What is the best A.I. to start with?
My issues:
- I'd guess I'd want some online tutorials (YouTube).
- I may like to share or even teach this stuff one day. Bold, yes, but so many folks, freedom movement or not, know even less than me about most tech.
- I'd like to get right into it without wasting time or repetition.
- I don't have money just now but may prioritize funding this if promising. (I have some BTC from James Corbett from 2015 or so, was worth under $400 a few years ago. I'd rather have it as gold-in-hand now if you know a fair place. I won't long-term trust it held in exchanges nor care to download the entire blockchain >100gb for a local wallet again.)
- I know (from Ian Carroll) that you can backup to just pickup where you left off. I don't know what this is called. It saves local files, so that every time you start the A.I., the history, log, files, etc. can bring it up to speed so you won't have to teach it everything from scratch.
Skills needed:
- MediaWiki - so I can improve Projex.Wiki, and scrape archived wiki-pages along with wiki-markdown, and copy/install wiki templates, and other wiki backups, plugins, upgrades, etc.
- Screenwriting/Writing analysis. I never want to use it to write, but getting "fresh eyes" on your creative work is always helpful.
- Private personal assistant - task management, scheduling, etc.
- Business assistant, for running a studio, meetings, and video production, publishing, and PR.
Skills needed eventually:
- Linux - I need to get with it.
- Video generation - Especially if I can sketch out or storyboard something to have it visualized as an image, then keep finessing that image, then add motion.
- Audio production - Over my head.
- File management - One day I need to better organize and/or properly analyze my many old drives of download hoarding. Some drives may have corruptions in need of help. Then it may be a private club archive/vault server.
Maybe I've missed or forgotten or should be aware of something?
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What is your level of experience with it so far? If it is zero I'd say you don't need any video tutorials. Those video tutorials will go into more advanced usage. Universally they will do that because the most basic usage does not need a tutorial.
For chat, advice, content creation, and basic code generation; The standard chat interface most companies ship is good enough for your first month of usage. I would get familiar with that before doing anything more advanced. Right now Claude is the only AI that isn't cucking themselves to the military so you might as well start with it: https://claude.ai/
They just have tighter usage limits before you have to start paying. But you probably won't hit them, so I wouldn't worry about it until you do.
Claude will be able to handle your first two use cases without any advance setup. So I'd suggest focusing on those two.
For a personal assistent. I wouldn't recommend it. That is advanced, and almost always privacy breaking. It's dangerous in fact because now you have an experimental AI acting as you.
The inbetween which I would recommend trying after a month of using chat interfaces is an agentic code editor. The one I'd recommend if you want extremely good milage without paying is anti-gravity. That would let you make a directory of one kind of file or formatted one way, and you could instruct it to convert all of them to different formatting with a single prompt. But doing each file one by one in chat is already 30 times faster than doing it yourself.
You wouldn't want an agentic AI to re-organize your files. For it to do that it would have to read every file you have. Remember that reading a file for an agentic AI means uploading the file to the service so it can read it. It would be expensive as hell and completely privacy breaking and not practical.
Remember, agentic AI is a backdoor to your computer. Unless you know how to manage that backdoor to limit it, stick with chat. Sometimes agentic AI isn't an efficient prospect because of this. The organization that goes into selecting what will be on one side of a back door or not sometimes is as much work as just doing something manually or feeding it to a chat.
There isn't a need to backup. These AIs are built as data sucks. By default they remember everything. You don't do extra work to get it to backup. You do extra work to make it not backup and isolate things. Not backing up is the advanced use case.
Starting from zero.
I've avoided the A.I. forced into all search engines now. Not sure if it's the same or a different beast. Usually I know what I'm looking for, so no need for assistants.
I guess the personal assistants are more advanced than I'd thought. I'm a long way from seeking agentic help for personal stuff. Or maybe I used the wrong term. I figured maybe there would be something better than a calendar/alarm clock/task manager. I'm not that private at present, but don't need to make mistakes, and before I become Santa Libertas, enemy of T, I must secure all of my shit up tight. I was looking at Mycroft back in 2018.
In the future, for file management, for the most part, it shouldn't be that complex or require uploading. The folders and names should be pretty good, and if not then it should have the video ID that should be on YouTube unless taken down. And almost all of the torrents should have .torrent files to help figure out whatever is not sorted. And then there's metadata. I'd guess a downloadable AI might work, down the road, but that's easy to say. Those are good tips though.
What do you think of the Health Ranger's Brighteon.ai?
Some freedom folks seem to like it.
Thanks for the great feedback!
Search: https://news.ycombinator.com/ Hacker's News for new AIs being created. None of the big ones are worth it and cost too much in tokens.
Good insights.
I tried Claude to write a Free Pascal program with a Lazarus GUI. Thing didn't work, had a blank GUI no buttons or sub forms, etc. Stored data in an array rather than a database. Something a kid might program in grade school.
Not sure it's relevant but I'm not programming.
Good to know Claude has issues.