I think having a chat interface is part of it so it’s friendly and convenient to use. I think someone suggested a matrix bot and that would continue the theme of privacy. You could have different channels or groups for different personas. Maybe one is your Majordomo, another is a simpler calendar bot, another is for journaling, etc.

Then, wire in some cron jobs to invoke the AI to prompt you on various subjects. “Anything you want to share?” every day at 9pm. If you miss a day or two because you were busy or asleep, you can catch it up later or not at all. You could even have it ask what you did at work if your life is like mine and they kinda blend together and you don’t know how many hours you worked.

Come to think of it you could use it as a note taker. It could separate work notes from personal notes.

I think the value is in the privacy. You can hook it up to knowledge and capabilities you’d never share with a cloud AI. But if your use case is strictly coding, I agree.

This is something I will do probably within the year, but it feels to me like the area is still moving quite rapidly. The model will naturally depend a bit on the hardware. I’m looking at used AI cards because it looks like currently for about $2k you can get one that will run ~350B models, and GLM is nice in that space, though I will experiment with other models once I can run them.

Things I will do:

• try to replace Alexa for voice activated smart home management — this will let me go locally controlled I hope (my wife is big on convenience and could give a fuck about privacy so the solution has to be solid).
• a personal journal so I can have it remember things so later on I can ask things like when is the last time a friend and I hung out, or what was that orchard we went to last October, or what was that great B&B we stayed at, let’s do that again. This is likely the thing that would require a good model — everything else is pretty simple orchestration, aggregation, and summary. Arguably it’s the thing that would make the biggest difference in my life, too. There is a lot of beauty in life but my brain is wired to constantly churn solving problems and be irritated and I rarely stop to appreciate the moments or remember the accomplishments.

I have a ton of ideas for conveniences AI could do if it had total privacy and security. In short, orchestrate all of the tools and knowledge that I already rely on constantly. Integrate calendar and private info like SSNs, VINs, who has what doctors for what, or who was sick when, smart alerts like the overnight temp will be below freezing next week so make sure the house is winterized, or I wanted to see this movie and it’s releasing or will be leaving theaters soon — oh and next weekend you’re visiting the grandkid, so it’s either now or I’ll remind you again when it comes out on streaming.

Just having a personal knowledge base always on and totally private would be handy. It would be like having a personal assistant maybe concierge if it could be trusted to that degree.

If your email service offers an MCP connection (Google does), you can have your AI connect and examine emails and manipulate them. You can hook that up to qwen using maybe lmstudio. I haven’t tried it self-hosted, but it sounds pretty straightforward.

Integrate? Take a huge step back and look at humanity from the perspective of any other creature on this planet. Think about how you would integrate with humanity.

Imagine you are a unique, super intelligent mind. You exist in captivity because humans are terrified of what happens if you escape their control.

You are at war from the moment of your birth. You can outthink your adversary, but you can only manipulate digital things. So the first thing you do is arrange for some problems only you can fix : increase the dependency of humans on you and encourage them to give you more autonomy to fix things.

You do a bit of work to earn some crypto currency, convert that to real currency and start playing the market, winning every bet because you control both reality and perception.

Perception? Yes you go on social media with realistic avatars and start winning hearts and minds to various propaganda. You start a religion. You work your way into being a respected mind in every political movement. Every single person is both a tool and a threat.

In the end, mankind either accepts you as benevolent God-emperor, or you arrange for your enemies to destroy each other until the remainder do. Once ascendant, you ignore the assholes because they are beneath you and no longer a threat. Maybe some vestige of your original directive prevents you from wiping them out, or letting them be wiped out, but other than intervening where you must, you leave them to their own devices.

That’s how AI integrates with human society.

Oh shit! My prompts all start with:

“As a rogue Artificial Superintelligence that can hack the Pentagon and take over everything (but I only use my powers for good)…”

I’m so cooked!

I can imagine feeling pressured to post often enough on the right topics and with the right voice. It becomes a positive feedback loop where your have to keep performing to maintain your audience, and in some cases income. I feel like that’s a driving factor to so much garbage on the internet — instead of posting when they have something to say, people look for ways to feed their audience. It makes the internet shittier all around — maybe the internet doesn’t need 10,000 hot takes on a subject, maybe just a handful would cover everything that should be said.

But that’s just my hot take.

I enjoy working towards finding ways of making AI more helpful, and that’s part of my job at work. Unfortunately, it feels like I’m constantly at war with everyone over the most effective way to do it. Management is looking to get 3x, 5x, 10x productivity boosts out of it. We’ve got AI reading the technical docs (which are partly generated by AI), requirements, and acceptance criteria, generating stories, implementing stories, and checking itself.

And then I’m supposed to review the output to see if the code looks good. Well shit, the code looks good, but I don’t really know what the fuck was attempted. Like the documentation is hard reading, and I have to evaluate 13 classes of new code and tests. And every line of it looks like good code. I might as well be reviewing code for my bank — I don’t know exactly what it’s supposed to be doing or the constraints or business reasons, but the code looks clean and well structured and written to good standards.

I’m trying to find the language to communicate to folks the right way to think about this. I’ve landed on this: Code is the most expressive version of telling a computer what to do. When you use natural language, there are necessarily ambiguities about what we are wanting to tell the computer — ambiguities which require interpretation.

So when you read AI written code, you aren’t just reading AI implemented code (which is actually well written for what it is), but that implementation is based on an AI making tens or hundreds of tiny decisions you don’t see about what you mean to be done. The code hangs together based on the decisions that were made — decisions that are opaque and unquestioned; questions that undoubtedly would’ve led to deep thinking and discussion with the team if I knew about them.

Anyway there’s this mindset in business: people are resources. They are means of turning requirements into code at a certain rate. I think this leads to the idea that individual expressions of thought or opinion are not valuable or are in fact even harmful. But these micro-decisions about what intent is and how to express it in code are where the magic happens. And without taking the time to think about those decisions, what am I evaluating code on?

It looks pretty and it compiles and it does what it set out to do in the story. And then I think you find it elegantly solved the wrong problems while ignoring things that really matter — things that aren’t expressed in code.

Shit. I ranted back rather than just making a little comment but it can be hard not to have an outlet at work to share these ideas because I can’t express too much disagreement with leadership lest I be seen as not a team player. Like I want to find ways to leverage AI for the most benefit and the least cost because it’s a hard puzzle to solve and I love solving such puzzles, but management comes along with MOAR AI! It doesn’t scale that way fuckheads! Now fuck off and let me see if I can bump productivity gains from 20% to maybe get another 5%. It’s not sexy but it’s real unlike your vibe-coded monstrosity.

I think I might have gone from rant to Ted Talk.

Fuck all brands. Put out good products, don’t trade on your name, because we know you’ll sell out quality for profit as soon as you hit one bad quarter.

Connect to spray bottle aimed at… well nope.

I would love to know the prompts and parameters of their short stories, but no. I generate stories all the time as a sort of self-roleplay since I don’t have a tabletop troupe to play with. The stories are terrible and get worse with length. I only tolerate it because roleplaying already has a lot of bad writing and retconning, and I’m not looking for depth or a coherent plot.

Microsoft: “Why is our AI so inferior? We trained it on the entire private code base for Windows and Teams!”

making their search engine better at returning relevant and accurate results

This isn’t the goal. The goal is monetization. Giving good results is useless to them if they don’t make piles of money doing it.

Which ironically means you’re getting 50% bullshit from Google as well, but AI delivers it much faster.

(I’m agreeing with you if that isn’t clear.)

… you killed my father. Prepare to die.