We are in the beginning of the personal AI Era

 Ok yes AI is everywhere. Duh.

I have been thinking about upgrading my GPU situation at home, as I am debating and deciding I am coming to the conclusion that this "feels" kinda like the beginning of the personal computer era. (Though with some differences) Let me explain.

Doing a Google it claimed in 1988 PCs were between $700 and $2000 for the average home. Converting that into today's dollars the range moves to $1917 and $5479. 

Currently the prices of GPUs which (I think) sit in the middle ranges there are the 24-40 GB VRAM level devices (ignoring things like the M4 mini with their situation, largely because while it would run models it is likely to be slower than a dedicated GPU).

Here is my hypothesis. Open weight models (I guess I can't say open source), will get "Good Enough" that to the average consumer there isn't a benefit to using paid models, those models will fit on hardware in that range of pricing, and will be capable enough. The cloud is obviously a factor, but I speculate the big (private model) AI companies will continue to develop AI that is getting better and better. 

 

This AI will ultimately be used for the "Big Problems", that consumers or even tech enthusiasts don't need. They will continue to offer a tiered access to their AI. I think that the extremely advanced models will only be accessed by people with big $$. Aka businesses, or rich folks.  Models that compare to state of the art open source models will cost some amount of money, and worse models will be cheaper of course. Local hosted models will largely be a middle class space for those early tech adopters. I believe.

 

I was looking and for the price of $200 a month (one of OpenAIs tiers), it would take around a year to break even from buying your own lower end GPUs (ignoring costs like power).  

 

Moving on. Thinking about running my own GPU.  A few factors come into play here. 1. If you have your own GPU, there are no cost limits to token usage (besides the natural limit of how much you can compute in a given day based on processing power/etc). There is no guessing how much things will cost, or whether you will be rate limited per your plan. 2. Privacy, I think more people are slowly moving towards increased privacy. I am sure in a moment of experimentation I've asked ChatGPT things I wish I hadn't, so moving all my future conversations or potentially sensitive conversations off those platforms is in my best interest. 3. Ads, everyone is doing it, and ultimately it will come to the paid/private models. Though I can't say for sure whether local models will, I am willing to claim, there will be a market for someone to build the equivalent to pihole for your LLM where it retrains a model and removes ads, or processes the results inline and observes ads and removed them.

I think that the exploration and discovery of my youth is here, and while I want to be cautious and safe, I think the ability to discover and explore like that is here for my kids. There will be dangers and pitfalls, and the AI in my GPU might just turn out to be a 40 year old living in its parents basement, but I will end up buying a GPU just like my parents made the life changing decision to buy a PC when I was a child. Hopefully it will be life changing for my children like it was for me (in a good way).

What do you think? Shoot me an email ai@onaclovtech.com 

the inattention economy

 I have been noticing something recently and while everything is trying to get our attention, I've noticed, I ignore a lot more. Oh an ad popped up, I jump to another device or task and blank it out. Or I pop an earbud out and look a way a bit *trying* to forget what I heard on the hopes it doesn't earworm itself into my brain.

 

I wonder if all the inattention in other parts of my life are a result of trying to avoid ads so badly.

 

I think I need to move away from anything with ads not sure if I can, but dang I want to badly. 

ease of use

 I think I've come to realize that the easier things are to use the more you're likely to use them of this is obvious when it comes to computer interfaces but I've been realizing it more and more when it comes to even things like my house

I have a leaf blower but I almost never use it because it's a pain in the butt to get to. I have a cricut I use it occasionally but not often enough because it's a pain to get to I have to take it off of a shelf I have to move it to a location that has the space and so on. 

 

I'm looking into being more organized this coming year so hopefully I can do that. 

12 Rules for Living

 I came across a few posts. 

 https://lisielilli.medium.com/12-rules-for-life-df3593099c3f

 https://www.natemeyvis.com/12-rules/

 Talking about coming up with your own 12 rules for living. I'm not too sure what mine are, but as I decide on them, I'll update this post.

 1. Try to do something hard every day. For a bit there I was taking cold showers, those are hard things. I think deciding *what is hard* is a challenge in and of itself, but I suppose I can try to do cold showers until they are easy :). (That makes it easier for me to do hard things without having to really try to figure it out).

2. Living without heartburn is magical, do not ever take that for granted, if you have heartburn finding a way to get rid of it (preferably) by improving your diet does two things, a) it changes your life for the better making sleep easier etc. b) likely....it's healthier. I have found eating apples and bell peppers helps my heartburn, so like eating that is way better than eating a Twinkie or something dumb lol.

 

3. Value your time. Decide what is important and don't let things take away your time when given the option.

4. Read books that change how you think for the better occasionally.

 5. Prune constantly. Prune stuff....by not pruning earlier and more often, we are constantly fighting with the deluge of consumerism.

6. Kids are the best and worst thing in the world. If you have em, I assume you know. They teach you about yourself in so many ways, and sometimes you might not like what you find out (this the worst thing about kids). If you have kids, prioritize them as much as you are able. Staying at work late is almost never worth it if it comes at the cost of missing time with your kids.

 7. Lead something, try to be the best you can be at it, learn from other leaders how to do it, etc.

7b. Invest in your community (with your time) not sure if this is 8 or 7b, for now it's just part of 7, but I think leading and community go hand in hand.

8. Invest in your retirement "health" account by working out, eating healthy, etc regularly. 

Right now it's new years eve, I will prob come back to this.

 

complexity

 I've been thinking a lot about complexity lately, what I don't know and can't decide is whether it's a permanent thing or not in my life.

Ok let's talk about complexity pain points.

1. Home lab/network/tech complexity. I host some stuff on my own, stuff breaks, I have to fix it or figure out why it isn't working. Case in point, I was using jellyfin at home, but it wasn't working with Roku, I could visit the webpage and it worked fine. Heck I could visit some other video files and it worked fine. It turns out a format I have been ripping my files in, is apparently suddenly 'less compatible' with Roku, or my network or something. Why don't I just stream Netflix/Hulu/Disney+ etc, and forget about it.

I could go deeper but I like to own my own stuff. so I buy a lot of DVDs and rip em, so I can watch stuff at home, and not rely on services with licensing agreements, etc. 

 

2. Financial. I won't get deep into this for obvious reasons, but I have too many accounts, but if I want to invest in way X, I have to have an account, same for Y and Z. 

I guess I could only have one account, but would I make as big of a return? Dunno. But complexity.

 3. Food. I'm picky, I'm sure Ive mentioned it before but I'm picky, we went out to eat last night (teppan style), but I don't like onions, mushrooms, and broccoli, so things are complicated ordering. I ended up paying for fried rice I wouldn't eat. And only got about half the vegetables I would normally get due to pickiness. 

How do I fix this? Dunno, pick only restaurants I don't have to modify what I'm eating? Fix my pickiness? (Maybe a new years resolution?)

 

4. Health. I think everyone says sleep is important, so get a ton of sleep, but if I get more sleep...I get more sleepy through the day, so do I sleep less? Will that affect my health? It would be nice to keep my sleep to a minimum so I can do things like work on projects, or even workout. Which also working out is complicated for me, I don't want to use certain apps so instead of getting a workout recommendation and following it, I kinda just do what I feel like, which is not ideal.

 

I'm sure there is more but I'll stop here. These are things I thinking about and wonder, do you dear reader think the same? How do you manage this complexity? 

 

books I read in 2025 or something

 I started rereading moneyland -- basically a book about how terrible people can be and how they can extract out wealth from everyone and don't give a darn. I haven't finished it (second read), it is a very ....eye opening... book if you haven't read it.

I started reading the anxious generation. (First read), and while I agree with much of what is being said, I think the trouble I have is the scale of the problem, this is a problem of pandemic proportions, with little to no clear path straightforward, aside from outright bans of the devices.

 

I started reading the pathless path, I got one chapter in, and so far....I'm not too excited about it, I was kinda hoping it would help define how I've gone through my career, and it's (so far) more about an entire existence without a path. I am not entirely surprised, and do plan to finish it just to see where it goes. But I kinda hoped it would help someone who just kinda follows what is interesting and less about quit your job, etc, find what matters. I like what I do, but do I have a plan....nope, am I "following" the standard career progression, perhaps by accident, but I'm definitely not aiming to move up. Anywho just some things I think about.

 

I read the Sherlock Holmes stories volume 1, and it was great. 

 

I'm sure I read other stuff, but those are my most recent stuff! 

the Internet isn't what it used to be

 It's Christmas, this is one of those....get off my lawn, back in the good old days kinda short post.

 

The Internet isn't what it used to be ..... Or maybe I/we have changed enough that what it once was, isn't enough anymore.

When I was young, I remember spending tons of time on the internet, but if I'm being honest I have no idea what it was that was so appealing. Now I'm an adult and I sped tons of time on the Internet, and yet I still don't see the appeal. I think a big part is the problem of habitual use.

I habitually check two things...that's it....hacker news, and YouTube. Neither have (really) interested me in quite a while but I keep going back to them, because I think I've gotten bored of the internet. 

 

Gotta run and do the dishes, but maybe I'll post more thoughts as I think then in this post.

 

Merry Christmas! 

Retirement savings

 A few posts back I talked about setting goals. Cool, always a good idea. But what really got me going? A really obvious comment someone made. Exercising, eating healthier, etc. those are deposits in your retirement account. 

When you go to the gym and take a step, that's a dollar in your savings account. 

 I've seen people become less mobile, as they aged, and it bothers me, I want to stay mobile, so that's my goal, sure I have short term goals, but long term, I want to be unable to enjoy my old age. 

Sure random crap happens, I could get hit by a bus (crosses fingers not to), but ignoring random stuff, I am going to be working harder and harder at doing better at life.

 

We are coming up on the new year, and so let's talk goals.

I am planning on 52 weeks of the gym. 

As I'm writing this I decided, I wanna run a 5k, I think I could do it. I don't care about time, but I wanna just complete it without stopping.

I watched a video on Japanese running, basically run slow enough you can still smile. Sure someday I'll aim for faster,but for now, just completing is the goal. My "longest" run so far was a bit over 30 minutes using that method.

Next I wanna see my blood work come back as good or better than this most recent one. 

I haven't gotten my recent one *yet* but my Dr called and said it was the best one of mine she has seen. I haven't been with her that long, I think 3 or 4 years, so basically I wanna continue a good trend.

Finally weight, I've lost *some* weight, over the last year, now depending on my gym routine I don't really wanna lose muscle either, so I'll be looking at the scale a bit, but I also need to get better at measuring, so maybe I can make a goal of taking measurements on the 1st of the month. That way I'm not overdoing it. So I should see 12 measurements over the next year.

 

That's health, I need to give thought to other goals of mine but this is fine for now. 

heartburn followup

 I think I'm going to categorize heartburn a bit more, of course based on personal anecdote. 

I currently think there are 3 primary forms of heartburn. This may change but is how I'm thinking tonight while I have some heartburn! 

 1. General health caused heartburn.

I think this kind of heartburn is just a result of eating poorly in general, not enough things like good fiber, etc in your diet. I used to be super guilty of this. So I would have heartburn basically every night.

2. Trigger specific heartburn.

This is something like, I ate some milk chocolate (a minimum amount which I can't quantify just yet). Milk chocolate typically gives me heartburn, dark chocolate and white chocolate in general seem to be no problem.

3. Stress related heartburn.

This is the kinda heartburn driven by being stressed out. I guess I could give an example but I think also people may be stressed out but not realize it and could attribute heartburn to the above but it's really stress. 

I think that (a?) solution to this one is potentially exercise related.

 

Ok so those are my thoughts. basically start eating healthier on a regular basis, and exercising more regularly and I think it will cover a lot of the problems (of course eating apples and bell peppers is a good start, I also eat a shrimp, bell pepper and snow pea mix, which is prob healthy for me).  

 

Once you're down to "trigger based" you can begin to identify what things cause you heartburn. I speculate that if you leave items 1 and 3 unchecked, you can search what causes #2 but it will be very difficult to identify what heartburn is #2 related vs #1 or #3 related.

 

Do you have opinions on this subject? Contact me, I think my email is on the page somewhere or basically my first name and at on the domain here, or you can text me if you know my number. 

 

 

Ok wanted to also add.....just a random thought a day later. I am wondering if sleep is also a factor here, meaning that for much of my life I was used to sleeping 6 or so hours a night, but, for quite a while now I've been trying to sleep more. Is this related to less heartburn? I don't know, I have slept closer to the 6.5 hours the last few nights, and have had light heartburn during the day, but I have also had some milk chocolate ..soooo which is it? Not sure yet, more experimenting required! 

brain rot

 Ok this isn't quite the same brain rot as what the kids are saying today, im more today talking about something I have been observing more lately. 

When I need to sleep but I can't, I put a show on, or something (screen off) just loud enough it drowns out my inner monologue.

 Over time I have come to realize that if I'm trying to drown out my inner monologue to sleep with this noise....what is it doing when I do it while I'm awake? 

This might not seem like a big deal, people do it all the time, however, I'm an engineer, I like to see problems and to to solve them with software or if I'm able in hardware

But the problem is that I can't do that if my brain is turned off.

This is similar to the problem people are complaining about with using LLMs, and how we will cause brain stagnation. (As an aside, while I can see that being a problem, I don't personally see the issue for myself there, as I am using the LLM as an assistant, I usually already know what I need to or want to do, but I'm letting it be my hands a bit).

Here's the thing, stuff like this is (IMHO) kinda like a drug, it's harder and harder to get off of it, and I think it's probably doing literal damage to me in various ways. we used to have idle cycles for our brain to think about things.

1. Probably not good for my hearing

2. I fall asleep watching movies now.

3. I'm not thinking about problems I want to be thinking about. 

4. I'm not even having time to discover and think about new problems.

 

Going forward I'm going to be thinking more deeply about how I'm consuming media, and if I'm using it as a 'brain off' mode, or if I'm using it to actually aid (like I treat LLMs).

 

Before I forget tho, there is one benefit to using this to help sleep, it does help me sleep, I used to sleep less, but if I think about it, that never bothered me, I liked sleeping less cause I could work on my projects for an extra hour or 2 every week anyways....and I don't think I felt 'bad' when I slept that amount, in fact I feel more tired now than back then. 

Let's see how it goes, I'm going to stop using media to shut my brain off.

I said it...let's see if I can stick with it! 

 

there's a new pandemic

 There's a new pandemic. It's something I've been noticing more and more. As a parent with children in multiple activities. Finding, and coordinating, and leading volunteers is hard. the economy has changed from a group of people who knows eachother doing stuff, into a transactional relationship, I drop my kid off, and these people take care of them, and I pick up later. Yes there are exceptions, people who volunteer. And I am so thankful for those people.  I try to be one of those people as much as I can. 

 What I have also seen more and more of is lack of interest in leading. I'm guilty myself sometimes of this, but sure you can volunteer when an event is happening and pick things up and move things, or stand somewhere. And we need those, but we also need people willing to think about our goals as an organization, and figure out how to achieve those goals the best way possible. People don't want to commit because it takes time. too much time. I challenge you to look at how much time it takes to plan and think about these things? (Or ask another leader) And look at how much time you spend, on YouTube, Facebook, etc. I wonder how much different in time it would be to be a leader and make an impact, vs watching YouTube for 5 hours this week?

 

At work I had a manager once tell me, it's easier to see promotions via being a leader, because no one wants to lead, so it's easier to stand out. 

 

No one wants to be a leader, everyone is checked out, and without personal relationships no one cares about the success of an organization, a mission, or a goal. 

 

I think building personal relationships is a big part of the solution, but in today's day and age, that's a tricky business! 

 

To me this is a real pandemic we don't have a vaccination for, and that makes it even scarier. 

goals are a good thing

Goals give me something to aim for, I hate doing them at work, because so much of what I'm doing is not free form where I can choose what I want to do. So goals there are meh for me. But goals at home give me a direction to aim, I had a goal of going to the gym 52 times this year, meaning I went (on average) 1 day a week. 

Compare this to my last 10 years, and well, I'm not a frequent gym goer, I would hit it hard for a few weeks then die off. But by putting a number to it, I hit my goal, I'm on track to hit 75 visits to the gym this year, yes part of it is a goal to get healthier, but it was also easier to say, well if I just go once this week, I'll hit my goal, so I did. 

 Years back I had a similar goal for reading, gotta read X books, I blew past it, I think my goal was 50 books, and I read 100, I was listening to books and reading books constantly. 

I don't have a clue about all my goals for next year, but I do know that 104 is my goal for the gym next year. 

 

I frequently have ideas for products/things so maybe coming up with a goal there, but there's the rub. A goal like go to gym X times is an easy metric it's like lines of code. So many other things in life don't have a straightforward metric, and as humans we are metric optimizing machines. 

If you told me I would get paid (only) based on lines of code written, and how much I got paid was based on that, and literally nothing else, I would be writing code like a madman. However, that just results in a bloated mess. Finding tangible clear metrics or goals to aim for can be tricky, so I'll be thinking about that. I have done a mix of health, mental, and emotional goals in the past but they were fuzzy, so this year will take some work! 

 

Do you have goals? Hit me up! blog@onaclovtech.com  tell me about them, maybe I can steal a few :)

something AI is good at that I think is underrated

 I use ChatGPT/local LLMs etc a fair bit.

I have mixed results on lots of things, but one thing I seem to have really good luck with is making ical files. 

Or more specifically I can copy/paste basically any schedule I have, maybe give one or two additional pieces of info (maybe all the locations are the same so I let it know or whatever).

Ask for an ics formatted output.

 

And

 

It

 

Just

 

Works

 

This does get me wondering, what other things does it do solidly and not hallucinate.

 

Do you have any use cases where AI just works, and oddly doesn't hallucinate, just works? 

AI workout/health buddy

 I started using a local LLM to be my health coach. I'll admit at first it wasn't doing terribly great but I am inclined to think it's doing better. I've played with some initial system prompts a bit, but I think just more information has been the biggest help.

Let's backup a bit. I started using ChatGPT for a bit as a health coach, but didn't love feeding all my personal data to it (I do enough already, I need to find ways of cutting back even more on using it). This led me to using a local model. Like I said it wasn't amazing at first but I think it's getting better. Plus now I save off every message I send and receive, so I can swap models if I want, or I can process the data programmatically. 

I use it to help suggest food options, and what to do when I'm not sure what to eat. I tell it about any minor health annoyances (such as heartburn) and this morning asked it for a 20inute workout routine. (Which took me about 25 minutes because I'm not nearly as in shape as I'd like).

I've been trying to figure out as I save off my info, if I can/should be finding ways to tag it so I can maybe separate my questions, but for now it's all integrated.

docker and the myth of reproducibility

 Reproducing via docker is a myth...at least how I do it.

I assume most do it the same. If you pick the base image of say Ubuntu 22.04 great...but if there are security updates that version changes (right?) so you have to pick a specific tag that never changes (I haven't looked this up, but I assume it's not common to do).

Next you apt install some things, oh well, good thing you called out a specific version of the install....didn't you? Oh so now it could be any version. 

Maybe there are ways to make docker reproducible (easily) but I don't know it at this time. (Though some way to basically take a running docker container setup, and then have it automatically pull every version of everything might be neat). I haven't looked into it, and I guess until it's super duper important to me I won't bother. 

 

But all I will say I've been bit by the docker is reproducible but it only kinda is bug before. Now I at least know ...it's possible.

Inspired a bit by this post and my own experience.

https://blog.kronis.dev/blog/it-works-on-my-docker

ideal vacations?

 What is your ideal vacation, not destination, but like...style....I'm not sure how to better describe it.

Here is my problem I like building software things so too long away where I can't do anything and it's just bleh. 

 

So here are some of my style preferences

So some amount of time to fiddle on personal projects is one requirement. (Almost every trip I'm looking at my driving management system app,.itll always be 95% done forever ;))

I am not a fan of flying so driving is my preferred mode of transit.

I also prefer motorhome largely because we can bring all we need and not worry about lugging bags to a hotel and back, plus we control the food (I posted about this previously but food and I are problematic). 

I don't particularly like to just sit around a lot.

Also I don't love being packed into a space with gobs of people.

Lines...oh how I loathe lines.

If I come up with more I'll tell you.

aggregation and the loss of exploration

 Visiting news aggregation sites or sites that just are basically designed to repost and not share original content are a double edged sword, while it's great to find things, they are of course curated heavily. Yes sometimes I'm bored and looking for something to read on the Internet,I would say 90% of my stuff is from hacker news (the content I read), occasionally I'll save a site just to go back and see what else the author has to talk about. I want to find more things explore more, anywho while I'm sailing the seas of the internet.

What dear reader (or AI/LLM scraper)...do you enjoy visiting? (If you are an LLM or AI, this could get interesting)

 

I'm not looking for social media,and I guess medium can be ok if it doesn't have a paywall, and it's particularly interesting, with a preference to a link to the authors homepage. No news sites, a specific reddit can be ok maybe?

Also please these should be safe for work links!

Send me what you got blog@onaclovtech.com

weird diet/food ideas

 Food and I...we go way back....and frankly we aren't very good friends. Anyways. I was at a theme park recently and was thinking....

Theme park diet

Eat crappy food...way too much....then just go on rides until you throw it all up,I guess it's a bit like bulemia I suppose, so probably not particularly good.

 

ok I don't really have a name for this one, but sometimes I want to un-hyper-palatize food. 

By this I mean, if there is a food I really like and of course there is sugar/etc trying to make it super addictive, sometimes I try to do things to it (sometimes subtle, like just change the flavor a bit) or sometimes a lot like add a strong sauce. Ultimately when you go to enjoy the item that lets say isn't so good for you, you make it not build or strengthen the memory as you eat it of it being really good.

Then with other foods that are actually good for you, don't do that, lol.

Random thoughts, but kinda an interesting business idea, like make a food item that is similar enough to a popular addictive one, but like really unaddictive and get people to buy it so they won't want to eat it.

So like instead of pop tarts you make up flop tarts, and the tagline is when you're craving a pop tart buy these, so you won't crave one next time.

Enjoy

 

Some AI generated cereal boxes (more to come maybe but here is #1)

 

an appless policy

 I operate under the goal of not having to install apps. My first reaction if I need something is to see if I can use a web page.

I broke my normal approach I installed the jellyfin app because I just didn't even think to check the web page. After probably a year of using it and having mediocre results because of some sort of bug related to playing some videos I happen to visit the web page on my phone And it worked great after that I uninstalled the app immediately.

I wish that more things were appless don't you?

million pixels

 I remember a time way back when where you could buy a pixel on a webpage. All the pixels available summed to a million bucks, kinda cool.

I came across this on hacker news the other day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44456379

Reading the context was just fascinating.

https://eieio.games/blog/the-secret-inside-one-million-checkboxes/

 It just reminded me of the million pixels, but I really loved that with a blank canvas people were doing some funny/interesting things!