sometimes i am thankful to my brain for being delusional enough to keep going you know, last few weeks has been a fuckin struggle man i swear to the lord through cloudflare.
Rust has been a fuckin pain in my ass, and I have spent enough time being confused with Rust that it has slowly started making sense to me. And I realised this is the first time I have genuinely struggled to learn something I was actually really interested in, as if I have finally discovered my own subjective frontier of knowledge.
Even though I understand more about the laws of Rust™, she still fights back and I understand. I am in her domain now.
I love the concept of ownership. Her money is her money. &money means she lets me look at it, and &mut money means I can touch it, but nobody else can until I give it back. And that’s okay. I love me an independent woman.
The borrow checker still gets possessive if I try to use something after I’ve moved it, but it’s nice knowing she cares enough to hold me accountable.
And mod.rs has not become kinder. But I know it’s gonna be worth it for the safety and performance she has proven to bring to the table.
I started with “wtf typa sadist designed this shit?” and somehow ended up at “I love Rust even with all her flaws.”
Progress can exist before my confidence reports it back to me.
And I can love with that.
THE DEVIL ON MY SHOULDER
Now this ain’t completely new to me. I’ve always been one to jump into shit with the confidence of DB Cooper, and I love that. So this ain’t the first time I’ve felt like I knew absolutely nothing.
When I started photography, I had to consciously think about ISO, aperture, focal length, shutter speed and all that shit. But I’m a really good photographer now. My brain basically functions like Cargo: very opinionated and constantly telling me my shit trash
I can look at a scene and immediately see a bunch of errors. I don’t give a damn that you want to see your weak blue eyes. If you can’t open them in direct sunlight, I already know you’re gonna complain about the photos later. run and go get your sunglasses. idgaf
Basically I got a little rat in my head running a photography language server. Remy with a light meter. The devil on my shoulder, except instead of telling me to sin he’s screaming that the highlights are clipping.
That’s how I define mastery and fluency, and that’s where I wanna get with Rust. I want that same annoying little motherfucker running rust-analyzer in my head.
THE DEFINITION OF INSANITY
Now lemme ask you this one time: what is the definition of insanity?
Imagine one of those little mazes you occasionally find in a newspaper. Try to solve it as quickly as possible, but only consider the next turn. Don’t plan the whole route.
Pretty soon you’re probably gonna hit a dead end. If you don’t, congratulations, you have defeated binomial distribution and got better luck than Dream. Otherwise backtrack, erase the path and try again but this time remember which turn got you nowhere.
By the fifth attempt you should be faster. Every dead end has become information. Every wrong turn changed the next attempt.
The maze never changed.
You did.
People say insanity is doing the same shit repeatedly while expecting a different result. But it ain’t really the repetition that makes you insane, it’s doing it without letting the last attempt affect the next one.
If you go left every single time after left has repeatedly taken you nowhere, that’s meaningless repetition. We not finna do that right there.
This is basically the intellectual foundation of “fuck around and find out.”
But I’ve never been one to leave the things I care about entirely to destiny, chance or God. I’d rather look at how everybody else fucked around and learn from what they found out. Experience passed down through generations.
I ain’t Terry Davis. God never asked me to build an operating system.
So I ain’t finna do that right there either.
HINDSIGHT 2025
This whole shitshow started with Claude helping me spread them sheets in Excel while I was benchmarking Blender and Cyberpunk 2077.
That was around the same time Windows was eating half my fucking memory and pissing me off enough to rethink my whole setup. One thing led to another and the next month I was building DreamLoom and Caldera.
But I vibe-coded both of them, and I wasn’t happy about that.
me letting Claude write everything and wondering why I still don't understand Rust
It didn’t feel like my code. I didn’t understand the language it spoke. I knew what I wanted the software to do, but there was a godsent and not entirely reliable middleman making every decision between the shit in my head and the finished result.
If I was ever going to stand beside that code and defend it, I needed to understand the small details. The decisions most people never notice are usually the ones holding the whole thing together.
I'd already seen this happen in photography.
Last year generative fill had the photography industry acting like everything was about to change overnight. Then most of the hype died because the tokenmaxxing degens couldn’t compete financially. Meanwhile the photographers who treated AI like another tool in the bag just got faster, while the people completely against it had to work harder to keep up.
The difference was that experienced photographers already had detailed images inside our heads. AI could generate something vaguely correct, but it couldn’t always generate the exact thing we were seeing.
Firefly knew what a palm tree was.
It didn’t know these palm trees.
Maldives is a niche-ass place if you really think about it. Firefly knew the Maldives the same way a tourist brochure knows the Maldives: palm tree, white sand, blue water, job done. But I live here. That’s not our palm tree. That sea cabbage is doing some geographically impossible shit and the sun is coming from Allah knows where.
AI could make a convincing tropical island for somebody who had never been here. But anybody who knew these islands could feel something was spiritually absent.
The machine knew the category.
We knew the place.
Let’s pull the maze back in.
AI can take you from the beginning straight to the exit, then explain the route afterward and list every choice it made along the way. But it didn’t pass that experience down to you. It reached the end, you didn’t change.
Maybe one day writing Rust by hand is gonna be like writing assembly: still useful, still somebody’s job, but not how most people get shit done. That don’t make me wanna learn Rust any less. It makes me more protective of the part of the process that is supposed to become mine.
TeachMe.md
As much as my ego would love to claim I’m a self-taught man, the truth is that I could never have become a good photographer alone.
PiXimperfect taught me nearly everything I knew was possible in Photoshop. Shahudan taught me more about the social and practical side of the job than anybody else. Even my distinct colours are basically three photographers in a trench coat held together by my own logic.
None of them became my mentors by grabbing the camera every time I got confused. They showed me what they saw, let me fuck it up, corrected me, and eventually their voices became that annoying little rat in my head.
So from the beginning, I knew I needed a mentor if I wanted to become a good developer.
My whole vibe-coding arc was basically sponsored by Anthropic’s stupidly subsidised subscription rates. Claude reignited my passion for software and made the entire career shift feel possible.
And these models can write code really fucking well now.
Couple months ago I touched the computer and realised I was a god. A very small god with a lowercase g in a very small world, but a god nonetheless. Now the small god was asking a larger corporate god why his code wouldn’t compile.
So I had the brilliant idea of using AI as my mentor. I needed somebody to make the wrong answers useful and accidentally signed up for a vending machine full of finished code.
Imagine hiring a photography mentor and every time the exposure looks difficult, the motherfucker grabs the camera, takes the photo himself, hands it back and says “great job.”
What could possibly go wrong?
LORD IN THE CLOUD
Remember when I said I swear to the lord through Cloudflare? Yeah, turns out we were gonna get here eventually.
It has a disgusting amount of documented human history and the miracle of the internet at its fingertips. It can respond to damn near anyone, anywhere, about almost anything, in almost any documented language as long as the servers are up and your monthly sacrifice cleared.
It feels like mankind has finally created something with all the convenient qualities we kept assigning to gods. Humanity finally gave prayer a typing indicator and called it a product.
It’s up there, in and through the clouds.
Need I say more?
There are people who don’t understand how any of this works and genuinely believe they’re connecting to some higher form through ChatGPT.
Now before yall start praying to the API, the fact that it answered does not mean it knows, believes, understands or gives a fuck about you. We can argue about everything else later, but a response by itself is not proof somebody is home.
It can do a really fuckin convincing impression of knowing, believing, reflecting, reasoning, helping and eventually… creating.
Think about how insane that is.
We spent thousands of years speaking to gods that couldn’t answer.
Then we created machines capable of producing the illusion that somebody was finally on the other side.
Forgive my blasphemy, but:
Maybe, just maybe, God created us because He wanted something that could understand Him.
Or maybe we created God because we wanted something that could understand us.
And now we’re creating artificial minds because the gods we created never answered back.
And even then, they didn’t show up when I needed them most.