Catching Up with Artificial Intelligence and Life

Learning and using AI 🤖

AI is practically everywhere and you can’t really hide from it anymore. I shied away from using AI products for productivity for a while and it still hasn’t registered with me completely.

As far as working and developing AI apps, I find it fun yet daunting if you never worked with it before.

Things like LLM, tokens, inference, agents, tools, OpenAI spec, and the ever growing list of things to learn puts a lot of pressure for a new developer to try to keep up with.

While working on Dotted, I don’t know how many times I switched back and forth between different models, frameworks, and AI providers.

Not knowing where to start, and staying away from paid services, it was tough to find out where the starting point lies.

I knew I wanted to work locally so first I tried BentoML, and when that failed me, OpenLLM. And when OpenLLM was taxing my resources till the point I couldn’t click properly, I moved to cloud services.

Then I discovered AI agents through CrewAI and started learning a bit of Python to get it to work. Unfortunately, I kept hitting bugs and it wasn’t production ready.

I settled with using Google Gemini for the time being because Google is holding a competition for using their products. I figured, why not?

Other than that, Dotted is nearly complete for a demo release. I don’t plan to make it a paid service or submit it to the App Store or Google Play Store since I think the cost will be too high on every generation.

But what I did learn about working on Dotted is using Flutter, working with a Job Task Queue with Redis, using Supabase locally, and much more.

I plan to release a case study in the future to further delve into my thoughts in a concrete form.

The Family Reunion

I’m so happy I had the chance to meet my family again after 5 years since moving abroad.

We all live across many states so it’s hard for all of us to be together. But what drew us in was a member of the family had graduated college.

It called for a celebration of all those who were involved and I was glad to be apart of it.

Having nostalgia and recalling our youth spread laughter among us and catching up with many family friends sparked interesting conversations about their present and future.

The best highlight of all is seeing all the young ones growing up and becoming their own person. All babies who have been born in the last few years were expressing wonders with their eyes and cooing up a storm.

I wasn’t very close to the graduate but having been there in his early life and now starting their next chapter in life gave me a reason to reconnect.

I’m very proud of him and I’m sure he will pursue many great things as both his interests collide between being a Data Science and a Musician.

New Laptop for Content Creation

At the family gathering, I was called the “Family Historian”. 🤣

I had a good chuckle at that and I will cherish the title ‘till the day I die. Over half the time, I had my phone out, recording all our moments together.

I wanted to take all the video clips and stitch them together. My current laptop is the mere base model M1 MacBook Air.

I needed a stronger laptop that can perform at all the task I give it.

You’d be surprise how far I pushed my laptop with web development but in no way it’s sustainable to record, edit, and render content while having an iOS simulator, Docker containers, LLM server and recording software running in the background.

It’s just too much for the base model M1 MacBook Air.

I had to get an upgrade so I got myself a nice M3 MacBook Air.

I took advantage of my military discount and my Apple credit, so it was fairly cheap.

The configuration I got was 24GB RAM and 1TB of SSD storage for about $1,200 USD.

You may be thinking… “Why not just put that money into a MacBook Pro?“.

Well, I will say to you that this laptop also has another purpose in that I plan to hand this down to my wife when I’m ready for the MacBook Pro.

In two-and-a-half years, I predict the M5 MacBook Pro will get a new design and also be on the 2nm die for more power efficiency so I’ll be waiting until another upgrade.

Finding a niche content

That’s pretty much what I’ve been doing and I’m ready for my next project when I wrap up Dotted.

I’m thinking about going full-time into Furfil, or start on another Flutter project. I’m not sure yet but I’ll be sure to provide an update.

As far as content creation, I’m still figuring a good niche. I still feel like I’m adept to a lot of the web development topics so I don’t want to dive too deep. But that might be Imposter’s Syndrome talking. Who knows? 🤷🏻

Well, until next time, I hope you enjoyed this update and I’ll see you around. Thanks for reading and have a good one! 🍻