August 21 2023

I found out today that, oddly enough, my dislike for food—and smells, as an offshoot—liberates my ears. I can fill them with all kinds of sounds, just like I fill my mind with all sorts of books. And who knows, this might make my understanding richer, deeper. After all, tastes and sounds, they both bring in similar complexities, don't they? What's the science behind this, I wonder?

Planning with time blocks using the Time Block Planner is something else, I tell you. Just staring at how my hours roll out in reality, versus where I believe in my mind that they're going.

It really makes me treasure those fresh hours each morning when I draft the plan. But, damn it, they do race by like comets while I'm knee-deep in living them. Sure makes one thing clear though - there's still quite a road ahead of me to align my time better with the stuff that sits front-row in my priorities.

Today, I cranked out a couple scripts that just might fan the flame back into my inconsistent habit of creating Instabrams. Knocked up one heck of a pipeline for DALL-E, taking chunky texts, wringing them dry into neat, crisp summaries, and morphing them into fetching cover art.

Then there's the second script. What does it do? Well, simple: it chews up shorthand blurb, like the one you're picking through now, and spits it back out in the flavor of a certain author close to my heart, our man Murakami himself. Now, you can sneak a peek at both these scripts down below and take in the art piece a notch above.

Both scripts neatly tuck away the outputs onto my clipboard. Handy for the lazybones that like me, can use ‘em just about anywhere across the machine. Embrace sloth!

i wrote two scripts today that should hopefully harken the return of instabrams. i created a dall-e pipeline that takes text, summarizes it and turns into a cover art.

in addition i wrote a script that rewrites shorthand like you are reading now into the style of one of my favorite authors, haurki muarkami. you can see both of the scripts below, and the art for this peice in the image above.

importantly, both copy results to clipboard for usage anywhere across my machine. let's go laziness!

Really would be nowhere without these amazing tools that devs have built (Ghost, Obsidian, GPT). I merely build the ligaments that connect the very solid bones.

GitHub rang the bell for the 700th star on chat gpt md today. It's been awhile since any updates were added, and I can't help but feel a twinge of regret. But the open source world - well, it can be a free ride for some folks, especially amongst the Obsidian folks. It's like being a chef with everyone sampling your soup, but no one foots the bill.

there was an enormous disconnect between how we think open source works and what is actually happening on the ground today. There is a long, and growing, tail of projects that don’t fit the typical model of collaboration. Such projects include Bootstrap, a popular design framework used by an estimated 20% of all websites, where three developers have authored over 73% of commits. Another example is Godot, a software framework for making games, where two developers respond to more than 120 issues opened on their project per week.† -- Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software

Create a Ghost Cover Image with DallE

import dotenv from "dotenv";
dotenv.config();

import OpenAI from "openai";
import clipboard from "clipboardy";
import fs from "fs";
import fetch from "node-fetch";

const openai = new OpenAI({ apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY });

async function summarizeClipboard() {
  const text = clipboard.readSync();
  // console.log(`Summarizing: ${text}`);
  const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
    messages: [
      {
        role: "system",
        content:
          "Summarize the following into a theme and create an art prompt from the feel of the text aesthetically along the lines of: 'an abstract of [some unique lesser known art style from history] version of {x}' where x is the feel of the text aesthetically. Just return the art prompt, say nothing else." +
          text,
      },
    ],
    model: "gpt-4",
  });

  // console.log(`Summary: ${completion.choices[0].message.content}`);

  return completion.choices[0].message.content;
}

async function saveImgFromUrl(url) {
  const response = await fetch(url);
  const buffer = await response.buffer();
  const filename = `./dalle-images/${Date.now()}.jpg`;
  fs.writeFile(filename, buffer, () => console.log("finished downloading!"));

  return filename;
}

async function appendToLog(logItem) {
  const log = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync("./log.json"));
  log.push(logItem);
  fs.writeFileSync("./log.json", JSON.stringify(log, null, 2));
}

async function main() {
  let prompt = await summarizeClipboard();
  prompt = prompt.replace("Art Prompt: ", "").trim();
  const image = await openai.images.generate({ prompt: prompt });
  const imageUrl = image.data[0].url;

  const imgFilename = await saveImgFromUrl(imageUrl);

  const log = {
    query: clipboard.readSync(),
    prompt: prompt,
    imageUrl: imageUrl,
    imgFilename: imgFilename,
  };

  await appendToLog(log);

  // save prompt to clipboard
  clipboard.writeSync(prompt);
  console.log("./dalle-images/" + imgFilename.replace("./dalle-images/", ""));
}
main();

Rewrite Chicken Scratch as Murakami

import dotenv from "dotenv";
dotenv.config();

import OpenAI from "openai";
import clipboard from "clipboardy";
import fs from "fs";

const openai = new OpenAI({ apiKey: process.env.OPENAI_API_KEY });

async function rewriteClipboard() {
  const text = clipboard.readSync();
  // console.log(`Rewriting: ${text}`);
  const completion = await openai.chat.completions.create({
    messages: [
      {
        role: "system",
        content:
          "Rewrite the following in the style of Haruki Murakami, using short, punchy, easy to read, simple words that flow. Almost as if spoken cadence. Text:\n" +
          text,
      },
    ],
    model: "gpt-4",
  });

  // console.log(`Rewrite: ${completion.choices[0].message.content}`);

  return completion.choices[0].message.content;
}

async function appendToLog(logItem) {
  const log = JSON.parse(fs.readFileSync("./log.json"));
  log.push(logItem);
  fs.writeFileSync("./log.json", JSON.stringify(log, null, 2));
}

async function main() {
  let prompt = await rewriteClipboard();
  prompt = prompt.replace("Rewrite: ", "").trim();

  const log = {
    query: clipboard.readSync(),
    prompt: prompt,
  };

  await appendToLog(log);

  // save prompt to clipboard
  clipboard.writeSync(prompt);
  console.log("Prompt saved to clipboard");
}
main();

Images From the Script

These have wriggled under my skin, becoming my favorites of the day. You can make buckets of them without breaking much of a sweat. Keep your eyes on the blog – there's more visual feast on the way!

Half a decade past, this is where I lived.

I snapped this photo, and soon after found myself in a nearby bar, nursing a drink and ruminating on the past five years. I had some predictions right - walking away from full-time software engineering to chase dreams of startups and artistry. But there were surprises too - who could've predicted a pandemic, or AI taking great leaps ahead?

I pondered over the goals I set for myself in 2018 - many still unmet, many still echoing around my head. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Not sure. But one thing I've learnt is this: success is a recipe. It calls for dogged effort, an accreting outlet for said effort (think: investment returns), a dash of lady luck, and being at the right place just when it's the right time. Voila, dreams come true and they'll call it fate.

Like Ging said to Gon, "I can't get there quite yet, but I'm relishing the ride."

"Five years ahead?" I reckon I'll be there, right at the threshold of that old, worn out door of mine.

Oddly enough, it seems as if my eyes on the photo on the right been brushed with a dash of guyliner. Can't make heads or tails of that, honestly.

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