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These folks obviously think different. But it occurs to me that there is one perspective that most people are not seeing.

Cloud AI companies are gaining real intelligence from you by trading artificial intelligence back in return.

The cloud computers take your ideas, your questions, your real life problems, feed them into models, and return partially baked code, probabilistic answers, and hallucinated lies in return. Sure, a lot of it is useful, but it is artificial, and occasionally harmful.

Oh, you don't think they are storing everything you type into those boxes forever and ever? I strongly suspect they are. This is the gold they are mining, and spending so much to obtain. All the world's private thoughts and desires and plans and hopes and dreams are flooding into their data centers at record pace. For later analysis.

Take the story of Josh which you can watch on Youtube here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2fv664Ndf4. It's the story of a man who used AI to write a report he should have written, and then gets caught in court, where reportedly 350 pages of his entire ChatGPT history is read into the record.

Now, it doesn't explicitly say where this came from. Did they just open his personal account and copy everything out? Did they send a subpoena to the AI company for the details? Not sure. But anyone who knows how these things work would be shocked (shocked!) to learn that AI companies around the world are just throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

It is best to go into the agreement of using AI with your eyes wide open, and just assume that everything you type into the prompt is stored somewhere forever.

For example, ChatGPT's privacy policy states that they will retain your personal data until you delete it, in which case they will either delete it within 30 days, or de-identify and disassociate the data from you and use it to improve their models.

By that point, it doesn't matter if the prompt you use can be traced back to you. The gold is the prompt, the idea, the human intelligence or human experience behind it, which allows them to improve their mimicry of humanity and eliminate dependence on it.

Solution: run your own models locally so you own all your own data. How? I hope to blog more on this topic in the future as my friend and I have been recently working on Project Jarvis.

So much for that!

Let's deal with it one step at a time. They say what gets tracked gets measured, what is measured gets managed, and what is managed gets done.

Enter TimeWarrior. This is a simple command line tool that helps me track what I spend time on. It then presents reports back to me such as daily lists, and weekly and monthly graphs. Each time block can be tagged with one or more simple words.

For example, here's how I may record a day's major events:

tw start sleep

# morning arrives, breakfast
tw start 8:30 food
tw start 9:00 exercise
tw start 9:30 blog
tw start 10:30 work
tw stop 13:30
tw start 14:00 food
tw stop 14:30
tw start 15:00 work
tw start 20:00 food
tw stop 20:45
tw start 22:30 project
tw stop 23:45

tw start 0:30 sleep

That would be a productive day. All tags represent a major event, and a major event is one worth tracking and one worth doing. Anything not worth doing is not tracked, leaving the report with gaps in the day showing "wasted" or rest time. In this example, only 3.5 hours were spent on untracked/wasted time.

I started using timewarrior in order to track my sleep, to see if I could detect any particular patterns that would be useful to know. But by tracking major events, I can also track my focus. I can detect days when focus is bad, other days when focus is good, and perhaps find the patterns or the reasons for one or the other.

What are the reasons for wasting time? Perhaps that is tomorrow's blog. :-)

Document more. Like what I would say I don't have any regrets in life, but one of them is that I didn't document the struggle. I didn't document the journey, because I was ashamed of it. I didn't want anyone to know.

It's kind of like the people who, ... when they're overweight, they don't want to take pictures of themselves, cuz they're ashamed. But ... one, you got to face reality. And two, if you believe that you're going to win, this will be part of the story you tell.

... the moment that I actually started documenting purposefully, was the day that I had a thousand dollars ... in my bank account after I lost everything. I was like, I will never let this happen again and this will be the beginning of my comeback story.

This hit me. I have a ton of projects on my todo lists, and they are all in various states of completion. I also waste a lot of time on youtube. It's the modern TV. And while I have learned a lot from that youtube time, it is mostly superficial knowledge. Only a few topics have turned into projects, and even fewer have gone full depth, and fewer yet have been completed.

If my comeback story is going to be documented, it can start right here. Perhaps it will grow to audio and someday video, but the blog is likely the ideal place for the bulk of it.

And if documented, then regular progress is needed, and if regular progress, then the frequency of blog posts will be a measurement to myself whether I'm stlil on the horse, or have fallen off.

This leaves 3 goals:

1. Document more. Document your life and your progress and your setbacks as if you believe you will eventually win and win big, so that you can have a documented trail to your success that you can share with others.
2. Face reality. Don't let shame hold you back. The only thing to be ashamed of is standing still.
3. Blog daily, or close to it. Because if you have nothing to blog, did you really do anything toward that hope of success?

But how?

I have an idea, but that's tomorrow's blog. :-)