bazera

Some insights: I have to plan ahead, what comes after another, and limit time in-between, especially till 8pm. After that I can have more leeway. I don't really like structured day, but this is what I need to do at this stage of my life to succeed in what I'm trying to do.

For the past few years, I’ve been struggling to stay consistent with myself — with the promises I make to myself, with integrity, and with discipline. I’ve examined this many times and identified some fundamental issues that I’m working to fix. This journal will serve as public accountability while I build the foundation for the next phase of my life. I’ve just turned 30, and I now realize how little time I have and how easy it is to waste most of it. I need to take much more action than I did in my 20s. Currently, I’m struggling with addiction, I’m overweight, I do the bare minimum at my job as a software developer, I don’t exercise much, and I deal with some anxiety. I know how to fix all of it — and more. I know what to do to make my life unrecognizably better (at least to try my best), and inaction only makes me resent myself more. I know what to do. I just have to do it. This thread will help me stay accountable. I’ll be posting every Saturday with a report on the previous week. This is how it will go. Phase 1: 3 Months I’ve been overconsuming pornography and engaging in compulsive masturbation. Since I’m single and somewhat isolated, I need to control this habit. I will abstain from both to reset my dopamine reward cycle. I’ve been slacking off at work, so I need to refocus and concentrate more. I currently work in 45-minute blocks, then rest for a few minutes, repeating this 2–3 times a day. I want to increase this to at least 6 blocks. Work inconsistency has caused me to sleep very late or work late into the night. As I fix my work habits, my sleep habits should improve as well. My goal is to sleep at least 7 hours, from 12:00 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. I’ve gained a lot of weight. I’m currently around 105 kg and eat a lot of junk food. The plan is to build muscle and lose fat simultaneously until I reach 72–75 kg. Eat 1,800–2,000 calories with at least 160 g of protein Weight train at least 3 times per week Jog for 30 minutes at least 3 times per week Cut out junk food at least 90% of the time I work as a software developer, and the industry is changing rapidly. I need to keep up. I will invest at least 1–2 hours per day in studying, building side projects, or diving deeper into AI. Read books for at least 1 hour per day. Summary of Phase 1 No porn or masturbation No social media Limited YouTube/Reddit for recreation 6–8 daily 45-minute work blocks 1–2 hours of study 1 hour of reading Fixing sleep routine Weight loss: 1,800–2,000 calories 3x weightlifting, 3x cardio weekly Cut out junk food Phase 2: 3 Months On top of the foundation built in Phase 1: Add spiritual practices: Mindfulness meditation (breath-focused) and Kriya Yoga pranayama Add therapeutic practices such as shamanic breathwork, TRE (Trauma Release Exercises), and self-therapy journaling to work through unresolved trauma and issues from the past few years Continue weight loss and exercise — likely reaching target weight by the end of Phase 2 Continue reading and studying Allow masturbation at most once per week after the first 90 days, since more than that negatively affects my life Phases 3 and 4 I can’t say much about these yet. I imagine strengthening spiritual practices, making them more focused and prioritized, socializing more, and possibly starting to date — though dating may be too distracting at the moment, and I don't want it honestly since I've recently got out of a LTR. Phases 4+ Getting involved with psychedelics More socializing More dating experience Starting to work on additional income streams aside from my job Working on creative projects Traveling Meeting new people Exciting things — but first, the foundation. That’s the plan. I won’t plan further than this because planning is a trap for me. Planning gives me a false sense of accomplishment, but it isn’t real progress. Real accomplishment comes from daily execution — day in and day out. It’s that simple. I’ll update every Saturday. 52 updates total. Let’s see how far I go. See you next week.

Okay, I relapsed with PMO, and all my other structure crumbled because of that. This is basically the reason why I'm stuck at the current situation for the last 10 years. I knew all this shit 10 years ago, I knew the benefits of meditative practices, excercising, healthy-eating, consistent deliberate practice in some craft over time, etc, but I kept myself into the same pattern of relapse => blame, guilt => crashing down all the structures => next trial => relapse, etc. This won't stop happening until I don't manage this habit. I'm not sure if anybody actually read this, but this will be my public commitement for this. Because if I don't handle it, nothing else will work. Everything that I wrote here as plans, none of it. It's that serious.

Me too. AI could really boost that process, it could assist you in improving your solutions, give you new perspectives, help you when you're really stuck and just wasting time with no hope. The key word in "AI assistant" is assistant. I'm trying to use it as assistant, not just for solutions generator. So it's not really an AI issue, it's more like a people issue. People are irresponsible, and giving irresponsible people these tools without proper guidance might go sideways.

@Joshe Sorry if I misinterpreted. I'm subscribed to his channel and watched that one when he posted it, he makes good points. This is exactly my experience as well. That might be the case, but that doesn't mean it will be sustainable long term. Also, "making money" isn't a good indicator to me for quality software. Slop can make money as well. The project that I'm working on has been in production for 8 years as of now. It takes a really careful usage of AI to not mess it up over time. It won't be apparent that you're messing up the project with 1-2 promtps. It will be a slow process. If you let AI coding assistance run amok only with people with little technical knowledge on project like that, it will become disaster in couple months. Maybe it can work for smaller scale projects.

It's all fun and games until your "fix it please I beg you" prompts doesn't work anymore and you have to debug and fix manually the code you didn't come up with yourself. Lol. I've been there. All the AI fantasies crash at that point.

No it's not. No software that actually has customers is being made / maintained solely by AI, that's just not the case. Maybe if you have a small startup with a small app with few features, yes. But it still needs an experienced person to overlook it.

It's not that AI literally replaced en emplyee, it just reduced a need for more junior roles at certain companies. Also, the expectation and requirenments for an entree level coding job increased tenfold over the last couple years. Plus Covid made many people realize that coding jobs was profitable and everybody starting learning it, like, in my city if you asked random people if they were learning how to code, 7 out of 10 would probably say yes. And the market got oversaturated pretty quickly. Plus many people was laid-off after Covid was settled and that also created a huge competition on the market. So there were lots of factors in the fact that now juniors struggle to find a job. It's not really only because of AI advent. But it plays some role. To answer your question, yes definitely, that's the real danger that I see today, many people are missing out on learning from the ground. Just imagine trying to learn math and you copy all the answers from the answers sheet for 80% of the times for the problems, because nobody taught you that it was irresponsible, you just figured that it was easy. I remember when I was starting my career, at job, I was having nightmares over the issues I had left at job because there was no way of solving them other than my own mind and research capabilities which I had to develop through painful experiences over time. But now you can just ask a chatbot to "please fix", and you're done. That's something that really concerns me. It takes lots of responsibility to use these tools correctly, and you know the level of responsibility that an average person has, so yeah. There needs to be some of that as well, but for 90% of the times, undergrads should use their mind to solve problems, not AI. Hell, even experienced people need to do that. Sometimes I feel like my mind is rotting when I use LLM's for coding, it's still a new problem so I'm still trying to figure out what's the correct way of using them for productivity and also not to rot my mind. That gap is already here. Not with just coding, also with other things like AI videos, music, etc. For example, when I listen to some AI generated music, it may sound good to my ear and ignore it's AI, but when professional musician will listen to it, that will be much different. Same with the code. For example, yesterday I was tasked to modify some of the feature I worked on last year. I did it with Claude Code in 15 minutes, when without it I'd need at least 4 hours to do it. But it was done with couple iterations, first I asked it to give me a plan, then I modified some things in it's plan, then the first implementation was a bit sloppy (which I was able to identify through existing experience), then on second and third iteration, it was something decent to be pushed and released. I had to meticulously review every line it generated, or else it might halucinate something, and if you aren't careful, customers will complain and if that happens many times, you might even lose customers. So business will lose customers if you aren't being careful as a developer. And you won't be able to be careful if you don't have experience.

They know that if they don't do that, they are gone. It's a life and death situation for them.

Are you serious?

Lol I noticed that some time ago, and I assumed that was a local accent of theirs since I'm not native english speaker, don't know much about english accents.

Thanks, this is really helpful because I live in far eastern European country and getting USA visa would take some hustle, if even possible. Also, there's money aspect. But I really want to attend it at some point, hopefully Peter will be there for at least couple more years, he's old but he seems much healthier for a person of his age. One more question, what do you think would prepare me for that couple weeks that I can start doing now? I have some meditatives practices, I also try to contemplate stuff on my own, taking more responsibiliry over my epistemic process more and more. I'll probably be doing some psychedelics in the near future to boost contemplation as well. I've read not knowing book couple times, I'll read it again probably and the rest of his books as well. Is there anything else? Maybe he even has some prerequisite for entering his retreat?

Just wait for couple years and you'll have hot witch AI girlfriend Problem solved.

I've been using AI tools from day 1. The fearmongering that it would replace developers was already there. Since then couple years have passed, and it affected the market in couple ways: First, decline of junior developer jobs, it's more or less attributed to the advent of AI coding assistents. Recent models from Claude can do recent job at doing fairly complex tasks, but it always needs a human reviewer in my experience. It's just an extension, not replacement for an actual developer. Second, it doesn't make much sense to write 90% of the code by hand anymore, but that does't mean that AI generated code is ready for production in serious projects, far from it. Again, it accelerates building process. Also, if you just do junior level tasks at job and nothing else, for example basic frontend work, yeah, Claude + senior combination could actually replace you. The workflow has changed for sure. Most software industry now uses AI generated code in some ways or another, but that's a double edged sword. The reql value of writing code by yourself was that you were intimate familiar with it, you could catch and fix bugs sometimes almost intuitively when you had familiarity with written code like that. But now if you just review Claude generated code to make sure it works or fine-tune it by hand, it does't feel that familiar, which can bite in the ass as months go by and customers register bugs. Also, it takes a huge experience, knowledge, honed intuition, architectural and systemic skills to notice if what Claude generated is actually good. The importance of competency hasn't just gone anywhere, it only became more important. I've used AI to learn new technical subjects, diving deep into technologies much faster that I'd do without it, build projects in weeks instead of months, boosted my performace at job. Also, I've used AI in other creative ways, created some videos that got thousands of views, used it for self-therapy and personal advice when I was in need which was super helpful, its also very useful for health advice. AI has so many good uses, we just should't overestimate it's possibilities. Even Sam Altman was pushing the idea of AI girlfriend when he posted one word on twitter when voice assistent was released: "her". It's just ridiculous. It's like, when there is some truth in falsehood, the entire falsehood is sold as truth. When there is legitimate usefulness in AI tools, it makes it easy for these tech-bro CEO's to sell this technology as the cure for all humanity's problems.

What does AI girlfriend even mean? You mean something similar to a movie "her"?

@BlessedLion This was great, thanks for sharing. Make sure to keep us posted on that! Could you tell me a bit about your experience on his retreat? How was it structured, how long it was, and what would be your brief feedback on it? Did you find it effective?

This was also a great example of deconstructing AI hype bullshit. Newport always stayed a reasonable voice amidst all the techno-chaos in the last years. It's crazy how these people skew literal facts to push their AI agenda.

Hey, I'm working as a software developer (mostly web) for 8-9 years now, and for the last couple years, the industry is being reshaped in front of my eyes due to AI. At the moment, it's like, if you don't use some sort of AI agent in your workflow, you're getting behind, and you feel that each month. Managers push us to use AI more and more, and expect productivity gains due to it, and for the last 2-3 months, AI agents have improved to such a degree that me and most developers around me don't actually type code manually, the process has morphed into talking with an agent, or multiple agents at once, and basically orchestrating them, reviewing code, making sure they do the job correctly, and if an agent isn't able to do something, then we switch back to an old school way and do things manually. These agents affected the industry so much that many of us have anxiety over losing our jobs in the long term. That's why now I'm switching more and more into roles and projects that require more architectural and big-picture thinking skills. If not at the current job, I try to advance those skills with my own toy projects in my free time. So, I was wondering if any of you guys experience similar changes due to AI in your induestries. Would be interesting to hear your thoughts.

What do you mean AI pictures of clients? What specific ways do you use AI for dating photography? You do editing with AI instead of traditional Adobe way?

@Miguel1 I know, right? It's been more then 10 years for me, I freaked out a bit the other day when I realized that. We're getting old Time flies.

Here you go The Slop Song.mp3

Just woke up, it's 06:55, here's the update: -0.3kg (-0.7kg in 3 days) sleep 7 hours regular schedule [finally fixed] no addiction relapses [3/90] 1900 calories, 170g protein 10k steps 40m pull workout 22m run 45m read 45m study 20m meditation I missed yoga didn't work much Some insights: I'm wasting many minutes / hours in between tasks, it's an issue of procrastionation, I have to fix this somehow. An idea: I'll log the starting time of a task, and write it here with the updates so I feel more accountable to myself and it will be more apparent ho much time I waste. Bringing that to an awareness. I have to follow up meditation with pranayamas in the morning, if I postpone it for later that day, I'll probably won't do it. Morning hours are extra precious to make most of them. If I do everything on time with minimal distractions, I'll have much more free time in the evening to just relax and enjoy myself. One of the snickiest distractions for me is my curiosity. I've so many diverse interests (history, AI, technologies, spirituality, philosophy, creativity, relationships, etc etc) I have like 20 youtube video tabs open at any given time on different things podcasts, interviews, courses, etc, I'm so curious, I read books on diverse topics, but the problem is that I get so excited on all these that I might skip work (which I'm already fed up with), or some task that requires mental resistance. So I have to somehow balance my curiosity and training.

What's your day-to-day diet like? Like for 80-90% of the times, what do you eat? I try to lose weight while building muscle and here's what I eat: protein pancakes (protein powder, banana, egg) chicken breast + rice / buckwheat eggs cottage cheese tuna salad some fruit That's it basically. 1900-2000 calories and 160g protein. And on the weekends I might switch and bring in some variety, but still stay in these caloric range. What about you?

Don't investors realize that? How is it that they still get billions of dollars for implementing this AGI pipedream. This will get more apparent as some years go by, I think it's still relatively recent that AI penetrated into the culture, even grandmas use ChatGPT now. But I think people will develop higher expectations sooner or later, that these companies won't be able to live up to.

It really helps with nasal breathing techniques. That book has some very wierd techniques as well, one was about cleaning your internal organs with some cloth you stick through your mouth, I don't remember the exact technique but he was teaching you how to manage the gag reflex and stuff like that. I wonder what other crazy shit hardcore yogis to.