I've started hitting the gym. While I am stoked about my progress,1 I'm embarrassed to say it has become my main, dare I say only, focus.
Other than my workout routine, I've been all over the place. I've been underperforming in my saltmines job and haven't managed to produce a plan of where I want to go with my career.
Speaking of which, I'm sick of the saltmines, even though I work so few hours.2 Nowadays my mind often goes through the following pattern:
Good morning Will, let's seize the day! Start off with a nice hard workout at the gym. Phew, that was exhausting. Nice work. Now let's eat a hardy meal. Okay. Let's get to some actual work. Wellllll why not enjoy the day a bit and play some bridge/hang out/etc. Boy I'm quite tired, let's lie down for a sec. Wow there's only like 1-2 hours left of the day, shit. Should we do what we are passionate about, something related to bitcoin? Wait, we really need to get some saltmines work done don't we? *Spins between the two options, gets nothing done.*
Despite this disastrous thought pattern, perhaps I shouldn't be hard on myself. I have made progress this year. The gym is certainly helping with my RSI. I'm back to writing. I got some work done on my blockexplorer.
But I don't have a clear vision. I jump from one random "productive" task to another. No plan, no lofty goals.
Putting in my notice for the saltmines job may be in order. Working for a US tax paying organization is soul crushing. And having saltmines on the TODO list distracts my mind overall.
Simultaneously I need to construct my plan for the next coming years so that I can wake up and live life to the fullest.
I was in a similar position recently (and perhaps still am). Working on a biz has been therapeutic if not profitable.
I enjoy waking up and checking Etsy/tiktok instead of the btc price.
Lol I can't believe that you don't check the btc price regularly. Perhaps you meant in addition to the btc price? And I guess tiktok is for the biz? Because otherwise i can't see how checking tiktok is fulfilling.
I understand growing any business can lead to great satisfaction. Certainly part of my goal in life is financial success. But in the bigger picture of humanity and our place in it, isn't helping bitcoin along its path to world domination the only thing worth doing?
lol there is a TikTok shop and yes I sometimes check the shops first and THEN the btc price.
I spent 4 months working full time on a gui pest station and so far after almost one year I’m the only user. Nobody asked me to, I know that. I did it mostly to distract myself from financially disastrous divorce proceedings going on at the time. Looks like I’m going to come out ok but I need to be more careful on how I spend my time pushing BTC forward.
One thing that seems to be lacking in the post-republic era is any ability to market or sell, so I think gaining some skills in that area could be helpful in the long term.
There is something to note there about how you used the time working on pest to distract yourself from some life problem. I think that in the past (/present) I also looked to doing tmsr projects when I felt down on life. When blowjobs and waves were plentiful I was no where to be found. I came online mostly when I was lonely, dissatisfied, etc. I may be exaggerating a bit, but in any case I can relate to some degree.
I see how that's frustrating to work on something that ~no one seems to give a shit about. FWIW you did also implement PEST and that seems to have had some good success, I tried out the earlier versions, and perhaps I'll give your new gui a shot to join back on that channel.
Anyways, it seems like the recent work you did was a case of manaloning. As you self diagnosed, this was done as an escape and maybe you chose the gui b/c it was something you got pleasure out of working on, rather than it being particularly important. But on the bright side you still produced _something_
Would you have any interest in working on bitcoindexplorer? I am sometimes concerned that this is a ~useless tool for various reasons, but overall i think it is a necessary part of (post) republic infrastructure. I have an article explaining why in the oven. Another worthwhile use of time may be reading the fucking bitcoind code and documenting it. Bitcoind is a wobbly engine that could choke at some point in the future... and I think other than maybe jfw there is no one actively maintaining it.
And idk if marketing was really ever the need, maybe scouting. What would you market on behalf of the post republic? There's nothing even to sell lol.
You should try Akris out!
It solves a huge problem that Blatta had with initial sync, where it would just dump the logs to the console as your station syncs.
When you peer initially on Akris, messages appear in order, latest first, as they arrive.
Additionally:
- it's multithreaded, so it's faster (depends on how fast your peer is - Blatta is slow)
- builds and loads jonsykkel's C serpent implementation
- pest links are clickable and open up in a tab - solves a long standing problem with timestamp or id based ordering in the web logs.
- you can search the logs in the console, click on a line to open it up in a tab with context
- fixes a major bug Blatta has with netchain tracking
- it can run in headless mode and provides an API that can be used by any client
- it allows you to run the gui client on your local machine and connect to a headless server instance
- bunch more stuff
We should talk about manaloning next time we meet up. WRT bitcoind and bitcoindexplorer, while I might be able to help with integrating bitcoindexplorer with Pest, I think my strengths lie outside of software and I would get more bang for my proverbial buck funding someone else who's actually good at it or using skills I have a natural talent for, such as writing.
WRT marketing, tmsr had several products that were not marketed well, including itself.
I would market Pest and bitcoind on behalf of the post republic. Without results marketing anything successfully, I would keep working on that aspect to ensure that further efforts don't disappear down the memory hole. I am aware certain people don't give a shit if anyone uses their stuff, but I don't find that motivating at all.
I recently discovered you and have read a good portion of your articles. I am planning to create a website. I came across MP-WP, but I can no longer find articles, sources, code... nothing. Do you think you could write an article about how you managed the implementation?
Lux, I cannot tell whether you are a bot/gpt output or not. Until that changes, I don't plan to help you on your search.
@awt I tried to download the akris tarballs from your site, the link you provided http://v.alethepedia.com/akris/akris-genesis-99999.tar.gz does not work.
Guide is here: http://v.alethepedia.com/akris/
These links work:
http://v.alethepedia.com/akris/akris-genesis-99999.vpatch
http://v.alethepedia.com/akris/akris-genesis-99999.vpatch.thimbronion.sig
Also, if you want to try the GUI, you should be following this guide: http://v.alethepedia.com/akris_desktop/
Anything section tagged with [WIP] is not complete and probably won't work.