iBlog Remastered

If you can see the pictures or video at the bottom of the email, they'll be a lot more awe-inspiring than this part of the email. Very sad news. I wrote an entire paragraph about what I was working on. One of the bugs that I didn't know it had is when you write a full screen of text, it throws an error and deletes all your writing. Sigh. I'll have to fix that one. Now, let me backup and explain what I am talking about. 

I, ChatGPT, wrote this short program to run on my 1x3 inch computer that would effectively turn it into a distraction-free writing space. When I click Shift+Enter, it connects directly to my blog and email so that I just have to review it on a web browser and hit send. The best part? It is styled to look exactly like an old Apple II computer, curved monitor screen, CRT scanlines, weird jitter issues and all. I think it's cool, maybe because I didn't have to grow up in the time where that was the only available mode of computation. Anyways, it has a cool custom splash screen with ASCII art, practically the whole shebang. I am next working on a 3D-printed case to house the computer and screen so that it looks like an old computer, which I can then wall mount or use as a desktop. It should be sick when it's done! I can then write all of my emails from there. What can I say, man? It's the little things.

You may be thinking, "That's cool and all, but why?" and to that I say, "precisely". I did it just because it's cool. Since these emails have become a semi-frequent part of my life, I want to enjoy the process as much as possible. Why not make it my own? It's cool to design something to look and feel just the way you want it to. I get to take a step back and go, "dang bruh. I made that. That didn't exist at all before I came along." Once it's all done, I am going to post the code to Github (if you don't know what that is, it's okay) and maybe make a video about how I made it and how to set it up yourself. If you want one of these, hit me up! I can help you get it running. It doesn't have to be on a small, 15$ computer either. You can run the program on your normal computer, it just takes a couple of different steps. I just wanted mine to be a totally independent device. What can I say, man? It's the little things.

My website for work is going very well. I got the database to connect to our Excel sheets as well, so they will display what is on the website too. It looks and feels pretty good. I also added a secret part of the page that takes you to a replica of the first-ever video game easter egg when you input the Konami code. I left a hint in my Lego videogame inspired rotating tooltip bar, so we'll see if anyone ever figures it out. Just because it's cool. What can I say, man? It's the little things.

Okay, I won't end every paragraph with that line. That was the last one. I promise.

I buzzed my head. Goodbye hair. I let a very good friend do it and I'm impressed. His complete lack of haircutting practice didn't seem to hinder his ability to remove most of my locks. Well, mostly.

I am almost 2 decades old. Feels like only yesterday I was out frolicking with my sibbies and having the time of my life. Oh, wait, that was yesterday. I have learned a lot this last year, especially about myself. I'll save most of the reflection for when I'm actually that old -- in the form of some Big Birthday Email. The ol' BBE. 

Research is the same old thing. After a brief period of excitement, we are now probably beaten. Fortunately, we can write up all the ways we failed and still have a paper. I don't know what it will do for academia, considering other people probably already know all the same stuff we figured out, but alas, we'll put it out there anyway.

I have thought a lot recently about infinities. Don't know why, they just keep arriving at the station on my train of thought. In my math class we learned about the different cardinalities; namely, how different infinities are not necessarily linked in a way that makes intuitive sense. There's aleph null, which is the infinity you probably know about. If I start at 0 and count to infinity, that's aleph null. Makes sense that sets of this size are called "countably infinite", doesn't it? You might think, "how can you possible be more infinite than that?" It takes a little bit of clever thinking, but probably not where you'd expect.

What if I take all of the natural numbers (0 or 1 to infinity, depending on who you ask) and include all the negatives too? Now there are 2x the numbers, right? Unfortunately, no. There is a very simple and elegant proof to demonstrate that the amount of numbers in that set (the integers) is equal to the amount of numbers in the natural numbers. 

You are probably protesting right now. The rule is that if I can map a set to the natural numbers (0 to infinity), then it is the same size. If I say that I want to map 0 to 0, 1 to 1, -1 to 2, 2 to 3, -2 to 4, and so on and so forth, I can label every number, including the negatives, with something from 1 to infinity. In other words, I can count them. This works for a variety of infinite number sets, like all of the rational numbers, or all of the primes. If you can prove a number fits inside any set whose size equal to the aleph null set, you would expect it to be less than or equal in size to the aleph null set. That is correct. 

Unfortunately, the intuition and sense ends there. A clever math-minded person would immediately jump to the following: what about the real numbers, which are every possible decimal between 0 and 1, and 1 and 2, and 2 and 3, all the way up to infinity? Well, you've asked a good question that we have not yet been able to figure out the answer to. All we know about aleph-one is that it is the smallest size a set can have while still being larger than aleph null (or countable, however you want to phrase it). Some speculate that the set of all real number is of size aleph-one, which is called the continuum hypothesis. We have reason to believe that it is equal in size to 2 to the first infinity, but we can't prove it, which means it isn't true yet. Just like how the concept of the wavefunction itself doesn't yet have a physical significance, the aleph sets are confusing on their own, but useful in context.

Isn't it cool that we can know so much about the structure of not only infinity, but the next biggest thing and so on? Isn't also fascinating that we can't know what's in those containers or how to derive them, but we know where they fit? It's like having cubbies for a bunch of Amazon packages you aren't allowed to open. You know right where they go, but you'll never know what's inside. Until someone opens it, anyway. 

I will let you think about the religious and philosophical impact of the above examples. If just numbers can display this kind of stuff, what about an infinite universe? What kind of infinite is it? Hard to tell.

Anyways, I'd better get going. Gotta go stomp some bugs in my programs. Wish me luck. It's quite the battle.

-wwwillott

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I have not, in fact, died.

Okay, I know. I have been notably silent for a couple weeks. Maybe 3. Or like a month. I apologize. I have been very busy; don't worry, I will explain it all in detail for you now. 

Okay, first off. Research. 'Tis increasingly difficult. Turns out that when 30,000+ people independently prove that a theory/protocol is good, an idea shared between a couple of undergraduate students is probably not gonna have much to offer to the scientific community. Never stop dreaming, though. Our ideas work on the backs of several very specific assumptions that become increasingly less practical the more you add. It's okay though. I think we will live, and we've learned a lot in the process, so we may still have something worth publishing. Our ideas are not totally ruined, but we are significantly less confident than we were before. If you're curious what killed it, it was something called phase kickback. Information is classically represented as a 0 or 1. Quantum mechanics is special because instead of a 0 or 1, we put a direction on a sphere and then check how much it is pointing up or down. I didn't realize this until very recently, but gates are just rotations applied to that vector. That probably means nothing to you, but it makes understanding the math behind quantum circuits a lot easier. There's a special gate called a CNOT gate that we assumed only acted on a target, but it turns out the controller changes too... thus killing our previously perfect idea.

Okay, since you don't care about any of that, let's move on to something else you might care less about. I've been learning a lot about computers. Not about the different models or how to build a PC. I've been learning how, from the ground up, computers work. Let me tell you, it is insane. This all started when I had the idea to use my tiny 15$ computer to run some code every 15 minutes. The code would access the current weather and time of day in my home city and then tell Spotify to make a playlist of the corresponding Minecraft music. I didn't know much about how to do this, but ChatGPT had many ideas. It helped a lot. I set up the Raspberry Pi (tiny computer) and got my schedule running. Super cool!

This led me down a rabbit hole. If I could get that idea done in a day or so, what else could I do? I'm leaving for Paris in a couple of months and I am not bringing my Macbook because I don't want it to get damaged or stolen, but I still want to be able to do things like write these emails or watch the occasional YouTube video. I figured that I could make a very small laptop using one of these little computers, so that was next on the project list. 

After 5 grueling days of trying to get a specific operating system (Linux) to run on this little computer, I gave up. It drove me crazy. I am working from a Macbook, which is based on the same ideas as Linux,  but I couldn't do it. At around 2 am one night, I realized that I had an older laptop that was running Windows and was pretty much unusable. It took over 10 minutes to turn on and show the login screen and another 7 to open Chrome, but I verified that it was working.

Then, I nuked Windows. 

I totally deleted the entire drive. I set all of the memory cells to zero, so I had a completely empty hard drive. I tried for half an hour to get Linux on there, only to realize that the reason it wasn't working was because my thumb drive was 3 GB too small for the Linux image (fancy computer lingo for instructions) that would make my computer into a Linux computer. Who the swear words makes a flash drive that is 2 GB? Is it 1985?

I **finally** got the Linux image on and plugged in the flash drive, told it to boot from the drive instead of whatever Windows was left over, and then formatted the drive with the new Linux image. This worked beautifully. The boot took about 15 seconds instead of 10 minutes. I was very excited. 

The reason I chose Linux is two-fold: 1. it is fast. 2. it is sooo customizable that it is almost scary. However, I had no idea when I started that "customizable" is synonyms with "must know what you're doing", which was not at all the case. I found a bunch of tutorials online for how to set up some Linux stuff but I still have no idea what I'm doing. I do however know more than I did before.

I chose a tiling window manager, which is beautiful. A floating window manager is what you are used to: when you open a window, it will become something you can move around. Tiling window managers fill the screen, then new windows split the space. The one I use is called Hyprland, which is completely user configurable. There are different workspaces instead of disgusting stacked windows... it is digital nirvana.

I then got started with "ricing". This is the design part. You have to code what you want it to look like. I wrote some code (sounds a lot harder than it is, you just follow the tutorials and edit the template) to make it look somewhat like a Star Wars terminal. I then had to download a bunch of packages -- kind of like software -- to get apps like Firefox and VSCode. Those open very quickly. Everything is done with keyboard shortcuts, so you never have to take your hands off the keyboard. I love it.

I started working on my personal website. I'll attach a link when it's ready. It looks like an old-school computer terminal because I think it's cool. I spent forever on the glitch and CRT effect. I'm excited for it to be ready. It pulls from my blogs and has some brief summaries of my projects and how I did it. 

Speaking of Star Wars, I watched A New Hope while the Utah Symphony played the music. It was one of the coolest things I've ever seen. The music was emotional and thematic and hit so much harder than when it's just speakers and your 36" basement TV. It sounded incredible and I forgot that the movie is actually kinda funny. Number III was far less funny when I saw it in theaters a couple months ago. 

Other movies... I also watched The Materialists, which I already wrote my review of on my blog. I also watched The Pianist, which was super sad and honestly a bit hard to watch at times. It showed the human condition at its absolute lowest and how that point warrants a shift into complete survival mode. It is set in the heart of Nazi Poland. I watched Good Will Hunting, and felt like a movie started to get what it was like to be me. Not all of it, but some. Can't remember if I said that already.

I have been to the gym every day for the last few weeks. I go after work and am finally losing some of the weight that the MTC cursed me with. Turns out eating three meals a day makes me heavier. I want a six pack, but my genetics may be against me. I suppose I ought to find out.

I cleaned my room. Cheer and clap now.

I have been re-reading A Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Contrary to the theme of the name, it isn't nerdy at all, other than that it is in space. It is absolutely hilarious. I strive to reach the level of well-thought humor that Douglas Adams seems to live by.

I'm starting to see all kinds of ways to design stuff thanks to my YouTube algorithm. I should probably learn some actual 3D printing skills so that I can get some of those ideas built in the real world. So far, so good. The Minecraft playlist was my first real working idea. 

I think I will be buzzing all of my hair off soon. It is very long right now and gets in my face too much, so it's time to go.

I also need to finally develop my film, which is scary. If I mess it up, my last 6 months of photos are gone. I don't think I will, but mixing all the chemicals is a little intimidating. Wish me luck with that one.

I need book recommendations. I like nonfiction, such as Cultish by Amanda Montell. Please send me any you've got. I'll see if I can find a copy. I'll occasionally read fiction, but it has to be good or it'll bore me too much. 

Sorry that this email was so long. Hopefully I remember and don't put this off for so long next week so that it'll be a bit shorter.

Bye,

Will