Foreword

Note: Dates are in DD/MM/YEAR format.

The aim behind this is to keep a general account of my career in hopes to inspire people who stumble across this. It’s a bit of a mess, but hopefully you can find some use out of it! I also would like to look back at this later down my career and be proud of myself for all the hard work I put in.

I’m a practical hands-on-programmer. I learn things when I need it to write code/make it better. I tend to build simple systems first, while keeping in mind where I should add dynamic data structures, and iterate over that rather than dwelling on future proofing everything.

I spend almost everyday building projects I’m interested in. I love to build programs from scratch because it’s a blank canvas, allowing you to express your creativity by bringing architecture from your mind to life. I find it therapeutically fun. I tend to work on multiple things at once because I get inspired while building and want to capture the idea(s) as they arise.

Update: 06/08/2024

I hope this can inspire you no matter what period you are in your life. I have experienced death too many times w/ people I care deeply about where they have no record of their lives. Everyone is interesting in their own way. I hope you find my life in, even if in the slightest, interesting. May your ambitions change the world of others and yourself. All the advice I have for you is don’t limit yourself, be open and make sure to discover the true power and meaning of things. We tend to nievely overlook things over being egolessly curious. Curiousity will take you further than ambition or natural talent ever will.

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2024

18/11 - Gradient Descent!

• Learned that gamma and alpha are the steps sizes in gradient descent and that nabla is how a vector of partial derivatives are held for mutli-variate gradient descent. TLDR; learned gradient descent at the mathematical level! LFGGG. Actually I was thinking how to do it without looking it up and really its quite intuitive tbh. If you understand derivatives quite well then this seems quite obvious with the tangents. I had a few ideas in a past article on fog-of-war splices and concating them to form a mental model. I
• Looked more into adaptive markov chains and their ability to self-tune. Discovered semi-hidden markov chains, need to look into them tmw. Went deeper into splices (super useful i think) and thought about arc-length linearisation to linearise the curvature (not sure on application but at least im being creative). I learned about monte carlo simulations too and how the law of large numbers works with it! I feel like im unlocking so much understanding each day high level. Soon the technical will follow. I feel guilty for not doing technical but i think just being curious long enough i will naturally lead there. The goal is to learn math everyday no matter how i do it so i think im on the right track, despite feeling guilty and anxious about it. we’ll see but i have a lot of faith because i did the same with crypto.
• Still fine-tuning my routine. Bought a physical pomodorro clock because my phone clock has too much friction and digital clocks are really bad for urgency tbh. Perfected my stew recipe and wrote it all down, preparing my routine article for release but im still experimenting. I did visualisaton this morning and forgave myself and have been feeling really calm and blessed today, more than usual — noticeable. I still have extreme faith my podcast is going to be the best in the world for diverse mathematical talks within a year.
• Learned about Edward Thorp and that he’s still alive at 92! Emailed him to see if I can do a podcast with him. Oh and Terry Tao replied the same day after I emailed but he was busy D:
• Feeling a lot more confident in my math abilities, seems like I’m learning quite well. Did a bit of math academy today but ultimately im still learning breadth first search and have extreme curiousity so im taking advantage of that! I’m playing the long game here — I want to be a great mathematician in a few decades. I think mathematics is the end game for me tbh and then use it to do bio and chemistry. But ultimately math is where ill always be imo.
• Ive gotten used to the CPAP and holy shit has it skyrocketed my sleep quality. Im consistently landing 88-95 overall sleep rating on my ultrahuman, even w/ 7hrs sleep, relative to my old 78-80 on average without it. Nuts! Amazing investment tbh.

17/11 - Active Avoidance

• I’ve settled into my apartment, have my desk and basically everything needed to live my ideal every day life. However I have this (common) problem of doing everything but starting. Let me break it down: Every day I feel extremely tired only 2 hours after waking up and doing my main chores (working out, meditation, cleaning, etc). It happens when I know I should be doing something but don’t do it. It must be because my brain is fighting itself with this war of “do it” vs the other side trying to hold me back to “not do it”, therefore a lot of mental resources are allocated to this internal war. This complex interplay of anxiety, perfectionism, and procrastination, takes an enormous mental and physical toll. When I sit at my desk I actively do everything but click on the Math Academy pinned tab and do math. I must have a fear of failure or perfectionism tied with anxiety. The perfectionism standards I assign to myself cause my mind to procrastinate as a way to cope with the anxiety surrounding the imperfection / failure bc by avoiding doing it I theoretically should be getting a short-lived relief, which leads to more anxiety and guilt… It’s so weird because this tiny action of clicking the pinned tab, clicking on a lesson and doing then doing it is extremely easy and cannot be broken down further. It’s not so much the task itself but more my thoughts associated with the task. I have like 15 half written articles because I can’t muster up the energy to finish any of them. The only consistent thing I’ve been able to do work wise is [wake up at same time, jumprope for 30 mins, eat healthy] and be curious about math but not do math academy. I’ve been tring to understand everything to do with derivatives and more recently complex numbers and imaginary numbers but I don’t do any quesions. However I have a really good understanding of them and could explain it to anyone simply. So my solution (which I did before writing this) was to reach out to an ADHD specialist to get some confirmation that I’m not just a brain-rot victim and that I can actually harness this “disorder” since I do get very hyperfocused while I’m doing things but starting is very difficult (at least for perceived difficult things. Games were much easier bc I was good at them, low barrier to start which would lead to being highly fixated on performing well with a lot of creative output). TLDR; going to talk to a professional about ADHD because im always exhausted bc of my brain fighting to do and not do something which makes this stalement internal war and everyones a casualty. It is like my brain treats everything as all or nothing which is probably the reason for my fast success, but then i get these periods of nothingness where I crawl myself back to the hyperfixated state. It just so happens i do more good periods then bad which results in the progress.
• Stumbled across my old high school best friend from 8 years ago who shaped my teens and really my personality quite a bit — especially music wise. He was very receptive when we saw eachother and it was like a mini reunion. We plan to do a proper one soon which is quite exciting.
• I feel like I kind of wasted this month because no math academy and I saw someone finish foundaitons 1, 2, 3 and ML4M in 4 months 0.o which is phenominal progress. Once I get a hold on this starting problem I should be able to fixate on it like how I was doing at my grandparents spot. The problem has been creating a schedule I can stick to because the timezone has kind of fucked me now that I’m getting a shit load of new mathematical guests (which I thoroughly enjoy) that unlock unknown unkowns and therefore must prioritize over my schedule. So I haven’t been able to stick to a single routine where I do math academy for 4hrs in the morning after my 2hr routine. It’s more like a flexible block-sectioned routine where I can move parts around. But I really thrive off hardcore routines and the podcast just doesn’t allow it unless I wake up at 4am which is hard because the sun is still up when i go to bed and would basically remove any night life activities from my life, including speaking to friends that live across the world.
• Been talking to a lot of professors and mathematicians for my podcast. Stochastic calculus is my main goal atm. I’ll get there, but slowly. I just need to make a bulletproof schedule and somehow fix my ADHD-like issues of starting specifically math. Everything else “hard” I can easily start and finish with ease.

11/11 - Fractals!

• Adjusted my schedule
• Learning about Julia sets and the Mandelbrot set. Led me to understanding the difference between imaginary (different axis (y) from real numbers (x)) and complex numbers (real + imaginary).

10/11 - Understanding Common Notation

• Learned in depth about mean, variance, variance schedule, covariance, mean squared error, X vs x, subscript meaning, e.g., X_{1:T} and how they can be viewed as a column vector, latent variables, normalizing vairance. Cleared up my understanding of and and or logical operatiors and iff/implications. Also cleared up that inequalities mean that since it’s not equal its either >, < or =>.
• The past two days I’ve been quite curious about stochastic processes. Markov chains + hidden markov chains. Probability derivatives I find are super fascinating and how they can be used to analyse sensitivity.
• Found out my AI thing is already a domain called Alpha Generation and is an everything problem which makes it extremely hard, but honestly idrc and now I have more references to study and get inspiration from!
• Been kind of wasting days it feels. I still dont have my desk -.- its comes in 2 days. Hopefully then i can dedicate a spot to locking in instead of getting distracted at my sink.
• My goals for this week is to understand the proof of quotient rule, chain rule, and all the types of things that can be derived (trig fns, exponents, logs, etc). Then i will do the proofs for partial derivatives and move onto integrals. Maybe dabble in gradient descent and then move onto stochastic calc.
• got a job offer from MakerDAO (now rebranded). This would of been wild back in the day but now I’m like meh because my identity is now math. Quite sick though!

08/11 - Donald + Stochastic Calc!

• Met a bunch of people, such as James Shakarji and Nicholas Spizzirri, who confirmed my theory of learning proofs of derivatives and everything else is the best way to deeply understand. Also James introduced me to stochastic calc deeply as well mentioning it’s exactly what I need for my mutation algos. So been on this deep dive of Itos Calc, Investment theory, regret theory, Markov Chains, joint probabilities, etc. I realised that evolutionary algos are highly correlated with economics and quant-like math so ig by nature I’ll become a quant lol.
• Haven’t been doing math academy at all bc i figured since im really into wanting to do the proofs that I should do them before i do the derivatives and integrals by brute forcing and slowly picking it up on the way but instead truly understand how to interact with them, like algebra and reciprocals, and then do the questions otherwise its just mindless rote learning where my goal is to be creative and understand eerything fully to manipulate everything down the line when i reach the edge of my field.
• Invested in a $1k USD bed bc all the others were destroying my back. I think it’s worth but we’ll see. Better to get it the early days of my 2 year lease, yk.
• Got a lot of professors and math people on the podcast. Super exiciting times. I thought it would take a lot longer for me to start talking to math people but ig not!
• Trying to invest in my brands a lot more so hired a logo designer for my podcast and a ui/ux designer to restyle my website since these two things are really how im even in the position i am right now.
• I think ive been quite stressed lately bc of the new house and ordering furniture that is shitting then needing to return it. Im still transitioning i think but tbf its been like a week and 2 days since i moved. im trying to get in a routine but all my orders require me to be home and my podcasts scatter my routine. But i need to continue having this scattered routine bc I cant limit people on the times they talk to me when im the one that wants them so i have to sacrifice my schedule for it.
• Im quite confident in my long term prospects regarding mastering fluency of math but atm it is quite difficult bc deeply understanding is a very slow process and i need to juggle not burning out aka resting to destress with perpetually learning. I get my daylight computer in dec so that might be really good. Also turns out im using 20% of the average single household electricity usage. Pretty good i think
• Maintaining network and manually outreaching to uni math departments and actively cold DMing math postgrads and professors is extremely time demanding work. I need to create a way to automate it with ML asap for my first project.
• Also australia is trying to get this bill that basically puts a KYC onto accessing any social media. Essentially trying to become totalitarian. I think Australia needs a Trump tbh. This isn’t a good thing to happen here and I’ve always hated this government rule and want Aus to succeed. I feel patriotic but also not at the same time bc of the gov. But I have faith that I can help push Aus towards being a powerful country via my self-mutating AI pursuit. But we’ll see. Kind of sad to see your country “fall” like this.

03/11 - Library Arc Begins

• Spoke to the founder + ceo of Math Academy for 4hrs! Absolutey insane. Longest podcast I’ve recorded, it was 3hrs! I have a bunch of math people lined up for this month so I’m very excited!
• Was getting hammered by basic conditional probabilities in Math Academy so I decided to do my own research on the intuition behind the formula and everything about it and so I wrote a couple paragraphs explaining to myself in extreme detail everything about it and even got to Bayes Theorem accidentally. Then I realised “how, probability is actually super fascinating”. And then I relistend to my own podcast about stats and prob with Noah 3 times lmao. Tomorrow I aim to write everything about derivates and integrals bc my intuition of why a fraction becomes a log just doesn’t exist. I do the rigor but have no idea about the intuition!
• I also wrote everything to do with the common set theory notation so I don’t have any gaps when reading math. Still trying to understand the arrows a bit more but overall I get the main things.
• Tried to do math academy today after like 1-2 weeks because of the move and man I’ve forgotten so much of the new stuff! But it’s okay though because im back on the grind. A lot slower than just spamming it bc I want to know the underlying intuition of how it even came to be and why things are true, which I hope will pay itself more in the long run than just spamming questions. I think understanding is more important because you can then form the rigor from the deep understanding and its more generalised. Its like throwing around a weight relative to knowing how to squeeze the muscle and the anatomy of the body to actually do the exercise effectively.
• I realised I hate my sink bc the water pressure is so damn high so it splashes everywhere. Also kind of lonely in Melbourne. Didn’t really have any friends before I left and still have none while I’m here, lol. I did sign up for 2 meetup.com smol meet ups. 1 was high dimensional statistics lecture and the other was a casual get together. Hopefully something comes from it. Would be nice to make frens. I think the library will eventually have people walk up to me but in reality it’s a hopeful dream. Someone may see me do math or think I look attractive and idk. More time spent there the more likely, ig. Especially since it’s the environment where I’d assume the people I want to meet usually go. I have been having regular blood noses, even twice in a single day. Maybe it’s because I’m eating raw ginger every morning which is a blood thinner. But still? Am I dying?
• Also got told a friend had a podcast say they charge $8k USD per episode for sponsorship. Like wtf? Can I be making this much money when I get entertaining and big enough?! Sure looks like it…My sponsorships were like $25k USD per 24 episodes where I make 96 episodes per year.

01/11 - Hometown Return; 2 Year Lease!

• After waiting for my plane for 12 hours (and finishing attack on titan, ps really great!) and then another 3hrs after landing I finall moved into my new apartment on the 29/10/24. It’s everything I wantd in an apartment and I remember thinking years ago I’ve always wanted something like this. I think I’ll do some really great things and make a lot of progress here. I decided to initialise the house with everything ASAP including very good amber lighting for night time. Turns out it helps ALOT for being creative. Installed my first fridge (not that hard) and washing machine (also not that hard, just hook up the limp pipes).
• Have been exploring fractal geometry, measure theory, and topology. Had some ideas about proximity positional probabilities in regards to topological spaces and this came from watching some microscope videos from microcosmos. Some lil creature was eating another one and i was like “how does it know to go towards that thing and try to eat it? its sensors must be so small?” and then I thought about everything around it must information and certain sections around its body have a higher heat radiation or something that directs it to go towards, therefore not needing eyes or anything and when it eats it it just randomly walks until the slighest heat appears in proximity and thats what directs it, until death. Thought about electrochem-substrate based spatial computing too.
• Taken a break from math academy while i wait for all my orders to arrive bc i have to be present and therefore cannot go to the library and I want the library to be where I associated locking in with. Also I just dont have my table and am not mentally ready to start w/ commitment so been using the time for creative exploratory work instead. MA should be releasing a machine learning part 1 course by the time im done with everything else (vec calc, prob, LA) so really the path is super clear (and honestly very coincidentally perfect when I quit my job). Fully confident. I’m completely emerged in math (i really love it!). I feel like it was the thing that unlocks all my curiousity to it maximum abilities (e.g. being able to execute). It’s like having the idea and coding abilities BUT now it adds the explainatory abilities, also coding with ML but you get the point.
• Spoke to my first uni professor on my podcast (ep #114) about Topology Machine Learning and Topological Data Analysis (I was actually very nervous about it but turns out it was SUPER enjoyable and not scary at all!). Cold DMed like 20 professors and math people, surprisingly got a few responses and follows. Very exciting to see that its working as predicted and I have full confidence I’ll make a great network here.
• Been thinking about what to prio recently and came to the conclusion that I need to focus on understanding derivative proofs, i.e., why does an exponent’s derivative become a logarithm, and understanding set theory completely, e.g. ”|” and ”:” are interchangable and represent “such as” and/or “where”. Did some reflecting and realised that I’ve learned a lot about set theory. A year ago i was in an uber in dubai trying to read topology and it had intersection, subset etc as notation and i was dead lost. Now I confidently understand it quickly when reading. Smol progress but really big in the grand scheme of things, idk. Feeling good.
• Im viewing my apartment 2 year lease as a 1 time payment so i dont get anxious about 750$ a week rent and can just focus on existing bc if i think short scale then ill feel guilty for taking essential rest for my mental state.
• It’s a friday night, am im right next to bars and clubs but I just want to learn more math. Waiting for my DayLight computer tablet so i can start smashing out reading sessions without destroying my circadian rythem with the bluelight from my laptop. Should be here EoY/during Dec.
• Got a lot of frens in my network that are saying theyve got availablity for me to join/work when I get my skills up and am ready. Really great knowing I have frens to fall back on and pursue my math journey with! Really excited for the future. A lot of work but I have an obsession with it now. And it’ll furiously grow the better I become. Yk, hitting that escape velocity that pushes you past the threshold to then go parabolic with learning. For me, it’s the ability to read math like english and understand it, at least to the point of knowing what to do to solve the problem. I have so many ideas rn but insufficient math skills to model them and flesh them out D:
• Good fren of mine finally committed to leaving her job as top lawyer to fufil her dream of starting a business and new career. Glad I played a big role in that decision! She’ll do great things, im sure.
• Started to work out again consistently with my ropeless jump rope 30 min per day. Got to start my meditation grind too. But trying to figure out the best sleep schedule here to account for 1) library grind and 2) networking with frens bc the shitty timezone dif. Im thinking around 8am, 9am or 10am wake up but still trying to figure it out bc lib opens 10:00-17:00 but frens usually awake during 20:00-02:00

26/10 - Vivid Dream Communication

• Just binged seasons 1 through 3 of Attack On Titan. God damn what a waste of time. Really good anime but still, damn. Didn’t do any math today. That was the first time in 2-3 weeks.
• Only two more sleeps until I start my new life and we play life on hardcore NG+ mode. It’ll be do or die in my mind in 2 days. I’m trying to mentally prepare by setting up the perfect routine, but maybe its just an excuse I’m saying to myself for slacking off…or maybe i really do need a rest. idk. life is hard and thats just it. i cant quit otherwise id go back to a life id dispise.
• did a math podcast with my first ever professor! he teaches topological ML and I learned a lot today about topological data analysis and topological ML. I think i’ll definintely pursue these fields in the near future in conjunction with signal processing and information theory. I was asking questions about partial mutation in the objects and continous data streaming and he mentioned there are little or no experiments so it boosts my motivation much higher. it seems there arent many experiments at all to do with what i want to do…i believe so deeply that i will achieve my goal of building self mutating ai and it will be groundbreaking. and based off that undying belief I really will achieve it. especially how im learning about so many things.
• had a really vivid nightmare on the 24th that represented my anxiety manifesting into a bear like person in between the doorway across the corridor and a fly-door locked with sun beaming through it. i asked perplexity to analyse it and it symbolised my life perfectly. what was even more wild was that i was reading “Inner Work” and how to communicate with the unconscious mind. this was an absolutely perfect communication the night of the reading. i wonder what else lies in the depths of my mind and what life will be like when i learn to harness it. in the mean time, watching shows and distracting myself from the realities of life, rotting my brain and ambitions, is stopping. no more distractions from anime and random shit. life is so much more exciting than these pitiful consumer products. melbourne arc is going to be life changing for me, i guarentee it.
• about to upload my #114th episode of my podcast Scraping Bits. i think im on to something truly great with it, especially as I get better at math. i can feel that it will be a cornerstone podcast for the math x AI world. the leading one by a long shot bc ill speak about math in simple terms and will inspire so many people. just as i did for crypto, ill do for math and ai.

23/10 - CPAP + Soon Melb

• Bought a CPAP machine bc after a week of trialing it reduces my apneas by 50% minimum, relative to the best recorded sleep I’ve had so I’d imagine it would be helping a shit ton more with my average sleep. And better sleep means better life and deeper sleep, impacting neurogenesis, aka learning.
• Binged Berserk, Cowboy Bebop, Ghost In A Shell, Jujitsu Kaisen, and Solo Leveling. Noticed that my big ambitions and dreams vanished during this time. Super weird.
• Preparing to move to Melbourne on the 28th. Bought a fridge and washing machine. Bit stressful moving again but should be fine.

19/10 - MA Foundations II

• WE FINISHED FKN MATH ACADEMY FOUNDATIONS 2 BITCHES @21:02 19/10/24! I projected to finish it by 01/11/24 but I somehow finished 11 days before… I learned so much from this its unbelievable the efficency the platform has. I can’t wait to see how much I learn from Foundations 2, ML and the uni courses…I aim to finish foundations 3 by the end of year, so 2 months to get it done. But I really hope to finish it by start of Nov.
• Fucked around with a weed whacker bc lawnmower broke. I mention it bc it was my first time using a fuel motor — super cool technology.

16/10 - Negative Thoughts Mindfulness

• I spent 5hrs trying to do math and only got 156 exp on MA. I usually get around 200 exp in 4hrs. I think i tripped up by not playing Binaural Theta 4-8Hz like I usually do. Strange. I feel more agitated and slightly burned out like motivation is falling. Was getting quite mad, yelling at the math and having mental breakdown.
• Going to try and practice 1minute segments of gratitude
• Looking to explore
  • Burn out; perseverance is all feelings based. therefore, analyse my feelings and find out how to switch to positive instead.
  • Focus attention and resisting urges to make 4hr sessions better. Need to optimise time efficiency
• Been having negative thoughts, like “am I burning out?”, which are the byproduct of my brain resisting the physical change from the math, meditation, routine, etc. Thoughts like “am I doing it properly?” or “can I really be consistent with 4hrs of math each day?” are the brains response to try and get me to stop the progress of the physical transformation of the neural circuitry bc it is computationally expensive and should be for good reason aka something that consistently occurs. Therefore, I need to focus on meditating these negative thoughts and feelings away and CONTINUE while resisting the temptations of the brain trickery.
• Started dry fasting at around 14:00.

15/10 - The Bounceback

• Turns out blocking yt, x, instagram, anything that I automatically opened on my laptop was A GAMECHANGER. I was averaging 7hrs on yt + x per day and now i use that time to read. I have learned so f*cking much with books within these almost 2 weeks. Books are the way you exponentially gain in knowledge, force yourself to quit yt, the occasional good yt video doesnt outweigh the doomscrolling time wasting.
  • One of the things I’ve learned is stop eating 5hrs before going to bed and stop using blue screens 3hrs before for OPTIMAL deep sleep for memory consolidation which is very important bc thats how you actually learn and turn it into long term memory.
  • Your brain doesn’t know the difference between physical experience and imaginaton. The more emotion and senses you attach to your imagination the more neurons that will fire together, thus wiring together. You can meditate, go into theta brainwaves, and rehearse the extremely detailed actions + emotions you’ll feel and your brain will build neural circuitry for it, increasing your chances of 1) encountering it and 2) achieving it when you do. So now, I meditate 20 minutes a day and before working 4hrs of math in the morning after my workout and meditation I imagine what my life would be like if i DIDNT do the math.
  • 92% done with Math Foundations 2! Projected to finish all of the courses on MA by end of April! Saw they’re making ML1 and ML2. So hopefully when I finish my current courses I can start these. I do 4hrs of math in full attention in the morning and have done it for past 6 days. Focusing on building the habit instead of the progress made.
  • Started to learn Bayesian statistics via books.
  • CPAP dropped my AHI to like 0.2-1 from 5-15 so seems to be going extremely well.

06/10 - Math Procrastination, Social Media Elimination Experiment

• Still doing 30 minutes of jump rope a day.
• Stared at the white wall for 15 minutes with no music to see whether I have some attention problem. Turns out the wall is pretty interesting. I could see different images and words from the grooves in the paint so really it wasn’t that boring. My mind was empty too, not really having any thoughts and when I did occasionally get one it kind of just vanished after a few seconds.
• For some reason my body impuslively avoids learning math. It’s like something happens that makes my brain go “nope, run away”. I’m trying to fix it…
• Read Deep Work by Newport and The Art Of Science And Engineering by Richard Hamming. Starting to get very curious about biographies about Mathematicians that created new math: after reading Richard Hamming I’m looking to explore Ulam and Gobel. The biggest takeaway from these inventors is that “Luck favors the prepared mind” and really knowledge compounds and from some interviews of Ilya from OpenAI he mentioned his focus on how to “succeed” is from deep understanding, which tends to only arise from iterative experimentation. But for some reason, I seem to find myself over and over again avoiding the hard work of learning math. Is this natural? I have a strong why. So really I have no idea what it is…I wont quit, but I want to find a solution to this. The gym is something I enjoy doing, despite it being “hard”. The physical feedback is enjoyable. How do I get the mental equivalent? Just keep doing a little each day until it works? Idk. You can start a routine with gym where you do x sets of y reps of z exercises and you just incrementally increase the weight. Alternatively you cannot really do that with mental stuff, theres really only do x amount of questions or do it for y time. The difficulty of questions is not as easily recognisable as “monkey brain lift heavy stone and then heavier stone tomorrow”. I think its really a game of just allocate x time each day and if you go out of that window stop, or keep going if you really enjoy it. Since theres no tangable feedback of progress, even if there is, the only solution is just continue each day and eventually it wont feel like work(?). But then how do you start? I think bring up the task, stare at it for 5 minutes and then you’ll most likely try it to get stimulation. Just get yourself to do 2 minutes as earlier in the day as possible so you don’t say “oh I’ll do it in the afternoon” and then it comes around and then you say “ill do it tmw”. Just do a few questions and try to realign your focus when you start avoiding/drifting away. The distraction is what breaks the progress of reaching flow and thus preventing you from making any meaningful progress.
• The social media on phone, blocking all social media (telegram and x) on laptop and throwing phone in the other room is really good for focus. The only distraction is youtube but it helps quite a lot when you use it correctly…However, I think disabling youtube will most likely be the most important bc the distraction outweighs the occasional benefit, at least for now. My dopamine baseline is so high it needs to come down. And since I’m a really good addict, I binge videos and disable my youtube minimal app every god damn time. So, think it’s important to remove it. Everything I watch isn’t important, 95% of the time, and that should really be the only limiting factor. Gonna experiment now by adding it to Cold Turkey and time lock it. “Throw everything away. Whatever keeps you away from what you really want. Untie the knot or cut it off all together.” - Seneca. Removing ALL of my distractions seems to be the only way to recover my dopamine baseline so I’ll timelock the core and try…Anything that is bingable or doomscrollable should be completely erased, despite it’s occasional goodness. It’s too much of a risk, at least for me. And even on the chance that you start, you’ll end up wasting more time negatively than positively, net.

01/10 - Heros Journey Complete

• Began to do Math-based podcasts! I find them so interesting and have acquired a new passion for math podcasts :D No longer does it feel like a drag. I think its bc crypto was always the same shit on repeat and it just was not interesting anymore.
• 78% done in Math Academy math foundations 2! Targeted to finish by end of October and then onto foundations 3 which sets me up to start uni-based classes! (wowza!). I’ll take the methods of proof course first as I think that will serve very good ROI for learning any other math down the road, inc calc and LA.
• Spoke to a statistics PhD and discovered Decisions Under Uncertainty and Probabilities of probabilities. Recommended the book A New Kind Of Science. And that anything that is not modeled is “noise” and should be treated as such. Super interested conversation and will eventually do a podcast with him: Noah Silverman.
• I finally signed a 2 year lease for my next apartment (around 4k AUD p/m in rent, not including bills (i know, fml)) in my home town to fully focus on learning math and upskilling into AI. My rationale behind the expensive place is that it’s so nice so it should improve my mental health so I can feel more comfortable and learn faster. Enjoying life is essential and overlooked and its what I concluded after moving countries for reason I put above being comfortable. First time doing the whole renting thing from scratch in melbourne where I need to set up all the bills and furnish. Going to learn to install a washing machine n whatnot. I thought that if I stay in the same spot for 2 years, right next to the library and in the heart of the city, then I can get into a deep routine and really enjoy my time there. The downside is I need to furnish it and drop like 3k on essentials (rip). It’s a new building with students so should be quite good. I’m optimising for lowest overhead and comfort so I can truly only think about learning. When I start tinkering it’s going to be incredibly fun. I can feel it in my bones.
• Going to buy a futon and fully investing in my health — did a sleep study and now test riding a CPAP machine. Turns out I wake up 6-15 times per hour and hold my breath for 30s each time…This eventually leads to 1-2hrs of being awake and so my quality of sleep is not even a thing, lol. So super excited to see how it changes my life and my “normal”. Surprised ive been able to learn so quickly with bad sleep too. I must be a machine when Im on that thing. Turns out the time to get to REM is 5% faster than normal and the duration is 5% higher. Strange.
• Finally getting the daylight computer to read for the 2hrs I use no devices before bed. Also Im still waking up early, but changed to 6am since the sun wasn’t rising at 5am and it was cold af. Still very consistent. Working out first thing, cold shower, all that jazz. The only thing is recently I havent been doing deep work with math. The new lessons on math academy are pretty tough to read and so my brain just naturally avoids it. Finished reading atomic habits again to get back in the zone of just doing things. Did see blue tongue lizards a few times while here at my grandparents spot. About to get my full drivers license too! Still eating very well (kale, ginger, fish oil, eggs, sweet potato) every day. Back to my roots when I was learning to program and body build!
• Becoming an advisor for a project called ZeroID (first advisor gig!). Didn’t even ask for it, it was just given to me lmfao (ty LMC).
• Optimised my backpack a bit more: got caribeans to latch my clothing pouchs and tech onto it. Latch on my documents too so no one can steal easily and dont lose it.
• My thoughts atm: math is the only bottleneck to doing cool shit. having strong math skills in the fields i desire will make me stupid rich as a biproduct and a great cushion to fall back on if i ever do anything else. Im fascinated by a lot of branches. Recently found odemtry for robotics, control theory, toposes, signal processing, toplogical ML. I think shifting the pdocast into a math based / explain papers with a webcam on my hands will be wildly successful, just as the crypto one helped me significantly. We’ll just see.
• Looked into Figure and Brett Adcock. Such an inspiration with all his companies from age 26. I looked at all the jobs he posted in Figure and copied down what skills I need from electrical eng, controls, ai, etc. This is my baseline for what I want to learn. Master of all. Phenominal what they’re doing there but I think AI will be their bottleneck. It reinforced my belief that AI truly is the center of attention. Build bleeding edge AI and you’ll control the world. Robotics is already quite high end and computation, its the algorithms that are the problem and the creativity behind them that are lacking, hence proof writing and strong math understanding is critical and why i am pursuing that target. I guarentee I’ll discover new math that will be groundbreaking in the form of AI models. Actual AI models, i.e., self thinking and growing, not ML.
• Finished messing around with the Arduino kit but I don’t think Robotics is useful unless advanced AI is incorporated. Therefore, focusing on math and AI should be the sole focus. Electronics and robotics should be a hobby in my eyes.
• Overall: life is great. just need to build up my math grinding habits and stop being so distracted. but maybe thats my body telling me to chill before i burn out. idk. optimistic for the future and glad to be back home. feeling a lot of patriotic for australia but also still think the government are retards but I understand that theyre trying to do a reset on the economy bc they fucked up the elite squeeze. anyway…skills will get me through anything :) oh also I turned 23.

06/09

• Finished half of the ELEGOO Mega2560 R3 Project Kit, an arduino kit.
• Did a podcast w/ Justin from math academy, talked about learning. Spoke to mevquant about math too. He said it’s like reading English! Truly amazing. I really want to know what it’s like to read Math like English — must be an insane shift in perspective of the world at that level… They said that when you have a really solid understanding of LA and multi-var calc you’re pretty set to learn anything in math you want. If you read something you lack prereqs for you just throw it in GPT and ask what is missing to go learn.
• Thinking of moving back to home town now. Miss human interaction. Looking to get a super nice place to lock in learning for a year or two w/ the money I made from freelancing, as runway.
• Still skipping in the moring. The 5-4-3-2-1 method from Mel Robinson really works when trying to get out of bed. It’s a meta cognition ritual to get your body to switch to pursuing the goal by not giving yourself time to subconsciously make excuses.
• In terms of math, I feel quite comfortable with the language of algebra now. A lot of things have clicked, even some set theory stuff like union, intersection and in! Learning the intuition behind trig and circles. Then I’ll move onto linear algebra :)
• I have some really good frens. Two of them told other frens to msg me about something. Made me a bit teary of how grateful I am for them.
• I love you future me. Always, remember that. Figure it out, for me.

30/08

• Yesterday I watched “The Bit Player” of Claude Shannon. I’ve always seen how Mathematicians say they visually see their ideas in front of them, like they were actually there. Today, while I was standing at the beach staring into the ocean, the sand and the clouds in the sky, while thinking really hard, I actually had a flash. A visualisaton of my thoughts. I physically saw my thoughts. A graph with different skews manifested into my vision and I instantly wrote it down after being in awe for a second. Then the flow kept going and I was amazed. I couldn’t even imagine or conceive of what this feeling would be like. And now I’ve experienced it I see clearly this is how people were able to invent and come up with amazing ideas. Things were just so clear. Me and my notebook staring into nature. I ended up staying for an hour staring into the waves, thinking about everything w/ no restrictions. It was breath-taking.
• I don’t think I’ll move to Japan. I did some analysis of the time costs of being there and it turns out it was not worth relative to using that time and focus to be 100% ingrained in my thoughts for my career. Future opportunties will arise bc of my career investment over personal growth and country movement. Despite being introduced to Japanese gov officials.
• A really great friend, and former boss, of mine recommended me to an active USA defence contractor. Spoke really highly of me saying “I think youre really fucking good when you care. rare talent when you care” and “If he’s passionate about it he’s the best in the world, if he’s not he fucks off” which 1. is true, that I will dread doing something If I don’t truly care about it and 2. it meant a lot to me. I really appreciate such kind words, espc from someone that is brutally honest and ex-defense.
• Did daily 30min skipping every morning, even when I didn’t want to. I have almost blisters on my hands and fingers but I still do it.

27/08

• Watched this video on learning Japanese and he mentions you can literally just listen to japanese for min 2hrs a day and passively listening (not background noise) and eventually you will begin to pick it up when using flashcards w/ anki. I tried this morning and started recognising certain words in this podcast very easily and then I’d just repeat it in google translate, make an anki card and bang, new word acquired! So now I’ve been trying to find good Japanese songs to spam and podcasts when I workout and exist.
• Got out of bed at 8am and started skipping for 30mins while listening to Japanese podcast, pretty proud :D
• Aiming for 150exp on math academy today. Actually completely quadratcis flawlessly. Quite shocked I’m understanding now (it was the algebraic concepts I’m finally getting intuition to, I’m starting to understand, anon-kun).
• Japanese visa getting along. Need to make pitch deck and estimate financials then send it off to the mayor of Tokyo.
• Nexastand arrived! Only 150g :O my neck isn’t rekt anymore!

26/08

• Spent 6:20hrs on Math Academy to get 120exp :(
• Skipped 30m w/ 1lb (getting more intese)
• Started listening to Japanese instead of music to see if I start to pick up the language.
• I want to aim for each day to just spam math and listen to Japanese.

25/08

• Did 30mins of 1lb jump rope to deep house and man did time fly. Was way more intense too today. I felt incredibly alert and mentally clear after.
• Read 88/239 pages of The Recursive Universe, William P: talks about information theory, entropy and John Conway’s Game of Life. Quite interesting book.
• Read How to get from high school math to cutting-edge ML/AI

24/08

• 2 days after the death of my grandpa. feeling pretty good overall bc I’ve been doing 30min 1lb jump rope each day intensely. Working out the single best thing you can do for your health. It’ll cure any depression you have. Any stress vanishes. You feel and look amazing (which makes you feel amazing again).
• I stared at a tree for like 45 minutes and thought of my mutation architecture by reverse engineering the problem of “how to make it”. I did that and realised to think out of the box you need to explore ideas that may see completely wrong, illogical and the complete opposite. After some further reflection I learned that I only need to do 3 things in life to feel proud each day:
  1. Math academy (to learn math at this stage of my knowledge)
  2. Read books + be creative
  3. Exercise Pretty simple.
• Scheduled sleep study for 18th Sep to check how my sleep is going bc I’ve always felt fatigued after a long ass sleep. And I was awake for 4hrs out of the 10hrs I was “asleep” for last night. This happens every single night so time to make a change.

22/08 - Death 3x

• Woke up at 9:43 to a text saying my grandpa died saying “[name] just passed away peacefully a few minutes ago. Sorry.” at 9:14 AEST. So I hopped out of bed and drove to the hospital and saw his corpse lying there. The all too familiar smell of death was in the room. This time I was unaffected emotionally from the actual passing. My tolerance is too high…It was interesting though that my brain was hallucinating to see him still breathing w/ the pulse on his neck and chest, and hands slightly vibrating. It’s such a sad sight to see 85 years of life cease to exist physically anymore. He had a fantastic life in the Australian Airforce. I went back home and found out what my great-grandfather and great-grandmother looked like. The old man definitely looks German, lol. I decided to purge all my “sentimental” items by taking photos of them, uploading to a 4TB SSD and then duplicating it to another. I feel a lot more free but it was quite hard to phyiscally throw them out. I sent my paintings to a close friend and other valuable items of my deceased relative(s) to some friends. In death there is always life. We only have our experiences and actions to reflect on at the end of it all. Phyiscal items are meaningless. This is the philosophy I’ve upheld ever since 2020 when my mother passed away holding my hand. Nothing matters but people. Everything we do is for people. Conquering, control, invention, living, sacrificing, it goes on. Things will decay, even us, but the experiences will mold those who are involved into who they are, effecting their very path in life to go on to do things they would have never gone on to do. So go on. Experience life for what it is. Be fearless as it’s the only life worth living. Risk taking is the only thing to make life interesting. Regrets weigh the heaviest. To make a hard choice just ask yourself “what gets me closer to my goal/objective?” and then you have the answer.

20/08

• Started to stop watching all these videos on “get motivation back” or “how to strategically be consistent” bc I’ve been so exhaused from experiencing a slow death, again. I decided to just close them all and focus on what I already knew what I had to do which was learn quadratics and write the article. So I started doing that today — learning about completeing the square and factoring. After some reflection I realised all these videos are pointless and are just distraction. I already knew what I needed to do to succeed and was just consciously avoiding it. So I decided to just do it.
• Todays the day where he’s no longer able to hold cups of water and eat food by himself. His speech has deteriorated where he old communicates with binary question head nods. I just saw the nurse pour small amounts of apple juice into his mouth bc he’s unable to use a straw or anything (I tried assisting w/ straw). Quite sad. He’s conscious but cannot communicate. Not in pain bc of hydro-morphine pump (the last thing they give you to die easier). I’d predict he dies in the next 3 days, at least I hope he does for his sake. This isn’t living, it’s merely existing. All of his muscle has been eaten up from his body. All you can really see is the outline of the bones on his arms and flabs of what I think is skin mass. Whatever muscle he has left, whether chest, arms, shake when used and cramp quite often. It’s very eerie only hearing the machines irregularly make noise and the heavy breathing of his body trying it’s hardest to not shut down. It’s interesting bc in this moment he sees everything as meaningless, all the experiences and life. I think about what death’s experience is like.
• Going to do 30 mins of 1lb skipping when I get back home and try and crank out some creative work — I really enjoy writing. It’s better than any consumption task. Production tasks are super interesting when not watered down bs. Hopefully this part of my life comes as interesting to those that read it. Produce more, stop consuming so much. - I think not consuming and just producing is how you find fufilment. I watched a video on a 16 year old that built a DIY electric car and his passion for learning is very beautiful. He does it with little money for resources which makes it that much more impressive. The grit from having “nothing” seems to make him want it more. Very inspiring. I was thinking I just start on PCB design and schematics for robot instead of experimenting with IRL things, as I travel.
• I wonder where my future will take me. My grandpa thinks I’ve had a very difficult life so far but I see all the pain and suffering prepare me for the challenges that will come w/ deep tech to change the world.

19/08 - Japan Arc?!

• Spoke w/ some people from Shibuya Startup about my mutation AI, pitching myself as I was referred by a fren. They seem to like me and they want me to go to Japan so potentially moving there! I think this will be a great opportunity to capitalise on.
• Spent day w/ grandpa in the hospital. Turns out this was his final day of being able to have conversations. I told him about the Japanese call and he was shocked, haha. I was being a nurse for him w/ the food and getting stuff for him. He said he was in a lot of pain that day and the day before.
• SKipped for 30 minutes again :)

18/08

• Jumped 1lb ropeless rope 20mins yesterday and 30mins today, right after waking up and stretching — it feels like a good routine bc I start the day of with a ton of wins that should compound. The main benefit is that I don’t feel cold in the morning bc jumprope is really tough cardio.
• Learned what convex and non-convex functions are! I’m definitely more interested in non-convex bc it represents reality much clearer (most of the time). Funnily enough I finished my workout, opened twitter and check this guy’s bio and it said non-convex which triggered me to research about it bc I learned what convex fns are yesterday from writing my quadratics article.
• Decluttered IRL sentimental depedencies (much harder than normal shit).
• Preparing for my be in a room and have no stimulation arc for being creative. Been binging self-help videos, but all I’ve learned is within “just do the thing instead of thinking about it”.
• Went to the medical ward to see my relative. His food tray was there with nothing opened so I put on my carer pants and helped with setting everything up. He appreciated it, verbally. Made good convo and he mentioned it was good that I’m there to be with him. He chose to be moved into palliative care tmw instead of trying to fight the cancer so really I’ve got very limited time with him now — tldr; its a place where they aid you in dying, no treatment or anything. He was worried about me “falling flat on my face” but I said I will be quite well off in the future and my only limit is my knowledge. Success is inevitable. We made this connection of me saying “love you” and him just saying “back” — makes him smile bc as he got weaker he would go from “love you, back” to just “back” and now it’s an inside meme, lol.

16/08

• Visited the hospital for a couple hrs. Read a 7 paragraph appreciation letter I sent that he wasn’t able to read. He said I’ve had a tough life and “can you hold my hand when I die”, ofc I said yes. Last night I spent 6 hrs in the hospital w/ my cousin talking to our relative. After we left together he told me he’s very pround of me. But he was a vietnam vet so that era of men aren’t great at showing feelings. Especially ones with extreme ptsd of hearing the 50cal bullets going through the side of the helicopter, killing the crew and being shot down twice. He had powerful steroids last night that surprisingly enabled him to have normal conversations again from drifting in and out of consciousness the day prior. The same today. It’s good to speak to him normally again. Hes been lying in bed everyday bored out of his thinking mind so I got him spotify so he can listen to his classical music — he really enjoyed it.
• I got my 1lb weighted ropeless skipping rope and did that for 20 mins. I remember I was in such fantastic shape when I jumped rope for 40mins a day during covid — going to try get back into that! It was quite fun since it feels like a toy. I was using it while cooking and just standing outside swinging it lmao. I feel significantly better today mentally bc of the exercise and stretching.
• Did a bit of math and realised I’m very slow with quadratics. So I decided to write an article on quadratics to fully understand it. I did the same with fractions and logs and now I fully understand the intuition behind those so hopefully it will be the same with quadratics, which are really just the study of parabolas.
• Nothing much else, just existing and processing while trying to make some progress.

14/08 - Digital Minimalism

• Been taking digital photos of my stored photographs and hand-written journal to store in a usb drive for when my grandpa passes so I can travel and still have everything — realised this kind of dependency when I bought books in London and they were my only physical item I cared about.
• Emotionally exhausted from visiting hospital and felt very guilty when I went home after waiting 1:30hr for them to do their things (after visiting for a bit). Will go back later. I’m perpetually mentally fatigued, it’s paralising. It’s super hard for me to do anything like math. Writing is the only thing I can actually do throughout the day. Everyone asks “how is he” or “how are you” but I’m just so tired of thinking. It sucks bc I really appreicate the checkups but I can’t respond with enthusiasm or anything so it may seem I pass the wrong impression. People say “do it tired” but god damn is this hard. Maybe I need to have a break away from social media (twitter, discord, etc), idk. Tbf I’ve been through what no 22 y/o should go through: mum dies @ 20 while trying to upskill into becoming a SWE w/ 2 jobs and being her carer for 2 years, dad contesting her will after, dealing w/ domestic violence, grandma @ 22, grandpa borderline facing deaeth at @ 22, moved countries solo 3 times in 1.5 years, learning math from scratch to change career, juggling maintaining network while figuring out life, trying to calculate and plan my future…like bruh, when does the dip stop dipping lmao.
• Looking into mutation rates and trying to design some math model for a prototype, with my limited knowledge.

13/08 - Grandpa ICU

• Back at my grandparents’ place. Driving to the ICU 1-2 times a day to see my grandpa. It’s been quite an emotional journey. Starting to get very fatigued once hold from seeing him. I suspect my subconscious is taking an emotional hit however I don’t feel it consciously. I’m witnessing, once again, in real time the decay of a human. From being totally fine, holding fluent conversation to perpetual tiredness to the point of barely able to eat, walk, move legs and body, speak and when able to is very difficult to do so (takes serious effort to). I don’t think he’s mentally accepted the if death scenario. He asked me if I need any money left behind and I said no (bc I truly believe my upskilling will grant all). It’s quite sad bc it was hidden prostate cancer that spread to liver, lungs, bone marrow but then got kidney failure the 2nd day in hospital bc of some dye catscan 2x mistreatment. Everything has recovered but his blood is tanking, taking a toll on his lungs, hence being put on large tank of oxygen. They’re thinking of migrating him to another hospital, 2hrs away, to do a biopsy on his bone-marrow but at stage 4 cancer you’re really just on borrowed time, unfortunately. And so I’m trying to spend as much time with him as possible, even if it takes a toll on me, otherwise I’d regret not trying down the line. He said he had a dream last night that “all your problems will disappear after this”. Was quite sad.

  Cancer is such a bastard. This is why I focus on eating raw ginger and dry-fasting (now). Health truly is all that matters, without it you’re left to regret on not taking it seriously. I’m all by myself at his house. A place that was once a joyful experience is now a torturous reminder of what once was. The memories from years in the past, how much I’ve grown and who I’ve out-lived. A terribly sad thought that none of them will be able to witness what I’ll achieve. My grandpa said “I wish I could have your optimism”. No matter what happens to me, I have to do what I set out to do, not only for me but for those that died / will die. Another year, another slow death to remind me how valuable life is, no matter how shit it is.

• Working on an entire thought-out plan for when I move back to my hometown. Finances, regime, 1 meal per day ingredients (soon calories and weight). The main part was figuring out how to create a consistent daily regime. I decided to do blocks of 4 for deep work and forcefully 3hr to work on body + mind. 4hr creative, 4hr mandatory math, 4hr math or electrical. Publishing soon. Trying to wake up at 04:00 and sleep at 20:00.

• Bought a ropeless 1lb jump rope to get back into my jump rope game. I was super fit when I used to do it for 45 mins a day. Ropeless will allow me to do it indoors and any time, while traveling! Exercise is the only thing that is a steroid to living a healthier, longer life, while enhancing cognitive abilities.

• Started doing Math Academy again. Life has been quite a mess the past few weeks but we’re slowly doing a little bit each day. I learned about fraction reciprocals today and rooting exponents and their inverses! Slowly I’m learning.

• Started to do more serious architecture work on my mutation AI protype and thinking about the possibilities. It’s been a while, old friend.

• Have a call w/ Shibuya Startup on the 19th to discuss visa, my start-up and options. Planning on learning Japanese. Also speaking of Japan, this Tokyo based company SakanaAI released an “AI Scientist, capable of ongoing discovery of science. Unbelievable. Revolutionary if true. I think Tokyo is the physical manifestation of anything close to a cyberpunk world and hence why I would want to live there. Plus it’s busseling city and nature the further out makes it very good for being able to adapt lifestyle as you grow.

• Need to read “Deep Work” and a bunch of books from John Holland on emergence — could be very inspiring and/or unlock new thoughts.

• I think damn near every place on Earth is on the brink of collapse and thus a war of somesorts will spark. Learning more about geography and the sea-trade relationships makes making these bets a whole lot better. After coming to Aus I realised just how bad the politics have gotten. If they carry on w/ the Digital ID here there’s no return to a free-speach country. It only gets worse, like the book “1945”. We already see it with the UK atm. And then you’d think USA would do something if Trump isn’t elected is my prediction.

08/08 - Hero Journey, Return Home

• 2 hrs before I embark on a 20hr flight from London to Australia. I’ve always traveled ridiculous times in my life since year 9 (waking up at 6am and traveling 3hrs to get to school, one way) and now into my early adulthood (flying usually 6-20hrs per flight). My endurance for things that take time is quite high. Everytime I go through suffering I just think that the thing is an army requirement and I’ll just die if I don’t. I also think about my family and friends that aren’t able to do the suffering I’m doing and therefore it gives me strength, to do it for them since I’m in the position to capitalise on it. Ultimately, everything is a battle of the mind. Whatever you believe will manifest.

• I left my London house, threw all things I don’t need, purging all my belongings and am left with 2 moving boxes. 1 contains books, which I could just get on libgen or something else. The other is random non-essentials, suhc as leather jacket and virus gas mask. My plan for when I get back to Aus is to rework my wardrobe entirely w/ GoRuck military-grade clothing. I think the performance of the items are phenominal — dry fast, very sturdy, don’t look shit and can work out in them. I think limiting itmes down to 1 bag is how you achieve true freedom; the ability to go anywhere at a moments notice and can cover all terrain. It’s essentially the modern day requirements to live — without the essentials life gets difficult. And by the essentials I mean the things you can’t easily buy at stores like toothpaste, etc.

  On top of this, I also may have the option to relocate to Japan and have a renewable visa that lasts a year — very good friend got me connected. It’s potential for growth in other areas aside from career seem tempting. I really enjoy the Japanese lifestyle and society, aside from the hierarchical “you’re older than me so you’re more important” in business. Society in the non-business side is quite good imo, probably the best in the world — at least in my experience. But then I’d have to dedicate time to learning Japanese, which isn’t a bad thing as long as Japan is a good thing for myself to enjoy life more! Optimising for comfort and happiness is what I’ve realised is what ultimately improves net performance in every aspect of life and so if Japan trumps Australia then it makes sense to invest in their siloed language.

• Dropped my ex-job’s machines and spoke about genetics w/ a friend. Giving me great insight into evolution and theories, e.g. maslovs hierachircal needs and the red queen effect: if you stop evolving you will die. Input to keep going if its self governing and input to push the direction of with mutation occur and without competition why would it evolve? Theres no reason. Its expensive computationally — you need to incentivise with an external thing. Sharks dont evolve bc theyre the apex predator

06/08 - Activating NG+

• Flying back to London from Dubai, after staying w/ a very close friend’s house for a week and a bit after I just did the same with 2 other very good friends in the mountains of Switzerland. My plan was to send all my non-essentials to my friend in London and go back to Australia on the 28th of Aug to “establish” myself in a single spot so I can focus on learning and getting the skills required to capitalise on these foreign, more developed economies. As I woke up in the morning I received a text from my family member that they’re in the ICU w/ liver failure bc the person doing the cat scans w/ dye did the scans twice instead of once. It’s ridiculous how poor Australian healthcare is. This has happened to two other family members for misdiagnosis that lead to death…Anyway, now I’m scrambling to get my life together as my plans have shattered.

  Ah, yes. The dynamical chaos of life is ubrupting once more in my face. So now, my plan is to get everything sorted tomorrow: ship my non-essentials to a friend, hand in my work machines as I just quit my job, and scramble to get to the hospital in a country 17hrs away. But, this is another reminder life is fleeting and you really must do what your think is the best decision. Money comes and goes. So does life. But you can always get money back…I’ve been through this experience twice already, so I’m remarkably tolerable. I’m not sure why but I really have no emotional impact to this. I love and care for my family member dearly, but for some reason emotion isn’t provoked. Maybe because I haven’t seen them in person, suffering. It’s all online, dehumanised. I wonder if I would make a good spy or become very dangerous in the future since I have very little emotional attachments in my life aside from friends. A few close friends have told me about this emotional coldness. It’s objectively abnormal, but for me normal for me.

• Wrote my first ever math article, “Unlocking Algebra”, explaining how logs, exponents and roots work at an intuitive level, since my understanding was quite poor.

• My plan now is to go live in Australia and grind out this next year in terms of math, ai, chemistry and biology. The Japanese stock market just crashed and as a result the USA market did too. A couple hundred billion liquidated from crypto. Bangeladesh is now under military control. Lol. It’s difficult to say “I love you” or tell them how you really feel about them because they know you think their going to die, which creates stress, etc. It’s a tough position to be in for me. I write this 2:09hrs away from landing in London.

• I’ve also realised you can get any physical book online for free and just have PDFs of them, which I’m becoming a lot more accustomed to. The many books I have at home were a giant depedency and limiter when it comes to accessability for instantaneous traveling, and also stress.

• Still continuing on with Math Academy. This product is phenominal. I really think I’ll be able to get super good at math within the next couple months when I’m locked in in Australia, with stability instead of constant chaos. No idea how peopel travel and are hyper-efficient.

• I think I mentioned it before but I quit my job and my stress instantly vanished. It’s remarkable. My mental health has just come back so fast. However, I had a call with a friend, Robert, who I spoke to when I first moved to London around 6 months ago and didn’t really have any updates about my career. It was a very sad reflection that I had made no progress, aside from beginning to learn math. No biology or anything. Well, not as much as I hoped in 6 months. To be fair to myself, I became the youngest VP of Galaxy at the age of 22, making a ridiculous base, learning an entirely new ecosystem, Solana, and building a critical infosec tool from scratch. Ultimately, it was a fantastic experience and my good friends there made it a joy to be around. It was a wild ride the past 10ish months but ultimately I detoured my vision for myself and humanity. My close friends saw my fire gradually extinguish. Not because of the people or the job per-say but because of the general concept of a job and being distracted, unfocused, not being able to dream and think of this idea of self-assembling AI 24/7. Even on my days off I would still think of work to some degree, unaligning myself. I’m thankful for them and that team, and I set themselves up for success with the connections and partners too. They will succeed in due time, regardless if I’m there.

You can’t even call yourself smart if you’re not smart enough to make yourself healthy and happy

A large part of the Dubai trip I was complaining a lot about stupid things. I was never content with the present always thinking about the future. My friend is Muslim and she mentioned this to me and I was completely aware but still did it, like a habit. It’s a disgusting habit that needs to be fixed. In other news, I hope she takes the same commitment I did and pursues her founding dreams to own a company. I gave her much advice on the questions to answer, “who do you want to become”, “what are the habits of such person”, “how do you adjust your life accordingly to become said person”, etc. I really do hope she takes the leap sooner or later. She’s in the same position as me, golden-cuffs with mid hundreds of thousands but her dreams unaligned with her reality. The future will reveal all.

02/08

• ”Knowledge isn’t frameElement. You have to pay attention” - Richard Feynman

31/07

• Progression is all that matters. Try each day as much as you can. Career isn’t the only thing that matters to progress in. Progressing in your mental health and physical health are more important. Don’t disregard them.
• In Dubai, I’ve been thinking about how I can better myself mentally and prepare for this next chapter of my life. When I learn math and am able to act on my ideas I have guarenteed investment — it really is a marathon.
• Trying to reflect on my ugly truths, e.g., I complain a lot and trying to fix it. I have a horrible sleeping routine, also need to fix that. Need to be more grateful for life and not as negative. If I can fix these 3 things I guarentee my life quality with drastically improve. Maybe even less time online on social media? Not sure yet. I’m quite excited to move back to Australia, get some solid footing and grind hard for the next 1-2 years in isolation, just as I did with programming.
• Saw a post of a guy doing 250 exp per day on math academy and comparing myself to that with my 50 each day

28/07 - Switzerland!

• ”You need to tear muscle to grow it. Why would it be different for the mind or spirit?“. I’ve been reminded I compain a ridiculous amount, kind of like a habit. Maybe theres an underlying meaning to why I do it? I cant remember if it was something i grew up with around my father or if it was something i developed around online friends. Eitehr way, im not too sure how to stop it aside from being conscious of it. Why am I valuing it more than accepting the present and trying to enjoy it to the maximum over thinking about what it could be? It’s quite weird reading this…
• Went to Switzerland for the first time (absoutely insane country) and landed in Dubai yesterday morning to see frens! Haven’t really been doing any work, preparing to leave London on the 28th of Augest to move back to Australia so I can get back on my grind since it’s so isolated to travel to countries in 3hr notice and I don’t really have too many friends there so not much distraction can occur. And the cost of living is quite low for the quality you get out of it, especially for the CBD housing. Going back to the original life plan. However, there is a chance that I get a visa to start a company in Japan and move there for a bit. I think it might be interesting to live there bc there is so many people and i’m truly foreign there in terms of looks but also language. A big plus is that my friends might be moving there next year in Tokyo and the Japanese military is one of the best in the world, top 7 bc of their self defence program.
• Still trying to get through math academy — now 38% through Math Foundations 2. Definitely learning a lot but struggling a shit load with quadratics. However, I’m learning a lot to do with logs, exponents and roots, e.g., $\sqrt{x} = x^{\dfrac{1}{2}}$ or $\sqrt{3}{x} = x^{\dfrac{1}{3}}$.

21/07 - Fight Club + Life Reflection

• I just watched fight club like 20 mins ago, it’s 16:07 in NYC right now. SPOILER: the delusional insanity he had just broke my mind. I’m not sure why but I want to experience that level of delusions. It intrigues me. What was fascinating to me was that he got to a point where he was conscious of it and was able to have full conversations with this alter-ego and was able to achieve remarkable feats. I’m struggling to put together what I feel after watching it. After watching it I saw a flock of pidgeons fly onto a roof and then there was one that flew onto a street lamp. I instantly was curious about the model of thinking the anomoly took. What causes it to think that flying to that light was a better decision than to stick with the pack? And then looking at the crosswalk on this sunny day, people renting the street bikes, walking across the street in their own unique ways — the way their arms swaying x, the tempo of their body, where they look and how they hold their torso position. And lastly the cars deciding to turn. I can’t really explain why I think this way or what it means or even how my future will look when I get deeper into chaotic dynamical systems. The world is, to put simply, interesting. I’m curious towards whether I will develop any kind of mental disorder. I predict most likely, especially the further I go down the route of mathematics.
• After spending the past few days with very close friends in NYC and super enjoying life, maybe living in Australia isn’t the best decision. However, it’s probably the best decision I can act on now. NYC definitely seems like it could be on the list of places to live, purely for the inspiration alone and close proximinity to “life”. I would say it’s the most lively western city in the world and can see why people love it here. The closest I can think to this place is Tokyo or Seoul in terms of “life”, sheer amount of people. It’s an interesting place here. No wonder people stay here. I get it.

19/07 - Quit Job To Fill My Potential

• 09:38: I have decided to quit my job. Atm, mentally preparing since it will be in person. I’m so excited to be unshackled and pursue more important things for myself personally and professionally — math and the pivot to AI. This will mostly likely be the end of my crypto career too (by choice) to fully transition into the AI sector. Man does it feel like a giant weight that has been putting me in a limbo is released.
• 10:50: Had a very receptive call about quitting since they weren’t there in person. I super appreciate the 7-8 months I was there. I learned a lot about Solana thanks to it and now I can safely feel like I’ve done all of the cool stuff, aside from “solving”, which is math based.
• Now that I’ve quit I have time to pursue my math journey with no restrictions, distractions or constant stress from the obligation of being there.

18/07

• In NYC to grind stuff out with the team I work with. Had profound reflection that no matter where I go the true source of happiness is internally not externally and realised my hometown actually isn’t bad, it is me who is bad.
• Been staying consistent with Math Academy since it’s AI tutors you via catering for your current skill set. It’s been better than books since it dynamically updates via your skillset. It’s purely exercises. And with coding, the only way you get better is by doing. So I think it’s waaay better then following a textbook and triyng to do the exercises and not really getting any feedback. On top of this, this is a completely new thing! There hasn’t been a custom AI tutor that is able to cater to your needs and defragment your scattered mental model of Math. In retrospect, I’ve learned a lot and should be proud of it. But as always, I’m never really proud of myself and believe there is always more to do.
• I’ve written a lot about my philosophy and way of thinking about myself and life. A lot of reflection. However, I haven’t published it. I’m not sure how it will impact this brand or if I even want it to be public.
• Sold on moving back to my hometown and going back to anonymous again. I think the London experience of doxxing was not really beneficial or worth it. I’ve been thinking of doing a clean reset of my brand by starting a new account and being actually anonymous but then I’d have to drop my reputation, network I’ve built and the podcast. I think being open and honest about my life probably is the way forward. We’ll see. As I travel back to Australia I’ll be going to see all my friends I’ve made in Dubai, Switzerland, maybe do a pit stop in Korea and Singapore. I want to stay and establish in a single spot that brings me joy and comfort since these impact efficiency and willingness to persist. Not sure how the lab stuff will go, but I’ll try to make it work. As for my job, I’m not sure. Will most likely quit so I can do a fresh reset and not have a part time occupant in my mind that isn’t getting me closer to my goal of being a world-class AI expert and enter the private military game. I’ve recently learned that every decision should be made based on “does this get me closer to becoming who I want to be and what I want to do with my life”.

03/06 - Bio Lab!

• start of day 5 dry fasting. feeling pretty normal aside from not being able to focus too much. not hungry or thirsty just would like to drink water. im going to make it to 7 and probably stop and do an 11 down the line bc i want to get that deep internal surgery from biology. cure any buildup i have from the early years of not taking care of my body. I have to say im burnt the fuck out from reading too much each day and now i have nothing to do since im taking a break to recover. ordered a shit load of juice: grape, lemon, watermelon and like 140 bottles of mineral water to prep for the fast break. i super want to go do an 11 but i guess a 7 day is a good test run, lol. not many people are willingly able to do this, feeling pretty proud of myself and my display of willpower. whenever i tell someone ive gone for this long they are genuinely shocked and question it and my sanity. feels pretty shitty but as with everything else i do it gets judged super hardcore so i guess this is my life, lol.
• thinking of getting my own place to have no anxiety or anything and just be “free”. I think living solo is much better than with people, at least for now.
• got some more organic chemistry books, 1 on history and another that is a very guided textbook. i think understanding chemistry is super important for being able to understand whats happening when you do lab stuff in bio.

01/06 - Dry Fasting Discovery (5 days)

• 6:34hrs until 72hrs (3 days) dry fast. I was brushing my teeth but now i’ve learned that while dry fasting our bodies create a toothpaste like organic protection layer and brushing is actually dangerous for the enamel + water in the mouth kinda breaks the fast. Looking to reach 7 days. Went for a 40m walk and my heartrate went to 100bpm but after resting im back to 80 (ty ultrahuman ring). Feeling sluggish and brain feels tired. Lets see if i die in the next few days lmao. Body feeling great though. Muscle still there. Mouth relatively moist, close to dry but I think thats bc of the walk. Usually it’s fine. I have minimal stress, which is super new to me…Been listening to stoicism and meditaiton.
• Started reading Dry Fasting, Sergey Filonov
• Read like 120 pages of Learning To Reason but moving back to linear algebra bc want to get it done so i can move on.
• Had the coldest shower i could and damn…it was fucking fantastic. I wish it went colder but I feel so much better after a freezing shower. I feel like my gratitude has gone up a shit load in general. This fasting thing is really just a mental game instead of a physical one. Good thing i’ve got some experience in testing my mental fortitude :,)
• Read this a while ago, pretty interested in organoid computation
• 02/06: couldnt get to sleep until 2am, 2 more hours until day 5 of dry fasting. mouth super dry bc spoke a lot and walked like 2hrs…

29/06

• 142p in Linear Algebra Step By Step
• Started looking at differential geometry (super interesting)
• Started my first dry fast! Lets see how this goes…
• Read The Phoenix Protocol, August Dunning. Such a remarkable book. I was always curious about “solving death” but this definitely opened my eyes to how one might go about it, aside from molecular nanotechnology.

17/06

• True intelligence in the modern AI world forces you to to collect experiences most don’t have. We are all born slightly different but our minds are functionally the same. We are merely shaped from experience. How do you differ from the masses and their uniform experiences of 9-5, normal “x country dream”, do shit differently. This is why traveling is so important. Taking chances. Be curious.
• You cannot fit in and be exceptional. By definition an exception is one that is not included, does not conform the a rule.

14/06 - Nanoscience Curiousity

• Finished The Manga Guide To Linear Algebra, working on the electricity, calculus and stats guides atm. They’re quite good for conveying concepts. Been grinding quite hard w/ linear algebra, definitely understanding it but need to do some more rigor and whatnot.
• Finished Engines Of Creation, Drexler to whitepill into molecular nanotech (which involves chemistry, physics, molecular bio, math, electronics, quantum mechanics). Going to start Soft Machines, Jones next when I get curious again.
• Tried to get into electronics starter kits but have no idea where to start. Been thinking of what is the highest ROI I can do right now and everything I try to fight against math loses. Math helps in every field and even for things like bio I need probability. For Understanding Deep Learning I see Lamda everywhere (eigenvalues) and just other shit.
• Sleep schedule back to beign destroyed (2-3am sleep) bc its the only consistent time i can do. Everything happens at night for me so going to bed early means I miss out with hanging out with people and whatnot — maybe it’s not as important idk.
• Thinking of reading Organic Chemistry As A second Language, Klein but math takes prio until i lose temporary interest.
• Still balling out in the gym. Benching again, doing pause reps with 70kg to build the strength and not injure myself — got super good form rn. Started to run again, only 1km per session.
• Need to read about bacteria + stem cells next when im curious again.
• Can definitely feel the burnout approaching, permanently tired atm. Get this weird closure around my heart when i cough (been like this for weeks). Probs will die, idk

06/06

• Finished The Machinery of Life and read a lil bit of Synthetic Biology - A Primer but realised that I don’t have enough math skills to read that book (its a phenominal book!).
• Realised I need to learn a bit of organic chemistry to help my understanding of molecular biology.
• Bought Linear Algebra Done Right, apparently one of the best if not the best books for learing about linear algebra. Been trying strang’s but it seems far too academic. The writing style is weird imo.
• Bought Engines of Creation: The coming eroa of nanotech and Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing and Computation. My fren is about to start working with the author, the god father of nanotech, and I looked at his wiki and aped so hard.
• I’m at this constant deilema of “read some bio or field x, but oh wait you need math for everything go learn math loser” and everything feels futile until I understand LA, calculus and prob + stat. Shit sucks.
• Got blue light glasses, AYO, and I think they’re working pretty well. My sleep schedule is crawling from the depths of hell to wake up at 8am but I’m trying. Got a Co2 sensor too to see if I’m suffocating. Fun fact, I’m not really dying at all (yay).

03/06

GM chat!! What’s new?? I’ve been up to quite a lot since the last update.

• Finally reached Matrices and Determinants in Robert Blitzer’s College Algebra book, on page 558 now!!!! Made a tweet here. Was a long road but so much motivation to continue now… Very excited to do calculus and prob + stat.
• Read “Evolution of Cooperation”. Was very interesting to learn about game theory. Now reading the follow up, “The Complexity of Cooperation”. Why am I reading this? Swarm AI models! But also to learn about to survive and coevolve with other agents in the environment. Turns out being bad gets you killed off quick :)
• Read “Princial’s of Virology Volume I” and around halfway through Volume II. Definitely opened my eyes to Complexity Theory, Game Theory and why math is needed so much. I cannot really get good at bio without math to build probabilities or rates of change algos, been feeling illiterate, hence math!
• Visted my first lab on 27/05, here! Super inspired to build my own and experiment. Learned about creating protiens and why they’re so important — got very interested in wanting to create my own experiments. Also, learning about molecular biology of the immune system has taught me the importance of doing certain things, e.g. eating protein — bc ribozymes create proteins from translation for everything else.
• Got the ultahuman ring to observe my sleep and the AYO glasses to focus on my circadian rythm. I woke up at 3am one day and smashed through the Virology textbook for 6 hours straight and had so much energy and motivation, more here. So now I’m trying to keep that Haruki Murakami schedule. No wonder Jocko talks about waking up so early all the time…
• Bought a leather peacoat and a gas mask (MIRA) to embrace the new identity of being an expert in molecular bio/virology and AI. The appearance of dystopian “wtf” emerges me into who I want to be.
• Got this traveling nomad setup from here so that I’m able to travel w/ a portable monitor that is ergonomically like having a 24” monitor at home. Hopefully, I feel less stressed by having this…
• Stress. This has been a super big problem. I’m perpetually stressed with tension headaches. Probably the uncertainty of finances, no “control” over living situation and carrer, mainly bc I’m in this awkward transitionary period to get to where I want to go.
• Updating website to enable me to record my journey with [general career, journal, biology, math, ai, electronics], kind of like a polymath journey recording, similar to this but with every aspect of my life! Should be super valuable. Shout out to my frontend homie blessing me @thetruthseekah on discord.
• Have released 87 episodes of Scraping Bits! It’s super tiring, but worth it at the end of the day. I hope to become a technical version of Lex Friedman for AI and expand into the fields I mentioned I’m adding to my website. AI and crypto will eventually merge so I’m not too worried about it. I have to say, maintaining friendships is hard. I’m so burnt out from talking, in general, while having the homies dm me. And my emotional capacity is just so phenominally low that I end up not responding for so long bc I never recover. Shit sucks.
• Rebranding my icon to suit more who I want to be identified as. My current one is more offensive cybersec scary vibes but now I want to be more involved in virology and AI, so kinda expanding that security realm. Maybe greenish colour instead of redish but we’ll see.
• Realised I got to stop eating fast food as it fucks up my immune system. Soooo stopping that lol. Want to stop alcohol (and have already for this month) bc it does the same (I have a shit immunity). I like to not be sick so trying to maintain gud habits. The alcohol one is hard bc when seeing people it’s such a big social thing, business or not. If I do I’ll probably go super light like a wine or something.

19/05 - Learning Math By Textbook

• The math grind has been super hard. I was stuck on factoring Complex Rational Expressions for 2 weeks and suddenly it just clicked after a lot of grinding. I can say, I’m 165 pages into Robert Blitzer’s College Algebra book atm. Although it doesn’t seem that much for the amount of time I’ve spent on it, I have definitely learned a sh*t load of the essentials, truly understanding how the fundamentals work — def recommened reading https://degatchi.com/ai-journey if you want some insight into what that looks like. I essentially read the textbook and elaborate a lot more on how to solve things and the intuition behind it. The goal at the end of it is to write a math book (that would so crazy) to explain these concepts to people that are in a similar position to me. Math truly is remarkable and I only know it gets better. Although, I feel like I procastinate a shit load, I think I still get a fair amount done bc I show up each day. Consistently improving, marginal or not each day.
• Started studying molecular virology and immunology AND I’ve released everything is game theory in terms of co-evolution, e.g. immune system vs viruses, lion vs other, smart human vs normie human, etc. It’s all just prob theory w/ game theory!
• Got some out of this world attention on my AI startup regarding investment, mentorship and advisors. So, slamming out math and virology for the next 3 months hardcore to try and make some meaningful progress.
• Did battle some dark times mentally, think it was burnout creeping up, my stress levels were through the roof and I wasn’t recovering when I got sick. I would straight be sick for 2-4 weeks continously.
• Spoke to my fren, Alex, about math. Gave some super great advice: “read the source of the math, e.g. for calculus go look at Newton’s work” and for linear algebra go look at Strang’s work. The reason behind it is to gain insight into how they actually invented and the math! What were they thinking? Sequentially how did they get to that point of creating the thing?

28/04

• Started the public commitment to math and AI in my AI Journey.
• Broke into Solana quite heavily, both coding wise and w/ the podcast — got so many chads coming on! We’re back to 8 people a week lmao.
• Contemplating doxxing my face so I can make video content for studying, podcast, general chatting, etc. Feel like there’s much more leverage with video.
• Started going back to the gym, focusing on very slow controled reps and 100 burpees a day (fuck is it brutal). Since starting the math journey w/ Robert Bliter’s College Algebra, my humility is at ATL and so applying that to the gym too — feel like a fat piece of shit after the Berlin trip and i know that slow reps is better for muscle mass. And so, dropping all weight and going full bodyweight but slow reps is my new wave. Less chance of getting injured too.
• Met a PhD in statistics chad, Jack Mayo. Spoke about my AI ideas and he is going to see if some AI chads would want to chat to me. He was also shocked that I document my career. Very big bull signal. IMAGINE me doing it for AI and Math. It will be truly remarkable. A continous autobiography while succeeding.
• Acquired another repeated sponsor, thank you Fastlane, Alex Watts! Truly remarkable how I’ve managed to get here… I hope to turn Scraping Bits into a technical AI podcast.
• Back to normality bc of my new job. Did a full analysis on whether its worth having a job and I must say, if you are contemplating and have enough runway for 1-2 years. Dont do it. Moeny is an illusion that strips you from the very fabric that is your conscious exploration. I feel as if i’ve been roped back to the surface afer joining and not spending as much time thinking about the universe and origin of life and what it means to be human. As if the alchemy I was brewing with indirect philosphy, microbiology, future of humanity, origin of life, space exploration had corrupted. Am I built for a 9-5 slave job? No. My brain is not wired this way. I hope things improve, very soon. I was sick for 3 weeks straight and then 1 week after bc of the pressure i give myself and also from my manager. Probably the worst I’ve felt, ever, from working for someone.
• Bought the Apple Pro Max (whatever they’re called). Super good buy! The noise cancelation is phenominal for locking in.
• Reading “On Writing Well” — terrific book for writers. I’m already trying to apply the principals!

03/04

No idea where i left off or if i mentioned the following things earlier but here we go frens:

• Got cold DM’ed by jump’s security arm (now assymetric) when in living in Dubai
• Got cold emailed from Galaxy when in Thailand, bc of the podcast I did with devs do something

Now:

• Reading about unicellular transitionary period to multicellular, why dna elongates and becomes complex.
• Went to berlin (and germany) for the first time to surprise Miguel from Composable with the family
• Started talking to people in the Solana ecosystem
• Thinking about take a job or go full research mode with the money i have, deciding what i want in life and what to optimise for
• Released my 70th episode of Scraping Btis (jfc lol)
• Started reading Blitzer’s college algebra: SUPER good math book that i actually can READ and enjoy
• About to get my 2nd first sponsor renewal
• Want to study nanotech to solve death, rocketry and military: how a PMC works and contracts, etc
• Moved into hacker house with 0xtaker and hosted first house warming — met some very interesting people and frens from the interwebs
• Met with 0xDmtri, met an FPGA dude (oh god how i miss electronics), finally met the man the
• Wondering how I can start my r&d company for AI research: helped my fren Leni with her deck for raising; got advice on how to raise:
  • Get your name out there to attact people w/ articles (just like what i did with crypto)
  • Raising is selling yourself, why will you make money for them? team, background, what is problem, who else is solving it, why they suck, how you will solve it, why is it better than others?
• Going to nyc w/ the homie Lucas Martin Calderon to see the homies

04/03 - “What box?” Thinking

• Read Probably Approximately Correct, Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, 12 Week Year and richard dawkins’ The Bind Watch Maker.
• Currently reading about Mutation: The Logic Of Chance and Mutation Driven Evolution. I ordered a ton of molecular biology books (one of them is $150).
• Pretty burnt out from podcasts (despite having unlimited chad guests wanting to come on), reading so much and absorbing so much information without any action. I actually started a new 9-5 and oh god do I think the normal life of work is not for me. Literally. My brain wiring cannot deal with this. I’ve fine-tuned myself to solo R&D. And I can’t do a startup unless I get some kind of credentials for people to even take a chance on me and give me funding. I feel as if my obssession for knowledge is ever-lasting and will never be quenched. This gives me anxiety and i death spiral, lol.
• London is decent. The thought of it was a lot better than reality. Nightlife ends early and it’s simply not a place I’d want to live long term bc of the old architecture it has — I want a super modernised place.
• Within the past month I’ve been trying to figure out what I want to do in life, where I want to live and who I want to spend most my time with. This has been surprisingly extremely hard. I’ve spoken to people from all walks of live with different ages and situations from incredibly rich to regular 9-5s. I found a very nice girl but in all honesty i cant see myself with anyone at this point in life. I feel there is so much i need to learn and do and it would be a disservice to the person for not being able to make time — ive felt this way for the past 3-4 years. I’ve recently became really pissed off at myself for not knowing math at the level i’d like and have been too adhd to focus on a single task — i contribute that to the amount of books i have ordered in regards to mutation, evolution and microbiology.
• I spoke to Deep Thrill that really opened my eyes to what i need to do next on my journey in mutation based AI; tldr look into how mutations occur in codons and microbiology, multicellular organisms and the transition from single to multicellular organisms.
• I want to move to texas, so i can finally build a homemade lab and all that jazz but im not even sure if id be happy there too…part of me feels like i should go back to Australia but also USA seems to be where everything im interested is at. After watching some of oppenheimer and “a beautiful mind” I feel like the USA is the spot to be.
• I hope to release a research article soon on my mutation based AI algo…
• I noticed taking b12 actually super helped me not feel fatigued all the time — give it a go if you feel the same way!

02/02 - Moving continents, again

• Before heading off to London I soldered for the first time at my Aunt’s house! Made some shitty DC motor + LED + tinned frankenstein thing. At least it worked!
• After a grueling 20hr flight i’m finally in London! I essentially lost half my networth (AUD to GBP aint it). I’ve been living in a shared house w/ the folk from Aori and I think it is a great choice before buying your own place (thats my end goal), although it seems quite inefficient to do it in London relative to buying in some other country, but having a home base is num 1 goal atm so I can relax and not worry about getting rekt from rent. I guess whatever floats your boat really. Although I do have the opportunity to meet online frens that will definitely help project me in the right direction career + life wise. Finally met Lucas Martin Calderon after all these months. Glad to be around frens. Although quite cold and gloomy, definitely different from 24/7 sun of Aus. However, I’m sure it’s the correct decision long term as long as I thug it out.
• 29/01/24, Read Why Evolution Is True: very good book! highly rec if you’re serious about evolution and wanting learn about it.
• 01/02/24, Read Steven Johnson's Emergence: this was pretty good at the start (like most books) but faded towards the end IMO. All the relevant information can be found in first half-ish of book and like 1-2 gold nuggets towards end.
• Got some guidance on what to dive into regarding RL an evolutionary algorithms. Spoke to genetics and mutation specialist, breifly, about what to look into to gain more insight into how I can create this self-mutating architecture. Book rec: Sutton’s RL book. Imo, the world will be solved by emergence via evolution solutions instead of engineering solutions. What we are capable of is so difficult to comprehend in our lifetimes so we need to develop things that can evolve like us, using computers to accelerate the evolution process — thus why im drawn to self-mutating agents, able to generate and heal itself. But, of course, the questions leading to this point are very very difficult to come up with.
• As always, spending most my time reading and trying to ask the right questions (this is the most important thing!). If you can ask the right questions you can get to the destination faster by knowing what to look for :) Released my 50th episode of Scraping Bits and acquired my 4th sponsorship! I wonder how far it goes in a years time, especially when I start talking to AI folk.

01/02 - HFT Company Founder Advice

• Spoke to a fren, Totlsota about some advice and I want to share it with you:
  1. Make a random agent
  2. Evaluate it on some market data (i.e., it looks at the market data and makes trades)
  3. Evaluate profit/loss (env pressure = profit loss; agent has to make money trading is objective)
  4. Use that to mutate your agents and make better ones
  5. Loop until bored. There are no recipies, just tools. Keep trying things and keep learing more.
  • RL is a must for trading
  • Not fooling yourself is very hard
  • Learning linear algebra is like a box of rocks w/o knowing the high level concepts
  • The interesting developers are the ones that create their own models and not simply using existing ones.
  • His fav algo is ASGA-11
  • Book suggestions:
    1. Probably approximately correct, Leslie Valiant (read it — its fantastic!)
    2. Reinforcement learning, Sutton
    3. Why greatness cannot be planned, Stanley, Kenneth O. (also fantastic!)
    4. Strang, Linear Algebra
    5. Deep Learning, Goofellow
    6. Methods of statistical learning

16/01 - Pre London Move

• Authored and published: Swimming Safely In The Public Mempool: MEV Smart Contract Obfuscation Techniques
• Switched over to stem cell research — mainly how and why things mutate and what causes mitosis — and also evolution, mainly natural selection.
• Friend told me his MEV bot got hacked; kind of inspired me to work on my exploit suite again, although…eh.
• Moving to london in 10 days. Slighly worried since the pound is twice as much as an AUD and I might wreck myself. It’s like moving to Dubai but more risky, kinda. Simply just stressed about decisions that change my entire life trajectory and also leaving my grandparents (again). Feels like time flies and I’m not spending enough time w/ them. Feel a bit awful really. Part of me worries they wont be around after I leave.

10/01

• Read Livewired, by David Eaglean: very interesting book. I think it ramps up towards the end but also mentions neuromodulators, which i’ve never before, that are responsible for greenlighting parts of the brain that are ready for change.
• Read The Quest for a Common Model of the Intelligent Decision Maker

08/01

• Read The Molecule of More, by Daniel Z. Liberman: excellent book on the two different types of dopamine (now and future) and how it’s the molecule that drives us, creates motive. It also talks about the neurotransmitters that are responsible for living in the present and how these 2 types of neurotransmitters work in harmony to create our sense of conduction.

06/01

• Read How Emotions Are Made, By Lisa Feldman Barret: highly recommend this book after reading A Thousand Brains Theory, By Jeff Hawkins. The realisation I got from the book is that: what do we use to set and pursue goals? what drives us to wanting to accomplish something?

03/01

• Read Dopamine Nation, By Anna Lembke: This is an interesting book for understanding how pleasure-pain homeostasis works and why we get addicted to things and how to escape them (tldr cold-turkey for 1 month straight).

EOY Goals

What are my goals for 2024?

I have 2 big goals set in stone:

• Understand and be proficient, to the point of writing articles, on
  • algebra
    • edit 13/08/24: can confirm making fantastic progress. super proud of what I’ve learned and setting myself for greatness down the line.
  • multivariate calculus
  • linear algebra
  • probability theory
  edit 13/08/24: I want to get a very strong foundation before venturing out. This might be a 2025 goal as with the following below.
  • [ ] stochastic calculus
  • [ ] stochastic differential equations
  • [ ] chaos theory
  • [ ] graph theory
• Build my first AI model from scratch. I really want to build a virtual AGI that can continuously learn and self mutate it’s topology (hidden layer, inputs, connections to other models, etc). Alternatively, something to do with tracking people on twitter and social media because it’s really hard to track all my friends and keep up to date with them (sorry everyone D:)
• Start learning electrical engineering (?)

Some other goals that are just general are:

• Continue with the podcast, hopefully break into the AI realm and make more great friendships.
• Become more stable in life, financially by having a base.
• Start stretching and meditating. My stress this year has been over the moon.
• Maybe look into marketing content like podcast, articles and my personal brand. Still unsure how to approach this, even with websites and mail subscriptions.
• Get my money from the Dubai bank…
• Survive and enjoy life every once in a while. Don’t take it too seriously. Experiences over money. Be a good person.

---

2023

Recap

2023! What a year. As I’m sitting at my grandparents’ kitchen table listening to the ocean’s waves crash it’s quite funny how we can disregard the progress we’ve made by looking narrowly short-term. Now that I think about it, I’ve done a ridiculous amount of things this year. Reflection time.

To begin, my goals for 2023 we’re met to a degree - I was very unsure what I wanted to do aside from the exploit generator, which I did get to the point of being able to synthesise contracts in raw hexadecimals! However, the trajectory of my career has changed, for the better!

• Solo traveled all across Japan for a month, Rome, Italy, NYC, lived in Dubai for 6 months spontanteously, Thailand for 3 weekish, Australia and now preparing to move to London! Wow, what a ride. My mother hoped I would travel during this period of my life and looks like I ended up doing it :)
• Worked with another MEV team for 6 months where I became a bytecode specialist for EVM smart contracts. This really helped my reverse engineering journey which later led me down the rabbit of building my own fuzzer that evolved into an entire crypto protocol exploit suite.
• Started a technical podcast, Scraping Bits! Recorded over 85+ episodes within 7 months and made some great friends along the way! Received 3 sponsors, two being for the entire year. Hired my first editor and really improved my public speaking and listening skills that contributed to being able to come up with questions on the fly. Started the podcast really hardened the fact that building strong friendships is the best thing you can do. I’ve met so many amazing people that just aren’t connected with anyone. For me, my online friends have been a privledge to have and I don’t know where I would be without them… Take your reputation seriously and actually provide value to people.
• Did a lot of freelancing, actually spoke to a hedgefund (after getting approached by some last year from my MEV articles) that found me from the Devs Do Something podcast I did in Febuary.
• Now deeply interested in/have started a new chapter in my career to build self mutating continous learning AGI (big thanks to Lucas Martin Calderon for opening my eyes to this path, wouldn’t have stepped into it without him), human granular neuroscience, and to become proficient at math (im starting from khan academy algebra for anyone interested).`

13/12

• Deciding to move to London for maximum growth potential. Close to USA, EU and in a pretty good geolocation if a war goes down (invasion wise).
• Met a MEV team that got into searching because of my articles. Kind of crazy the impact you can have without even knowing it.
• Doing a lot of research on decision making at a neurological level, self-mutation of the neocortex, creativity and studying how humans are generic algorithms.
• Read 1 thousand brains theory by Jeff Hawkins in 1.5 days. I really enjoy the concepts of reference frames, [grid, place, orientation] cells found in the neocortex.
• 13/12/2023: intro learning about differential equatians and Bayesian Theorem: very interesting that by updating current beliefs by learning more context and understanding of the scenario the more accurate you can predict future outcomes.
• 18/12/2023:
  • the more i read about neuroscience of the human brain te more i realise we not largely nothing about the neurological workings of our minds. my main concern is with [modeling the world, memories, decision making, emotion], in that order.
  • starting to learn algebra since i missed a ton of inutitive stuff when in high-school. pretty keen to learn about probability theory and calculus after

07/11

Oh wow, 3 months have passed! Sorry for not updating D: There have been so many stressors in my life I’ve been juggling, from closing apartment lease to moving countires and learning new skills for career (this adulting stuff is hard). So what has happened in the past 3 months? That’s a good question, let’s begin…

I’ve had the pleasure to develop a strong friendship w/ Lucas Martin Calderon who has red pilled me into AI. Why do you ask? When we think about world class at a single domain there is a couple people/companies competing. But when you intersect 2 domains you’re an expert at (e.g. AI and cyber) then you enter a new realm of niche and there becomes little to no competition. And the possibilities of AI are limitless (as discussed in my AI article of Humanity).

Anyway, so what have I done specifically?

• Have a 2-3 month long existential crisis after learning about AI.
• Moving back to Australia. I figured that everything is derived from the thoughts of the brain. Money, happiness, skill progression, focus, health, literally everything. And so I came to the conclusion of: optimise the brain but reducing as many stressors as possible and being as comfortable as possible. Why? You can focus more on routine, optimal strategies for learning, which in turn correlates to money, happiness, everything. The plan is to buy an apartment and pimp it out w/ standing desk, hermon miller chain, kick-ass kettle for tea, etc. It turns out everywhere in the world is bad. Everywhere has trade-offs. The grass will be greener whereever you water it the most. And when you make enough money you can go buy a house or travel to other places anyway!
• Did some deep dives into crypto hacks, namely Pickle Finance, to understand the why behind the hackers’ thought process to learn about the human algorithms in decision making. This was quite insightful.
• Simultaneously was learning high-level about AI and reinforcement learning to discover a passion and reason for learning it.
• Decided to pull the trigger on ceasing development to switch focus on learning math, namely linear algebra to begin as it’s the basis of quant dev, zk and AI. Actually started learning consistently (05/11/2023) and taking it serious, unlike the last time I spoke about it… Why, you are so close to finishing the fuzzer? I’d rather learn AI now to enhance my thinking and possibilities in the future, I can always come back to it and even upgrade it w/ AI and math. Opportunity cost. I’m not in a desperate position to have a startup bring me out of the dirt, yet.
• Got my first podcast sponsor, Fastlane Labs! Now I’m outsourcing my podcast audio editing! Super exciting time. Fully investing in the podcast as it’s enabled me to network like I would have never thought. It’s exponentionally helping me in learning about new topics, thoughts of people and more importantly making strong friendships with people (met Lucas from it too, who has changed my life). I have around 40-50 episodes pending, which is around 70-80 total episodes in 6 months (wow, time flies…).
• I learned a lot about the realities of the world’s internals and have gained a new pov when it comes to the unseen side of society. I’m more aware of opsec and thinking about how I can gain the most power (hence AI).
• Part of me wants to start doing education, but theres so much effort involved in that that I could be diverting to learning math, etc. We’ll see.

Ultimately, I’m taking it day-by-day, trying to eliminate as many stressors as possible (im quite an anxious person in general). I hope in the coming months I will have had read and learned quite a lot about math and have made great progress, relative to today, in the realm of AI, quant and math in general.

I would like to leave a personal note to myself: as long as you keep doing something each day, no matter how big or small, you’ll get there in the end. Stick with whatever you decide to do and give it a good shot for a couple months. Goodluck with the move, I hope you eliminate as many stressors as possible and find peace. Things will fall into place. I love you. I look forward to hearing from you soon!

19/08

• So far have published 13 episodes on Scraping Bits! Have around 50+ pending for release after 2 months of doing it! Have made so many new connections are various levels of prestige, from devs starting their careers to technical founders leading innovative technology.
• Discussing podcast sponsorships - had t11 + banteg reach out and say the love the podcast! Who knew it would get this kind of reach 0.0 Also very surprised people aren’t reaching out to sponsor. Where else will you find a source of content that consistently has field-renowned devs listening to it :o
• NibbleOnBytes MVP is almost done! Have 2 more features then onto the fuzzing part. Super excited to see all my work from november 2022 about to come into play.
• Been pilled into deep learning AI. If I don’t learn it I will regret it later in life. I want to eventually build a private military with AI (as the brain) and robotics (the body) - kind of like bringing star was droids into reality…how cool would that be! People ask me why I build my exploit generation tool. It comes down to power. How much power do you hold in each field and what can you use to leverage to attain influence? You can use your brand as leverage (mental), military (physical) or cybersec tools (cyber). When you have all three you will be either a large target for partnership or wipe out. However, I hope to see my future self get more into building AI models, etc.
• Moved into my first apartment, ever, during summer in Dubai Marina (40 degree C, sheeesh). 3x the rent I was spending in Australia but it’s a growth investment…Dealing with all the bills and adult sh*t is hard, was a lot of stress but we’re making it work. Thinking of setting up a company in HK for tax free corpo tax since Dubai introduced 9% corpo tax. Then I can claim it as income tax from HK and im freeeee.
• Built a fair amount of Rust tools and am getting quite a lot of freelancing offers, extended from my network leverage.
• Learned about direct RPC calls, knowing the underlying calls happening abstracted suites like forge foundry (highly rec to learn this!).

11/07

Oh man, gm blog! It’s been quite some time since I’ve updated you :) Lets go from when I was in Tokyo…

• Met a bunch of people for the first time while staying relatively unknown. This was my first experience solo traveling and figuring everything out by myself, from flights, accomodation, learning new society infra and communicating with people that don’t speak my language. Gained a lot of self confidence and independence. Ultimately, I met a bunch of fantastic friends that I’m still in touch with! After tokyo, I went to NYC for 2 weeks, Italy for 6ish days, thailand for 2 weeks and now I’m in Dubai, taking the biggest risk of my life. I relocated to Dubai and am making great strides with my bytecode decoder to the point where I’m confident in my ability to turn it into a cyber-weapon, capable of finding complex critical vulnerabilities in smart contracts.
• Learned a lot about static, dynamic and symbolic anaylsis. Researching all the tools that exist, all techniques in each field (mostly learned about fuzzing, but still need to go deeper).
• I turned my reverse eng/bytecode decoder tool into a company, NibbleOnBytes! The end goal is to eliminate as many firms and auditors as possible. A lot of people doubt me but we’ll see how it plays out. I have 100% confidence I can do this and when people doubt it’s more often not a good decision to go through with it.
• I hosted a cohort of 100+ interns to try and attempt to hire, by using 1 task to filter them. 5-7 passed the first task, 1 passed the final one. Now i’m mentoring this one, @AuditYourContracts. However, he has 10 years of web2 cybersecurity experience so quite the interesting dynamic ahaha.
• I sponsored myself via NibbleOnBytes, a Dubai company, to get a visa for 2 years. So now I’m leveraging this to attemtpt to become as successful as possible (bc no tax!). I think leaving my family back in another country is quite a difficult thing, especially since I would have to go back (obviously) but then whatever I earn in the UAE I would have to pay taxes on back in AU since I declared vacancy from AU, which takes 3 years to completely severe. We’ll see how that goes though. Maybe I can bring them here and hopefully get a villa for the family. I’m jumping from airbnb to airbnb but looking to rent and eventually buy an apartment to set up base. Bought some vitamin D, fishoil + b-12 pills to make sure my brain is functioning as optimally as possible.
• Was thinking about defense tech but met someone that did it for a decade and told me the USA market is the only real one worth getting into, and getting into defense tech is f-cking hard, maybe as a hobby later then…
• Did my first Huff audit contract job! Was quite fun :D But boy do I need to put the price up for the amount of skill it requires. I think we’ll see a Huff market surge soon. Sentiment is there. Seems like tooling is the sentiment too, however I’m narrow minded bc I’m in that field 24/7.
• Started a podcast! Bought a $20 mic and just started reaching out to people in my network. It’s remarkable the amount of information you can extract from talking to someone for 1 hr. I did 26 episodes from 23/06/23 - 11/07/23. You can find them on Spotfiy @ Scraping Bits! Spoke to Brock from nascent, some trail of bits people, Jon Maurelian (cofounder of consensys), Owen from Sudoswap and way more!
• I think the future is incredibly bright for me and I’m super excited to see what it holds and how I can look back on this log and see how far I’ve come! Until next time, anon…

22/04

• Arrived in Japan on 12th for ETHTokyo. Met a bunch of frens. Debating whether to go to Korea to set up shop or go back to AU.

01/03

• Released: Smart Contract Obfuscation Techniques

26/02

• Talked to some frens about generalised frontrunners, learned what goes into building one from scratch and the progression. Started building one and gyat it’s incredibly hard - so many possibilities to consider.

• Learned about the BYTE opcode and made the most efficient jumptable i’ve ever seen, in my upcoming article.

• Built my first Huff contract (a port of WETH9) - using call. Learned how different contracts interpret calldata differently when utilising call; there is a standard per compiler.

  // Create the payload
  PUSH4 0x12345678 // Fn selector
  PUSH1 0x00
  MSTORE
  PUSH1 <value>    // uint256 param
  PUSH1 0x04
  MSTORE
  
  // Paylaod in memory
  0x1234567800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
  0x0000000A
  
  // Then the solidity contract would read it like:
  PUSH1 0x00
  CALLDATALOAD // Get selector
  SHR
  PUSH1 0x04
  CALLDATALOAD // Get value

20/02

• Attended the Solana Hacker House in Melbourne.
• Got accepted into EthTokyo (my first overseas event + travel i’ll be doing :D).
• Made a lot of progress on bytecoder.

18/02

• Fix disassembler outputter. Converts opcodes to mnemonics w/ their corresponding program counter.
• Accepted offer as a Rust dev for a HFT! Hopefully I enjoy this role. I’ve realised dapp dev isn’t my thing and security/mev is the way bc of the ever-changing environment. They all have terrific experience so should be a great place to learn and grow :) All the best for future me!
• Working on bytecode obfuscation technique article - doing some experimenting with bytecode to solidify my knowledge.
• Battling demons as per usual :,)

17/02

• Watched: Learn how to fuzz like a pro: Introduction to fuzzing. Now know about invariant/property based testing. Curious about fully autoamted testing. Was thinking of ways to create the most sophisticated vulnerability scanner.
• Did a lil bit of research on reinforcement learning.
• Reaching out to more auditors about their opinions on the most common vulnerability causes, great insight into what i need to add to accomplish sophistication in my vuln scanner.
• Jtriley helping me with my storage reversal journey. Legend has helping me since I joined the Huff discord, consistently. Appreciate him a lot!

16/02

• Talked to a few content creators in the space (gmhacker, rareskillz, johnny, patrick c) to get some insight into how they view content creation, monetisaiton, scaling, marketing, etc.
• Working on storage layout reversal in bytecode decoder for 3 days, writing solutions in notebook todo with context and pattern recognition (v hard problem atm).
• Things didn’t work at Valio, I’m definitely more focused on writing FV tools and security and have realised dapps are no longer something i’m really interested in. Maybe for contract work since it’s an ever-changing environment.
• Did some diving into bytecode obfuscation techniques, very interesting realm :P
• Worked on my branding a bit more.

Very surpised on how far my reputation has come. Seems like i’m kinda well known in the dev community and whoever i talk to is impressed with my decoder progress. Makes me very excited for the future and my impact on the ecosystem! - Networking with a lot more people, reaching out to a few auditors asking them about fv vs manual + the most common critical bug causes - gave me some good insight into future plans for my decoder! - I should probably start doing some Code4rena stuff. I built a bot to grab all the reports from their github and soon to analyse them all for statistics, hehe.

10/02

• Featured on my first podcast @ Superfluid’s Devs Do Something Podcast: Episode 26 DeGatchi on Reverse Engineering and MEV!
• Joined [Valio][https://vaults.pro] on 1st of Feb.
• Started building a sandwich bot with an anon.
• Got back into writing my deocoder. Paused writing the assembler since it’s not really what i’m looking for long term - now explroing binary formal verification (fv) + layout analysis (finding this super interesting). This is my first fv tool! Hopefully I can expand on it to create something for Solidity to automated Code4rena submissions.
• Exploring writing pure bytecode contracts, very interested in obfuscation techniques.

11/01

• Finished writing an article on explaining how EVM storage works + interacitng with it via solidity inline-assembly. Wrote this because it was incredibly hard researching and finding out how it all works w/ assembly - especially the bitwise operations to mask. I believe this will be the go to article for anyone wanting to learn assembly/yul bc the ones out there don’t go this in depth, step by step.
• Spoke to my first angel investor that mentioned i sound like i need to find my group of chads to speak to because most chads are busy and aren’t active in discord/public forums, they’re all in their own friend groups.
• Got a job offer the same day after the angel investor call to join a team of 9 senior devs on omnichain vaults (rust backend for risk management, some AI stuff and smart contracts). This could potentially be the chad group i need to become senior since i have only 2yrs experience coding.
• Going to finish off my decoder’s assembler now. The EVM storage was a detour i didnt actually need to do in hindsight but im glad i did it. I feel like a much more proficient smart contract dev now.

---

2022

EOY Goals

• Build a MEV bot (or multiple).
• [-] Learn EVM infrastructure (GETH).
• [-] Be proficient w/ Rust.
• Get a full-time/contractor job in MEV.

Recap

2022 has been a remarkable year for me. From building my first solo full-stack project, to joining a MEV team and building a bot from scratch in Rust, to now building low-level + secuirty related tools. I never would have thought at the start of the year I would be at the level I am today while having such a large network of frens and being able to provide value through my articles to thousands of people. I appreciate all my frens!

I did end up achieving all my goals i wrote, to some degree.

• Built a MEV bot from scratch in Rust (and some other bots, like nft minter).
• I’ve been somewhat learning infra; how to evm works but not node stuff, yet.
• I am getting pretty good with Rust since I use it everyday!
• I have had multiple offers for MEV jobs and have participated in a team for a while.

Overall, this year has been life-changing and excites me for the coming year, where I’ll hopefully be in a different in a different continent (probably Europe - Portugal maybe??) and start a new chapter in my life!

My initial goals for 2023 would be:

• Have my bytecode decoder sophiscated enough to assemble the bytecode into an assembly contract and run fuzzing + static analysis - all without needing an RPC!
• Maybe learn how to build basic malware in Rust, but i dont have a strong interest in it; the learning curve seems quite steep. So maybe expand my decoder to other chains?
• Maybe build my own wallet
• Write more technical articles

21/12

• Hired thetruthseekah to updated my website (he did a terrific job!).
• Did some freelancing for 3 different DAOs.
• Researched REVM a ton - then saw RETH come out.
• Created 3 articles: Memware: Generalised Frontrunners, Speedrunning Web3 Bug Hunts, and Reversing The EVM: Raw Calldata (which reached 70k impressions on twitter in the first day, crazy).
• Finally beat my procrastincation and built out my EVM decoder’s VM, including stack and memory. Now i’m building out the control flow graph of every possible path that can occur in the bytecode - made an efficient recursive algo to generate these. Feels like im doing mev again.
• Learned how to emulate the EVM for testing (might make an article on this) - Confirmed I actually knew about this when i did it for my mev bot but further digging solidified it.
• Getting a lot of interest for jobs. Maybe i’ll finally break into the auditing field??
• Learning about red team rust. I think my EVM decoder sparked an interest in this, although i think ill stick with web3 for now.
• Having a career crisis of what i want to pursue. I definitely want to do generalised mev with a team since doing it before was fun OR do low level evm stuff, e.g. compiler, decoder, security tooling - there doesnt seem to be a lot of people doing stuff like this or the ones that do approach me dont incentivise enough compared to normal defi forks (which sucks).
• Feel like i should learn yul since that’s where the high paying solidity jobs are at - maybe i learn huff when i finish my decoder, although it’s teaching me how things work. Dunno, we’ll see. If i do learn it i’ll definitely make articles on it.
• Not career wise thing, but trying to clear out my room so i can finally move to a different country and attend these hackathon events.

30/12/2022

• Finished the bytecode decoder’s v1 of the CFG generator!
• Decoded a for loop from pure bytecode: learning bytecode patterns.

21/11

• Stopped working on auctioneer bot bc I found it boring and am more interested in learning low-level evm.
• Tried decoding calldata w/ only bytecode around 01/10/2022 - failed to do so w/o abi.
• Learned about black/gray/whitebox fuzzing conceptually.
• Started becoming active in the Huff discord, making new frens, learning how to read bytecode and opcodes - found a passion for low-level programming and reverse engineering.
• Built the foundation for memory + stack decoding for contract bytecode (tryna get like jon becker).
• build v1 of pure calldata decoder, however wasn’t dynamic enough - example found here.
• jtriley helped me understand encoding dynaic types (somehow i forgot how it worked lmao), then built a v2 for my calldata decoder on 21/10/2022 that only requires the bytecode input (w/o knowledge of anything else) - example found here (quite literally spending 10hrs straight on this to the point where my legs were hurting from sitting too much) - got a bit of interest from job.
• On 21/10/2022, started diving into jon becker’s heimdall, also have plans to learn revm and foundry to understand blockchain emulation for blackbox fuzzing.

27/10

• Scratched the auctioneer bot’s data structures to make it dumbfounded simple - sticking to manual commands to begin to finish the damn thing. I had too many moving parts at the start (well, 2 moving parts - but enough to make it too complex).
• Finished off the JSON interaction for my Rust merkle tree generator, preparing for the STFX presale (they’re looking to raise 9 mil using a contract I made) - looking forward to it! It spits out an output JSON file to pre-fill frontend parameters for easy integration. That was always the hardest part imo, so i had to make a feature for it!
• Set up my first full-node w/ AWS (shoutout to Realism + 0xDmtri for helping me out).
• Been getting tons of job offers, from contracting work to full-time positions (I think around 12 in a single week - never thought this would happen tbh). The most noticeable ones were Grug Capital (super interesting bot work there), Phantom (sol wallet), Auto yield farming managers (like the bot i was building in /projects) and MEV teams (2 transitioning from traditional HFT to MEV).

22/10

• Published 2 articles: The Areas Of Web3 Development and Entering The Dark Forest.
• Released mev-template-rs which gained a lot of traction, leading to people dming me on twitter for job opportunities (2 mev related and 5+ protocol related). Also, it inspired the creation of subway-rs :O
• Completed a job trail with STFX from 21/09/2022 to 22/10/2022. Built a couple of contracts: Fixed supply ERC20 token, token presale with merkle tree claiming and a vesting contract. Learned about perp markets and integrated with GMX.
• Built a merkle tree generator with Rust (this bad boy took a while to understand the encoding part but we finally got there). Developed a solid understanding of how they work: generating trees, nodes, proofs and how to verify them. Also, learned more about the keccak256 hash function.
• Learned about different ways to handle multi-threaded data with Rust. One type i’m apply to the discord auction bot is the concept of actors - a single thread that receives and processes mutation requests. Multi-threading is a very interesting concept but i’ve now experienced why it’s such a pain.
• Working on a generalised mev bot just to build out a bunch of strategies. I finally learned how to keep track of state changes w/o eth_call each block! This will be very useful for a lot of strategies. Started exploring sandwiching and cross-chain mev: how to build an effective sandwicher on non-flashbot chains (very interesting btw).
• Need to update my website to make it cleaner and easier for people to hire me for freelancing gigs. Having a website is definitely the biggest helper when getting hired, resumes are outdated imo.
• Might do some CTFs (web2 and web3) and publish some write ups. Darknet Diaries’ REvil episode makes me want to learn about ransomware + malware development (although i would never use it practically) and it seems web3 hacking just never ends - very useful to have the knowledge of where to look for vulnerabilities.
• Note to myself: With a lot of offers for opportunities coming in, it’s a dilemma between payment and desire. Right now, i choose building something im interested in, even it it doesn’t pay as well as the one that pays well.

09/09

• Finished my first programming article How To Build a MEV Bot!
• Discord Auction Bot:
  • Modularised the code to make it so much cleaner. Been spending every day working on it and improving the IPFS cacher.
  • Got the IPFS cacher to work w/ discord commands, displaying all images and jsons in a channel.
  • Working on the on-chain stuff now with deploying the contract to testnet and interacting with the bot via bidding.

28/08

• Finished the first version of my auto-compounder bot. Currently supports all of SpookySwap’s MasterChef farms in a single contract. Most people use a contract for each farm I believe.
• Started applying for jobs on AngelList and Cryptocurrency Jobs.
• Going to start building my first Solana contract. I think this is the way forward if I want to find a job using Rust but in web3. Since I already have smart contract experience and want to have more things to build with Rust Solana contracts may be the way to get that experience (while learning a new skill to get hired). Senior Rust jobs pay a lot atm bc there’s such a small supply. Definitely worth learning!

23/08

• Working on this website so that I can continue applying for Rust jobs. I’ve been using twitter to reach out to people, I think it’s a terrific tool to find opportunities. Got markdown files to work on my Next.js website, it makes writing soooo much easier. Articles coming soon!
• Received my first freelancing task (ERC-1155 Migrator).
• Decided not to work on the twitter bot b/c it doesn’t seem beneficial atm, instead working on a yield farming bot to practice writing web3 bots. Will be learning to add + remove liquidity programmatically w/ a custom zapper contract.
• Found this darknet stories podcast, might be an interesting listen.
• Definitely feel like I’ve been progressing really well with what I needed to work on with the MEV team feedback. Been reading a lot more bots and building a lot more things in Rust. Thank the lord for impl and trait in Rust!

17/08

• Been working on the discord NFT auction bot. Almost done, just need to add a few more features and implement the metadata json + image embed msgs and then just a basic website for users to deposit their NFTs and a dashboard for the admin to choose which NFTs they want auction off. Tbh, building a discord bot in Rust is disgusting bc I need to keep using RwLocks, using .read() and .write() in scopes. Makes it look icky. Discord.js looks like it would of been soooo much easier. Anyway…good practice. Started using impl a lot more and oml is it amazing. The code becomes so much cleaner and readable. This is another reason why I want to do everything in rust now, lmao. Kinda hard to go back to other langs bc writing rust is so fun…apart from this discord bot (only bc of RwLock).
• Need to create a need blog website where I can use mdx to write stuff. Currently writing paragraphs in components…so yeah, need to do that.
• Applied for Dora and got an intro thing w/ Rook today at 10:30pm (its 5:27pm atm).
• Gonna start writing a twitter bot based off that coinfessions post of the twitter botter making 30-40k a month (crazy) to fake interaction in discords and twitter. Soooo, would be nice to learn how to create my own crate to interact with an API instead of relying on other crates, esp when I need it for something new or niche. I think I’ll also start looking into Machine Learning to try and have the twitter bot generate unique messages that people would actually send. Otherwise, mass followers and no interaction kinda makes no sense and is pretty obvious. Anyway, we’ll see how that goes. Once again, probs should do in JS…buuuuuut I want to get good at Rust bc I do believe Rust devs are going to be in high demand in the future. And junior rust dev jobs are non-existent atm.
• Need to learn about SQL too just so I can set up databases for my backend code to keep track of shit if my bot goes offline.
• Cross-chain mev is becoming a trend I see in mev twitter. I think it’s actually not that hard to build one but to have a good one would be interesting. Wondering about cross-chain arb frontrunning + backrunning too. I think you would need to monitor a bridge for interactions then trace the account for swaps, etc.
• Want to get into cryptography too, esp since the Tornado Cash people got shutdown. Seems like it can be very useful for protocols to use.

10/08

• Watched design patterns video.
• Started restructuring my metadata-cacher-rs w/ implementations (feels and looks so much cleaner).

09/08

• Got denied from the team I was working with for 3-4 months, however probably will still write bots for them as a freelancing type of thing until I get gud. I actually have even more hunger to learn Rust now. I feel like every time im denied it gives me more strength to learn more. I was getting a bit burnt out by the debugging but I think thats really the hardest thing due to so many moving parts. The bot is still stuck on the execution part, more specifically the calldata construction and propagation.

• Feedback:
  Positives

  • Able to build simple systems first and iterate on that instead of over-complicating + overthinking w/ complex systems at the start.
  • Natural inclination to look for new opportunities (there are 2 types of people: 1) focus person to perfect + 2) person to look for new opportunities), im a person that naturally looks for new opportunities (I do like constant change) and he said I should focus on maximising that strength.
  • Strong drive + hunger to do things without being told (Somewhat rare personality trait).

  To work on

  • Mainly experience, so just keep doing what im doing - e.g., build more bots!
  • Understanding new complex concepts quicker (abstracts, etc): understanding mev strategies to the core to the point you can simply explain it in detail. e.g, write down: thread to explain exactly whats happening in a mev strategy (blog).
  • Writing structured code and finding bugs / debugging w/ tests ( the hardest thing ) - I’ll be writing more bots + going through bigger projects and how they structure their code so should be better w/ more experience.
  • Learn general programming concepts (object orientated design patterns + undirected graphs).
  • Combine Rust implementations of GETH (not essential, just if I want to get into geth, 2 things w/ 1 stone).

07/08

• Learned about Rust traits + implementations from this video. Really good explanations.
• Created an IPFS json parser that filers topics. Focusing on the image topic, it downloads the image from the url, in either a JPEG or GIF and stores it in a temporary cache. Just need to add this to my NFT discord auction bot now.
• THe US government sanctioned Tornado Cash and deleted the githubs that contributed. This sparked an interest in cryptography for me and doing some research on zkProofs and zkSnarks.
• Watched Rust Demystified 🪄 Simplifying The Toughest Parts for fun.

30/07

• Learned about signing and verifying messages w/ a signature + message string to get the public key (signer) -> kind of sparked an interest in ZK proofs but not sure when I would want to use it. Saw an example for verifying I have a priv key without showing the key.
• Continuing to work on a discord NFT auction bot for TombHeads since I created a Rust alternative for Web3Auth w/ the signature authentication system, hopefully can start distributing after I get it polished up. Going to need to learn Solana smart contracts for a Solana version of the bot.
• Started to learn about linear algebra (probs going to do this course) + statistics (advice from one of 2 mev anons that reached out when I tweeted im starting to do freelancing). Also learned that to be fully successful in crypto you need to know the inner workings of protocols, e.g, their gas process and how the evm works - then optimise via low level programming (Rust + assembly/yul for smart contracts evm) for the millisecond. Definitely want to start learning GETH soon. It makes sense though, everyone I see that I consider at the elite level of crypto tech programming all know the inner workings of the evm in addition to being specialists in their fields (smart contracts || backend stuff). I do think im going in he right direction though, just gotta keep learning everyday.
• Bot update: still stuck on the tx execution. For some reason it fails. Not sure if its to do with the broadcasting bc the manual tx propagation worked before the broadcaster impl. All the tests work in Rust + Solidity :/

16/07 - Detected First Arb!

• Discovered my first monitored arb on the 28/06/2022 for 0.03.
• 07/07/2022, monitored $2.5k arb while building my tx crafting (lmao rip).
• 16/07/2022, Submitted 3 successful next block arb txs for the first time, except werent profitable when subtracting gas from profits… After 2.5 months of work on my Rust bot, it’s finally able to monitor + submit multi-hop-arb txs (e.g, 4 arbs in 1 tx) using flashswaps and function selector calls (like this).
• Learned Rust pretty well so far. I’m very comfortable with the ownership model now, which has helped tremendously in optimising the bot. I was doing a lot of cloneing but now im using &muts which are soooo much more efficient bc you’re just mutating the same variable over and over again instead of creating a new instance of it each time.
• Had a chat to Grug Capital, v impressive credentials and achievements (e.g, moonbird arb), got given a project to work on, but really don’t have time atm + it wont be profitable so not sure if the best use of time. May look into it later(?).
• Now I think I need to learn about GETH and node modification, that will be v interesting. I feel fairly confident with Rust, however I’ve never used traits or impl (lmfao).
• Shoutout to this cafe mix for being such great white noise: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iD4dMdpNe_I.
• I think the competitor for the strategy earned around 88k while I’ve been building my bot. Insane.

16/06 - NFT Mint Spammer

• Found MEV Memoirs: Into the Arena - Chapter 1, Part 2 🤖 but didnt read, yet .-.
• Getting pretty confident with Rust ended up creating an NFT minter bot that creates 100 accounts, mints NFT and records the tx, in 5hrs (? - idk I went to bed at 9am lol). Ended up not even using it bc the BitGoblins mint was delayed by 2hrs. I woke and it was minted out in 40mins.
• Deployed bot to AWS server + using custom node set up by searcher team (no sleep duration :0).
• Fixed the concurrency with the arb bot + updated monitor 328 paths from 72 :D. Only updating with block refresh instead of updating with incoming txs sooo only scanning 1 pair swaps atm.
• Started to learn Serenity for discord bot, wanting to upgrade TombHeads :) Rust is fun and I want to build everything I can with it.
• Learned Uniswap V2’s getAmountOut() actually works - basically reserveIn is the amountIn’s reserve supply whereas reserveOut is the supply of amountOut.

28/05

• Started optimising bot in order to get a stronger understanding of problems w/ MEV + Rust - need to do this to get a chance at getting a full-time searcher job.
• Created a rust-experiments repo for testing out and understanding operations (understanding &strs, loops, hashmaps and vectors atm). Still need to learn about traits and implementations. Maybe later on. Not sure how important they are, yet.
• Watching Crust of Rust: Channels. Edit: got 20mins in and think I need to watch something else for real use-case examples. His explanations are really good though!
• Watched Something Is Weird About Rust’s Threading and Concurrency | Rust Multi-Threading Tutorial
• Watched Introduction to Rust - Part 14: Threading: very good to understand threading!

21/05 - Building First Longtail Bot

• I have been working on a long-tail mev bot, for a searcher team as a skill demonstration, w/ mempool monitoring, decoding, block refreshing and my first arb algorithm to generate every possible path with a set of predefined paths (e.g, wETH -> USDC -> STAKE -> wSTAKE -> wBTC -> wETH). I literally have no background knowledge for Rust/MEV/Backend but my learning skills are pretty good so thats why I was given a chance (and my Solidity experience, almost 2 yr now). For anyone wanting to get into MEV, my recommendation is build a bot in rust that creates simulations, pre-computes incoming txs and determines optimal profit pathways. The majority of profit for us lil guys will be with long-tail opportunities. MEV is such a selfish space so you need to learn by yourself and filter out the psy-ops (is this psy-ops? :0). Getting into MEV is so hard but it’s so worth it. Just persist and build every day and try to break down everything in a very simple way.
• Launched @TheaterDAO + made a basic website (do need to update to make way more user friendly) - currently requires technical knowledge to use and doesn’t display all projects on a single page.
• Almost finish algorithmic auction house; finished semi-algorithmic auction house that just requires the auctioneer to start it.
• Optimised atomic swap contract (now atomic trade).
• Listened to Permissionless FB founder + ETH Amsterdam.
• Hopefully I’ll finish my mev bot in the next couple of days (a simple version at least) and see where I go from there. There is only 1 competitor atm and basically for every day im not competing is another day that person is making that $$$ (approve 4-5 txs every 20s - around $8-$30 - cough wtaf). Just for a simple arb + extra steps. Imagine a liquidation longtail or something. Anyway, not much has happened apart from my protocol development pause + beginning of MEV dev. Why? I prefer PvP over PvE ;) I’ll finish off some of my old contracts after I get my bot up and running bc im learning so much. I stopped protocol dev bc I reached a point where I wasn’t learning much at all. With mev im learning Rust, backend, bot creation, blockchain infrastructure (which is soooo interesting btw), Golang soon, and probs assembly and how shit works at a low level. Super valuable stuff to learn for all sectors of crypto.
• Ty to swampstream for keeping me accountable for this :P (hope this helps, fren).
• OH and portugal is adding 28(?)% tax soon (FML lol).
• P.s. the Rust book is so good! Love learning about everything, now learning about Channels + Threads to run 2 things in parallel for the mev bot (monitoring systems). Cake_sniper was right…building something is the best way to learn a language. Thats why I was struggling before. Its bc I didnt have a direct goal of what to build / where to start, etc. Now I have direction.

19-21/02

• Completed 7hr Rust Udemy course (Learn by building examples, or something).
• Read learn Rust in 30min article.
• Watched Crust of Rust: Lifetime Annotations.

06/02

• Started building monitoring system. Learned a lot more about UniswapV2 code - line by line (path[], reserves, kLast).
• Watched Flashbots: simple arbitrage repo walkthrough. Learned a lot and recommend to anyone.

05/02

• Determined to learn Rust but have no clue where to start.
• Studied 1inch + other mev bots for a bit.
• Wrote sudocode for Charles (my lil arb bot) - a todo + workflow. Now I know what I need to do and how to start developing him. Game-plan: write in js for v0, get it working the way I want it to, try to optimise it + make it faster or update strategies -> optimise it by turning into Rust +/or add new features over time.

03/01 - 04/02 - Reading cake_sniper

• Sigma Prime internship denied (Applicants had really strong knowledge :o).
• Reading articles on MEV and being more active in the Flashbots discord. Going to learn rust instead of go b/c I think performance is better and I can do more with rust when I learn the language (e.g., rust-based smart contracts).
• Reading some MEV bots (subway, cake_sniper) + learned more assembly and how opcodes work at the low level - especially w/ minimal proxy cloning.
• Want to watch this simple arb walkthrough but I’ve had no time b/c of building TheaterDAO. I really want to release it and help everyone! Maybe I’ll watch it when I release v1 buyout: fixed UI + cards.
• Reviewing UniswapV2 + V3 create pool func - very interesting how using salt can change the created address.
• Learned foundry’s forge! (lfg, solidity testing!).
• Released token factory on TheaterDAO!
• Finished create buyout: fixed UI on TheaterDAO.
• Finished coding the NFT launchpad’s first model + wrote tests for 9 dif models.
• Created TheaterDAO from scratch (as of 05/02/2022 working on the card rendering for each sale.
• Started dev’in an airdropper contract for TheaterDAO.
• Learning how FNAFs uses sound to evoke fear (horror game study) + how they keep players fearful, avoiding conditioning of the game’s horror elements (uses chances + prevents reusable strategies - creating a permanent unknown scenario).
• Studying strategies game devs use to retain retention that psychologically hook players to keep coming back and how it makes them feel (e.g, look boxes, close misses, long term + short term progression) - very interesting b/c there were laws created as a result from this since they use techniques from casinos.
• Started writing up NFT AMM, onchain nft creator + selector concepts. The NFT AMM forced me to learn UniswapV2’s code in depth. This will help w/ creating MEV bots too (super excited).
• Created a community dev chat, very nice to hang out in and surround myself w/ some like-minded-people (connecting more).
• Learning more about IPFS + how ERC721s are actually created (here).

03/01

• Line-by-line review of 2 price models in NFT Launchpad (A:T + A:BC).
• Reading articles on web3 security from Immunifi (Bug bounty article + why it’s beneficial!).

02/01

• Line-by-line review of 3 price models in NFT Launchpad (B:T, B:CC + B:RC).

---

2021

31/12/21 - 01/01/22

• Started line-by-line review of NFT Launchpad for B:BC + discovered an on-chain verification method thanks to being inspired by **Nil DAO’s__ frontend.
• Started learning Rust! (here).

30/12

• Applied at: OpenZeppelin, Halborn Security, Solidity Finance, Trail of Bits: Summer Internship 2022, Certik, Hexens + Immunefi. Lets see how this goes :O
• Talking at first AMA in the Diversifi discord at 9am.
• Rereading NFT Launchpad contracts for logic bugs

29/12

• Reworked NFT Launchpad after reading MISO’s factory + model deployment strategy (uses clones). So, made a factory that uses EIP-1167 cloning system and is catered to adding new models later on.
• Learned some assembly when deploying clones w/ the EIP-1167 clone factory contract).
• Thinking of applying for OpenZeppelin Security Analyst. Probs will get denied but why not apply (.__.).

25/12

• Researching erc20 launchpad protocols (Lukso: rICO, Sushi: MISO) to start building v2 contracts, similar to the NFT launchpad w/ multiple model selectors (much excite!).
• Began building tutorial game (here). Very refreshing to learn something new.
• Started building DutchAuction contract (erc20 launchpad, nft launchpad models, nft marketplace)

24/12

• Finished NFT Launchpad contracts + Loan Market contracts.
• Started reviewing old Erc20 Launchpad contracts.
• Applied for Sigma Prime Internship (pending).
• Purchased Rust course for Javascipt devs (here). Kind of want to build all my contracts in Rust and be a first mover on Sol, KSM + Dot.

---

TDLR

2020 - 2022

Started to learn programming from scratch, just went straight into Solidity w/ no prior knowledge, only the high-level knowledge I attained from trading. I began reaching out to people on twitter looking for work for free and met @0xBuns who mentored me. We built a project then re-branded to @SoulSwapFinance. I started building @TheaterDAO then got burnt out because frontend is just not it (for me). And now I’m obsessed with Rust backend (specifically bots atm).

• 07/12/2021: left my parents’ house to my first house (shared w/ 2 others) to Sunshine.

2019

I read books from and to my 2 jobs at the time (bar + retail). Eventually, covid struck and I ended up just trading full-time in crypto, basically becoming an independent researcher + swing trader. I made a lot of money, but inevitably lost all of it because I either didn’t realise the gains, got scammed or rugged. I wanted to become better at investing so I started to learn how to read what I was investing in at a technical level (Solidity). I eventually found myself learning everyday and stopped trading as much. And so, my journey had begun.