Just in the time since I was let go by Broadcom, AI has been sweeping the nation faster than a new dance craze. I wouldn't say I've gone hog wild with using AI, but I'm incorporating it more into my routines.
First, let's get this out of the way: I am not writing these blog posts with AI. At the most, I will run something by an AI to check my assumptions, but I am not directly asking AI to write. Therefore, any text you see here--including any em dashes, thank you very much--is mine.
ChatGPT has proven to be useful when I want an overview of something, or when I want a more in-depth answer to a question than I could get from a simple Google search. But I tend to rely on it more as a guide to my own thinking, or to give me a list of choices from which I make the final decision. Here are some examples:
- Recently, for a project I'm working on, I asked about logging libraries for Go that provided the kind of functionality I'd see in Log4J in Java. ChatGPT came up with a list of three packages, and, from that list, I selected logrus, which suits my purposes.
- Before that, in order to get an old project running, it recommended the best version of Ubuntu to install in a VM that would run Java 6. Ubuntu 14.04 was its choice, and it worked.
- When I wanted to know about all the golf balls I seemed to find in our neighborhood, which backs on the second hole of a golf course, it used an image I took from Google Earth, along with the number of golf balls I found, to calculate the probability that our property would suffer a damaging strike. (Answer: one in 10,000 or so, since our property itself doesn't back on the golf course.)
- It's given me estimates of the oxygen all our house plants generate, helped explain a high blood alcohol reading we saw depicted in a police video on YouTube, some insights into The Addams Family and the Netflix Wednesday show (including comparing and contrasting the characters with those in MTV's Daria), and even helped organize my thoughts to make a decision about our upcoming wedding. And, in the latter case, when I told it how much help it had been and it responded with well wishes, I swear to God, I misted up a little bit. I know--I know!--that this is just a bunch of extremely hairy algorithms running on a big pile of Nvidia GPUs, but sometimes it's impossible not to anthropomorphize it a bit.
Just for laughs, I asked ChatGPT to summarize what it knows about me, based on my previous conversations. It laid out a lot of interesting things, and assumptions it has learned not to make about me...and then turned those into a fun personality sketch, a slightly "roasted" version, a faux "user manual," a "marketing brochure," a fake "TV infomercial" script, an Amazon listing, a QVC live-selling script, and a motion picture trailer script. If nothing else, it knows how to be funny, and how to keep things rolling!
I tend to use Claude for cases which involve writing code. It was very good, for instance, at taking a copy of a Web page from 2006, laid out with heavy use of <table> and <font> tags, and rewriting it to look like the original, but laid out in a more modern fashion with Tailwind CSS. Claude has also given me options in development, but I don't call it, or any AI, directly from my IDE. If I copy and paste code, I make sure to try to understand what it does...and, sometimes, I've had to correct its minor errors.
I've even set up a couple of small models running under Ollama on my local server, which I refit with an old Nvidia RTX 3060 video board to give it this capability. One of them, I used to ask some tricky legal advice that I didn't want to share with one of the big models. The answer I got from it matched what Nicole had previously said on the subject, illustrating that they were more likely than not to be both right. I also used a custom prompt with Google's Gemma 3 model to make it respond like Darth Vader, much as a friend of mine had done with Meta's AI models. It did a remarkable job of staying in character!
The other main use I have for AI is art generation, particularly with NightCafe. Aside from creating cute images for our amusement (usually involving myself, Nicole, and/or our pets), I have used it to generate artwork for event flyers and similar. It even helped me come up with a logo for my karaoke hosting. Check out some of the images I've published on the site.
In summary: I'm no AI superfan, but I'm not exactly a Luddite. I'll use it if it makes sense to do so, but I'm not about to become a full-tilt "vibe coding" enthusiast...