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.
Whilst there are downsides to revealing an idea too early, there are downsides to not doing so.
I was doing some meditation and breathwork in the garden this morning, since I woke up feeling sluggish and had these annoying repetitive negative thoughts whirling around. After doing some journaling to get some of it out of my system, I knew enough to go and do breathwork, which can completely knock out negativity.
I realised what I needed in that moment, and for many times in my life, is I needed a ‘companion’ to mirror my positive thoughts, rationally look at negative paradigms, and provide genuine motivators when it looks like I was going off the rails, off-path, or beginning a down cycle. In short, I needed some sort of non-judgemental ‘guide/assistant’ that could help when friends and family could not. They aren’t always available and people have their own challenges going on. Likewise, a lot of well meaning advice can be defeating.
I thought about self-help books and the authors who make millions out of them. I realised that eventually those authors will want to supplement their own coaching programs with AI. These will effectively be avatars carefully trained with detailed prompts to allow for the LLM to identify specifically what mental state the people are in at a particular point, and to be able to respond in kind.
For instance, I can clearly see a Brian Tracey avatar, trained across all his books, 3D modelled so a person can login to that website pay some money and all of a sudden they get to talk to Brian Tracey. That in itself is probably going to be something that all celebrities do, and it’s probably already happening in some form. And the key thing is, that these coaching programs are done over time so its about keeping context of what’s going on with the user. Imagine having Brian Tracey alongside you, giving you the value of his books, linking with practical tools, etc. Or if you aren’t a fan of him, take anyone that you regularly read – maybe it could be a famous stock trader or investor, maybe it could be Peter Thiel or any of the Dragons Den lot. What about an Alan Sugar branded avatar?
To be clear, i’m talking about a complex, well thought out piece of software. Well trained, and tested. Not some generic drivel which of course will emerge from these markets.
Branded Virtual Agents / Avatars
These are literally branded virtual agents. I can clearly see an online store, maybe amazon, where you can just download these virtual identities of celebrities, famous book authors, film writers, and when implemented well, people will be able to interact with them in fairly meaningful ways. Some will be funny, some will be educational, some will be motivational. And to take it a step further you could then get them all to communicate with one another and see what madness unfolds.
Mental Health Personal Motivators
My initial flutter app that I have been building was focused entirely on obtaining wellness metrics from the user, and being able to track those metrics. Along the way I realised that it would be key for users to be able to journal in written word, verbal… and for those notes to be stored and interpreted back to the user at the appropriate moment.
Prompt training – things like if the user is showing signs of excessive and irrational negativity; you want to not overwhelm them with feedback, but assure them that there are ways out of it, they just need to pick their battles. So rather than reel off 10 top tips for dealing with mental health, the assistant has to mimic being empathetic toward the user.
I can clearly see that some famous breathwork practitioner might be interested in such a thing, if he is not already doing it. I can clearly see that gyms will have some sort of branded virtual assistants, that could also potentially monitor the attendance of a customer, check in on them if they haven’t been around for a while. Basically anyone who already writes books or has training courses can convert those into avatar driven special AI training programmers.
Privacy
Whilst you don’t want to lose the humanity entirely, one of the benefits of using an AI therapist/coach is that (data storage concerns initially aside) you can be assured you are working with a non-judgemental system that you really can talk through your inner most fears with. For instance, abuse victims can open up with a strength of anonymity; or severely depressed people can at least bounce their ideas off a well trained language model.
I watched a video on AI where the guy was saying LLMs were scoring just as high a rating as clinical psychotherapists… I would have to triple check this, but this is the sort of reality we are now moving into..
It doesn’t have to be mental health specific, that’s just a clear niche market (or relatively pervasive right now). Ultimately it comes down to what i’ve been saying for a while which is everyone will have a single Virtual Agent that will follow them through life, motivate them, guide them, research for them. It will know them intimately.
The only thing I would say is there are likely to be many brands and variants of personal assistants that people can choose from; and it may be that people have multiple agents; although I still think there will be some sort of of overarching single agent managing them.
Personal Development Market
The personal development arena will be supercharged by this sort of thing. When you get beyond the ‘soft skill’ guidance, meaning the psychological aspect, there is still the entire remit of having an assistant guide you through your goals, projects and idea creations.
So, todays idea is just an extension of what I’ve already been thinking – that the personal assistant is probably to be the main piece of software that a human uses, and everything will connect into that. I am probably not quite right there, but I am along the right lines.
Healthcare for elderly
The NHS is clearly under pressure for a variety of reasons. We desperately need to avoid privatising it at all costs because it is a wonderful thing to have and we should all be incredibly grateful for it. When things go wrong the NHS is there no questions asked. Compare this to the American healthcare service and if you have no conception of that, go and educate yourself on the insanity of it.
Anyway, I can clearly see that AI driven caring, empathetic, humorous and encouraging avatars can play a part in supplementing a hospital ward, senior living, hospice, etc. The AI can work around the clock, and I suppose with OpenCV it can assess a patients visual signs, along with any streamed healthcare data.
In no way am I encouraging departments with zero human contact, but there is room for supplementation. The same AI that goes and talks to patients, can be the same AI that reviews and talks to doctors, giving reviews (scaled sentiment analysis) and alerting to any critical incidents.
The Foundation Is Still ChatBots / Conversational AI
One of the main goals I will now setup is something thats obvious but well needed and thats getting a chat bot on my own website, trained properly. There’s a few options already and im most likely going to work with text.com
Part of me wonders where I’ve been the last couple of years as the rise in the obvious solution has come about. I suppose thats the problem when you do client work for a living, you just lose focus on the opportunities happening all around.
Anyway enough for now.
23 days ago I decided to temporarily stop pursuing client work and restart some sort of entrepreneurial dream – building some of the ideas I’ve had for a while. They’ve been bugging me for a long time, and it’s now or never really.
I’ve never been able to hold down a job whilst attempting to build something else on the side. The job ends up distracting me and takes most of my energy. Whether its a job, freelance or contract, it always takes away the focus.
I would never encourage anyone to do what i’m doing. Life is far easier getting a developer job and enjoying life. If you don’t want a job, contracting is lucrative and flexible. And if you are super organised you can do really well freelancing.
So far 10% of the timeframe has already gone and the rest will go quickly. But at least I will have done something of note with my year. If I really, really can’t get something resembling a foundation up and running within 7 months then it’s sensible to take the easier and saner route.
But for the moment, need to banish those negative thought processes. I’m pretty certain if I just keep going in the right direction eventually I will spot the opportunity. From what i’ve seen far there is an immense amount of interest in AI, and whilst a lot of people know what they are doing with it, there’s a ton that don’t. There’s even more that aren’t looking at it yet.
It’s become cliche to say that AI will change the world but I’ll say my bit:
Anyway thats enough for today.
Cheers
We had a meeting with a fairly large online company today and the discussion was over generating large amounts of website content for them in a reasonably clever fashion.
Turns out Google doesn’t mind AI content really, as long as it sticks to E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and a few other things.
People will use search engines less, but they will still be used as a supplement to language models. Language models are to search engines, what social media was to websites – i.e. websites used to be of primary importance, but social media took over. Now, likewise, language models have slightly taken away the dominance of search engines.
So it’s still worthwhile having a content strategy.
I think ultimately it looks like Google will reward the best of human + AI, so there is going to be some human skill requirement needed. Humans + AI will outscale humans without AI so now it’s at the point that to even ‘play the game’ you need to be strapped up with AI.
The questions is, what happens when everyone can produce high quality:
?
We are soon going to find out.
Judging by the AI music i’ve listened to, I would suggest that musicians are in a pretty bad situation; and larger agencies who produce video (not full on editors) or adverts are at risk of being massively undercut by more nimble groups.
The nightmare is thinking that all of a sudden that everyone is going to be your competitor but humans are inherently lazy, and not everyone is going to take full advantage of AI and will stay in their lane.
It’s difficult when you think the mountain you have to climb is insurmountable (because the market will be flooded with competition) but ultimately this is now the time where individuals or small groups of people can compete at a much higher level. Will large organisations be able to manoeuvre as quickly? Probably not, but they have larger budgets to throw at AI.
We are the last generation who will remember what the world was like before AI.
Anyway I’m tired. Today’s successes were:
In previous startups I got too involved in one aspect of the business to the detriment of the other areas. It became unbalanced.
When I had a fully working admission booking system for the UK Theme Park industry, I focused completely on customer support and product development. I failed to look at the bigger picture. And I failed to think about sales and marketing.
So when the 2008 financial crisis began to squeeze the UK Theme Park ticket market, they got dissolved within a few years and I was left with no new customers for the booking system.
Likewise, when I was running a web design company in London, I failed to do proper talent scouting so I could build a team. So I just ended up burning myself out by trying to do it all.
In hindsight, in both instances, I was in a great position, but didn’t realise it. And that could have been fixed simply by making sure I put time into different areas of focuses.
It’s not rocket science, it’s just realising that you just need to repeat certain actions with consistency in order to build up the results that you want long term.
Generally speaking you have these aspects of your business:
These all depend on the overarching vision you have, but once you have that you can focus on those areas. Even if you just put in 20 minutes to each of these a day, that consistency builds up.
It’s really important to support the business side of your life, with a positive and healthy personal side. If you treat your body poorly for the next decade just to try and get to some hallowed gold at the end of it, you are potentially in for a shock. Not only do you miss the point of life, but poor health is more difficult to reverse than maintaining good health.
Last year I began implementing some basic life habits:
Step One – Keep Your Life Clean!
It might seem a bit ridiculous talking about these things on a Startup Blog, but the point is, these things cover the bases. If you can do fifteen minutes per cycle (choose … 24/48/72 hour) … and the amount of times I can remember feeling super overwhelmed by an untidy office and paperwork everywhere. Likewise, even now my laptop is becoming a bit of a mess and I need to streamline things.
Also if you ever watch Kitchen Nightmares you’ll know that most of the restaurants are absolutely appalling – they don’t get cleaned simply because the owners haven’t created consistent cleaning habits.
A recent job at a startup on my first day the desks were just caked with dust. It just needed a bit of attention. I’m not saying it will change your business into a super success, but keeping your life clean is far more preferable.
Step Two – Life Admin
Doing these things regularly really does help keep on you top of things. The challenge is doing them consistently, but they are nice and simple tasks that you can apply your willpower and discipline to.
In my early years I left accounts to the last moment, but now I keep on top of things.
Anyway thats enough for today.
A good day… I did some more R&D work with AgenticAI – the python library for building virtual agents. Quite interesting really. And I started building out some migrations on the laravel project. Whilst I will be using python a lot more, at the moment it still makes sense to make the most of Laravel’s very solid functionality and integrate that with a python API.
See Agentic work diary for today
Really good news on one of the projects but wont jump the gun there.
Since I’ve had a cold winter without adequate central heating, I took the opportunity to warm up and sat and meditated with breath-work in the sun again in the garden. Honestly, being your own boss does have its benefits.
There’s a lot on at the moment. But when there’s too much to consider, it’s not productive at all … and so you need a better solution.