5 years ago I wanted to make animated visuals for music videos / light shows. I got the initial version quite quickly. You could make a composition of shapes and had some functions like swap these two components every 2 beats, rotate this one every 4, etc.
That got me thinking about the structure of language, how to model space-time and essentially how to build a programming language capable of building visuals through time similar to how one how would build functions in lambda calculus.
I spent countless hours on this and its become an obsession. I have hundreds of pages of scribbles and built 20 implementations trying to approach the problem another way, got stuck somewhere and restarted. Im closer than when I started but I am burnt out. I really wanted to build a sensible prototype but short of that I just feel like I'm nuts and its all close to worthless.
If you're not showing your prototypes to people to get feedback as you go, you'll easily burn out. We need feedback, as humans. The only artists I know who work in a vacuum are bitter and misanthropic.
I'd love see what you have arrived at, if you'll share it.
I have seen this. Its pretty cool and I do want to learn it.
What I am thinking of is much more of programming language though. The fundemental object is something like a composable tree with some additional state.
Funny you say that. I got the inspiration in part from weed hallucinations. I'd be listening to music and when I closed my eyes, I'd see this moving beautiful 3D colorful visuals. I thought it was astonishing that our brain could come up with these geometric structure and transform them in any way possible. I've spent ALOT of time thinking about the minute details of what Im doing when I imagine shaping/shifting objects in my brain, etc.
In my mind, this is far more than just about music videos, that was just my initial goal. But yeah you're 100% right, its an endless pit of trying to do everything and constantly moving goal posts. I wish I stuck to doing something simple and fun and gone from there.
I'm a developer and I started 3 years ago, a simple app as a weekend project. But this project took on proportions that I did not expect in my life.
If you’ve ever had a side project spiral out of control, you might enjoy reading about my journey.
Would love to hear your stories too!
Congrats on launching! The project definitely looks interesting - I am going to bookmark it for the next time I re-organize my notetaking approach.
Question from a security perspective: How much freedom are you giving people in the javascript code that gets run on the add-on publish functionality that gets hosted on znote.io? How would you handle users abusing it to create abusive material (i.e. using it as a more reputable url to redirect to a phishing page or other malicious page)?
Indeed, as long as you know the fundamentals, whether it be code or cooking, you can make something quite good. Recipes are just for help, to be a true master, you'll need to learn from a beginner's mind.
I think part of why we underestimate difficulty is, it's hard to see anything but the happy path. The complications are harder to anticipate. And for each of the solutions to a problem, we also only think of the happy path to solving it. And so on.
I'm 3.5 years into building the uptime monitoring + status page solution I wanted to see in the world, I'd argue the "core" part took a weekend to get into an MVP state.
The trick is the other 99% that non-early adopters need to feel like the solution is for them (user management, audit logs, and other SaaS table-stakes features).
In short, "we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy".
Took me a while to find a link to the actual product. Surprised it is not mentioned by name (or image) anywhere in this entire post. Figures it is the root domain: https://znote.io/
Readit News
That got me thinking about the structure of language, how to model space-time and essentially how to build a programming language capable of building visuals through time similar to how one how would build functions in lambda calculus.
I spent countless hours on this and its become an obsession. I have hundreds of pages of scribbles and built 20 implementations trying to approach the problem another way, got stuck somewhere and restarted. Im closer than when I started but I am burnt out. I really wanted to build a sensible prototype but short of that I just feel like I'm nuts and its all close to worthless.
I'd love see what you have arrived at, if you'll share it.
https://derivative.ca/
What I am thinking of is much more of programming language though. The fundemental object is something like a composable tree with some additional state.
- you get instant visual feedback
- the problem space is infinite and depends heavily on framing and psychology
- success is a moving target based on subjective goals
IMO, "build a system for X" is usually a trap. It's psychologically safer to "build a system for music videos" than to actually make a music video.
In my mind, this is far more than just about music videos, that was just my initial goal. But yeah you're 100% right, its an endless pit of trying to do everything and constantly moving goal posts. I wish I stuck to doing something simple and fun and gone from there.
Im sure theres truth to it. Nonetheless I think I need to take a break and do something easier/straightforward for a while
I'm a developer and I started 3 years ago, a simple app as a weekend project. But this project took on proportions that I did not expect in my life. If you’ve ever had a side project spiral out of control, you might enjoy reading about my journey. Would love to hear your stories too!
Cheers, Anthony
Question from a security perspective: How much freedom are you giving people in the javascript code that gets run on the add-on publish functionality that gets hosted on znote.io? How would you handle users abusing it to create abusive material (i.e. using it as a more reputable url to redirect to a phishing page or other malicious page)?
I think this statement is more personal than the author intended
I think part of why we underestimate difficulty is, it's hard to see anything but the happy path. The complications are harder to anticipate. And for each of the solutions to a problem, we also only think of the happy path to solving it. And so on.
The trick is the other 99% that non-early adopters need to feel like the solution is for them (user management, audit logs, and other SaaS table-stakes features).
In short, "we do this not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy".
- Couldn't execute the tutorial notebooks without first paying for a subscription
- Specifically surprised that executing a bash script locally is an "Advanced feature"
- I've "exceeded my limit 1/1" for deployed jobs, I'd love to see how/where this is deployed but I don't see a link. It's the default myapphtml job.
EDIT: Found the link to the deployed web app. Was confused because it has a column label of "Frequency"
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