I think that PID hits a certain sweet spot between cleverness, ease of implementation and practical utility that makes it catnip for the typical programmer's mind.

I liked it so much that when we had to implement it, I downloaded an open source driving simulator to see it work there instead of the simpler python environment we were using.

But to be honest many that might catch out a native speaker are just the Spanish/French/Latin word, so it was too easy in a way.

And without really changing anything about what I am actually doing, I now feel much better about it, because these are the right things to be doing now and anguishing about the ones that I can't get to is just sabotaging myself for no gain. It looks so simple now...

I still have a lot to digest, but having read thousands of books in my life, including dozens of self-help and productivity manuals, these have felt instantly life-changing.

Again thank you.

But there are still so many I can actually do that the opportunity cost of choosing any single one of them is infinite, and that leads to paralysis at worst and diluting your self while half-assing dozens of things at best.

Maybe one of them pays the bills, and even a nice house and a decent car. But it's just that, it is not what you really wanted to do, so you keep searching.

The "gift" of being a fast learner becomes a curse. In a few weeks you are an advanced beginner at almost anything. People marvel at how well you are doing, but you know you have just started and can now see how far you are from being any good. But to become good, you'd have to leave behind all the other things, and you can't pick. So you just start a new one for the quick dopamine hits and easy praise...

And then you are 50 and still don't know what you will do when you grow up.

Simracing trainer.

I love simracing, I'm moderately competitive and want to improve, and I like to be efficient with my practice. So having access to and using a lot of telemetry, I noticed that the "turn a few laps, load telemetry, compare against reference lap, try again" is not as efficient as it could be.

Also a lot of my telemetry analysis is very rote and "rules based": Look at the biggest laptime delta jump against reference, try to determine the cause among a few usual suspects".

So I have started experimenting with a system that reads the iRacing telemetry in real time, and compares against the reference telemetry live, finding the biggest delta jumps, and trying to find the root cause of the time loss using an increasingly sophisticated GOFAI rule and pattern matching system. Then this report is fed to a cheap LLM call to be condensed into clear advice, and the result goes to the free Microsoft TTS API. So I get instant feedback of where I'm slow and maybe even why.

So far I fear it's mostly making me faster from all the test laps involved more than the advice itself, but when it clicks it does feel magical and really help.

But sometimes I feel like I'm just speedrunning the collapse of 70s AI, as it feels a bit too brittle and situational.

I also have added additional tools for tracking improvement across sessions, finding statistically problematic corners (where am I plain bad?, where am I inconsistent?) or even training my muscle memory by tracing fast driver brake traces using my pedal.

Yay compiler: The other ongoing thing is a clean room reimplementation of Jon Blow's Jai. I've been curious about the language for years, but it's a closed beta and for some reason I've never felt about asking Jon to get into it. I'm not really a game dev so I wouldn't even know what to put in the request.

So now I have 100k+ lines of Rust that can compile a very significant subset of the publicly available Jai source code. I just used various LLMs to condense the public information about the language and come up with a dev plan and started chipping at it. Once I had something in a kind of working state I started with the Way to Jai big tutorial and make sure every example there compiles and works as intended, fixing errors or missing features one by one.

I mostly use Claude Code or Codex, but sometimes what I do is having them guide me into the new feature and doing the edits myself while they explain, so I get to know how things really work under the hood.

It's a silly pointless project, but for some reason I find very satisfying watching it compile the examples.

So comfortable that lately I have declined offers for interesting and much much better paid work, because I can no longer be bothered to take any risks or alter my lifestyle.

But sometimes I wish I could have been the guy managing to get 10k MMR using knowledge I've got in spades.

But 10k MRR sounds to me like travelling to Mars. I have 0 ideas and 0 initiative to push them ahead.

What I do very successfully is low stakes stuff for work (easy automations, small QoL improvements for our tooling, a drive-by small Jira plugin)

And then I do a lot of crazy exploring, or hyper-personal just for myself stuff that can only exist because I can now spawn and abandon it in a couple days instead of weeks or months.

The features of both are quite orthogonal. Cairn is a general purpose language with features that help in writing probably working code. Mog is more like "let's constraint our features so bad code can't do much but trade that for good agent ergonomy".

Cairn is a crazy sprawling idea, Mog is a little attempt at something limited but practical.

Mog seems like something someone has thought about. No one has thought about Cairn, it's pure LLM hallucination, the fact that it exists and can do a lot of stuff it's just the result of someone (me) not knowing when a joke has gone too far.

So now I prompted this: "can you generate a fizzbuzz implementation in Cairn that showcases as much as possible the TEST/PROVE/VERIFY characteristics of the language? "

Producing this (working) monstrosity (can't paste here, it's 200+ lines of crazy): https://gist.github.com/cairnlang/a7589de126b14e50a53b9bdc28...

Also you decide how much in control you are. Want to provide a hand made grammar? go ahead, want the agent to come up with it just from chatting and pointing it to other languages, ok too. Want to program just the first arithmetic operator yourself and then save the tedium of typing all the others so you can go to the next step? fine...

So you can have a huge toy language in mere days and experiment with stuff you'd have to build for months by hand to be able to play with.