Building without building

I just spent 48 hours building a new site using a new process (detailed a bit below): you-are-here.space.

The motivations:

  1. I’ve always loved the Show HN projects that people built on a whim over a weekend. So it’s been a bucket list item for me, but I had no muse yet…

  2. I was watching NOVA a few nights ago and learned about how Saturn pulled Jupiter away from the inner solar system. The thought has been brewing in me for a while on just how many things conspired to have everything work out for us to be here. So I was thankful to Saturn…and then on a whim, late at night, I typed this in ChatGPT:

And my muse had arrived. In a blind fury of asking for refinements in a brute force way, I ended up with YOU ARE HERE. I also added my longest domain to this project, so it’s available here as well: A Huge Ever Growing Pulsating Brain That Rules From The Centre Of The Ultraworld.

Details so far:

  1. New process: EVERYTHING* done by ChatGPT, with me as art/tech/project director, in a back-and-forth working session. *There was one manual adjustment: a dark mode class that no matter what I did for 1.5 hours - more time than I would spend outside of the goal of 100% ChatGPT created - I couldn’t get it to find/see/fix.

  2. Static HTML, CSS, and JS (though working still on a no-JS path for those that prefer that lifestyle)

  3. Tailwind CSS

  4. Not using any framework - just HTML, CSS, JS, and JSON that get compiled with a simple build process

  5. Hosted on Cloudflare Pages

  6. Installable as a PWA

  7. Dark mode - cuz space is dark, duh

  8. Languages - 100% ChatGPT generated with no human reviews (and I don’t read Chinese or scientific Spanish). I take no credit and no blame. :)

  9. Uses local storage to save your dark mode and language toggles

  10. Progress bar is to scale - at least to some degree - so it’s not steps but the distance between time

  11. Does well on Lighthouse:

Here’s the list of things to come as this is not close to being done:

  1. Fix the 404s on the links - ChatGPT is bad at this, but I’m working to get it to go one-by-one to fix.
  2. Adjust the layout to make a bit more sense
  3. Add some icons
  4. Easter eggs planned (there are a few navigation ones already, but more fun stuff coming)
  5. If demand is high, open-source it so it can become a resource to show the latest
  6. Flag any ’events’ that are widely disputed (not conspiracy crap, just legit, it’s our best guess, but we don’t really know stuff)
  7. More about the project - probably just a link to this post
  8. Post on Show HN of course!
  9. Get some real input from scientists that actually study each area
  10. Add granularity adjustment so you can have 10 major steps with well-established facts or 100 little steps with maybe some bleeding edge science (and icons labeling it as such)
  11. Make it more clear that this is all to show exactly how special you are (and to be honest, how special a fly in your soup really is!).

Stay tuned, Earthling!

PS - music consumed during this project and h/t to my friend Shaun (an ever-dependable source of good choons) for the share:

====== fin ======

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My working setup

Updated June, 2024

Here’s how I currently do my work, both personal and professional.

  • iPad
  • Mac
    • Terminal with Oh-my-zsh for terminal-ly good looks (and shortcuts)
    • Doom Emacs - I wrote about doom emacs for blogging
    • Roon - Can’t work without music!
    • Visual Studio - replaced TextMate and SublimeText and haven’t looked back; strange for me to say that for a Microsoft product (different than say GitHub, which was an acquisition)
    • 1Password - long-time user
    • Trello - Despite the Atlassian acquisition, this is still my go-to for just a general purpose throw it up and track it. Using the Assista bot for time tracking on tickets I drag into the Doing list - it helps a lot with billable work, but also helps me track where my play time goes.
    • yt-dlp - it’s a secret
    • CyberDuck - connect to anything for remote file access/management
    • Homebrew - I see no reason to leave this hardy package manager - it’s just worked under brutal conditions for years and years.
  • Home network
    • Fiber, it’s the only way to fly
    • Unifi network throughout house; wired (by hand, blood, dust, cobwebs, and pink spackle) and wireless
    • Pi-hole - remove all the craptasic stuff out there, network-wide
    • Tailscale - take my networks with me securely (recent addition so lots to learn)
  • SaaS
    • Cloudflare - it’s the only online service that I don’t have a fear of recommending. Yes, there might be some issues from the centralization of the decentralized web, but right now, that’s not a critical path issue.
    • Hugo - The most performant, flexible, and joyous web development platform. This site and my LLC and Synth company are built with it.

K-2SO copying data from another droid

I just re-watched Rogue One the other day…and besides loving K-2SO (and Alan Tudyk), I noticed something new. When K-2SO is acquiring data from another similar model, the data sync is shown by the eyes blinking a pattern in unison to “communicate” to the audience that one is being copied to the other.

Check it out for yourself:

Pretty cool, huh?

Let's build an iOS app

Ok. It’s time for Creatabu to launch an iOS app and we’re trying to figure out the best path considering we’re a team of two and only have one developer, yours truly, who is not familiar with Objective-C the language you use to build native iOS apps.

So…we’re in a pickle…and this isn’t the first time:

^ We’re like, really into pickles. Our 2014 Burning Man Camp – What Would You Do For A Pickle – shout out to the pickles!