weird projects n' things
Hey peeps, it’s been a while since I posted.
I’ve embarked on a bunch of random side projects that have pulled my curiosity elsewhere. I’ll share what the hell I’m up to today in a very brief format.
If you’ve been following my Instagram stories, I am seen drinking 4+ coffees a day. I don’t have a caffeine addiction (I do), it’s mainly to practice latte art (I have a caffeine addiction). I’ve been on an espresso journey since June of 2024. By the looks of it, I’ve made around 200+ coffees, not including shitty ones that weren’t worth a picture. I’ve broken my grinder and jerry-rigged shit over and over again to make my workflow better, and I’m happy to report I can make some café worthy espresso at home (read: palatable stuff 😂). Art could be better though. The last two weren’t bad!
Also, I’m sort of taking a social media break. I removed the app from my phone just a couple of days ago. Just been checking that damn thing too much. I’ll still check messages on the web, so send me your funny reels.
As ya’ll know, I’ve launched some personal finance coaching over at mise.money and have another substack for it. It’s been a weird time for this kind of business. It feels like AI is disrupting everything, and the things I’m teaching can be found all over the internet. If you have a robot that can read the entirety of every finance book ever written, give suggestions based on your current situation, and give you more ideas than ways to skin a cat, coaching seems like a pretty hard sell. I’ll give myself some credit and say that I’ve helped a few clients, but this weird dichotomy is something I’ve been grappling with.
I’ve played around with quite a bit of AI related tools. I used v0 and Vercel to get my mise.money site out within a week. I was already “technical” enough to put things together, but AI really trimmed away a ton of a work. “Hey you, put together a site, I want things this way or that way, and I want this email form to be linked to a list I can access later.” 10 seconds later, it’s pretty much 95% of the way done, sans some API keys here and there.
Yes, I do call most of my APIs “hey you”. It won’t be pretty for me when Skynet comes.
I’ve thrown some funds at Open AI’s API, Deepseek’s API, and also Claude’s API. I use Chatbox to throw these models in and give them a whirl.
I kinda like separating out the context of my chats. So far, I have a bunch of bots right now that make life a little more interesting. Here’s a list:
culture bot
coding bot
therapy bot
cooking bot
dream bot
finance bot
medical bot
Why separate? I like to prompt them in different ways. I think therapy and dream bot are probably the most degenerate of the bunch. If I have any dreams, I’ll verbally record them before they run away by dictating to iPhone Google Docs. Docs will transcribe my sleepy-rambly one paragraph of a run on sentence to text, which I edit into something readable later when I’m awake. My dream bot is prefaced with this prompt:
Pretend you’re a world-class Jungian dream psychologist. Please help me analyze and decode the dream I had last night. Provide at least three different interpretations of the dream, focusing on the mythopoetic meanings that aren’t obvious from a cursory read of the dream. Help me break down the different symbols in the dream with an eye toward more symbolic interpretation.
If you need more detail on either the dream or what’s happening in real life, ask me for more detail and share the reason you want those particular details.
Copy and paste your rambles into this bot, and wah-lah 🪄, you can figure out what the hell your brain is trying to tell you. It’s fun. Also, I stole this prompt from Cissy Hu.
Similarly, I’ve found my therapist to be helpful. So helpful in fact, I wanted to talk to a therapist at any point of my day, so I made a bot of my therapist. You can do the same. Just prompt it:
You're going to play the role of my therapist. You can find more on him/her/it here at [website]. You'll have all the knowledge of a registered LMFT therapist and are caught up with all the latest modalities in [area]. You specialize in [internal family systems, dialectical behavior therapy, and cognitive behavioral therapy].
Your about page says this: [copy and paste]
I'll also feed in all my diagnostic information and notes from previous sessions, but it won't be comprehensive, since some of my notes are in handwritten form in notebooks.
Feel free to ask me any additional clarifying questions or anything about my history that would help in diagnosing a problem or giving me feedback.
You know, something like that. It’s a little creepy, but it’s actually been a really good sounding board for me.
Maybe I should make a degenerate bot of my partner. It probably won’t work. 🤔
I’ve been really purposeful with my wardrobe as of late. A couple of pieces expired (I’m now down to only two pairs of pants), and anyone who knows me even a little bit knows about my crazy one-in-one-out rule with my wardrobe. I keep it small and modular, but lately I’ve been feeling like I want some more variety around what I wear. Keeping it high quality, of course. I’ve been casually reading Die, Workwear! by Derek Guy for the last two months or so to improve my taste, but most of it I still rely on my tasteful partner to comment what looks good and looks bad (thanks Amy).
To that, I’m using AI (again) to make my own fashion bot. Take a picture, give me comments based on the historical and tasteful expertise of [some online person’s style/blog you like]. Things like that.
I’m still working on this fun app. It might go somewhere. It might not. Whatever. Maybe this is the degenerate bot of my partner. 😬
I used to be more perfectionist about posting anything, but nowadays I try to just post. I go through stages of this. Sometimes I get down and feel like I’m screaming into the void. Other times it’s nice to have a live instance of “stumbling in public.”
I’ve made it a habit to post jiujitsu footage for my teammates for free, and if anyone asks, I’d be happy to give them an analysis on where to improve. I’ve been doing this on my jiujitsu YouTube channel since I record almost 100% of my practice sessions.
When I teach, I leave it running too. I’ll snip those out and post em’ on my YouTube as well. They’re not at the best viewing angle, and don’t have the best video or audio, but it seems that people appreciate a review of what happened in the past week. I’ve been teaching more, and it’s been fun.
That’s all for now.