This week I’ve been fighting my computer curse again. Still, despite the fact that the computer gods still really hate me, I’ve managed to accomplish a few things. I’ve managed to get the version history from my Syncthing replicating to my Backblaze B2 account, I’ve updated the OS and a bunch of packages on my Synology NAS, fixed a long-standing annoyance with my use of NoMachine, and I started building my first custom GPT. And all that was made much easier with the use of ChatGPT.
Perhaps this deserves a longer post—and perhaps that’ll be what I put up next week—but I’m still seeing a lot of AI skepticism out there. Last night I saw an interview with a tech reporter who agreed that, yeah, AI might be useful for helping developers with their coding, but beyond it wasn’t good for much. And, hey: it’s true that trying to make it useful for searching the Internet is tough (though not impossible), and trying to make it work for handling things like customer service is just a horrifyingly bad idea. But that doesn’t make it useless. In point of fact, for things like helping you integrate different software packages together, configure your hardware, or design a solution to an ongoing problem, things like ChatGPT are actually pretty useful. And I think it’s only going to get more useful as time goes on. Once they figure out how to integrate ChatGPT (or one of its competitors) into something like Alexa or “Hey Google” (as it’s called in our house), the utility of “smart devices” is going to go way up. Because our smart devices are actually kinda stupid right now, so they could really use that AI boost.
Anyhow, I don’t think I want to turn this blog into an AI evangelism vehicle or anything, but ... damn, ChatGPT shore is useful.
That’s all I really wanted to say.