I worked as a consultant for a company where the CEO one day, they just started using AI chat for everything. Every question you asked, they just forwarded it. Same thing for company strategy, major decisions, presentation content, and so on.
Initially, I was really annoyed. After I took a deep breath, and read through the wall of text they sent (to figure out how to respond), I eventually realized it was slightly better than their previous work. Not like, night-and-day better, but slightly better.
Since then, I've been playing with the idea of 'hiring' an AI to manage my freelance and personal work. I would not be required to do what it says, but I could take it under consideration and see if I work better that way. Sort of like the ultimate expression of "servant leadership".
> Since then, I've been playing with the idea of 'hiring' an AI to manage my freelance and personal work.
Shit, I think you are now personally responsible for 3-4 home projects I've neglected investing time into actually getting some attention. I too am much more productive and oddly enough, find the work more interesting when It's someone else asking and waiting for me to deliver it.
I haven't tried the Gemini CLI yet and creating an agent that acts like a customer I have to answer too about projects progress sounds like a perfect project idea for this weekend.
Question is, will I actually see this one through our will it too wind up in homelab project purgatory!
> How is GP's idea related to 3~4 different home projects of yours and not just one?
My thought process is that if I actually make this for myself, those 3-4 projects would magically get a very impatient new stakeholder who will pester me to actually deliver those projects to them.
It's gonna be interesting to see if I'm able to trick my brain into not just brushing off the agent (or if that's even really an issue, no clue at this point). I've started rolling around some ideas on handling that scenario but I'm just gonna let that stew while I play with different setups so I don't end up just building a convoluted reminder app lol
Unfortunately I had an unexpectedly hectic holiday weekend so I won't get to start playing with the idea for real until tomorrow afternoon.
I don't really use YouTube, but when ads play on random videos and it irritates me, I just close my eyes, the simplest version of content-blocking. (If the ad is painfully loud, I may also cover my ears in contexts where this is not extremely socially awkward)
Can we say it's immoral for me to close my eyes? Can someone's business model be the basis of an argument that it's immoral for me to exert this simple bodily function?
Is there some contract that I've signed where people have the right to my attention in any context? If they've based their business model on the assumption that this consent exists, and it does not, is it fair to say that the business model should fail?
It was fascinating to me for a bit but it gets old fast...
consumer: I want to fill my content hole with content someone made through hard work right now and for free and how dare they delay that by 5 seconds after which I can press Skip. I will employ sophisticated tricks and run untrusted code in my browser to work around that delay.
also consumer: I will totally not be pissed at all if there is no free content for me anymore. Their business model should fail because I did not consent to ads. How dare anyone consider and live within an objectively true reality that things have costs?
Is not you since you said you don't use youtube. but it is what many youtube users seem to think.
When I first visited Asia 13 years ago, this is the feeling I got too. It's wonderful and intoxicating and new.
It spoke to me so strongly, that I immigrated and started my first business. Not to China, but nearby (Viet Nam). It was a very tough road, I never ended up particularly wealthy, but I have no regrets.
I'm trying to make an RF lightning detector small enough to trivially add to my motorbike.
I live in Viet Nam, and driving through bad storms this time of year is pretty miserable, and they happen fast and are local enough that weather prediction is not terribly useful.
There are a lot of problems with EMI. Lots of ungrounded brushed motors everywhere that make the RF bits hard. If I succeed, I'll publish the PCB designs.
I've also got some educational products in production right now, about Vietnamese history. I'd share a link, but my website probably can't handle the traffic right now.
My strategy was simulate my possible next guesses against all possible codes, then pick the option that had the highest number of possible outcomes (sometimes this strategy is called MaxParts). It looks like the author's approach works for similar underlying reasons.
Besides this, I applied some optimizations for the starting move, and some further optimizations on considering 'irrational' guesses -- e.g. choosing a code that had already been eliminated as a possibility, because it returned more information (this was rare, but possible).
I ran my code against all possible games of 4,6 mastermind (I win in an average of 4.2778 guesses), and found that some starting guesses were more optimal than others! The pattern "AABC" (e.g. red-red-yellow-green) was the best performer. Perhaps this is a way that the author can improve their algorithm just a tiny bit.
An ESP32 module suitable for hobby use is about 4$ here in Viet Nam. You can get the "raw" ones for maybe 0.50$ less. We're near China, so electronic component price is usually higher than Chinese prices by 1-20% (modules and hobby components on the higher end). If you're ever curious about prices, the good online retailer here is thegioiic ('World of ICs', we love naming businesses 'world of something' here).
Locally, 4$ is probably "more money" to us than 5$ is to you.
Don't get me wrong, it's still a marvel that we can have something so good so cheaply -- but correcting for cost of living, it feels less affordable for us here in Asia.
Anyway, not a criticism. Just sharing a slice of life from over here in case you were curious.
I redesigned it to be much smaller and cheaper (surface-mount), made it an IoT device, and various other changes. Will order PCBs in a bit, hopefully it works well.
We don't have anything like Blitzortung in SE Asia as far as I know, and it would be pretty useful to me to detect lightning storms before they hit. The obvious application is to add it to my motorbike (driving a motorbike in a heavy storm is a necessary but miserable part of life here).
Bigger picture, there's no market for it, simply because it's cheaper to not buy one (I live in a very cost-driven market). However it would be useful to me personally.
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