Category: English

  • What are the use cases for AI?

    This might read a bit negative, but I am genuinely curious. What is the use case for AI for ordinary people?

    With big tech building AI data centers like there is no tomorrow — which might be true for some of them (fingers crossed) — I’m left wondering; for what?

    In which scenario will we need so much AI compute?

    I get it for developers, which is what Microsoft and Anthropic is targeting. These are the users that are easiest to reach, due to their already established relationship with the tech companies.

    Microsoft has their own annual conference, Microsoft Build, which was mostly about AI this year. “Build the thing that builds the thing“. No surprise there.

    One thing that is surprising is that Atrophic, the company behind Claud, the number one programming AI, won’t even build a Mac app themselves. They have, just as everybody else, made an Electron app. If I were selling finance software, I probably would not use Excel for my own finances.

    So, developers use AI. But they are already onboard the AI train and doing just fine. How much more compute do they need?

    Then we have what used to be search. “I never search anymore, I just ask AI” is something I’ve heard more than once. And to be fair, it is hard to avoid it these days. The top result on Google is an answer from Gemini, their AI model.

    So, some people, use ChatGPT or Gemini or CoPilot as a search engine. We ask questions; to find recipes, how to fix things around the house or do some risky changes on a production server. But even then you should check the sources. At least I do, because that’s what I learned at school1.

    Not just because the sources might be wrong, but it might also be the case that the AI summarized it just a tad too much. Leaving out some important nuances, or making some assumptions it shouldn’t.

    I also heard people talk to ChatGPT as if it were a good friend or confidant2.

    Is this the use case that will generate growth? If so, who will pay for it? Because I’m sure that if you suddenly had to pay to talk to ChatGPT about how you should feel about something, that conversation would stop once the first bill arrives.

    Then we have people that use AI to write for them. The text doesn’t always make sense, but that’s ok. People who don’t like to write usually don’t like to read either, so for them it makes no difference. But again, how much would you be willing to pay to let an AI write an email for you?

    But wait. What about video and audio production? Sure, that might be a market. But I bet there is not a market to consume all this AI generated video, audio and images. If I see an article online with an AI generated image, I’m out of there before the dickover shows up. It just isn’t worth the time.

    Or maybe I’m wrong, and that the zombie kids of tomorrow happily will watch 16 hours of AI generated crap filled with ads each day.

    One way for these companies to make money is of course by force. Microsoft can say: “you need a subscription that includes CoPilot if you want to continue to use Windows”. Because they have already built CoPilot into everything from Excel to Notepad.

    But even then it is just force to pay. Not force to use. Because, again, what shall people use CoPilot for? Realisticly?

    I recently opened Outlook on my phone — because work — and I was confused for a few seconds. Instead of just one icon to add a new event, as there has always been, there was now two. And the second one was CoPilot.

    I fail to see the point though. If you click on it, it will just open a prompt asking you for questions. It takes more time to prompt it to add an event than it takes clicking on an empty slot in the calendar, set the time, subject, and click “save”.

    After creating said event, I would still need to check it afterwards, opening up the same interface that I would use to manually fill in the information in the first place.

    And while I do believe in using AI as a tool, I don’t see a use case that will justify the billions that have been, and continue to be, funneled into it.

    So once Oracle and Microsoft has burned through their cash building data centers. And OpenAI and Anthropic has burned through their cash (and others) and find themselves unable to pay for the use of these data centers. Who will use them?

    What is the use case for AI?

    1. I learned not to trust anything found on the internet, once the internet made its appearance that is. ↩︎
    2. As John Gruber of Daring Fireball writes: There’s something wrong with people who consider today’s chatbots to be their friends or companions.
      ↩︎

  • Grand Theft Auto

    It’s hard to imagine that the most anticipated — and expensive — video game of all time, GTA VI, started out as a top-down game where you stole cars, drove around and killed people.

    And except for the top-down part, I’ve just described every GTA game in the series. So, in addition to top-down, let’s add that the first game had crude graphics and an annoying collision detection.

    Start of the first level in Grand Theft Auto in all its 4:3 aspect ratio glory. The view zooms out when you are driving fast so you can actually see the car (or any other object) you inevitably are going to crash into.

    But for some reason, it was fun. A lot of fun. And smooth. At least if you had a 3Dfx card. The effect it had on the game was huge.

    So, the first game was top-down. The expansion pack was, obviously, top-down. GTA 2 was, once again, a top-down. All with the same game mechanics, more or less. And then came GTA III…

    With GTA III, everything changed — except for the stealing, driving and killing; that was the same. But it was no longer hard to imagine that this game could go places.

    GTA III introduced proper storyline, a protagonist, roman numerals, and — best of all — a full 3D, third-person, open world. You could roam around in a sprawling environment.

    One year later they followed up with GTA: Vice City. Which might be my favorite in the series by the soundtrack alone.

    So, in November, GTA VI will be released. And it will be big. It will be 3D. And the soundtrack will probably be epic. And a lot of people will call in sick just to play the game.

    It’s amazing when looking back at the first game. How much has changed, and how much has stayed the same.

    Playing the original

    If you want to try the original game today, I would recommend using dgVoodoo2. There is a guide on Steam on how to use it. Rockstar did give this game away for free at one point in time, so it should be possible to find it online.

    One tip: Set aspect ratio to 4:3 in dgVoodoo2, otherwise you will not see everything you need for the game to make sense.

    Fitting a city into 32 MB of memory

    And if you are interested in the more technical side of things, I found this video fascinating. It’s about how Rockstar fit an entire city (GTA III) into the memory of PlayStation 2.

  • Om Malik has died

    The world of tech is in mourning after learning that Om Malik has died at 59.

    I remember reading GigaOm, along with other tech blogs, back when I was young and hopeful.

    Rest in peace.

  • M-series Macs are Amazing

    I am blown away by this Apple M-series. And by blown away, I mean the complete opposite, because there are no fans. Nothing blows!

    And it seems like I bought it just at the right time. The new prices Apple announced today has made my MacBook Air 3000 NOK (around $300) more expensive in Norway.

    The price change did not come as a surprise. Tim Cook did give a warning last week that prices would have to increase due to high cost on memory and storage chips. The same chips AI eats for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

    I have not yet put the Mac through its paces. But in my experience, most laptops get a heatstroke just by playing a YouTube video these days.

  • (A)I made a WordPress Widget

    What I made is not important — it’s a list of kayak courses and available spots.

    I already had created the logic — no AI needed for logical thinking1. So I already had the authentication, the API calls, the custom filtering and the presentation layer.

    But since I didn’t have any experience with WordPress plugins/widgets, I hosted it on a separate domain and embedded it onto the web site. This has worked for years.

    However, there were a few drawbacks. Mainly that it was dependent on my private website to be up in order to work. On the positive side; when things broke, I could easily debug it on my own server. Like the time the API stopped working, and it turned out I had been using an internal API endpoint, and not the one in the documentation. Whoops.

    So, with AI being all over the place, and Microsoft pushing CoPilot on everything that can be displayed on a screen, I decided it could not hurt to ask it to make a simple Widget that I could plug my logic into.

    I asked CoPilot to create a basic Widget. I asked it to display a placeholder text for now, but that I needed a settings interface to enter username and password for the API authentication.

    When I tried this crude plugin, nothing worked. I wrote to CoPilot: “it doesn’t work”, to which it basically replied “Your code is wrong”, and then continued to present the right way to do it.

    And this is what surprised me the most. Several times, CoPilot presented some code, just to lament me about it later.

    Yes, I know there are other models2 out there that are a lot better for programming. But I only needed to make a simple template for a WordPress widget, not make an E-commerce system from scratch.

    But part of me wonder; do these models behave this way just to make people spend as many tokens as possible?

    Credit where credit is due

    But I have to give CoPilot some credit as well. First, it did eventually present a workable Widget that I could put my logic into. Secondly, it created new token manager for me. My previous solution was to use Curl to get the API token bearer and store in a file. Hardly best practice.

    I also learned a little bit more about WordPress.

    1. I know some people automatically thinks text with em dash is written by an AI, but everything I publish I write myself. ↩︎
    2. I am not a programmer. I do this for fun. If I have used the wrong tool for the job, so be it. ↩︎