Blockchain Man

Another Friday rolls, around, and another Payday weekend. Money is burning a hole in my pocket, but I’ve been judiciously saving as much as possible. I already double my contributions to the shared account Missus and I use for paying bills, on top of another sizable chunk to replace our windows in the house. Another chunk goes toward a new car fund. And a lot is going into crypto, an amount that’s almost equal to my former salary. I’m buying a lot of BTC.

I’m watching the geo-political and macroeconomic news with a bit of distance. I’m not really paying attention to the news at all. National politics is of little interest to me right now, and while I voted early last week, I didn’t know several of the local candidates and left a few boxes blank. I’m more concerned with bond rates and Fed policy, and where things are going to break next. I was waiting for a collapse in the used car markets, but since I’m not actively shopping for anything yet I’m just relying on what comes up in my TL. The mortgage market is of more concern to me, there are rumors that some with adjustable-rates now find it cheaper to rent, and that may have some effect on housing prices.

There’s an old saying, “if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” I think it’s Yiddish or something. Maybe I heard it from a rabbi, or maybe it was Mel Brooks. Anyways, it’s a point that I’ve carried around for a while, which is funny because I tend to run my mouth and fantasize about grand goals. Which is why I am truly amazed that life is going so well. Missus and I have been so happy with our quality of life lately. I know what people mean when they say blessed, but I don’t like using that word.

The stoic in me can’t help but tell me memento mori, it’s not going to last. I was sitting in the pharmacy parking lot yesterday and found myself fantasizing a rather grizzly accident — think 127 Hours — and you’ll have the gist.

I’m waiting for the other shoe to drop. Things can’t really be going this well? Can they?

Part of this mood is probably from hanging out with my FIL this last weekend. He just bought a new house so his wife can work in the city when she gets her degree, and his resort mountain home is too far away. It’s nice, but part of the reason is that the end of the bear market took $600,000 of value out of his brokerage account, and now he’s got too many toys.

And I threw a bunch of junk out of my house Monday as well. I’m somewhat less hesitant to fill it back up with junk, although I did pickup a cart of shit at Goodwill when I dropped off that carload of computer equipment and old clothes.

Computers, books, musical instruments, board games. I think if I just had those things with me I would be happy. Hmm, there’s that word again. Happy. Be careful about giving yourself the things you think will make you happy. Chasing that high may lead to immense disappointment. I’d still want more. Even writing these words I thought of five more things, and basically came back right to the spot that I’m at now. I can’t add any more to the things I have, I can only take away.

There are still too many broken things around this house, unfinished projects. Clutter. Oh god, the clutter. I can mind driving a dirty car with stained panels, carpets, and cushions, but I can’t abide so many clothes that the jackets pile on the floor. No.

I went through our “subscriptions” with Missus this weekend as well, cancelling a bunch of stuff that we had accidentally purchased or forgotten about. We still have too much. Too many options for our attention. I had to change the Netflix password last night, after the girls got in a fight. It wasn’t because they were watching Netflix, it’s because Missus and I were trying to get a show in while the girls played outside. They were perfect until we called them in to get ready for bed and sent them upstairs twenty minutes too late. They were disregulated.

I think if we had turned the TV off and helped them get back on track we could have gotten them both down before they attacked each other. Lesson learned.

Yesterday I got my new PC build in, and spent most of the afternoon setting it up. It took longer than I anticipated — of course — as the Win10 image I was using didn’t have storage support for my mobo, and I couldn’t load it manually. A fresh download and new ISO did the trick.

I’ve been using the same gaming machine for almost eight years. I bought it before the release of the Oculus CV1, which would have made this last build somewhere around Thanksgiving of 2015. It’s served me well over the years, the only upgrades I’ve done were storage and a RTX 3070. It became apparent after this GPU upgrade that the CPU was terribly behind.

So yesterday I pulled out all the old components out of the case, and spent some time cleaning every fan blade with my little DataVac. I really haven’t built a new PC since this last one, and I was a bit overwhelmed with all the fan and PSU component and connections. I had another miss because the CPU I bought, a i9 11900 something-or-other, didn’t have discrete graphics support, meaning it needed a GPU. I try to fire up the mainboard with as few components as possible, and couldn’t for the life of me figure out why I had no video! So I figured that out, and finally got everything setup late in the evening, and managed to get in a session playing Terra Invicta. I also played Tarkov, but didn’t mess with any of the graphics settings. With vsync off I was getting well over 170 fps, but I didn’t have all the bells and whistles turned on. The one thing I did notice is that my stash pulled up faster, there’s usually a second or two where all the items have to load and it seemed noticeably quicker than usual.

It’s funny because CPU speeds haven’t gotten that much faster. 3.5GHz is about the same as I had before, but the number of cores is a lot more. I didn’t notice things being that much faster, but the system should be able to handle a lot more. I may try running Stable Diffusion on it and see whether it’s faster than my Macbook or Google Colab studio.

So I’ve still got a new case here that I bought. Simpler than the Thermaltake one that I was using before. I’m going to take my old PC components and load it up in the case, then pull the GPU out of Elder’s machine and shuffle them around. Old parts are going to Goodwill. Or maybe Younger, I’m not sure yet.

Right now my office is a huge mess, there’s boxes everywhere, my desk is a wreck, so I need to get busy cleaning that up and putting things away. I’ve got some important meetings this afternoon.

After work we’re loading up the car and taking a road trip, heading to my FIL’s. There’s a fall festival where he lives, and we’re meeting my mom up there as well. I’m also hoping I can get some mountain biking in while we’re there, but we’ll see how that goes.

Younger was being very challenging this morning. She said she was tired so I was content to let her sleep in. I was tired also. She didn’t stay in her room for long, I caught her trying to slide out of her room on her belly. She was trying to stay below my line of sight — I can see her doorway and the hall as I lay on my side on the edge of the bed. I just had to raise my head a few inches and there she was, with her tablet, trying to sneak downstairs. I tried to coax her back to the bathroom to do her morning chores instead, but she fought me every step of the way. After I finally got her to school I saw that she had thrown sand and mud on the car in the one minute she was outside without me.

So the whole morning was thrown off, although it wasn’t really her fault. I stayed up late last night “doing research” as I call it now, culminating with a thirty dollar purchase on Steam. Today should still be productive though, I have plenty on my to-do list that I’m ready to get to.

So I’m officially an old man now, I kid. I went to get new glasses a few weeks ago and they sold me bifocals, or as they’re called, progressive lenses. Whatever.

Fall is officially here, with weather in the forty to sixty degree range. The first day of fall the temperature plunged from the mid-eighties down into the forties. I joked that the weather looked at it’s calendar, said “it’s fall y’all”, and cranked down the thermostat.

I’ve started meditating first thing in the morning again. I’m not quite sure why I stopped, although if I’m being honest with myself it’s probably due to cannabis. So for the last month, month and a half I’ve just been getting up and getting straight to work. I’m trying to get back to my practice. So here I am.

I finally tore down my mining rig and disposed of it, I gave it to my friend Ed. The equipment is still good but it wasn’t worth my time to try and sell it off. GPU prices crashed — rather returned to normal — because of the ETH merge to PoS. So the rig is gone, and I finally repurposed my Alienware laptop. It never really ran Ubuntu really well, and I moved the last of my scripts off of it, wiped it, and put Win10 back on it. It’s going to replace Missus’s current desktop.

I ordered a new build gaming PC yesterday. The one I have currently is holding up well, but I’ve got a 3070 in it and the CPU and memory are the bottleneck now, so I built a modest rig (sans GPU) for under $1100. It should be here tomorrow. So I’ll be shuffling them all down the line. My current one will go to the girls, and that one will get donated or something. I don’t even know how old that last one is. I think I’ve had it at least ten years or more.

The family and I are in a really good spot right now, I’m making more money than I know what to do with. I’m buying about three grand of crypto a month, doubled my rent payments into the house fund, am tucking another four grand a month for auto and home, and still paying off the CC bill every month. And then this weekend I found that I had an extra $500 in my paycheck. Apparently I hit some Social Security maximum, so I’ll be getting an extra three grand before the end of the year.

So yea, money has been burning a hole in my pocket. So far I’ve been able to keep myself from doing anything quite so stupid with my cash, like buying a sport car or motorcycle. I have gone kind of crazy with groceries and some small subscriptions for things, but besides windows for the house, I haven’t made any large purchases.

We are going to Costa Rica for Christmas. We had flight vouchers for the Hawaii trip that we needed to use, so we went ahead and booked a trip. We’ll be staying at an all-inclusive, and even that isn’t costing us that much because of travel miles.

So yesterday’s “flood” was anticlimactic. Ian, or what was left of it, turned, sparing us from any threat. This was after I went into full fledged daddy-bear mode, and wound up trying to prepare for the worst while my wife looked on bemusedly. D. wound up buying sandbags and a load of sand, so I helped him, even though he lives several houses further away from the river than us. I figured if he was going to need them then we were going to be hit very bad, but I gave him a hand anyways, filling bags to put in front of his garage doors. He even went back out and got a second load of sand so that we could put them down in front of mine. They were totally unnecessary.

So now I’m the proud owner of about thirty-odd sandbags, still laying in front of the garage. I’ll probably stack them up inside the garage somewhere — I’m sure it’s just a matter of time before I’ll need them again.

I wasn’t able to do any work yesterday with the girls and D.’s kids stuck in the house all day. They weren’t too bad, but even on their best days I’m unable to concentrate on anything important, so I had to cancel my meetings for the start of the sprint. So that’s first on today’s agenda.

The last 426 event was a smash success. Our DAO update went off without much trouble, the team had prepped things well and we ran into a few wet paint issues that we quickly took care of. In all, we had almost one million dollars of ATLAS locked up within twenty-four hours of launch. I spent the last week working on some data analysis; the team knew what they had to do so I didn’t have to spent much time with my PM hat on, but I did want to have some basic metrics in place. I used Flipside Crypto’s SQL index of Solana transactions to pull data into a Colab notebook where I could manipulate it with Pandas. It was fun, and I’d like to do more with it, but I think I’ll be tied up with other tasks this week.

So the remnants of Hurricane Ian have stalled off the coast, causing Nor’easter conditions. We’re expecting an afternoon storm surge five foot above sea level, which may be enough to flood the entire foundation of the house. I expect the backyard shed and front garage to flood, so I’ve got some work to do the next six hours.

D. has already picked up some sand and bags and is trying to protect his garage. He’s much further down the street that we are, so if he’s flooding we are definitely fucked. I think we stand a much better chance of moving our stuff around, his garage is packed full of stuff. I’m going to go help him load up his bags, then I’ll try to front run the flooding to keep any chemicals or tools from getting ruined.

Missus seems somewhat nonchalant about the situation, which is surprising as she’s usually the anxious one. Who knows, maybe it’ll all be for naught, but it does go to some higher-level anxiety that I’ve had since we bought this house. It’s going to flood at some point, the question is when. I’ve been a bit crazed lately over the global macroeconomic situation, mainly with interest rates in the US. Who knew that the baller thing to do in 2021 was lock in a two percent mortgage?

Part of me has long been anxious that we would never be able to sell this house. It already had minor flood damage before we bought it, and I just anticipate having a hard time trying to sell it after we’ve scored a direct hit from a real storm. That unease has been further exacerbated by the fact that the housing market has cooled down now that rates are at seven percent or whatever.

I’m going to try and clean up the garage and get a couple more things out of the shed. If the garage floods I will have a big mess to clean up, so I’m going to try and get things off the floor as much as possible.

I’m not concerned with personal health, we’re not in danger. We’ve got plenty of emergency supplies and non-perishable food. We’ll be fine. I just don’t want to have to spend days or weeks cleaning up the mess and throwing out ruined construction materials or whatever junk I’ve got laying around. And the last thing I want is to have to deal with FEMA flood insurance. That would be the real disaster.

I’ve been playing with my new hobby: generative AI art.

First attempt with Deformer. pic.twitter.com/Le9qAy8CzH

— BCM – The Blockchain Man (@dahifi) September 11, 2022

I’m sure I’ll have more to say about this in the coming weeks; I’m going to be doing a deep dive into the machine learning models and applications over the next week or so. I don’t think most people really understand these natural language prompt systems are going to have on us over the next months and years. Artists understand, yes, some of them, but tools like DALL-e, Stable Diffusion, Midjourney, and GPT have gotten much better over the last year or two, and they’re quality — but not tooling — have reached commercial and production quality.

Some of these models have already been put into use for video upscaling. Think VHS to 4k conversions, for example. And some of the things being done with virtual humans… zoinks.

There’s a lot of music generation going on that’s just scary. There are many companies out there offering song generation on demand. I’ve got several bookmarked that allow you varying levels of customization parameters to prompt your own house music track, for example. I’ll be combining one of those with the SD video I rendered last night.

The use of these models for brainstorming is immense, and overwhelming. I was working on a new song last week when I started messing around with these audio platforms.

It almost makes artistry obsolete. Coming up with ideas is trivial now, just push the button and you’ve got something unique. Using it as a starting point and mixing in various prompted results in manual and automated ways is going to be an artform of its own in a decade, maybe next year.

Today’s Friday, and I’m feeling better today. I forced myself to bed last night even though I wasn’t feeling drowsy, and tossed and turned until after one, brain giving me todos and thinking about work. One very critical thing did pop to my mind that warranted a reminder for this morning: funds in an untouched IRA wallet that should be awaiting me, salvage from the Perpetual Protocol v1 crash. Could be tens of thousands of USDC that I should have put into BTC as I did with the salvage from my regular account.

I’ve been attempting to buy an entire bitcoin the past few weeks, since the bottom dropped out of the market I’ve been aggressively throwing setting stinkbid limit orders up on FTX. I still have them, all the way down to 18k, but I doubt we’ll be seeing that price action anytime soon. Every time we run up I set more orders, 22050, 23050, and so on, trying to catch any dips. I’ve still got cash orders, and am more than halfway to my goal.

I find I don’t have the energy to keep up with everything as I did before. I’m sure not as active as I was during the last bull, aping into anything and everything. I’m not even interested in what’s going on outside of the ETH merge and SOL development. There’s just too much to worry about, and Star Atlas has enough going on there to keep me busy.

Speaking of work, I’m trying to step up my PM game. The ATLAS locker is almost out of my hands at this point, so I’m turning my attention to the proposals system and everything that encompases. Since we’re not under any pressure to deliver that, I’ve got a bit of room to sit back and think about the overall product pipeline, and flesh out my process. We mainly work out of two apps, Notion and ClickUp. Rather, I should say that the engineers work out of Clickup, but it seems that RevOps and most of the game development planning goes into Notion. Sometimes it feels like my job is literally copying and pasting from one to the other, but that’s not quite the full story.

I had lots of ideas last night that I need to add to my various backlogs. Plus I plan on cooking hibachi for the neighbors, since they fed the girls earlier this week. I got pounds of chicken, shrimp, and steak, and bought everything to make yum yum sauce and fried rice. Thankfully I only have one meeting today.