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Loose thoughts, everyday life, and things in progress.
A kind of brain dump.

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Secret project

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This is where I’m tracking the progress of my secret project.
For now, almost no one except J. knows what it is, but it’s going pretty well.
inb4 - no, it’s not a pregnancy ;)

I finished playing Mass Effect 1 (by the way, I completed it because I was curious about the story; the combat system and side quests were weak), and I started playing Resident Evil, the remaster of the first game.


I'm quite pleased with myself because I'm really making the most of my interest in amateur radio and learning a lot. Thanks to that enthusiasm, studying comes easily to me. I've organized Anki flashcards for learning the NATO phonetic alphabet, Q codes, and exam topics I need to memorize, such as which frequencies in specific bands are allowed for amateurs.

Ha ha! I found my multitool, which I lost a few months ago! 💪

I’m considering going back to small notebooks for dumping these kinds of loose thoughts.
I always have this dilemma between paper and digital things. For example, between a little notebook and this blog. I already have this “stream” for small posts and loose thoughts like that. There’s also probably a better chance I’ll actually browse through it someday, because I almost never look back into those notebooks. But paper has something tempting about it. I like writing, I like holding a fountain pen in my hand... And I like the format of a small, pocket-sized notebook. Bigger notebooks, like LEUCHTTURM1917, are also great and I used them for a long time, but a pocket notebook is something I can always have with me and scribble in anywhere, whatever comes to mind. There’s also something romantic in the way it gets destroyed.

I bought this particular notebook at Tiger in Rome. There was a set of 2 for a few euros. Very cheap, and the quality matched the price. I wrapped it in adhesive tape so it wouldn’t fall apart so much. In the first one, I wrote down Italian words and phrases I was learning at the time. And generally I used my standard approach in it: regular working notes from the front, and more personal entries from the back, something like a diary. I don’t know, this format does something for me.

There’s also an option in between, meaning something like ReMarkable: e-paper, an e-notebook, or possibly scanning the notebook to have a digital copy, but that’s a lot of hassle, not necessarily needed, and I feel like it combines the drawbacks of both worlds. I probably won’t go that route.

I renamed the "Projects" page to "Praxis", because I want to use it to collect various ideas of mine that I’m putting into practice, not necessarily just "projects", since I don’t actually do that many "projects", and I definitely have more of these smaller ideas. And they make me happy too. I also reworked a bit how this Praxis page will look, but migrating to it will take me a while.

I finished playing Gothic 1 today and started Firewatch. Interesting experience, because the story is set at the end of the previous century in what I think is some national park in the USA. Interesting because it gave me this weird feeling of being left to rely on myself. I’m alone in a huge park, I’ve just started working as a fire lookout. Nobody around. I only have contact by walkie-talkie with my supervisor. If something happens to me outside the tower, my workplace, then maybe after some time she’ll get worried, but will anyone be able to find me in time? I guess this job comes with accepting the risk that no, they won’t.
Somehow I’m not used to that, to that kind of wilderness. Even when I go outside the city and into the mountains, I only walk on popular trails and usually have phone signal.

I’ll drop here a fragment of a screenshot from my newest idea, inspired by GPT-5.6 models and that Japanese guy with his broccoli farm. There’s a very good chance I won’t do anything with it, so maybe at least in a few years I’ll remember my crazy burst of trying to do impossible things ;)

I really need to finally write a post about how I use Codex, especially since Codex is probably ending and ChatGPT Work is beginning.

The development of AI is some kind of major point in my life. I’m stunned by its pace, but also by its possibilities. I don’t know if in a positive or negative way.
On the one hand, the possibilities are huge, OpenAI’s motto, “you can just build things”, describes exactly what I feel. I can finally gather my ideas together and make them real. Not only the digital ones, but also the ones in the real world. And that’s because AI gives me, on one hand, a way to save time at work and work on my own projects in the meantime, but also access to approachable knowledge better than ever before. It’s very easy now to learn some concept from scratch. I’m inspired by this guy, a Japanese man, Hiroki Tomiyasu, who used ChatGPT and Codex to create an automated broccoli farm, even though he knew absolutely nothing about it.
On the other hand, I have to fight with myself not to have FOMO. I’m building my own projects and apps, and I have to fight the thought that I need to make them first, that maybe if someone has built something similar, or probably will any moment now, then there’s no point doing it. That kind of thinking has a lot of potential to take the joy of making things away from me.

I’m reading this CD Action and I can feel this huge appetite growing in me to play all these interesting games, while at the same time there are so many books I’d like to read and so many movies and series I’d like to watch… One lifetime won’t be enough for all that :p

I made some interesting purchases. I bought Japanese incense sticks, white ash for the little bowl so they stand nicely, and a bowl from Action. Curious how it’ll work, supposedly those Japanese ones have less smoke than Indian ones.

And out of curiosity I bought myself CD Action, I’ve never bought it before, so since I got back into gaming, I thought maybe I’d read something interesting there :p