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    Pick for a second, an arbitrarily small unit of time like the second. How much can you do in one second? What does your body do in one second if you do not consider involuntary tasks to be your doing? What can two people do in one second? What can eight billion people do in one second? What can more than eight billion people do in two seconds? In a day? In a year? In twenty thousand years? Forget people. What can a near infinite amount of atoms and molecules do in 13 billion years?

    They can do today, right now.

    You stand bare, in front of you is a large jagged structure with medium-large bright-colored spheres dangling off of each branch. Your stomach makes a familiar pain. You are starving. You pick off a sphere, and it is plump and coarse. You, out of necessity, take a bite. It is bitter and hard, but your teeth reach it’s soft and sweet innards. You eat it. You do not know your name. You do not know where the orange tree came from. You do not know the names of the things you see. You do not see anything but the prickly ground you stand on for miles.

    Recently I saw a comment on a YouTube video I saw after playing Dredge. It talked about how Lovecraftian horror is often done very poorly in media. It said that all we really have now is fearing the unknown, and we are never explained it. It used the example of an ant that comes across a microchip and does not fear it because it is new, but for a moment it understands the wires and structures and can never go back because it has realized there is so so so much more to the world than pheromones.

    Regardless of if I agree with this random comment, I thought “Wow! That must be a really difficult kind of media to write! You would have to present a world as absolute and complete, then rip it all away and put you back with a semi-complete knowledge of just how utterly flawed and incomplete your life was. Worst of all, there’s nothing you could do to continue living on that higher level of what-ever.”

    Then it dawned upon me that I had had a very similar and much more personal experience. That this experience this random YouTube comment called “Lovecraftian horror” was something that happens much more often than I thought. Not with technology but with cultures and ideologies and entire lifestyles and worldviews. It is the experience of the apostate, the deserter, and the rebel under tyranny. It is also, I thought, the life of the artist.

    If I were to die in a car crash tomorrow, I do not want the life I live to be one where my last thoughts before nothingness would be “Damn! I really wish I had the time to learn how to make a nice front-end with React and TypeScript; had the time to learn more about H.P. Lovecraft’s terrible mother affected his self-image and writing; had the time to learn about the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire(s); had the time to learn about how Isaac Wood's departure affected the Band’s music; had the time to learn about how John Carmack’s work in ID Software in the 1990s influenced the next decades of games to come; had the time to learn about how the goddamn Krebs cycle works.”

    I wish to do these things because I feel like the ant now. My only wish is for more time worrying less about the grades and the schools and university and the food and the money and the time, oh my god, the time. I turned 18 this year! Happy Birthday, me. Time to invest in the S&P 500 like you always wanted to, but oh wait you need to do a million other different other things first!

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raspberry pi adventures ep 1

     So! The Raspberry Pi 4B. 2GB of memory, ARMv6 CPU, GPIO pins, Ethernet, USB 3 and 2, MicroHDMI port, and so much other stuff I haven't even gotten the chance to look into yet.

    I had a MicroSD Card sitting unused in my Nintendo Switch that no one uses anymore!! So I took it out and imaged the Raspberry Pi 64-bit OS on it immediately, but I couldn't figure out how to set up Wi-Fi and SSH into it, which lead to a lot of anguish and frustration.

    I realized that to actually do anything with this, I would need to use an actual keyboard and mouse and everything on it to see what the fuck the problem was. The Robotics club somehow has a Pi 4B too, which one of the students owns and uses with a camera module for some AI shenanigans (As the Sir said). I couldn't get the MicroHDMI converter from the club because they only had one, and it was in use! So I decided to take my Pi to school and set it up there and then come back home and do stuff on it.

    I first accidentally took the Pi to school on a Saturday (31/Aug/2024), a day when the Robotics club is closed because Sir doesn't come to school! So I kept it home till Monday came around and went there to update and set everything for my SSH-ing.

    The Robotics Sir hooked it up and let me do whatever I wanted on it which is like duh because it's mine, but I was expecting him to just sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade it and turn everything off. So I update the system, and it takes ages to install everything and quickly SSH into it using my laptop and close it because I had physics or math class or something.

 

    Anyways, after setting up everything correctly I tried to remote desktop into it but the VNC stuff is really weird to set up because it's way less straightforward than SSH and Remmina said I need some kind of certificate for it which I don't have. So I'll have to figure out how to send files using something in SSH, or just write code on the Pi.

    I keep telling everyone that I'm making a "Miata" with this doohickey, which is true, but it requires knowledge of robotics, soldering, 3d modeling, electronics, Pi programming, Arduino programming, and a bunch of components that I don't have yet!

    Once I have a sexy little design document ready for the "Miata" I'll blog post about what the hell I'm doing :3

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the to-learn list

    Let's say, hypothetically, that I were to apply for an internship at something like Neuralink. The website says I need to submit a cover letter (whatever that is), a resume, and need to give at LEAST 3 examples of “exceptional ability” in the field you're applying in. If I wanna apply for the Software Engineering or Mechanical Engineering, my requirements for these internships are as follows:

Software Engineering:

Required Qualifications: 

• Ability to design and implement simple and elegant software solutions
• Proven track record of shipping software with real-world impact
• Enthusiasm for technology and software
• Understanding of how systems work at a fundamental level

Preferred Qualifications:

• Familiarity with Ruby, Python, and/or JavaScript
• Experience with C/C++/Rust
• Knowledge of container management and orchestration
• Experience with full-stack application frameworks like Ruby on Rails or Django
• Understanding of web development
• Experience in infrastructure development
  

Mechanical Engineering:

Required Qualifications:

• Strong understanding of engineering first principles.
• Strong communication skills.
• Strong design skills.

Preferred Qualifications:

• 1+ years of mechanical engineering industry experience, including owning products from concept to production.
• Experience with conventional machining and rapid prototyping technologies.
• Experience with precision design and manufacturing.
• Experience with advanced imaging techniques.

    Obviously, these things I have nearly no understanding of at the moment, but one of the hires they have (I don't know which department) is Kognise.

    Looking through their website and projects gives me an idea of what I want to do and what I can do at the moment (mostly nothing, which is okay for the time being). Their website and projects show that they have that “exceptional ability” in the fields they are interested in. I only show that “exceptional ability” in the classroom where no one else really knows what they're doing, which is like a big fish in an absolutely tiny pond. I would like to fix this.

    My transition from a big fish in a small pond to a tiny fish in a big pond will not be enjoyable. I will feel like I know absolutely nothing about the fields of computer science, biology, physics, and chemistry which, knowing me, I will despise.

    Knowledge is like that, though. So I've made a quick and tentative list of things I would like to learn and understand beyond a superficial level:

1. Computer Science (Software)
   
2. Computer Engineering (Hardware)
3. Chemistry:
1. Undergrad Chemistry
   
2. Computational Chemistry
3. Graduate Chemistry
   
4. Biology:
1. Undergrad Biology
   
2. Computational Biology
3. Graduate Biology
   
5. Mathematics:
1. Undergrad Math
2. Computational Math
3. Graduate Math
   
6. Physics:
1. Undergrad Physics
   
2. Computational Physics
3. Graduate Physics
   

    I will learn these through not just reading, but doing. So my website can also have a 30 fucking item long list of complete and useful projects I've made. Plus, there are some cool books I've found that I would like to read from cover to cover and understand everything in them.

    I've found some cool places to cover all of them as well. There's this cool website called OpenStax that provides all the necessary literature for these science subjects for free! Which is like yay Open access resources!!

    Next time I'll talk about the Raspberry Pi 4 adventures and what I wanna do with the Pi I was graciously gifted :3

 

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