AI is very helpful.
This blog has been in a state of hiatus for several years. Partly because I moved onto other projects. Partly because I had other server things happen.
But that will—hopefully—change. I can actually utilize AI to help me deploy
my website automatically to a local server, and have had AI help me administrate
the server itself. I am slowly transitioning to FreeBSD (from Devuan GNU/Linux)
and have set up another repository that will help with it. I love having deploy
scripts and automated services (usually via cron), but haven’t really had the
time to automate several aspects of what I wanted from a server.
Because of Codex, I have been able to get many things done that were on the To
Do list for many years. For example, I have a local server with several reverse
proxied programs (thanks to caddy). AI has helped me be a junior sysadmin to
set these things up properly and to learn more about the services and best
practices around them.
I’ve also been writing a book. AI has been the first editor I’ve hired and it has done some great things for my novel. Now I do not have a human editor to compare to so I do not know precisely how good AI is compared to a human, but for $20 I have been able to find plot and continuity holes (whoops, such and such person was 75 years old here, but is 50 there, or forgetting a thread that was never resolved) and to help me draft outlines and brainstorm ideas for when the chapter isn’t quite ending the way I want. The reason I greatly appreciate this is because I am also a father.
I quit my job some years ago to pursue an app at the beginning of the AI craze–that failed. In the meantime I have had two children and my wife works full-time. AI allows me to keep track of the writing I have done when I get 30 minutes here and 2 hours there. Getting interrupted by the needs of a child or a spouse when you do not have an 8 hour guaranteed block of time to work is very common. AI can help me recollect threads. Hence me mistakenly writing a characters age wrong multiple times.
I have not used AI to generate text for me, but it has generated a lot of code. I don’t care about AI generated code. To me—enlightened thanks to my brother—code itself is a solved problem. Algorithms have been discovered and methods produced to solve issues already and to do so very efficiently. I write little tools and websites for myself, so the code doesn’t need to be bleeding edge or performant beyond what AI has been able to scrape, learn, and reproduce. At the prose level of my novel, I want absolute control. I do not trust AI to modify the text because I have a voice and a vision to enact and ChatGPT does not match it. At a code level, the same is also true: I have a vision. But you don’t read code as a user of a program, so I don’t care what it looks like.
At one point Codex did modify my writing and I did not like it. It began to spin a thread I didn’t agree with and wrote the prose in a way that was not my voice. Luckily it has a good memory (at least within the context or session I was in) and so it undid the change. That reminded me to backup my novel just in case Codex ran off with it. Otherwise, AI has been a dream. It has been the tooling and refining part of my novel. It has been the code generation part of my stupid little private programs (I had AI make a program that reads 4chan boards and summarizes the threads, then scores them on how contentious they are and how much the posters disagree with the op–stupid but useful for my purposes).
I am able to spin this website back up, make changes, then push to master and
have my actual server pull that down and automatically publish the changes.
Wonderful! Thank you AI for freeing up my labor to get things done! And as far
as environmental damage goes, surely you can look to history to see the same
thing as during the Industrial Revolution: when problems arose, people found
solutions. Smog choked the skies, then we burned cleaner fuels. Oil had nasty
byproducts, we turned them into plastics. Now whether or not those are
particularly good solutions that, in themselves, do not cause other issues is a
discussion on its own. But water usage and noise levels of data centers can be
solved. It will just take time.