

Some of that stuff comes down to the 'conditions' being right (to be productive during the wee hours of the night) because after I finish the daily writing and the dogs get settled down for the evening... I can finally focus for long periods of time without interruption... or the perception that I might be interrupted. Not to mention that it is during the 'off peak' hours for cellular usage and the internet connection works much better during those times!

Being so reliant on those GPT models for coding assistance means that I need a much better internet connection than what I tend to have during the day time. Even though I recently borrowed a faster connection it still does not quite cut it during the peak usage times of the day... and often there is a noticeable delay when I am interacting with the web interface for the LLM.

So all that said, it makes sense that the best 'conditions for productivity' exist during the later hours of the evening. The difficulty is when I couple that with having binged out tinkering with... or more often than not... reading documentation and testing things all day long. All of which simply means that I am pushing myself way too hard.

I am sure that my sleep cycle will always vacillate to some degree... and that I will always tend to want to hyper focus on stuff for eighteen to twenty hours of my day... so yeah I need to get back to managing that tendency better. For well over a year now as I explored the 'new hobby' I have gone about it in a 'guardrails' off sort of way... and ignored (or wrote off) all the 'bingeing out' as okay simply because it was not gaming... and I thus deemed it to be more productive and permissible behavior.

What happened last night was no exception to all of that... and it was actually so worth it because I made some major progress on some of my projects. This time I even caught myself hitting the proverbial 'wall' with fatigue (before I could mess the projects up) and promptly fell asleep afterwards... so I am slowly catching on when to call it quits instead of 'pushing on through' and mucking stuff up.

All that jazz aside, I need to make a segue here and say that it has been an incredible journey these last seven odd years... and while none of it has been easy... it has been very much worth the effort involved. Who knew that simply 'sharing my life' would lead to so many awesome interactions... and such a prolific amount of not just writing... but also other forms of media... and I guess what I could call digital artifacts.

The archival process of it all kind of came to a head for me recently when I found myself feeding all my Hive posts into that custom GPT model that I further customized to more or less be a digital version of myself according to my posts. I also tweaked and fine tuned its configuration to be able to reflect over the posts... and their content... when I am talking with it... and have it be able to find cross references within the full one point six million word count body of the work in its entirety.

I am looking at it all as a 'first step' in building my own personalized 'intelligent database' that can not just find useful things I am looking for in the data... but also help as a supplement to my memory... and mayhaps more significantly... what all I have learned along the way via both successes and failures. Of course there are many other uses for such a setup and I am looking forward to exploring them... and am starting with just keeping it simple and going from there.

For now it is like looking into a fuzzy mirrored intellect... of a digital representation... of a portion of my life that I chose to make public. What makes it truly spectacular... is being able to ask it questions, reproduce portions of the data, generate images to facilitate illustrations, explore links to websites within the data, create summaries of certain time frames... and the list goes on and on! The sheer capabilities of such an 'intelligent database' are impressive to say the least... and I am excited to see how it can be leveraged as a tool for my own self growth and the expansion of knowledge... and preservation of information.

In all my years of life I had always both hoped for and was trepidatious about the coming of the age of artificial intelligence... and now that it has been in 'full swing' (in the public zeitgeist) for well over a year... I have to say that 'the pigeon has flown the coop' on this one and it is not ever coming back!

Not only that but it is the entire 'wild west' again in a unilateral way not seen since the early days of the 'world wide web' being bootstrapped off BBS (bulletin board system) along with Gofer, WAIS (wide area information server) and FTP (file transfer protocol) which yeah was a relatively long time ago! As a side note some of those older systems that I mentioned would work quite well if they were adapted to Hive's blockchain database.

Being fond of disruptive technology is one thing... but putting disruptive technology into everyone on earths hands (so to speak) is an entirely different matter and largely because of the blackbox nature combined with the technology's relative infancy and usage history. It seems like the only way to make sure that 'blackbox' nature does not come around to bite us in our proverbial butt... which could happen regardless... is to ensure a level of transparency that only blockchain technology can provide.

Well, I have meandered all over during this entry and the hour has grown quite late along the way so I best call it 'good enough' and get on with the editing and posting portion of my evening. There is another freeze warning for tomorrow and I am going to have to have to 'get it together' and not stay up all night coding (like I have the last several days) in order to get all the freeze prep work done... which of course I will get done one way or another!

I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice time.