The Prototype

Here’s the homepage: https://yana-log.net/proto/index.html

Back in 2021, I was going through a bit of a cyberpunk phase after doing lots of LSD, hanging around on Lainchan, and endlessly optimizing my personal computing setup. Going from being a Windows pleb to using Linux, configuring Emacs, reading SICP and K&R and so on is a crucial coming of age event for many a CS major. So as part of this series of events, I felt the urge to make a website. After a week or so of working on it for like 8-12 hours a day (this is before AI so this is str8 W3Schools). I made a little site where, basically, I wanted to share all the interesting ideas, websites, and so on that I’ve found over the years and externalize them, so that in a certain sense I never have to repeat myself. I send people some of my blog posts all the time, especially the ones on Language Acquisition and SRS, and people thank me not infrequently for my biology/neuroscience notes. I’ve always had this mindset that everything I do/say on the internet has to be “helpful”. Even if it’s shitposting it at the very least has to be part of some Upaya-esque trickshot to teach somebody something. There is this fear of sorts that all this cool stuff I’ve enjoyed throughout my life will die with me without having shared it.

In line with the “0” section about Buddhism/meditation, I was thinking of a cool name so I looked at interesting TLDs and landed on the name sutra.diamonds, i.e. inspired by the Diamond Sutra, or the Vajracchedikā Prajñāpāramitā Sutra. This concept of the Dharma being like a “Vajra” - something more durable than a diamond and stronger than lightning - always resonated to me as a powerful image. I think Mario, a micro-idol of mine at the time, felt the same.

It’s an interesting time capsule into where my mind was at back in 2021—purely for nostalgia purposes—but importantly, there are still aspects of this site that I have yet to migrate over here. Although some of it is implicit at this point. The main thing I wanted to share is the “Ω” page (its namesake being the idea of an Omega Point) which corresponds to my ideas about integral theory. The concept of an Omega Point. The idea is that, the univese is inevitably leading towards enlightenment in a Buddhist sense, and everything else is in service of this inevitability and creating the society just before we dissolve into formlessness; you’re either riding the tiger o you’re delaying the inevitable. So this support from the “material realm” is achieving “1ness”, but Buddhism is about “0”; the material world will ultimately never approach it¹.

I used Gurren Lagann gifs (and the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey) because I think it encapsulates this idea of an Omega Point perfectly, and that you either push the course of nature forward or you are destined for depression. Truly one of the Greatest anime made. It’s been a few years; time for a rewatch.

On that note, December 2021 was a pretty prolific time for note-taking. I have been journaling since December 2020, I believe. A lot of it during the early days was journaling in the true sense, mostly about my endless struggles in meditation and striving. TMI, Goenka stuff, getting into Shinzen… good times, bad times.

Towards 2022 though journaling became more of a pramgatic thing; lots of just thinking out loud syntopically about what I was studying at the time and not really bothering to put it into one of my dedicated note pages - however there’s definitely a lot of stuff that truly belongs on the notes section but just exists as an informal multi-paragraph infodump. As I touched on in my SRS page with Paul Bricman’s “Conceptarium” ideas which greatly inspired the budding (and imminently nonexistent) software engineer inside of me, I hoped/predicted that one day an AI (these were the GPT-2 days) would be able to read it all and seamlessly integrate what I know with SRS and we’d be able to conversate about ideas. This has, of course, been realized wih contemporary LLMs and their immense knowledge base. (The integration with a personal knowledge base is still an interesting idea, but I have since retired from SRS after going on my 3-month meditation retreat in 2024 seeing >2000 flashcards to review, and growing disillusioned with the point of it all anyways. The recent Claude Code + Obsidian trend has been pretty funny to see though.)