Sunday night.
I’m feeling tired physically and mentally. Physically mostly because today was shoveling day. I spent about two and a half hours this afternoon shoveling, and earlier this morning I spent at least an hour or more doing the first round. Overall we got more than 20 inches and it’s still snowing outside. So yeah. Quite a day of snow.
The week felt productive.
What?
I shared two articles online. Recorded, edited, published them. Created images for them. Did all the SEO.
I also worked a lot on my Chrome extension project, which involves managing YouTube. There isn’t a very good tool in the Chrome Web Store, at least not working the way I think it should, so the objective is to create a tool that really performs. What’s interesting is that conceptually and functionally, it’s not a very difficult problem. What’s difficult is figuring out the architecture and what’s going on inside. It’s sort of mysterious black box stuff.
And I’m now at the point where I’m taking the project from ChatGPT over to Google antigravity. With ChatGPT, everything is slowly getting better, but it’s a lot of back and forth.
I ask for something, get code, set it up, try it, give feedback, ask for tweaks… on and on. Just to get basic functionality sometimes takes multiple hours across multiple days.
What’s interesting about Antigravity is they have a working agent system that, if given the right instructions, can perform tasks autonomously without human intervention. It can write code, test it, figure out if it works, and spend two hours chasing the solution instead of me sitting here doing the back and forth.
Big advancement in that regard. I’m damn close to solving the last stubborn piece of the extension, and I’ve been prepping the documentation so I can hand the whole thing to an agent and let it work as long as it needs to.
Meanwhile, I can watch YouTube, take a nap, or go shovel more snow.
Even more interesting is how far I got on my voice cloning project.
Right now I’m very close to having a near perfect mirror of my voice so it actually sounds like me. The objective is: when I get done writing, instead of me having to read it, I can feed it to a folder, have it processed, and out the other side comes an audio file that’s “me” reading the entire text. I think I’m on version 12. It’s been a fascinating process. I learned new terms and what they do to a synthetic voice, including prosody, which has to do with variability in intonation. We don’t talk flat all the time.
On that side, things have felt clearer. I’ve finally been able to focus on something and make progress. And I also made huge ground on the Barely, But Here front, sharing more about the journey I’ve been on trying to get my feet on the ground and rebuild my life. It’s not an easy thing, particularly after what I’ve been through and what I’m still going through. Although I will say it does feel like I’m on the tail end of things.
I also had A good week of counseling.
If I think back: did I mask at all this week? Yes, I did. I masked with relatives. I didn’t mask at counseling. That would be kind of stupid. And the masking doesn’t really cost me anything with relatives. It gives me space and quiet and peace, so it’s a cost worth paying.
If I strip away all the bits, what feels most essential and core is that I had a very positive week in the 10 hours of therapy I did last week. It’s been intensive, which is why it’s called intensive therapy.
So what is everything asking of me going into next week? More sharing for Barely, But Here. I’m going to create an orientation page to help people understand what it is: start here, read this, that kind of thing. Because it’s heavy stuff. People could probably read one. I don’t know if you want to read two. It’s a lot, and it takes time. But you want to point people in the right direction if they’re looking for something specific.
I’m also interested in seeing where antigravity takes me next week with Google. And things have felt better depression-wise.
I don’t feel completely healed.
I still feel a bit in survival mode.
I’m still very frustrated about my situation.
This is where I’m at tonight.
