<p>I've always wanted to start project and properly finish it. Thanks to Golang and a heck ton of conversations with ChatGPT, I managed to make it happen. No more dead projects in the water, no more stranded code without an end in sight. </p>
<p>So what is it? What have my grubby little fingers created by hammering these poor blue switches for over 3 months in my spare time? <a href="https://tarot.dingo-bramble.ts.net/index.html">A tarot reader that is</a>. Just a boring tarot reader. Yes, yes, it is done with "AI". Yes, it is done with GPT-3.5. Yes, yes, it is probably worse than those chatbot wrappers you get off Play Store that scams with a hefty annual subscription if you forget to cancel the free trial. You go the site, you "talk" via a text form to an entity that tells you ambiguous futures and whatnots about what's on your mind.</p>
<h2>How It Works</h2>
<p>It is pretty much a Golang chatbot that is prompted to talk like a tarot reader. I generated the tarot card set with Dall-E. Link it up with some basic Postgres tables to store conversation, put it behind Caddy+Tailscale Funnel to serve HTTPS traffic and that is pretty much all. Unimpressive, I know.</p>
<h2>But Why</h2>
<p>Because I can. But really, it is because I never "knew" front end development. In this age of Bootstrap, AngularJS, Tailwind, and whatever is going on with front end development, it has always felt that I am served the same thing but on different plates. This project has allowed me to go in depth on how many things came together. CSS styles, the Javascript DOM model, HTML divs, etc. Never had I spent so much time reading MDN and realized the wealth of knowledge that is available on it.</p>
<h2>Conclusion And Some More</h2>
<p>This project is not "creative". If you are against OpenAI, then this project is "useless" too. But it was not useless to me. The "democratization" of LLMs gave me the push forward to places I have not been before. LLMs was the teacher that I never had, and the assistant that could do "that one thing" that you never really understand.</p>
<p>What about the poor artists I have ripped off? What about the treasure trove of knowledge that these LLMs were trained on that contains a ton of copyrights and IPs? Should I have stopped to wonder to wonder whether I should, before wondering whether I could? Is this code legitimately "mine"? I do not have the answers. But without the push from LLMs, the barrier of entry to the ever-changing landscape of tech has never been so accessible.</p>
<p>I've always wanted to start project and properly finish it. Thanks to Golang and a heck ton of conversations with ChatGPT, I managed to make it happen. No more dead projects in the water, no more stranded code without an end in sight. </p>
<p>Yes, I am fashionably late to the party. Everybody has already moved on to 2025 goals and have achieved 99% of them, or at least that is what my anxiety says.</p>
<p>So what is it? What have my grubby little fingers created by hammering these poor blue switches for over 3 months in my spare time? <a href="https://tarot.dingo-bramble.ts.net/index.html">A tarot reader that is</a>. Just a boring tarot reader. Yes, yes, it is done with "AI". Yes, it is done with GPT-3.5. Yes, yes, it is probably worse than those chatbot wrappers you get off Play Store that scams with a hefty annual subscription if you forget to cancel the free trial. You go the site, you "talk" via a text form to an entity that tells you ambiguous futures and whatnots about what's on your mind.</p>
<h2>AOC 2024</h2>
<h2>How It Works</h2>
<p>It is pretty much a Golang chatbot that is prompted to talk like a tarot reader. I generated the tarot card set with Dall-E. Link it up with some basic Postgres tables to store conversation, put it behind Caddy+Tailscale Funnel to serve HTTPS traffic and that is pretty much all. Unimpressive, I know.</p>
<p>I gave Advent of Code (AOC) a try at a whim and unsurprisingly, I struggled with it. Turns out years of writing glue code for years does not make you a good programmer at all, who knew. I gave myself a restriction to write it only with Bash and Linux CLI tools only and it was hard. Performance was mostly terrible and I am not proud of the hacks that I had to do to make it work. I turned a blind eye to some terrible Day 2 solutions because it was 2am and I needed to sleep.</p>
<h2>But Why</h2>
<p>Because I can. But really, it is because I never "knew" front end development. In this age of Bootstrap, AngularJS, Tailwind, and whatever is going on with front end development, it has always felt that I am served the same thing but on different plates. This project has allowed me to go in depth on how many things came together. CSS styles, the Javascript DOM model, HTML divs, etc. Never had I spent so much time reading MDN and realized the wealth of knowledge that is available on it.</p>
<p>Here are some of my takeaways :
<h2>Conclusion And Some More</h2>
<p>This project is not "creative". If you are against OpenAI, then this project is "useless" too. But it was not useless to me. The "democratization" of LLMs gave me the push forward to places I have not been before. LLMs was the teacher that I never had, and the assistant that could do "that one thing" that you never really understand.</p>
<p>It is time to read a book on computer science. Without a good understanding of software and hardware, it is nearly impossible to gauge how well my code is going to run. It is ridiculous to always hope that I have enough RAM to cache my results, or that Linux pipes will always solve my problems. Djikstra’s algorithm is a tough nut to crack and search algorithms still confound me.</p>
<p>What about the poor artists I have ripped off? What about the treasure trove of knowledge that these LLMs were trained on that contains a ton of copyrights and IPs? Should I have stopped to wonder to wonder whether I should, before wondering whether I could? Is this code legitimately "mine"? I do not have the answers. But without the push from LLMs, the barrier of entry to the ever-changing landscape of tech has never been so accessible.</p>
<p>Bash associative arrays are no fun. It is very dangerous and frankly slow. If I ever have to deal with associative arrays in Bash, it is time to have some self-reflection and rewrite the script in a big boy language.</p>
<h2>Trying Haskell, Again</h2>
<p>I really did my best here, but 2024 was not the year for me. I got stuck trying to understand currying and monads but I could barely make it out alive. Perhaps one more time this year would do the charm.</p>
<h2>Self-hosting With Tailscale</h2>
<p>Tailscale deserves an honorary mention because it was a joy to work with it. Tailscale with Linuxserver Docker images, not so much. Please fix your broken Tailscale Docker mod image, Tailscale devs.</p>
<p>The open source community continues to tear itself apart. The Gitea/Forgejo split was disheartening, but I am not sure where I stand on that for now. I have more to say about open source, but I am growing weary of writing for the audience of one.</p>
<h2>Turning 30</h2>
<p>That is it. No more 20s. The years of “having fun” are over before I even tried them. The burdens of adulthood weigh more oppressively on me year after year. Most days I just slog them out with a good dose of stoicism, but the rough days are getting rougher. You know what they say : when the going gets tough, the tough gets going, until you do not.</p>
<p>I finally got a property. It is tiny but it is a property, a place to call my own. No more renting, no more dealing with housemates. Working with contractors and shelling out cold hard cash was painful, more painful than many decisions that I have had to make over the years. It is still not done, but I hope that when I am done, it is a space for me to clear my head and my mind.</p>
<h2>Turning Inward</h2>
<p>Many encounters in life have had me looking inwards to think about the ethics and philosophies of my being and my conduct. 2024 has all the signs of the world burning down : polarizing politics driven to the extreme by widespread misinformation; massive centralizations of wealth by the elite; healthcare and groceries becoming insanely unaffordable; the failure of technological innovations to benefit the public; the air, water, and earth literally poisoning us as we in turn continue to add poison to it. Fun stuff.</p>
<p>Perhaps as hopelessness and helplessness becomes a common value and perspective, what does it mean to be? Is it obsessive work? Is it virtuous and selfless sacrifice? Is it compassionate love? Is it mindless accumulation of wealth? It is easy to say that The Way of Life is one’s own, but where does one draw the strength to walk down that path, perhaps one day I hope to learn.</p>
“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”
“but what should we do when the highborn and wealthy take to crime? Indeed, if a poor man will spend a year in prison for stealing out of hunger, how high would the gallows need to be to hang the rich man who breaks the law out of greed?”
"The true mind can weather all the lies and illusions without being lost. The true heart can tough the poison of hatred without being harmed. Since beginningless time, darkness thrives in the void but always yields to purifying light."
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