Recently I was thinking about how some people want to offload their work to AI and it got me to think about how people already offloaded getting around to cars. When is the last time that you saw a group of people walk from Nyon to St Cergue via La Dôle, rather than take the train most of the way, and walk a short loop at the top?
If we think about it, years ago we offloaded walking between villages and towns to horses, and carriages, and cars, and trains, and boats and more.
From what I see the aim of AI companies is not to provide human beings with great tools to speed up work flows, to automate menial tasks, and to enhance our daily work lives. It is to replace us. For this reason I don’t like that there is so much hype about AI.
Listening to the Keen At the same time as I write this I have been to half a dozen, if not a dozen talks about Vibe coding, AI workflows, MCPs, Agents and more.
Yesterday evening I was at a talk about AI. The person had written an AI agent that scrapes news sources for information, and reads reports, and then provides a summary of this information as a report.
We often think of AI as a chat where we ask a question, and then get an answer. This does work well, when you do something once, or twice. If you do something a dozen times per day then agents become interesting.
Yesterday I asked MyAI by Swisscom, which is still in Beta, if it could help me write a JavaScript app to generate passwords and it did, with ease. It provided me with the javascript code I needed so I could cut and paste it, and then use node to run it straight from terminal.
People often think that AI will replace us, and if certain companies in the US have their way, then it will.
If we use Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT or a few other AI models we are using AI that has data centres in the US. If we use Le Chat by Mistral or MyAI (Beta) by Swisscom we are using AI that is based in Europe, or Switzerland. The data stays here.
The first thing to note is that MyAI is in public beta. It is still at a 0.0. version number rather than a 1.
Yesterday I went to a talk where Claude and Cursor were used to write a Flutter app for Android. The idea is quite simple. “Claude help me write a to-do app and a shopping list app” before following the instructions produced by AI to write the app.
When I watched this I thought “This reminds me of the laravel tutorial that I followed at least two or three times. If you find a tutorial you can write the code by hand by copying it line by line, and function by function.
The Absurdity of AI in Creative Writing I find it absurd that someone would spend billions teaching AI to do creative writing. The reason this is absurd is that reading takes time and humans already generate more content than we can consume. The result is that creative disciplines, such as writing, video making, and other forms of creativity or art, need to find an audience and people willing to pay for it.
This morning I went for a run. During this run I listened to Systems Crash and the discussion about AI, about the US attitude, and the European/International attitude and it convinced me that I much prefer to use EU/International projects rather than American ones for a simple reason. Corporate Social Responsibility.
The US wants to move fast and break things, including the law, by hoovering data it has no moral rights to.
If you bought a Mac Book Pro in 2007 or so you could get it with firewire 800, Thunderbolt 1 and a number of other connectors. A few years later they did away with every connector except USB-C, for charging and devices. The result was a thin laptop that needed dongles, and breakout boxes, for everything.
If you have a garmin device to charge you need an adaptor. If you have a firewire 400 or 800 drive you may need two or three dongles to have the right connections.
Yesterday afternoon as I set off for my walk I noticed that the Pi AI Kit was in my post box. I moved it to the locked compartment and then went for my walk. After the walk I took the time to set it up and it went well.
Easy Assembly If you’ve got your own kit but haven’t assembled it first, the long screws are there so that you can fix the Raspberry Pi and AI kit within the default Pi case.