Comment by noduerme

Some pretty giant weird stuff. Some of them were things I imagined would be startups, and built at scale over 6-12 months, but realized I was the only person who had a use for.

So like, during covid lockdown I wanted to assess cumulative risk from me going to the supermarket, or seeing my girlfriend, or each of us hanging out with meeting 1 vs. 2 vs. 3 people per day. This led to me writing a pretty insane Markov Chain engine/GUI for defining time- or repetition-based curves for expected outcomes of bespoke events (basically like: I go to a bar N times, each one gives me a probability of encountering covid around 5%, if any of those happens it triggers another event in which having a covid-positive test result goes in a parabolic curve from 0% to 100% and back over the 12 days from contact, anchored around day 5), and chaining them together with other events that would only happen if the initial conditions had been met. I credit that beast with preventing me from getting covid... but it's also basically so visually insane and complicated that just explaining to someone why they'd need it would be pointless. Yet it has an entire login system, a custom engine in PixiJS for drawing time curves, and a whole multi-threaded worker system on the back and front for comparing monte carlo versions of the chains. Me and one friend are the only users.

[edit] Also: An engine for identifying stock market patterns. It's my form of "low frequency trading" - one of the goals being to avoid wash sales. So far, averaged over last 2 years it's turned out trades about 14% over base increase/decrease on the stocks it's trading... and I set aside a fund with which I follow it religiously. It only suggests trades every month or two. I have no interest in making picks for other people, or in trying to market the software. Occasionally I give my brothers tips from it.