content warning: it's mental health time!!
Well, this has been a weird last 2 months. Here's some of what I've been doing in that time.
I have developed a major mental health crisis, featuring anxiety about nothing that is so severe I sometimes cannot sleep.
I have been sick multiple times as a result of not being able to sleep.
I have been to stay at my parents' house twice.
I have spent 2 hours talking with friends about myself, and triggered an epiphany: Although I love computers, they can not and will never love me back. I pour my heart and my soul and my life into computers, and it's just gone. I still love computers, but I need to direct my time and attention elsewhere rather than overworking myself in a struggle for validation that I will never receive.
I have quit participating in multiple projects as a result of that epiphany. Some of those projects I was leading. Notable ones are Amanda, FreeTube, Invidious, and this website. There are more.
Unfortunately, even though I decided to drop those things, the universe has decided to put more onto my lap than I could possibly imagine, and these are things that I feel I have a real obligation to do.
I have learned that Invidious is now unmaintained and the main instance will be closing on September 1st. When YouTube next introduces a breaking change, there is a very good chance that its code will never be updated to adapt to that change ever again. An alternative is needed. FreeTube is a good option, but it must be run as a program, not as a website. NewPipe is a good option, but it's only for Android. There is another one in development named Parasitter that I haven't looked at yet.
CloudTube, on this site, relies on Invidious to get its data. It is important to add the option for users to select an instance to use. Doing this would require the entire site to be rewritten. So that is what I am doing.
Of course, this rewrite won't do much good when the Invidious API, which I am using, breaks due to a YouTube change. Which is why I am not only creating a frontend but also a separate backend which is compatible with the Invidious API. It relies on youtube-dl for the main metadata and URL extraction, so when YouTube changes, it should mostly be managed by the youtube-dl team. My project is called Second. I previously also made ytdi, but this is now abandoned because it became unfeasible at scale. In short, each process took about 0.1s on my desktop to compile the Python regular expressions. To update 50 channels, a modest number of subscriptions, this locked the CPU at 100% usage for 5 seconds. This was obviously not going to scale. Some people have hundreds and hundreds of subscriptions.
As well as all of this I have a bunch of stuff to do for class. Not only do I have many lecture recordings to watch, I also must research and write a 2500 word essay by September 9th, figure out how to take the test I missed, and complete a week of 242 labs.
Maybe that anxiety about nothing isn't really about nothing after all.
I can cope, though. I can cope. That's what I tell myself. That's how I try to convince myself that I don't have problems. That this is all temporary. That it will end. That the 2 months of constant anxiety is just a blip in my life. I don't have problems. I don't have problems. Not me, surely. Mental health problems are for other people. I'm not like them. This cannot happen to me. I'm perfectly fine. I can cope. I can manage. I will manage.
: )
— Cadence
