When you get to the end of your life, old and tired, and you look back on all the things you did and time you spent, what will make you say: yes, I did well and it was all worth it?
Put another way, if you have an extra hour tomorrow with nothing planned, what could you do with yourself to later say: I’m glad I did that? What if you have an unplanned day? Or a week? Does how you use that time change? Would the choice of how to use that time be more or less deliberate, depending on how long you have? Does that choice define you as a person?
When I was 26, I looked at my career and realized I would wake up old one day having accomplished nothing – largely due to government spending cuts in my original area of expertise (biology / forestry). Oh well, no hard feelings. Governments need to do that sometimes.
So I quit, sold all my possessions, immigrated to Vietnam, and spent literally every dime to my name setting up a company (I had the equivalent of $0.025 left). Then I cram-studied software and electrical engineering every spare moment for 3 years (meanwhile I survived on low-value, high effort contracts that no one else wanted). I also met my wonderful wife at an engineering club while doing this.
Looking back, it was an unreasonable, absurd, dangerous journey. Maybe there is something about those qualities that define actions I value? I used to wonder if I was entirely sane at the time, until I had the chance to visit my home country recently. I saw the economy hadn’t changed, and I would still be in the same dead-end job at 40 if I was lucky. Is accepting drudgery really more sane than taking a risk?
Maybe there is no sanity, only the ways we are mad together, and the ways we are mad alone. I don’t know which is better.
When I have spare time, I create things. Music boxes of exotic wood, robots, particle detectors. Lamps that shine in colors that are hard to identify (via optical illusion). Artificial plants that quiver in anticipation of rain. Nightlights designed to last forty thousand nights. A Lemmy bot that does I-Ching divination with a hardware TRNG. Machines that try to detect if the Universe is a simulation. Those musical greeting cards that no one likes. Anything, so long as it is strange and new!
I never regret time spent this way, and all my days are unplanned at some fundamental level.
I hope that every word of this is true. I loved reading it.
Oddly enough!
If you want to read about stuff I work with, I post some of it to vintech@voltage.vn from time to time.
Also you can use the I Ching implementation by sending your query to kong_ming@voltage.vn (the bot will communicate with the machine on my desk using a little Lemmy-MQTT bridge I wrote). Internally, that machine uses an el-cheapo version of the simulated-universe-detector – using a circuit that is hard (but not provably impossible) to simulate that is based on diode breakdown in 2N3904 transistors.
I’ll connect up the fancier version eventually. I’ve built it before, but the original design used export-controlled parts and could be construed as nuclear technology (it’s a very sensitive particle detector), so I don’t really want to carry it across borders. I live in Vietnam, my luggage gets searched 100% of the time as-is, and someone at CERN published a neat design I can adapt that relies only on unregulated parts (https://github.com/ozel/DIY_particle_detector)! So I’ll get to that in a few months or whatever.
I could also use a Geiger tube but that feels sort of boring.
Please tell me you have a blog?
If you drop by my instance (vintech@voltage.vn) I do some long form posts on some of the stuff I make, with photos. Lemmy is a weird thing to use as a blog, but I’m chronically short on time so whatever :D
…not everything is there though. I have this weird habit sometimes of publishing things under different names, then throwing away the accounts. Truth be told, even I’m not entirely sure what I’ve done over the years. Some ideas belong only to themselves, I guess.
Right now (professionally) I’m trying to pull together some kits for a STEM program – STEM programs are generally worthless marketing fluff here designed to help rich parents show off on Facebook while teaching kids exactly nothing. Also it’s like the cheapest kit from USA or China depending on the affluence of their target audience. A client mentioned that they want to set up a STEM school, so I’m going to pitch them a vertically integrated business so I can optimize for quality at all levels (kit engineering - curricula - marketing). It’s also way cheaper to manufacture good robots locally off my own IP than to buy them across the world :D
Besides that, I’m working on doing audio analysis on the Attiny10. It’s got 32 bytes of RAM, 1k words of program space, and 4 I/O. So that’s being challenging. The screen with graphics works right now, but I wrecked the last chip when I overclocked the ADC that does the audio sampling by too much. Luckily they are like 30 cents each. The final goal is being able to do beat detection so I can make little animated companions with face graphics that sing along with you e.g. at karaoke. I actually hate karaoke, but the idea demands to be born, so I have little choice in the matter. I can always choose not to sell it, I guess :P