Adventures In AI

Background

I'm sure you've all seen the media hullabaloo about Artificial Intelligence (AI). I'm also sure you've asked yourself: what has AI ever done for us (me)?

After some twelve months of dabbling and delving deeper into AI's capabilities, I'm pleasantly surprised at how helpful it can be. I started down this path because, although I know enough about how things work to ask the right questions, my coding skills are rudimentary. The AI is so much better and quicker.

To show what's possible, I thought I'd list the things I've been able to do with the help of Anthropic's Claude AI (mostly). I have only used the free service.

Automatic for the people

I now spend far less time on social media because I have automated:

• Posting new blog articles (Bluesky & Mastodon),
• Posting new blog comments & static pages (Bluesky & Mastodon),
• Removing posts older than seven days (Bluesky),
• Posting random articles from my blog archive (Bluesky & Mastodon),
• Sending new posts to both media accounts at once (write once, post many).

Building a better mousetrap

Getting and displaying data is much easier thanks to scripts which allow me to:

• Automate how I download & manage podcasts.
• Download a complete list of all 450 plus blog posts to populate the initial data tables for an ongoing, and comprehensive, index of my blog,
• Automatically add new posts to the blog index held in Google Sheets via RSS and an Apps Script,
• Display my blog index here as a searchable table via a custom html widget using the data directly from Google Sheets,
• Display a custom "Popular this week" widget for my new web counter,
• Display data from Google Sheets as tables on my blog. Updating the sheets automatically updates the blog,
• Add searchable tables of online data to various projects: WRG database, WotR Liveries.

And there's more ...

I have also:

• Written a Firefox extension to quickly close tab groups,
• Written an XFCE panel indicator to manage my todo.txt task lists,
• Added a script to automatically update a number of share prices in Google Sheets to track my portfolio and create a price history,
• Quickly rewritten old spreadsheets that had become overly complex & unwieldy,
• Created automated web scraping tools to convert poorly designed forums (fora?) to simple tables (TMP & ADLG for example),
• Scraped web stats from Blogger's management page, storing the results in Google Sheets to create a simple, time based web stats dashboard,
• Likewise for my new web counter, but using the counter's API & Cloudflare,
• Fixed the odd annoying Linux bug or two.

Caveat emptor

I have read a lot about how untrustworthy AIs can be. This isn't the case with the above. None are based on "research"; the AI delivered code (eventually) that either worked or it didn't.

I have used perplexity.ai for "softer" historical research; often simplifying historical trends like shield shapes, clothing colours etc. These I take with a pinch of salt. I prefer perplexity.ai for this work because I can check the references it provides (just in case).

Why you may ask?

The truth is I find this challenging and a lot of fun. It's a bit like solving a puzzle. The AI does a lot. Sometimes it's spot on with its first response and all that's required is a bit of tweaking. Other times it's way off and you have to persevere to get a decent result.

The real benefit comes from the automation: it has significantly reduced the amount of time I spend on my computer doing menial, background tasks. Now all I have to decide is what to do with all the time I've freed up!