Short update today.
Main work task today was taking a few more steps forward on the DXP project. Nothing may come of it, but I am working on the bits that need to be fixed. Having taken over an alien tech stack from someone else without any hand over, it’s a ballache, but there’s potential in the system for use this year, and I think we can amend it to drive the AI marketing rush that we will see over next few years.
Whilst it’s a Sunday, I still got up early and went to my Wetherspoons office. Their refill drinks for less than two pounds are pretty much unbeatable, and it’s a nice change from working from home since its just around the corner.
Today was one of those days where I’ve done ‘stuff’ – I am trying to systemise my actions so I can more easily repeat them and then delegate out or automate. About a year back I thought long and hard about my weaknesses and came up with a few realisations:
So I came up with the concept of micro-habits – which was before I knew a book called Atomic Habits existed (it’s not a very good book) … and based on my analysis I came up with things I wanted to get more consistent at. I grouped them into two groups:
The Five Life Cleaning Habits
The first group was about keeping my life more clean, organised and streamlined. There’s a big negative drain on you when you’ve got an untidy home and office. It’s also a time sink because you lose stuff, and it can be more stressful.
I’ve found that these are pretty solid and cover everything I need. It’s worth giving some notes:
Tired now, will finish this off tomorrow.
A reasonably good Saturday!
Had an hours worth of call talking to a company that needed some help with re-platforming their booking system. It’s normal web development work but I enjoy this sort of project, so am quite excited. And there’s avenues there for AI integration further down the line. Will see how we go.
Also managed to take a step forward in the DXP AI platform; we are getting closer to the point where we can demo it to clients and there’s a looming deadline, so i’ve been chipping away at that tech stack for weeks, and slowly progress making progress.
Apart from some normal Saturday things, I was then trying to figure out what to do next and came up against the normal never ending list leading to overwhelm.
Building something for yourself is a never ending task. There is always something that you can do. It’s not like you close the shop doors and wait until the next day. The internet never sleeps so there is always opportunity about; and there is always something that you can do to improve.
But that’s the trap…
The trap that will keep you in a loop of working, working, working… and before you know it a decade has gone and you haven’t done the actual important things you’ve wanted to. Fortunately, I managed to do a lot of travelling whilst working remotely in my 20s and 30s so I have plenty of good experiences to look back on.
But it’s very easy to get caught up in that self-employed rat race – which is infinitely more difficult than employment. I like the freedom that I have had in my life, but it’s also been the freedom to make mistakes that can cost dear.
This time I am trying to work harder and smarter. Spend less, save more, invest more. Desire less. Work with other people in an executive team, and employ people. Use AI. Make time for the fun stuff, and work the business around that.
But I still will do the most important thing which is to travel and see the world. It’s literally the best thing you can do with your life. You will never regret not travelling and seeing new things.
This has probably been the most eventful month that I’ve had for a long time.
Giving myself the tactical stress of a hard deadline has been fun and invigorating… albeit mixed with the occasional anxieties.
I had been stuck in neutral for quite a while with the handbrake on. The decision to just go and do it, is starting to have ripple effects in ways that I didn’t really imagine.
The one thing I’ve noticed is how insane the demand is for information on AI. The uptake of ChatGPT must be unrivalled in market history (beyond software) and it boggles the mind that effectively one product is so versatile that everyone is using it in their own way.
I’d like to know how much of the available information we have actually trained it on now. I imagine somewhere there is a copy of a model which has actually been trained on all the copyrighted material the AI companies can find. If you were Google or Microsoft with all their infinite data – everyones emails, work… all the software code, all the books … all the websites … they must have a copy that is actually trained on everything; just not released that to the public.
Then there’s doubtless the military and intelligence agencies which would have had this technology for way longer. How far are they down the road with this? Backdoor into Facebook, link it with all the other data they have, and suddenly you can mimic every person … you can synthesise insights over scale.
That’s not even beginning to mention the robots that are coming down the pipeline…
More to come over next few weeks…
Simple solution:
In your dockerfile … swap out
postgres:
image: 'postgres:17'for
postgres:
image: 'postgis/postgis:17-3.5-alpine'https://hub.docker.com/r/postgis/postgis
Then put this in one of your migrations
public function up(): void
{
DB::statement('CREATE EXTENSION IF NOT EXISTS postgis');Was a bit braindead this morning as I stared at the screen trying to understand some python, so decided to goto the recycling centre and drop some stuff off. It’s absolutely crazy how much we throw out without even trying to repair it. An entire relatively new BBQ, a fitness bike, a leaf blower, dozens of TVs, dozens of laptops… it always blows my mind when I realise the level of our waste.
The council have now started taking bookings for the recycling so there’s data now on usage, but you’d have to use the cameras better positioned to identify what we are throwing away. I suppose this is probably already done at the next step anyway.
Today I also spent ages trying to sort out keycloak on a digital ocean droplet. There were some complications but eventually the old off-and-on sorted it.
I also had a good call with a conversational AI company today that I can partner with.
The AI market is moving at a rapid pace. Every day I see another project that is awesome or at least somewhat interesting.
The fundamental models themselves keep iterating, and OpenAI keep improving. And all the incumbent software services are implementing more tooling.
It’s fairly unnerving but at the same time sometimes you sit down and do some programming and you realise how awesome it is to just having programming helpers at your side. You can do pretty much anything that you can think of now, and that is incredibly inspiring. It definitely helps to have a great basis of programming knowledge.
Anyway, I’ve been continuing some R&D experimentation, and there’s some potential positives in the pipeline but I won’t talk about them just yet.
I am still very much in the uncertain stage but the roadmap is straightforward:
I was having a conversation yesterday, and a really good point was made. A lot of AI products are coming out at the moment, but as soon as Microsoft decides to properly implement all forms of media creation in Microsoft Word, the game is kind of over for many of them. I don’t use Office or Teams, and assume there is already rudimentary implementation… but at some point there is going to be a high quality implementation of AI into those products. At that point, loads of ill positioned startups will be wiped out.
I should probably buy Microsoft shares...
Especially once the new lightwave processors become mainstream a few years into the future… we will just have language models embedded into the operating system, and everyone will be able to generate any form of media. A new wave of creative output is already being unleashed, but it’s nothing compared to what’s coming.
Microsoft are clearly dominating in terms of positioning. They are just waiting and observing what’s going on, and when the timing is right they will pull the trigger and implement them.
The AI Consultancy will also expose me to opportunities in the market for AI, so it’s a key strategy going forward. It’s also where my bread and butter money will come in. And this is still on top of my normal web development projects that may come in, although I want to predominately focus on AI driven projects.
Some people are still expecting me to immediately have all the answers already. I’m only a month in, I have some ideas, but I also thought at the beginning I would be spending three months just doing R&D before anything came up that resembled a product market fit. I don’t have the answers, I don’t have a completely clear idea but I’m on the right path and that’s what counts.
That in itself can be really unsettling to some people. They want to clearly know what the plan is. And the uncertainty is somewhat unsettling to me, and I still have to be modest and honest enough to admit that nothing may come of this. I am smart enough to make something happen, but still, life doesn’t always work out the way you want it to. And if that happens, it’s also fine. As I said on day one … if things really don’t work out this year, and i’ve given it my 100%, then I think i’ll be fine deciding to take the easier albeit less exciting route of being an employee. I know I’ll be a good asset to most startups or companies, so whenever I get nervous about things I do remind myself of this.
Embracing uncertainty involves just going for it.
It’s not that I have a backup plan, it’s just I know I will be alright if it doesn’t work out. Might be tight for a while, but it will still be OK.
That said, I still want to play to win, and right now whilst I potentially can bring in a few people to help, I need to get my own time optimised and effective.
Each day I am attempting to get more organised.
For instance today I focused on sales and marketing separately.
I followed up on three sales leads, and I wrote some automation scripts for a marketing which generated webpages from markdown.
I am keeping a list of all the tools i come across, amongst all the other things that crop up each day. I am working toward setting up systems and automations in every single area of the company. And I’m fairly certain as I build the software to do this, others will benefit from it.
Tired again, but managed to write something down. One thing I’ve learnt from this process is that just writing this online journal helps cement thought processes.
Time got away from me today so only a short update
Go and use this Conversational AI Voice…
Today messed around with HuggingFace trying to get WAN to work. I thought it would work on my MBP, but turns out you definately need a GPU to do it. I learnt a bit about PyTorch today, and a bit more python stuff.
Anyway, I am hoping my friend is going to put together a GPU server for me so I can do some experimentation. I could rent a server, but would be good to see how we can put a GPU server together through virtualisation with KASM.
Wan is going to blow peoples minds. It turns out AI’s Open Source libraries are more than rivalling anything the big boys can do. Their moat really isn’t as big as they thought it would be. With WAN eventually everyday people will be able to make cinematic quality videos easily. It’s pretty crazy stuff. Check out the video on their page.
https://huggingface.co/Wan-AI/Wan2.1-T2V-14B
Also today:
It’s sunday and I haven’t done any work beyond flicking through my notebook looking at all my ideas and having some conversations. I meditated, did breathwork and bit of yoga in the sun for four hours. After the winter i’ve had, I deserve a bit of a rest in the sun, especially as apparently it’s leaving us shortly again.
Wanted to post something though, and wanted to talk about caffeine. It’s been at least a quarter year since removing caffeine from my life permanently.
There are two insane benefits:
Caffeine literally causes your body to have elevated stress levels. Everyone has a threshold of stress beyond which things start falling apart. Life can be naturally stressful. When you add an artificial stressor to that, often first thing in the morning, and then often repeatedly throughout the day… and you do this for years… you are literally keeping your body in perpetual stress completely pointlessly.
I have realised that in my adult life I had never knew what feeling genuinely relaxed was until I got caffeine out of my life. And it’s obvious … caffeine is liquid stress … there is no nutritional value, it tastes bad when your tastebuds regain their sense, and there is no energy in it. So throughout my adult life, every morning I just added to my stress levels without knowing about it.
Do that for two decades, like most people do, the accumulated wear and tear on your body and mind will be apparent.
I’ll talk more about caffeine in the future. It’s a really interesting subject to learn about because it helps you understand how societal and cultural norms are often a form of brainwashing that do you no good.
That’s it for Sunday.