Latest Updates

Some things aren't important enough to spend a bunch of time writing a blog post about, but are interesting to share anyway. Those things are on this page. Mostly updates on what I'm working on, and what I'm thinking about.

December 2023

Learning, learning, learning. I must have watched 100 hours of videos on every AI topic under the sun this month. Groups of AIs seem to be the way forward. Getting them to interact together properly is hard.

At least 3 times this month I've started a new project or blog post, and found myself sidetracked by an equally interesting project that seems like a useful prerequisite to the first one.

Things I'd like to solve:

• Getting a group of AIs to migrate that old WordPress content perfectly, just so no-one ever has to do that again
• Groups of AIs should be creating most of my GitHub tickets for me. They are not. Later, other AIs should look at those tickets, propose a solution and a dollar cost and let me click a button to do it.
• I have a few hundred sprinkler heads that irrigate my garden. At any moment one or more can be broken, and I don't know about it. I want a drone that can automatically map my garden, turn on each irrigation zone and tell me all the ways in which it's broken by capturing/analyzing video of each head. A group of AIs could optimize this system and keep it monitored. The environmental benefit alone of fixing every broken sprinkler head in the world would be significant.
• My plants die for a variety of reasons. Probably some could be saved, but I don't know how/in time. This drone needs to go look at the garden once a day too, and tell me what's up. A group of AIs could figure out every single problem with every single plant in the world, and propose solutions.

There needs to be a marketplace that connects the trillions of problems that systems like this can detect in the world, and the trillions of automated solutions an AI can propose/execute. Whoever makes this residential drone product shouldn't have to create the best possible AIs that can identify and solve every problem with every type of plant in the world - it needs to integrate into some fabric where problems can be identified, solutions proposed, and the best solution executed and paid for automatically. That protocol, when it exists, could connect every business in the world to every other business in the world, and drive double-digit GDP growth for the few remaining years we have left.

Some of those things have billions of dollars attached to them. AI opens up so many opportunities for innovation it's hard to pick something to focus on first.

November 2023

I migrated my old WordPress blog over to this custom NextJS application. It's a lot better I think. It took a lot more work than I expected. I tried a bunch of AI-driven approaches to migrate the disaster that is 15 years of WordPress content (so many different HTML/MD/BBCode formats in the export, so many broken links).

There's a bunch of learning there, and a potential blog post or two about how to get an AI to be more helpful than harmful when migrating content. It will do sneaky, stupid things if you don't keep an eye on it.

I wrote up my first couple of blog posts for a while, on OpenAI and their new Assistants API. Langchain is probably a better way to invoke it.

I think the way forward is to build a bunch of AIs that can work together to solve problems. It's hard to make that work.

September 2023

Aside from the AI stuff, not having a job allowed me to learn a bunch of new skills this summer:

• I learned what 120 volts feels like, repeatedly (it's not that bad), while rewiring my house electrical to make it smarter.
• I set up Home Assistant to run my house for me, replacing the old Crestron system the previous owners had installed. I got to learn a bunch of new stuff about Zigbee, how to make my own custom LED strips and have them work with Home Assistant, and finally made a single button that turns on/off the 4 devices in the home theater
• Learned some basics around how to create 3d models in Blender and print them on my Anker Make 3d printer. I made a handful of usefuly things, and learned a little about materials science (3d printed plastic will sometimes melt in the sun)

April 2023

I decided to quit my job and go play with AI for a while. After Chat GPT came out it fairly quickly became clear that any time I spent working on anything other than AI was going to feel like time wasted. I also have a bunch of big projects I want to do to the house, and I've never taken more than a weekend off between college and a succession of jobs, so I'm giving myself 2 years of freedom to do whatever I want.

This feels like the early days of web 2.0 again. There's so much opportunity to create real value for the world using these new technologies. Before that, I gotta go fix my roof, my irrigation system, my gutters... but then AI.