Revisiting, Reflecting and Restarting
Newsletter 17: 9/8/2023 - 10/27/2023
To summarize your life, your days, weeks and months, is helpful because then you can better grasp where you have been and where you are going. Like a large language model, we only have a limited context window, like a computer we have a limited working memory, to make ourselves understandable to ourselves, we need to summarize events, and our life stories. Even if it is not perfect, we do our best. Even if we feel that we are leaving out a lot, we need to do our best.
Today I am restarting my weekly article publication with this post after six weeks of break. Over the last six weeks I felt blocked from writing for some reason. I suspect that it is because I had already written weekly for sixteen weeks (that’s four months!) and didn’t spend enough time revisiting and reflecting on my writing journey so far. This is what I will do now.
There are several ways that you can summarize, like the LLM (large language model), you can cherry pick random parts and get the highlights, or you can summarize each post and then progressively summarize the summaries like the ‘map_reduce’ method, or you can use the ‘refine’ method, which is progressive refinement of the existing summary plus the new content.
Right now I will pick random posts and reflect on them. Then I will summarize each week since my last post and describe what were the most important events, experiences and insights there.
Reviewing Past Articles
“Launched a Web3 Product and Summary of Week in Bali”
Saturday May 27 to Friday June 2, 2023
This was one of the first posts and I was exploring what to write about. I described building two Ethereum web applications that after the elapsed time sound really awesome and like they would be really great products. I did not push them through to production and that is okay. Deep down inside I felt very uncertain about committing to building startups in Web3, because the way to integrating them with the existing infrastructure of economies and governance is very complex and difficult and many people suffer from scams, hacks and greed in this space, which are very big problems. Now I am focusing on building Ai applications that can be quickly used by anyone. Compared to the Web3 applications that require users to set up Ethereum wallets and know how to handle that security of the keys themselves. Overall it is really impressive to have designed and built this Web3 application with a group of friends and then presented it at a hackathon. Now it is just sitting on a GitHub repository, but that’s okay, that experience will influence future projects. I wrote about this transformative ‘meme’ web3 application that allowed people to work together to achieve difficult goals. This is indeed an idea with great potential. Something prevented me from continuing it, maybe that is okay, maybe it is something I need to restart and revive. How many projects have I left behind in a 90% finished state? There have been dozens!
In this post I described life in Bali, going on trips with friends, writing updates on my work and a trip to Mt. Batur on a motorcycle. The photos are amazing. I am so glad that I took the time to write this, so that now I have this document to look back on. This gives me more motivation to keep writing.
Weekly Update August 5 - 11, 2023
I love how I have this Ai generated image there. It is beautiful. It shows a guy sitting on a hill overlooking a large futuristic city, with shining skyscrapers. It is my vision for the future, it is me there in the future looking at a city that I love, that I worked hard for. I wrote about how meditation is important to me, how it is a practice that was something I have done naturally in my whole life.
I wrote about being more conversational with strangers at the coworking space. I wrote about the film “Oppenheimer”, on how it is impressive that one man was behind the implementation of such a thing, it is one thing to theorize and something completely different to build something like that.
I wrote about creating drone films and on creating a web application in public, learning to advertise it, as part of buildspace.
Weekly Update 9/1/2023 - 9/8/2023
Here I wrote about how Steve Jobs had a strong belief in himself, that this was the key to his success. On how building with technology you already know allows you to free up your bandwidth to take on new complex tasks, while having the basics down. On how ‘buildspace’ is a course that helps me keep a balance between building in solitude and showing my work to others.
Days in September and October in Chicago, Los Angeles and San Francisco
From 9/8/2023 to 10/27/20023 I have spent time mainly on building my Ai productivity startup and having many enriching experiences. In this time I have created multiple drone films, published vlogs, demoed my Ai startup and hackathon projects to audiences, I have gone on long hikes in mountains, valleys and city streets.
I have gone on runs with groups such as Midnight Runners Club and Founders Runners Club. I have met dozens of interesting people and listened to talks at tech events such as Buildspace irl, Ai Engineer Summit, Ai tinkerer meetup and coworking meetups. I have built projects at hackathons with names like autoGPT, life —upgrade, hack-o-lantern and Ai multimodal hackathon by TEDx. I have danced with pure freedom and joy to music at the SF ecstatic dance at the church of 8 wheels, and at the Spooky Ai Halloween party.
I have lived in places like my friends beautiful home in the Topanga Valley, a hostel named Samesun where I met travelers from China, Oklahoma and Germany plus others and at a pod co-living space in SOMA. I have meditated with friends in LA and in SF in the park. I did yoga with a group of people and two of my friends on a beach in Venice, then walked around on a late Sunday morning and got brunch with my friends and had the best time. I have published frequent ‘standup’ updates and demos on my startup YouTube for my Ai startup called synducer.com.
What is next for me, is to build my Ai startup that amplifies your thinking power here in San Francisco, to build a community and a network of friends and collaborators. To make happen a better world that we can make real if we believe in ourselves. If we can take ourselves seriously, to honor the gifts that we have been born with, and those that we have been given and have acquired, to show them to the world. To give back to the world through our good deeds and selfless actions. To not act like we are less important or less powerful then we truly are. Our ancestors have gone through so much, so many great challenges and dangers, to make possible us being here in this point in time. As we look up at the sun each day, we experience a direct connection with the Truth, that ray of sunlight touching your eye, that ray that came across those millions of miles from the sun to your brain, is a seed, of infinite possibilities and infinite power. Don’t forget who you are and what you are here for. Keep reminding yourself that every day. Don’t waste the day, don’t treat it with anything less then the full respect and honor it deserves. Don’t think that it is just another day, that there will be more of them. Don’t be indifferent to the outcome of this day. It is precious, it is a great gift, it is the greatest gift you could ever ask for. On this day make sure you remember who you are and what you are here for, make sure you treat yourself with love and care, make sure you take time to listen to yourself, where your mind and your body is at, what is happening there, what it yearns for and what it dreams about. Be gentle and kind to yourself. A successful day is one in which you are living your life as yourself. Such a day is a day of growth, in which you are nourished through the light of self awareness.
I offer you this selection of songs to enjoy as this post ripples out and resonates through the corridors of your mind.