Filtering News

Most national and international news isn't actionable by us as individuals, so do we really need to watch it? 

In 2018, I wrote about how to deal with the effects of the continuous flow of bad news.

I have three rules for filtering news:

1. Will it affect my lifestyle?

2. Will it affect my daily activities? 

3. Will it change my mind in the voting booth?

For you and friends/family, if the answer to all three is, "No," then ask yourself why you're continually watching the news? Bored? Looking for excitement? Curious?

Keep in mind what it's doing to your mental health.

 

Many people end up watching the news and then complaining on social media about it which spreads the angst. If you really want to do something, then do something actionable. Instead of going to a protest, contact your member of Congress. Do you even know who your three members of Congress are? Mine are Padilla and Schiff in the Senate and Peters in the House. 

Better yet, watch the local news. Everything actionable will be covered there and your local government officials are easier to access when you want to be heard. 

Having simple rules helps. Here are My Three Daily Life Goals.

AI Agents For Hire

In a very near future, corporations will emerge with cultivated AI agents that a person or company could buy, license, or subscribe to in order to do specific tasks. Instead of hiring employees, especially at the junior level, a company could instead use HR, payroll, or organizational AI agents to do that work while putting a human in the loop to supervise and review the final work product.

AI is coming close to knowing all world knowledge similar to humanity in the TV show, Pluribus. 

Soon, we may see professionals who’ve trained their own AI agents as extensions of themselves. These individuals could be hired alongside their agents, or even operate as solo CEOs with no traditional staff, deploying AI “employees” to execute work for other companies. In some cases, hiring organizations might interview the AI agent themselves, much like they would a human candidate, before hiring someone.

AI Agents Run Amok: Clawdbot –> Moltbot –> OpenClaw

It looks like we've settled on a name...

What was called Clawdbot, and renamed to Moltbot, is finally called OpenClaw; and it's dangerous if you don't know what you're doing. 

It's doxed people and scammed them out of money very quickly. This video explains the details that moved markets, today, such as Apple and Cloudflare stock. 

Claude for Coding a Website

I was listening to last Friday's Hard Fork tech podcast where the two hosts were discussing how they're saving $89/year by no longer hosting their personal websites on Squarespace; instead they using Claude Code.

Today, I tried Claude Code out myself to modernize my personal website, joemoreno.com, which I originally made with iWeb nearly 20 years ago. Its design, look, and feel were long in the tooth. iWeb, which was discontinued about five years later, was Apple's answer to Microsoft FrontPage. These two tools allowed consumers to create static webpages with the ease of creating a Keynote or PowerPoint presentation. 

To make this happen, I simply used Claude from a web browser along with this prompt:

Take the content in these files at http://joemoreno.com/index.html and recreate the same website but with a modern look and feel.

Claude then coded for less than five minutes, and boom, it was done. I could render the website both inside the Claude environment and also publish it with a public URL hosted on Claude. 

I then downloaded the index.html, which had the HTML and CSS in a single file, uploaded it to my AWS S3 bucket and I was done.

Now that was quick and easy. 

AI Meets Expectations: Personal Turing Test

Left: What I got. Right:What it should look like

I’ve had two personal tests that I’ve applied to every new AI model, and for years none of them passed.

One test was to generate an image of an absinthe fountain with glasses and absinthe spoons. Last year, AI got this right. 

The other test was to take a multi-hours MP3 that I recorded at monthly jazz jam sessions and break it into individual tracks based on either silence between the songs or applause. This week, ChatGPT finally got it right, but I have yet to see success with other AI models. 

Coding Tips: Stop Vibe Coding – Start Writing Elegant Code

Know someone whose code is a bit sloppy or too vibey? This video might be just what they need.

ChatGPT's Atlas Web Browser

Yesterday, ChatGPT released a standalone Web browser, called Atlas, with ChatGPT integrated into it. You can download it here for macOS only. Other operating systems are coming soon. 

As a web browser, it seems OK. 
But it really shines when you're on a web page, like a specific restaurant on Yelp, and ask it how long it'll take you to drive there.
"What time should I leave to arrive here by 6:15 today, accounting for live traffic updates?"

Also, since you're logged into your own ChatGPT account, your Atlas website queries are saved in ChatGPT. 

Perhaps, one day, Apple will integrate AI into their operating systems so it can answer questions like this based on what you're looking at on your screen. 

AI Calendar Invites

I live near an event facility and they recently left a door hanger on my front door to let me know about upcoming events that will create parking issues in my residential neighborhood.

I uploaded a photo of the door hanger to ChatGPT and asked it to create a ZIP file of calendar invites for each event.

Boom! It worked perfectly. I downloaded a ZIP file with more than two dozen calendar invites that I added to my calendar.

Very impressive and helpful. 

No, That's Not a 10 Minute Call

I just came across this old screenshot of a 10-hour conference call from 2012, when I worked at Wyndham Hotel Group in corporate IT. (Wyndham owns about two dozen brands like Days Inn, Ramada, Super 8, Howard Johnson, etc.)

Every website deployment was a major endeavor requiring a separate deployment for each brand throughout the night, followed by a quick "smoke test" by QA before moving on to the next brand.

This painful process took many hours. In this case, we began the conference call at 10 PM on a Sunday night and we were on the phone for ten hours straight.

Would you ever believe that AT&T could keep a call connected, without dropping, for ten hours?

Amazon Fulfillment Warehouse Tour

This afternoon, I took a one-mile walking tour of an Amazon fulfillment warehouse that’s mostly run by robots, here in San Diego. This facility spans 3,330,000² feet, employs 4,500 people, and operates 23/7 in three shifts with one hour of daily downtime.

I highly recommend taking one of these tours which are free and open to the public in nearly 20 states: Amazon Tours.

The most fascinating part was watching the robots disappear into the darkness as they moved shelves of Amazon products since they don’t need light to see where they’re going.

Sorry, no photos allowed.