The DIY Spirit Didn’t Die — It Forked Itself on GitHub

Intro

(176BPM)

1-2-3-4!

I’m a slob. That usually doesn’t end well.

I don’t plan. My attention span is a busted cassette tape - short, warped, skipping all over the place.

But here’s the thing: I like it that way.

I never wanted the spreadsheet life of a number cruncher. Never cared for the polished shoes and stiff collars of a classical musician.

Now - a kid bashing out DIY three-chord songs in a garage full of misfits?

Yeah. That’s more like it.

Verse

The thing is - late '70s punk? Way before my time.

I grew up in the '90s and '00s. And by then, DIY wasn’t happening with guitars. It was happening with code.

Guitar heroes were replaced by bedroom hackers.

Stages became command lines.

Zines became blogs.

Mixtapes became open-source repos.

Plastic-music major labels? Now they’re big tech - collecting your data, hoarding it, slicing it up for the highest bidder.

I’m not trying to hate. It is what it is.

But, once again, the whole system’s wired to turn you into a consumer - clicking, scrolling, “engaging” with whatever they decide you should care about.

Bridge

But how do you fight back?

How do you take control of your life - your data - your self?

Not that long ago, trying to do that meant a mountain of effort.

Logging every little thing by hand.

Jamming it all into spreadsheets or some database.

Then, if you wanted answers, you had to be exact. Dig through rows one by one. Or search for perfect matches - no fuzz, no forgiveness.

Ask the wrong way? Get nothing.

That’s not taking control.
That’s just digital paperwork with extra steps.

Chorus

Now, I don’t have to log my expenses or food intake like a damn caveman.

I snap a photo - receipt, food plate, whatever.

OCR or food recognition AI does the rest.

Extracts the details. Logs it. Automatically. No typing. No guessing. No Googling “how many calories in two boiled eggs?”

And the best part?

That data gets embedded as vectors - searchable by meaning, not exact words. So I can ask things like:

• “I was wiped out on January 15th. What changed in my diet that week?”

• “I blew my budget last month. What non-essential crap did I actually spend on?”

It’s not just tracking. It’s understanding.

And if you host it yourself. It’s taking back control - without selling your soul to some calorie-counting app from Silicon Valley.

You can check the GitHub Repo with my AI-powered expense tracker.

Solo

What the hell am I even doing - talking about expenses and calories?

My twenty-year-old self would spit in my face and call me a sellout.

Let's try a better example: If you want to play guitar like a proper rocknrolla.

Say you isolate Joe Strummer’s parts from The Clash albums - chop it up, riff by riff.

Run each clip through a pre-trained audio model - OpenL3, YAMNet, Wav2Vec2 - whatever gets you a clean vector.

You store those vectors in a vector DB - Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS.

Now it’s searchable. Indexable. Alive.

Later, when you lay down your own riff, you embed that too. Run a nearest neighbor search.

Boom - are you channeling London Calling, or just choking on your own distortion?

Suddenly, your tone, your rhythm, your mistakes - they’re not just noise.

They’re data.

Traceable.

Learnable.

Yours.

Outro

Punk isn’t dead.

It’s just machine-learning optimized.

Got ideas? Wanna fork it? Or run your life like a DIY ML project?
Open an issue. Start a fight. Or just build your own version.