Musings On My Many Ideas I'm Always Having
Man it sure has been a long, long time since I wrote a blog post. I hardly even think about blogging anymore, after I saw this cool blogging platform and set it up and posted stuff on it. Truthfully, this is how I am with a lot of my ideas. I'll get a good one, pursue it for a while, and eventually forget about it because of the time or effort commitment it takes.
Like, for example I even thought about trying to automate my blog posts. Maybe it would help me blog more if I had a starting point to like, start from? I conceptualized of this AI, run locally of course, that I could feed all this information to, which would draft a blog post that I could take from there. Like I would have this script that would run, and it would get all my search browser history for the week, grab files I recently opened, hook into my iMessage chat.db and pull out my conversations for the week, etc. Then it would structure it and give it to x LLM to structure something for me. Maybe it would help me identify a topic of relevance in my life, or something I was working on that I could write about.
And I still think that's a sweet idea. But I didn't do that because you know what, that was too much effort. Just like actually writing a blog post is too much effort.
Do you ever just have some great ideas and say to yourself, "man that's a great idea! I should totally do that!" and then never do it? Happens to me all the time. Usually I think my ideas are pretty great, but some of them wouldn't work financially, or practically, or etc. Like if I had unlimited resources and everything I would do my ideas. But I don't have unlimited resources. My resources are actually pretty limited.
The only time I seem to make progress on any of my non-resource sucking ideas, like programming projects, is when I "get in the zone! AUTOZONE!" nah jk. But like when I really get inspired to tackle something. For example I believe my last post was about how I was building a network radio, and how I was really having a hard time figuring out how to stream the audio. Well, I still am, but now my focus has sort of changed and expanded on that project. I wanted to make this whole web view out of it and build this frontend for my music library. I already had a database built, I just had to build pages that queried it and displayed the data interactively. Then plus I could build some cool interactive features off it too.
So thinking this, I finally got inspired. I sat down, fired up a chatbot, and began vibe coding. I think? I'm not a software developer, not sure if that's the correct use of that term. But I definitely used an AI to generate lots of code. I guess the difference being that I asked it to write very small pieces of code, not generate the whole project or the whole class or even necessarily the whole function. It's very good at saving me time and, more importantly, brainpower, in small chunks. I definitely need to understand how my code works though and what it's doing. I still logically think it all out, just the way I used to before LLM's were as capable.
And so now I have a webview frontend for my library, from which I can browse, search, and more importantly, play random tracks.
Man, in over five years of programming, the random track player has to be the most personally beneficial thing I've ever made. I'm discovering stuff in my collection I never even knew I had. I tend to just hoard all the songs by all the artists and never really listen to them. But this thing picks a random track from the database and loads it up and starts playing it. If I don't like it, I skip to the next random track. If I do, I go, "Wooooooooooooaaaaaa! This song is great!" I really like this thing.
I know, it's such an original idea. Nobody has probably thought of it before. YouTube definitely does not have anything like this, or spotify, or pandora, or apple music, or anybody. But this is what works best for me. I have all the songs right there on my network. I have them all in a database. I have a web player that plays tracks automatically, so I don't even have to press the play button. And I have a button that plays the next track, if I don't like that one. That's all I gotta do. One click. No skipping adds or anything. Don't even have to move my cursor around.
So anyway, IDK when the next time this or any of my ideas will ever get worked on. They just, ya know, get worked on when I get inspired. Same thing with my musical ideas. I have probably over four hundred logic projects I've created, in seven years of using Logic Pro, probably not even 25% of which are finished. I'll get to them when I'm inspired though. Likewise, I play music way better after being set up by a great bunch of songs. Best thing you can do to get yourself in the zone musically is listen to creative music. For me, that just seems to activate my brain somehow in a way that sitting down and playing randomly does not.
Well, anyway, the whole reason I even wrote this post today is because I got a call from my friend, who wants to start his own blog, which reminded me that I actually had one myself which reminded me that hey maybe I should post something on there. He too has a really great idea, which he too isn't sure he'll ever fully commit to, lol right? But if he does, he's asked me to help with the infrastructure. I'm pretty good at that kinda thing and it's fun. And helping other people with projects is different to doing them for myself because they actually have an expectation that I do them in some reasonable amount of time, plus it feels nice to be able to do something for somebody. It always seems like I'm never able to do that. Being blind, people are always helping me out with stuff all the time and I never quite feel like I'm nearly as able to return the favors. Not necessarily that I would need to, again it's just nice to be able to do something for somebody.
Well, anyway, this has been a blog post. Not sure when the next one will be or what it'll be about. Probably that topic, posted during that time. Buh-Bye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!