cope + paste

all of my friends hate ai (but i still want the star trek computer)

So obviously AI is extremely evil and the boys over in silicon valley are wetting themselves over their fantasies of destroying the world via sentient computers and how they'll be part of the over-class who never have to work while the rest of us live in the dirt because we can't afford to buy tokens or whatever.

It's an industry built (like most technology) on privatizing public goods and pillaging private property, from research funding to personal data and intellectual property. We're in a deadly race to eat up as many resources as possible to project a failing dream of techno-dominion into an increasingly empty future. Yay!

But there I was, minding my own business, when PewDiePie's Odysseus was formally announced (or whatever it was that happened, I still don't understand OpenSource software development, despite having been surrounded by it my entire life). And the notion of running an LLM on my own machine, disconnected from the internet, was introduced to me.

Obviously, the evil inherent in the emergence of LLM technology (scraping the entire internet to feed the machine without respect or care or recompense to the multitude of human beings who did the work the AI ground up and shat back out) is still true.

But the genie can't be put back into the bottle. We can be selective in our use of the technology and we can push for legislation and regulation to limit the on-going harm perpetuated by the technology. But the technology doesn't just... Go away if you ignore it hard enough.

And I want a fucking Star Trek computer.

There has been a promise, within science fiction, of the virtual assistant, the machine which you can carry with you which will help you keep track of the things that escape the average mind under capitalism. The types of thing men paid women to remember for them.

I've recently had the opportunity to work closely with someone who used to have a secretary that managed their calendar and associated minutiae. It's been fascinating watching an accomplished and indomitable figure be brought up short by the complexities of negotiating calendar reminders.

I have executive dysfunction for which I take prescription medication and because of which I have done untold hours of therapy and life skills coaching. In short: I'm pretty good at calendar reminders.

But I'm not great. I was 7 minutes late to my dentist appointment this morning because I had blithely assumed my appointment was at 9:30 AM when it was, in fact, at 9:15 AM. (Thankfully I had left the house early.) I try very hard to write down my appointments in my phone when they are set, and I try to copy those appointments over into the various planners and schedulers I use, and I always ask for an appointment card.

But it would be so GREAT if I could just tell my phone/computer/handy little machine "I have a dentist's appointment @ Date/Time @ [Place] put it in the calendar and remind me about it later".

Maybe I've told it if the word "appointment" is in the event title, put it on the "appointments" calendar.

Maybe I've already told it to set the reminders for certain intervals:

My real dream is that I want to be able to ask my computer/phone/pocket machine "Which grocery store should I go to on my way home" and have it check the traffic, how busy each of the locations is, and the price of certain categories of food and tell me what my options are. -- How long it'll take to get there, maybe it can rank them for me based on various efficiency/cost matrices.

I'd also love a real time traffic reporting machine.

(I really hate commuting by car, thankfully I won't be having to do that very much longer, at least not the way I have been, so maybe some of these highway fueled navigational fantasies will subside.)

So I've downloaded an LLM onto my laptop. I'm trying to figure out what interface works for me, because I'm the least technical person of my acquaintance (well, almost) and I can't code for shit, and reading docs kind of makes my eyes cross. So I'm plugging away with LM Studio and MstyStudio. (I feel like I want to like MstyStudio, but I don't have a spare $300+ to give them for the premium features, and also I can't figure out how any of it works, even if the premium features seem like the parts I might be interested in.) But I don't really know what I'm doing. And there is very little DIY AI tech documentation written for people who know what the terminal is, but not really know how to use it.

Anyway. I don't want to feed my data back into the context meat grinder of AI slop. And I don't want to be part of this whole mad-dash for tokens and data centers and whatnot. But I am... Curious. To see what the fancy predictive text machine can do.

Thus far, I've mostly figured out that it's really not very good at writing Excel formulas (at least the one's I've had access to). I might not be asking the right questions.

But to be fair, if I have to ask "write me a cross-footing (it sort of knew what cross-footing was) formula using an IF statement in Excel" ... I can just write it myself. It might take me a bit longer to get it exactly right, but.... I got there, on my own, and I didn't spend any of that time waiting around only to be disappointed by the answer.

(trying to figure out how to get an inbox set up, so hopefully I'll be able to hear back from someone, anyone, out there soon)