Ai

Recently I decided that I would backup my Flickr library locally despite having over a year left on my pro account. In so doing, when the decision comes whether to dump, or keep using flickr, I will know that my data is safely backed up locally. Of course I decided to play with the archive but came upon a snag.

E6 Microdegrees

That snag is that Flickr uses the E6 Format, also known as Microdegrees. With Google Takeout, when I exported photoss I used the exiftool to add metadata to photos and it worked fine. Because it worked fine I then moved photos to Photoprism and Immich without issues. With Flickr photos using the E6 Microdegrees format photos displayed as being taken in the middle of the Atlantic near the coast of Africa rather than the canton de Vaud.

A few days ago I was looking at MyAI and I was going to unsubscribe from the “Pro” account before they charged me, before realising that as an early adopter I have a year to play with MyAI for “free”. When I say that I can play with it for free I mean that I have been a Swisscom client for decades by now, so I paid for it through years of loyal custom.

Yesterday I had a chat with Google Gemini about mobile telephony. Specifically I was discussing Galaxus, Wingo and Coop Mobile. I told it that I was interested in a mobile plan in the same price range as Galaxus but using Swisscom as the mobile network rather than Sunrise.

In the process of telling it about the Coop plans it told me go for Wingo, and specific promotion plan, rather than others. It kept insisting that I should go for a certain plan. It also kept saying “but if you go for option A you still have the network coverage issue, whereas if you go for plan B you will not have that issue and you will get precisely what you want, because that plan/promotion is specifically designed to compete with Galaxus.

We are all familiar with the phrase. We learn better when we write things by hand, rather than when we type them on the keyboard. For decades people have been against typing, saying “It’s cold, it’s dead, it’s impersonal”. Those same people will then say “you have awful handwriting” and yet still feel nostalgia for hand written notes. In the age of AI more is being lost.

Ten Thousand Hours of Practice

When people my age were growing up, if you wanted to sing, you needed to devote ten thousand hours to develop tone, timber and a good voice. I am not a singer, which you can tell by what I just wrote. The point is, to be a singer you needed to dedicate yourself to the craft.

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. We delegated the activity that kept us fit and healthy to animals and horses. The consequence of that shift. as we became more and more dependant on cars, and buses, and trains, is that the energy we burned doing sports, went towards enhancing our girth and mass.

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. I have also played with Claude, with Le Chat, with MyAI and many other products. I have played with it to correct my french grammar 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. On the flipside I believe that AI will replace Googling for snippets of code that help us reach our coding goals.

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. something version. As such this means that it can answer questions but we can’t yet give it default data to work with like we can with Claude, Gemini and other AI solutions.

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.