It feels like my brain finds a way to do something else and avoid painful situations like boredom or hard work.<\/p>\n
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It reminds me of when I was in high school talking to a friend about how laying in bed with your phone can kill hours without you noticing it.\nIt was circa 2015, back then attention hungry<\/a> apps were less powerful but still lure a teenager’s mind for few hours.\nI learned that these apps should be used very carefully.\nAt that time I made a decision to never have a charger near my bed.\nBack then it was mostly about my phone, because when I was on the computer I was either reading, or programming, or playing a game.\nEven if I wasn’t in the mood to think, I played a strategic game or chess.\nThese activities exercise the mind and are fun.\nAll of them were an intentional activity.\nI didn’t do any passive activities like browsing or chatting on my computer.<\/p>\n Later I discovered HackerNoon and Medium, it was the first website that I was browsing whenever I was bored behind the computer.\nThis meant that I had a way to get out boredom easily.\nIt used to have some high quality content. It inspired me to do some projects and learn more programming.\nI found channels like CSDojo<\/a> there.\nNowadays I don’t even open them.\nThey are filled with slop or click bait articles, probably because of monetization incentives.\nThen hackernews, and YouTube and others took their place.\nI also found some good people and blogs along the way.\nI learned to keep a reading list<\/a> from people I like to read when I’m on the bus.<\/p>\n I slowly found more activities for when I’m bored.\nThis made it harder to focus on hard things for me.\nWhat kept me on track was that there was no way out.\nI had to work out some algebra problems. I kept myself to a very high bar of understanding what I do.\nAnd I did everything in LaTeX so I couldn’t copy from someone else. I was the only one typing them.<\/p>\n The first time I saw people not putting the effort and still get the reward for it was at work.\nYou might wonder, aren’t people in the university constantly cheating and copying homework, and get good grades?\nWell yes, but when you talked with someone in that group it was clear that he is clueless about the subject.\nA good grade didn’t mean much to me at that time. And as a student cheating does not get you that far.<\/p>\n At work it is different.\nMy days are mostly spend meetings and over chat.\nThe balance between actual work and bullshit<\/a> is skewed.\nI saw people who were barely doing any work and just talk are successful.\nAs long as people give 10% of their attention to work they are considered fine in most environments.\nPreviously I did an experiment<\/a> to track my time and found out that I spent 8 hours chatting on slack in a week.<\/p>\n I don’t care how employers want to shatter employee’s focus.\nBut this made me get used to distractions when I’m programming.\nI’m trying to undo this damage.<\/p>\n The next big change is more usage of LLMs.\nI find myself in this situation too many times, where I outsource something to an LLM and then I start working on something else.\nAnd while doing this I keep thinking about what it’s doing.\nOr when I’m thinking about something I start chatting with an LLM about my idea and instead of getting started on something I’m in research mode only for hours.<\/p>\n It’s good that I’m able to ask something else to research some topic for me.\nBut the productivity only comes if I can move on to something else and not think about it.\nI don’t have any notifications turned on so it doesn’t distract me.\nBut I still find myself thinking about what I just asked it to do and I cannot focus on something else.<\/p>\n At the same time if I’m spending the time interactively with an LLM I feel slow.\nI have to wait for the response and I have to correct every response coming out.\nThe best use of AI seems to be outsourcing what they can do end to end without error.<\/p>\n Why do I keep doing this? Presumably because it’s easy and fast, and productive.\nIf I realize I have to do something I can write it down to do it later or I can just ask the LLM to do it.\nThe problem only shows up when I start doing so many things at once because it’s actually doing the thing.\nThen I have multiple things on my mind and can’t focus really. I have to check on it and guide it in the right direction every now and then.<\/p>\n And this is overstimulating, in a way that doing something without LLM sometimes is boring.\nYou don’t see the results as fast.\nWhich makes focusing harder.<\/p>\n So how can I regain my ability to focus?\nSometimes I live stream<\/a> what I’m doing just because with a camera I cannot escape from hard challenges by grabbing my phone.\nI used to co-work with my friends over discord.\nUnfortunately it’s not possible anymore because people in Iran cannot have a stable internet connection nowadays.<\/p>\n It’s incredibly hard to commit to something for a long period of time.\nIf what I’m doing is going to take multiple days to have a result I have less motivations to do it.\nMeanwhile, vibe coding small utility scripts is fun I keep doing it whenever I see a friction.\nWhenever I am stuck I can throw my problem into it and wait strengthen this habit of waiting for an answer from someone as opposed to work through problems.\nAnd they are fast in getting back the results.\nSo next time I have to read a paper to understand the subject I will be more reluctant because I can get a faster result through them.<\/p>\n I’m changing some habits to replace the current ones.\nIf I don’t feel motivated enough to do anything I get up and pick up a book to read.\nI’m keeping a Garden<\/a> in my balcony is that when I’m tired I can move the soil around and plant some pots and prune plants.\nI find this to be a less addictive than say, watching a movie.\nWhen the motivation comes back I can stop it easily.<\/p>\n My goal was not to find an answer for this problem.\nI wanted to see what’s going on and why I am not doing anything inconsequential in the past few months.\nAnyway the timer I set to write this really helped.\nI spent a lot more time to write this but it gave me the initial motivation to write.<\/p>\n"},{"title":"This plant is two years old","link":"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/","pubDate":"Sun, 28 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000","guid":"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/","description":" I planted my first plant in this apartment nearly three years ago.\nIt was the result of a walk through a supermarket with my friend, where I suddenly saw the stuff needed for gardening and tried planting some herbs.<\/p>\n I had some moderately happy plants from the seeds that I bought.\nOne day I was wondering to myself if I can get a capsicum plan from the seeds of bell peppers in the home.\nI took about 4 bell peppers and extracted their seeds.\nI planted the seed in the soil and watered it.\nAfter a month of watering I didn’t see anything growing.\nSuddenly, after 5 months a the capsicum appeared.\nThe seeds were waiting for the right temperature to start sprouting.<\/p>\n This plant is now 2 years old.\nI have harvested about 5 small bell peppers from it. It’s beautiful and flowers during spring.\nEach year some branches die during the winter. Some leaves get infested with pests and I have to cut it but it continues to grow.<\/p>\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n I’m not sure how long it’s going to continue, I’ve heard that these plants stop<\/a> producing edible parts at some point.\nBut anyway I’m glad that I like plants. It makes the house beautiful and you produce something you can eat. It feels great.<\/p>\n This year it started to grow some baby capsicum plants.\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n The hardest part of maintaining it was the pests.\nThese are susceptible to spider mites<\/a>. They usually live behind the leaves and eat the juice inside them and slowly kill them.\nI usually just wash the leaves with water and spray with pest killers.\nLast year another funny thing happened.\nI found a mint plant on the street. It was completely healthy so I took it home.\nAnd that’s how I brought Whitefly<\/a> into my home.\nIt was really hard to get them out. They quickly spread among my plants including this one.\nOne night I gathered all of my pots and started cleaning the leaves. Whiteflies mostly live on the leaves.<\/p>\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n You might think that I learned my lesson to not bring plants from the street into my home.\nI didn’t, just last week I brought 3 pots inside. 2 of them were very dry olive trees. One of them was Hydrangea<\/a>. The Hydrangea had a lot of spider mites around it, I wasn’t even sure if it’s going to survive.\nBut every new plant brought from outside can teach me something new.\nI don’t like my own plants to be stressed or nearly dying. But when I find one on the streets it’s time to learn how to bring a plant back to life.<\/p>\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n I never planned to have this many plants inside. I’m glad that it happened.\nWhen I’m not feeling alright or need something to pass the time I always have some soil and pots to plant something.\nOr there’s some pruning to do.\nThis is a far superior option to scrolling on the phone.\nPlants are beautiful. They are also alive. It’s not just growing but you see them reacting<\/a> to the environment. They crawl around objects, react to temperature and sun.\nGet some plants. Use the shovel and move the soil around when you need time to pass.<\/p>\n"},{"title":"Devlog 8: Fuzzing ty and dotfile improvements","link":"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/dv-8\/","pubDate":"Tue, 02 Jun 2026 00:05:46 +0200","guid":"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/dv-8\/","description":" It’s been a while since I wrote a dev log.\nI was working on some networking project and I didn’t really think about other stuff for a few weeks.\nNow I’m slowly getting back to writing more blogs.<\/p>\n My plan is to share more notes on my blog like my current bookshelf<\/a>.\nI’ll probably start with sharing my travels.<\/p>\n Fuzzing is a cool technique. With fuzzing you can discover crashes in a codebase that you haven’t worked in before.\nYou might not find the most interesting crashes.\nBut you find crashes.<\/p>\n So what’s fuzzing?\nYou have a huge set of input data for your program.\nThis is called a corpus.\nA fuzzer program can feed input to your program and detect if it crashes.\nIt can also modify the input to generate new input.\nThe loop is to generate input data, feed it into the program, check for a crash, mutate again.<\/p>\n The mutation can be based on code coverage.\nThe fuzzer can explore random changes to input and try to hit new paths in the program.<\/p>\n It all started after seeing This PR<\/a>.\nI wondered if I could find a couple of these panics by fuzzing ty.\nSo I spent a day writing a fuzzer to see how it turns out.\nI didn’t have prior experience with fuzzing.<\/p>\n The most famous fuzzing tool is probably AFL++<\/a>. But for ty there was already a fuzzer setup with Rust Fuzz so I used it.\nI read through Rust Fuzz Book<\/a> and wrote a fuzzer for autocompletion in ty, and I found three crashes!<\/p>\n
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\n![\"bell-pepper-plant.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/bell-pepper-plant_hu_a1997f720b420e7d.jpeg\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n![\"bell-pepper-flowers.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/bell-pepper-flowers_hu_a18b04b3bf644aac.jpeg\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n![\"tiny-bell-pepper.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/tiny-bell-pepper_hu_77b26e8d0bf99729.jpeg\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n![\"whitefly-capsicum.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/whitefly-capsicum_hu_2f819b1253960d19.jpeg\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n![\"whitefly-tomato.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/whitefly-tomato_hu_724297b41e60e94a.jpeg\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n![\"olive-2026-06-17.png\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/olive-2026-06-17_hu_65fd7204b66b122c.png\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n![\"hydrangea-macrophylla-bad.png\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/hydrangea-macrophylla-bad_hu_12dbcceb1719565d.png\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n![\"hydragea-macrophylla-stem.jpeg\"](\"https:\/\/glyphack.com\/2g\/hydragea-macrophylla-stem_hu_e91e27ce79623d18.jpeg\")
\n <\/div>\n \n \n\n \n<\/figure>\n<\/p>\n\n Fuzzing Ty\n #<\/a>\n<\/h2>\n