SF Days: hackathon, hiking, drone films and Thoughts on Life Purpose
10/28/2023 - 11/3/2023
Contents
The main thread of my present life
Spookyland Hackathon
Hiking Lands End Trail
Weekdays Life in SF
Accelerate SF Hackathon
Drone Films
Conclusion
The main thread of my present life
The main thread through this story is my journey in building an online business. What it does is it helps people do research and to write. It is still a work that is in beta (find it at synducer.com). This means that there is a web application out there, it does solve some of the problems I am seeking to solve for my users, but it is still not in a state where it can be advertised and actively promoted as a good solution to the problems it seeks to solve.
In this process, I am meeting and talking to a lot of different people in the same space, some have funded startups in Ai, some have bootstrapped SAAS products like me, some are hackers, some are researchers, some VCs and many more. I am attending a lot of hackathons. These are great places to meet others like described above and to experiment and prototype quickly with new Ai API’s, product ideas and techniques.
Why haven’t I launched a product yet that is solving some user problem and generating revenue? This is a question I ask myself as I see others posting online about their successes in a relatively similar time frame as mine. My response to myself is that it is a journey that is not done overnight, I am still in the process of finding out what I need to do. Currently I believe that moving away from building on top of an open source project, restarting again, with all the lessons learned so far, is the right way to go.
Spookyland Hackathon
This was a hackathon at the Pebblebed VC office. Here I built an app that uses faceswapper model that puts your face on an halloween themed avatar profile photo and allows you to chat with that avatar in a zoom like video chat (this last part was not completed in the 24 hours of the hackathon). The point here was to prototype something quickly and learn new things. This was a success. I demoed the app and learned a lot about this Video chat like interface, text to image and image speech animation models. I am excited to keep building things around this medium that is video chat.
After the hackathon there was a some good music and party. I met some founders here, a bunch of VCs and other people.
Here s a link to a short demo
And the link to the tweet that announced it:
https://twitter.com/konrad_gnat/status/1719560954273481017
And the GitHub
https://github.com/kon-rad/hackolantern-2023
Hiking Lands End Trail
On Sunday I went on a hike with my iOS developer and zen meditation friend Pasha on a hike through lands end. It is one of the most simple, primary and joyous experiences in life to hike around a beautiful natural landscape, with a friend, and talk freely about whatever is important to you at the time, in our case it was about life, philosophy, working as a developer, meditation and more. Your mind naturally relaxes and you can freely talk about what is most important to you then. Some memorable discussions were on your life journey and meaning of life.
For me, what came up was the model of Steve Jobs as someone that lived a good life that I emulate and model myself after. I see him as someone that truly believed in himself, in his own creativity, in his own validity. This to me is very precious, this idea that we as human beings are inherently able to do great things, we are able to change the world, if only we have the courage to believe in our own abilities, and to trust our abilities. It is a tragic reality of life that many kids and many people do not have this teaching and do not have this environment where they are able to be encouraged to believe in themselves, but instead they are taught that some existing technique and way of doing things is the best. This is natural order of things, of the universe, it is something that exists in the learning mechanism of evolution and of biology. Yet it is when we approach things with this pure consciousness and fresh perspective, we are able to see things as they really are.
I had this same discussion with a Japanese founder and my house mate at the Pods co-living space. I explained in very detailed way how original thinkers and founders approach the world in this way. It is an ability to see the world clearly, to think about it in it’s pure way, and not be unjustly influenced by the conceptions and narratives of existing solutions. She said that what I was saying made sense and afterwards I was impressed with my ability to clearly articulate this view point.
I created this drone film while at the hike. Check it out!
Weekdays Life in SF
I am really passionate about organizing communities and strongly believe that we can improve our world through collective action and through new ways of organizing living, working and creating new products, lead with compassion, inclusivity and clarity. On way that I am working towards this now is through my community management role at the Brownstone co-living Pods apartment in San Francisco. This is a new role I started this month. I am putting my experiences in digital nomad, co-living, hacker house life to use in this role as the person that takes care of the commons and works with the residents to organize common shared responsibilities and promote harmony in the shared living space.
Accelerate SF Hackathon
On the Saturday and Sunday of November 4th and 5th I was fortunate to attend the Accelerate SF hackathon in Fort Mason building. I read closely the plaques and informational posters on the wall of this building that houses the Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture. They talked about the soldiers that came through here during WWII. It is the embarkation point where the ships took off to the other side of the Pacific. One point that is memorable is the story about how after the Japanese surrender. Ships full or returning soldiers, surely filled with hope and relief they were not going to (probably) die in an invasion of the Japanese mainland, were stuck in traffic and some did not manage to disembark before Christmas eve.
It also is the home of Founders Inc which is a kind of accelerator, co-working space and investment fund, this space is where the hackathon was hosted. The mayor of SF spoke at the opening. I felt as sense of patriotism and civic duty during this hackathon. I was motivated by this desire to use my talents and abilities to improve this city that is to me the most beloved in the world.
My project here was an app for zoom like video calls with Ai characters that can answer questions on all of the city information.
Here is the devpost with all the links and details https://devpost.com/software/sf-mastermind-zoom-call
I feel very patriotic about this country because I come from European country that was historically invaded and threatened by dictators and nationalistic monarchies. The values of democracy, equality based on the fact of being human, and not by religious or ethic ties, is to me precious.
I know ultimately that we are mere dusts in the wind, so to speak, small neurons in vast ‘neural nets’ (that is the meta-organism), and perhaps we have little impact on our surroundings and our conceptions of reality is limited. The vast truth is beyond us, we are simple characters in this vast cosmic drama, which we only see and comprehend a tiny part. Yet we have these conceptions of things we love, like in my case, the desire to keep this system that I have grown up in and live in, the system of democratic government, of societies created by free people, preserved and continued. I know there exist realities of people living in other dystopic systems like in China and Russia, and Iran. There the societies are under control of a central system of beliefs that is run through either force of violence and through through nationalistic blood ties. These systems do allow for freedom of thought, of speech, of action. All thought, speech and action is subservient to the main goal of the perpetuation of the system. This is true for the dictatorship in Russia, where all journalists and opponents are jailed or murdered. In China where all economic activities are subservient to the party, and anyone that opposes disappears. The moral thing to do for people living in the free world, is to be mindful and pay attention to what it is that makes our system healthy and well and do what we need to do in order to protect it from disintegration into these closed, dystopic dictatorship societies.
There are risks and threats to our way of life. We owe it to ourselves, future generations and those that died in past wars (like those colleagues of those that came back through the halls of the embarkation point that did not make it back), to be aware of this and to know that ultimately we may be put in a position where we are tested about how good we know our society, how well we have used the time on this Earth to take care of the things that are most precious to us. In this substack, in this life, my thoughts keep returning to the center, the most important thing, that is this awareness of what my life is about, who I am and what I am here for, and what I care about and how I can live this life well. This is the purpose of writing, and of art and science. The purpose is to know ourselves, to create ourselves, and to create the world around us.
One of the most impactful experience I ever had was playing the triple ‘A’ VR game ‘Half Life Alyx”. It takes place in a Eastern European like country that is invaded by an alien force. Many of the themes are around a simple human trying to survive against an oppressive dictatorship and an alien invasion force. This experience was so realistic and life like. I feel like I lived through those events. There are studies that prove that our brains can’t differentiate between VR experiences and real memories. This is a very powerful medium and indeed we have this tool and ability to use for good ends. I am motivated by the desire to build with these tools a world that is better and also to express myself like an Artist in this medium of code.
At this Hackathon I presented to the founder of Langchain, which is a tool that I used to build the product. It was really surreal to do that. This is the great part about living in SF. This was a very memorable experience. Will I continue working on this project? A part of me wants to. At the same time I have my hands full with working to create a product that people would be willing to pay for. Is this just an excuse? It is hard to tell. I strongly believe that with a strong belief in something, you can make it happen. Perhaps the best thing to do here is to create a list of all the possible things I can focus on and write pros and cons for each. Then decide based on this solid reasoning.
Drone Films
Here are two more drone video I created this week.
Conclusion
What do I take away from this week?
Find out what is the one thing you want to build and don’t forget it and don’t get too distracted by other things. I feel my attention is too swayed by diverging interests and paths to pursue in my startup.
What do I hope for next week?
I hope that I can define clearly what is the one thing I want to build and put out there into the world.
I leave you with this song that I have been into this week!
Enjoy and let me know what you think of this post in the comments.