random thoughts and personal experiments

Welcome

What’s the point?

I’m not sure why I’m writing this blog, but figured it doesn’t hurt to capture all my random thoughts and experiments in one place. Maybe one day I’ll come back to it and laugh or maybe it’ll help someone else looking into the same things that I have.

This page will act as an index to the longer to projects and experiments I’ve been working so if you see an update here it means I’ve either started something new or threw in the towel.

Projects / Experiments

Here’s the current list of what I’m currently working on and feel that it’s worth capturing longer term to look back on one day.

Golf AI Sports Betting

In this experiment I will be starting with a $100 bankroll and looking to bet $5 each week using AI as my research and guidance tool to place bets using the Kelly Criteria. Every week I will feed it resources from the web and allow it make 3 player picks to win the tournament for me. I’ll compare it’s results to some of the other guru’s you may see on Betting and Golf related websites.

At worst this experiment will cost me $100 and 20 weeks of writing, and at best it will prove AI is more capable than humans at predicting PGA tournament winners while earning a few extra dollars cash.

Indie Hacking

With the rise in AI and the desire to earn money outside my day, I will look to use my existing knowledge coupled with AI to build web apps in an attempt to make some extra cash. I’ve had some success in the crypto space building a referral website with a buddy of mine, but the search engine gods push us in and out of their good graces constantly so I’ll look to do something less “controversial” to SERPs as a singular person. However, I have zero web development skills and some modest Python/SQL knowledge so I guess we’ll see how it goes.

Each month I’ll track my website’s progress recapping it’s growth…or lack-thereof along with the efforts I put into it.

Skincare Aging Tool & Resource Center

I launched this website on November 20th 2024. The main driver of this website will be a tool to analyze a person skin and tell them their age. My goal is to monetize this site eventually through some combination of ads, affiliate marketing and building up a newsletter.

This site had a good amount of existing competition when I launched it, but I have ideas for additional features and written content to differentiate myself from the competition and grow the site organically.

File Token Calculator for OpenAI

I launched this website on June 6th 2024, and this was my first foray into building websites solely using AI. It has garnered some organic growth even though I’ve put no additional effort into it since launching.

I don’t think I’d consider counting AI tokens as something I’m passionate about and want to grow further, but I’ll keep the site live as a relic to what sparked my interest in building web apps and see what a single page website can do in terms of organic traffic over time.