Radio Silent on Social Media, On Expression, Projects and Interests

"If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" This is a popular philosophical question that is a pretty interesting talking point in conversations. While the original question mostly starts discussions with two major views pertaining to an objective view and subjective view, I am mostly thinking about this question in terms of our personal expression and actions we take in our day to day life. Specifically, our current social media habits and how our desire and tendency to share our activities on social media affect the activities itself.

To be more concrete, imagine when you planned for that last trip you took with your friends or family. How would the decision of going for a trip would have been impacted given that you wouldn't be allowed to share about it. Back when social media was in it's infancy, we traveled, and shared what was happening in our life. But now that social networks and sharing online has become ingrained into our socio-cultural behaviors, a lot of what we do and say is a direct and indirect result of our tendency to share on social media.

Personally, after the passing of a loved one, I've been reluctant to post anything on social media. Initially, the reason was grief. As time passed, I found it easier to stay off of social media. I didn't have to think about sharing anything online and that freed me from having to think of clever captions or how I could capture the moment for the sake of posting. I do feel that I should have shared more instead of being radio silent for so long. Most of my friends are far away from me physically, and the doomscrolling of social media and occasional sight of posts are what remind me of their existence. Now that I've not been posting anything, does that mean I am a mere memory for them. It's a good medium of catching up to everyone online, even though in it's worst form, it dictates our lifestyle and major life decisions.

Getting back to the first question, but within the social media context, having not posted anything on social media and thus not being viewed by others, has my actions have had any consequences, good or bad, given there was noone there to witness them. A similar analogy can be made for the topic of acts of kindness. Does helping a homeless person must follow sharing the act of kindness or is the satisfaction of doing a good deed should be enough. Are you kind or a showoff? one can be both, it doesn't have to be black and white. If the appeal of showing off fills a few more empty stomach, then who am I to complain. Right?

Well, the problem is with precedence. It is not what one does when the cameras are on, but after that when there are no spectators and no one to appreciate the act. Cause even in this technology filled world, the cameras are mostly off, and it matters more what one does after the cameras are gone, when one has to make a choice to help. Will they check for a camera or just pass a slice of bread to a person in need?

Sorry that wasn't the conclusion I was hoping for. I was trying to connect all that with how I've worked and learned so many amazing things in silence, without the need to show off, although ironically, this post is a way of showing off how I've not been showing off. So let's get to the actual point. After joining a job as an engineer, I've been learning web dev and playing with new AI tools that have emerged in the past year. Even though there is not much time in a day, a few hours here and there amount to a lot, and with low expecatations I've managed to explore and complete a few side-projects / experimentations.

So in no particular order, here's a random list of things I've done, which I would like to elaborate on and link to in the future.

• Color Pallette generator in python colab notebook
• Disco diffusion image generator style explorations
• Stable diffusion early adoption and exploration
• Dreambooth training for portraits and styles in stable diffusion
• Running LLAMA 7B model in 4 bit using GPTQ method in Colab notebook
• Fast.ai course and notebooks exploration, fast.ai for coders course
• Davinci Resolve video editing, custom effects, titles, editing tricks research
• Ali Abdaal Youtube course
• Obsidian, Second Brain, Personal Knowledge Management, Notion
• Advanced Prompting for chatGPT to explore different usecases
• created a few portraits of my dad using dreambooth and painting styles
• using twitter to stay updated on the latest of AI and generative AI
• twitter offline bookmark viewer

honestly, I've been exploring a lot and not really giving any projects enough time to mature or be good enough to share as a blog post. But the ideas and topics are there, and with enough cleanup, each of these points are worthy of blog post on their own.

I'm excited to explore more topics especially in the field of AI. A recent audio generation model called BARK has piqued my interest. I used Descript service last year which had impressive voice cloning ability, and now BARK model shows a similar capability while being more advanced and open source. I need a way to strucuture my research and write more on each topic to solidify my understanding and create and share something of value. For now, my posts are doomed to be long and roughly drafted. Cause you know what, I would rather have long verbose writing on my blog than a supposedly clean piece of thought in my brain which has a history of vanishing rather quickly in the busyness (business?) of life.