AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

I was trying to get tickets for an event that was in high demand. Unfortunately, we weren’t able to get it ourselves. While a friend was able to get it for us, it occurred to me that perhaps this is a situation where an AI agent might be able to do a better job than I could do myself - waiting in the digital line and maybe even get a better spot than I could have. To date, I have never been able to get a ticket where we have to wait in line. So, is this something an agent might be more suited for the job? Then it also occurred to me that perhaps this could be the start of an agentic arms race where agents are tasked to get tickets, reservations, or any other goods and services that highly demanded. I did not have anyone to ask so I asked a could of LLM if agents could be used in this way. The answer is technically yes but there coding and possible other issues that might mitigate any advantage an AI might have over regular old humans like me. Eventually, platforms will have to deal wit...

 Here is this week's update on replacing myself with an AI. It has not been seven and a half months into the experiment. The progress of this experiment really came in the last two months, a busy August could have became overwhelming if it was not for a lot of my workflow that was automated by the AI. For the first six months, work was pretty laidback when it came to AI use. In the fist few months, I did not really gain much tracking in terms of the time saved. It was not until I started focusing on specific tasks that I began to realized hours saved per day. But work became concerned about the whereabouts and security of the data that the AI had access to. Through irksome, I cannot blame them. Only a couple of weeks after they wanted to pull \ back, the hacks by Anthropic followed by OpenAI happened. Still, I did not want to give up on the progress. I resorted to having the AI create offline scripts for me to run. I continue to save time each day. Though I am not a computer or dat...

Depending on what plan on doing on a particular day, I switch between bring my iPad and MacBook. And for the vast majority of my tasks, the iPad (I happen to have an iPad Air) is hands down the mobile device that I grab on my out. And if The Apple gods permit it, it might be the only device I will ever buy, which means no more MacBooks for me. Email, paying bills, reading books/news, playing Clash of Clans (yup, I still clash), and watching videos, those are the things I do on the iPad. I also do a lot of work on it as well. I am shocked at just how powerful the iPad is now when it comes to office productivity.  On the days when take my MacBook Air to work is when I needed to do some work via AI-enhanced work locally or when I needed to vibe-code something. For a layman, these are things that I have not found a way to do on the iPad (I will be experimenting with some Python scripts to see if they work on the iPad this weekend). And these days, local AI is all the rage as my company...

Want an AI agent to run as much if your life as you are willing to give it? Apple's been working on it for years with Siri and its version of machine learning and then AI like ChatGPT came onto the scene. It was all large language models for a few years while Apple's effort being largely absent from the scene even as it marketed and misfired with Apple Intelligence. However, as an iPhone, iPad, and Mac user, we all know that there are elements of Apple Intelligence working in ways that are front and center like a chatbot. Now, we have OpenClaw. If you don't know act it is, I think it is what Apple has planned for Siri but has never found a way to make it work. OpenClaw is an AI agent that runs natively on your Mac or PC that capable of executing tasks on your behalf. The issue with OpenClaw is privacy as it requires access to user credentials to complete most of the tasks. And it was susceptible to prompt injections and lack protection against attacks. While this is a perfe...

I did a quick survey of people who uses AI consistently to see what they are using it for. A vast majority of people I know are using it instead of regular Google search. Judging by Google’s earnings, I do not think the company is too concerned by AI taking shares away from them just yet. Having said that, what is concerning is that a lot of the people who do use search via ChatGPT, Gemini, or another LLM take what they are presented as fact. I have a different view of search via AI: never trust and always verify.  For me, posing questions questions to the AI bots is a starting point that allows me to thinking deeper and eventually search the traditional way through DuckDuckGo (and then Google if I cannot find what I want right away). The people who uses AI as a search engine falls into two camps - those who just trust what the AI presents and those have a search flow similar to mine. A few months ago, I had an interesting use during a drive with ChatGPT’s voice function. We chatte...

I like to bring back posts about my recent AI uses. I am sure many other folks are using LLM more and more but I still say to myself why am I doing this task when the AI can do it while I move onto something else. First, let me start with my 80-year old uncle who is now using ChatGPT on a daily basis. He chats with it via the text prompt. And when he goes on his walks, he is chatting via the voice feature. Here are some things I found that what he has being using ChatGPT for. He is a meticulous writer. Prose and poetry. He writes them and post them to ChatGPT so it can provide critiques and suggestions on how he can improves his essays.  I recently told him that I was using AI to learn Japanese. He has since started doing that while he goes on his morning walks. He already knows some basic Japanese whereas I am starting from scratch. I think he'l make better and faster progress than I will.  He has posted results from his medical tests to ChatGPT. He would over his personal in...