What's Running Hot in the Home Lab
Florida summers slow the sailing calendar. That is when the NUC gets overtime—and lately it has been earning its keep. I heard someone on a podcast say recently, "If you aren't seeing a 10x increase in your own productivity using AI, you're doing it wrong." I can see the truth in that, but also I would add a warning. What I have seen at home is that AI is wearing ME out. My typical routine is to gather the emotional/creative energy to spend time on one of my projects, usually because daydreaming has caused my mind to visualize a path to progress on one of the threads. I sit down and work on it until I discover it was an unfruitful direction or I make some incremental progress and get tired and want to go do something else.
However, with AI systems available, I find that I have at least 3 or 4 projects open at one time, and rotating between them composing prompts and sending them off to work, then absorbing and analyzing the results they come back with, I can accidentally work through lunch and past dinnertime without realizing it. Often, I go to bed tired. It would be exciting except when I remind myself that these are my personal projects and are not monetized (for you old-timers, we used to just say that I'm not getting paid for any of this work). Not only that, but project ideas that I have had on the back burner, aka the "someday/maybe" pile, are now at the forefront and I'm making real progress on some of them.
Without belaboring the point or going through the whole list in detail (each project would potentially be an interesting blog topic), I can categorize the list into a few areas:
- A tool or app that I would use quite often if I had it, but I'm too cheap to buy it. Now I can just build it the way I want it to fit into my workflow.
- Time or focus management threads where I am staying organized, collating data, or mapping ways to manage my time more efficiently.
- External projects that I have long wanted to reach closure on. This category includes research papers for which I thought up the title and abstract a long time ago and always hoped to get back to someday. Now I have one about ready to publish and a few more still in the testing stage, trying to see if the data supports my thesis.
- Home projects such as building a device or 3D-print something that solves a particular problem around our home or boat.
- Sometimes, it's a combination, like bringing my voicemail in-house rather than putting up with Verizon telling people my mailbox is full and it can't take my message.
So what's running hot in the home lab turns out to be...me!