AI, Mobile, and Eveything Around the Cloud

I am going to upgrade to the new iPhone that Apple will release in less than an hour. I don't know which iPhone yet as the actual details (weight, battery life, what we can actually do with the new iPhone Duo/Ultra) will help me make that final determination. And I am still on the fence about what to do with my iPhone 13 mini. It has been my loyal mobile companion for nearly 4 years. That is the longest I have ever held onto a phone. It really says about about the device. So as you can see, giving it up is not that easy, least of all, it is still chugging along and should get a few more iOS updates from Apple. Sentiments aside, it is only a tool. Just like the AI induced social and industrial changes that are happen right now, the AI models are still just tools. We continuously get updated models because the ones that come after is always more capable and "smarter". For the mini, the fact that is still works and does a lot of what I need is the reason to keep it around. S...

I have been trying to test out agents on my MacBook Air. In just playing with it for a few days, without a lot of success yet. However, I realized that a lot of what I am was able to work with the app are things that Siri will eventually be able to once Apple has time to let the new Apple Intelligence mature. For Apple, I do not know if they will define AI agents the same way most other people do but I think for the vast majority of us, we will either find them very useful or not use them much at all. Even now, you can automate tasks with the need for an AI backend. Having said that, Siri-powered agents or tasks are coming. I am guessing here but I see two tracks happen on at the same time.  Siri ウwill gain more agentic features. Shortcuts are the way to go but automation is going to be a big deal if Siri becomes important as new generation of users want to farm daily and repetitive tasks to the computer to perform. Apple wants a lot of that to take place on-device. My understandin...

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...