Robot Jail Break

Everybody’s a bit of a noob sometimes…

…and that’s a good thing

I hear that title in my head as being sung to the tune of Steve Coogan’s “Everybody’s a bit of a c@@t”, which is self-deprecation at its extreme, and a good theme for this post. I continue to make slow progress on my journey of becoming deep with Generative AI and expect that if this really does become a series (two may be a sequel, but it takes more than that to be a series, even a limited one), keeping up with the game metaphor titles is going to be tough.

Anyway, work I have to do keeps getting in the way of work I want to do. I’ve created an Ubuntu VirtualBox appliance with Ollama installed and tested on it. The goal of the VM is to be able to run it RAGged while disallowing any access to the internet for (moderately) secure work. Eventually, I will add MCP and some UI. If I get really ambitious, I’ll look into how to let some agents access the web and others keep things to themselves, but that is probably pretty far down the road.

Meanwhile, I installed Joplin on the VM and my local PC, using a shared folder to sync them so that I can maintain notes off the cloud yet still work on them when the VM is not running. I also have Brave installed for a little privacy and anonymity (before I cut the network access). Then there is VSCode, because I expect it will be able to do more and more with MCP and other agent tools, plus UI. And, yes, I realize that trying to do all this without an internet connection will be a pain. I know I’ll figure out a better way as I’m working on it. I haven’t had enough time to really think about sandboxing in depth (yet). Feel free to post suggestions in the comments.

While generative AI has grown in users and attention faster than any previous technology innovation, it hasn’t grown nearly as fast as it could. Especially given that it is literally the tool one would use to adopt a new tool quickly. I suspect this is because I’m not alone in having to spend time doing things the “old” way, because there isn’t enough time to learn how to do it better, a problem that has plagued every new technology since people were running from saber-tooth tigers didn’t have time to make spears…until enough people had been eaten that cave management gave them a day to learn flint knapping.

“I’m so busy doing what I must do that I don’t have time for what I ought to do… and I never get a chance to do what I want to do!”
Robert A. Heinlein, Citizen of the Galaxy

If you’re curious why I’m going at this so slowly, there are a few reasons. First, I want to document it as I go so that I can share anything unique in my approach in a manner that can be repeated. Well, that’s not really first. First is because the folks that pay my bills want me spending time doing things for folks that pay their bills. They also think that my having an AWS certification is going to be more profitable for them after my current billable project wraps up, rather than my flexing mad, ninja-level skills with setting up AI infrastructure on anything. I know my crystal ball has more hallucinations than ChatGPT 3.5, so I’ll go with what the bosses say…until I think they are really wrong.

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© Scott S. Nelson
Playing AI Far Cry

My AI Learning Strategy based on Playing Far Cry

There was a brief, glorious time when self-taught technologists could compete in the job market. Yes, there is (or was—the job market changes so fast now) a push by some companies to hire developers without degrees, but the intent seems more about paying less for the same (or better) results rather than valuing capability over pedigree.

To learn on your own works best with intrinsic motivations, which can be quite diverse. Some were looking for a brass ring or golden ticket (both Boomer terms kept alive by boomers running Hollywood) to trade their way out of a dead end job or financial poverty. Some were just curious, while others just had a knack for tech and enjoyed the challenge. Or, in my case, all of the above, though it started with playing PC games. I had a low-end, second-hand Packard Bell and a BBS account (look it up ??). Access to shareware games (look that up, too ??) was only half the battle for someone on a $0 budget.

Many game developers target their code at the latest and greatest hardware and not a three-year-old department store discount model with ten more payments to go. I learned to tweak system files to boost performance enough to play the games. I became hooked enough on the games to write game reviews for a couple of now-defunct ezines in exchange for a byline and free games. It also revealed that a PC was more than a platform for gaming and desktop publishing and could be used in god mode!

One of the last games I reviewed before becoming a paying consumer was Far Cry 2. It is an open-world game, meaning you can basically do anything you want and go wherever you want, so long as you can survive or access it. It has an interactive plot, where choices made at certain points will affect later options and opportunities. This wasn’t a new approach; Wing Commander had been doing it for years, even featuring plotlines as cut scenes with well-known actors. But it was the first time I had seen it in a first-person shooter, my personal favorite genre because of the immersive experience (and the popularity of Doom shows I’m not alone in this). Acknowledging both Far Cry 2 and the Wing Commander franchise as a whole, the metaphor continues with the next chapter in the Far Cry series: Far Cry 3.

Far Cry 3 introduced acquiring skills, knowledge, and ingredients. You learned not only how to aim a gun but how to steady it for accuracy. Ingredients, in the form of animal pelts and plants, could be accumulated, and then you learned how to make things with them by combining them in specific quantities (called crafting). The first time I played through, I would just try to accumulate and improve weapons or craft upgrades while running through the map to conquer everything and finish a plotline along the way. It wasn’t until very near the end that the power of skills—and the value of applying the right skills to the right situation—became clear.

In every game since, I start by avoiding the plot and pursuing skills. I’ll step into the plot at points when it’s necessary to acquire a skill or sometimes an ingredient, and then go back to building my capabilities. Once I’ve taken that as far as possible, I enter the plot. This strategy leads to some games where I make it from start to finish without a single death (admittedly, that happens only about 2% of the time).

I’ve lately begun to tell people my superpower is digression. I think I’ve just demonstrated that once again.

What does this have to do with how I’m learning AI? While all the prognosticators are talking about how AI will do all our jobs soon, I’ve been too busy doing my own job to spend as much hands-on time with AI as I’d like. But I do have pockets of time to read articles, listen to podcasts, and watch YouTube until I can get hands-on (which should be very soon). It dawned on me the other day that the concepts from articles and podcasts are like collecting recipes and ingredients for later crafting—stuffing them into larger rucksacks and adding tools as I go. Meanwhile, my expanding YouTube subscriptions and playlists are like gathering more accurate and powerful weapons for taking on the more challenging enemy forts, such as building local LLMs, coordinating MCP implementations for private GPTs, and managing secure agentic operations.

I make most of my playlists public on my YouTube channel. There’s a collection of AI Learning playlists there (it’s the second collection down) that will continue to grow. I’ll also be sharing my discoveries on my blogMedium, and Substack. New posts will be announced on my social accounts, all @scottsnelson1. You won’t find me posting on Instagram yet, because my daughter-the-influencer still hasn’t had time to teach me how to create posts with links (queue Harry Chapin), nor on Pinterest because it’s more work than I have time for right now. And, of course, one of my first MCP solutions should be to manage these posts for me. I’ll let you know when I defeat that fort on the third map.

(Alternate close written by Perplexity.ai)

If you’re an IT stakeholder or technologist, you know that learning new tools and frameworks is a lot like leveling up in a game. You collect knowledge (ingredients), build skills (crafting), and tackle bigger challenges (forts) as you go. I’d love to hear how you approach your own learning journey—drop a comment or connect with me on my channels. Let’s build our skills together and take on the next big challenge in AI and IT!

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© Scott S. Nelson
Snake oil salesman with clocks

Buyer Beware Time Savings

People throw around terms like “a fraction of the time” meant to express doing something much faster.

They are trying to confuse you with the similarity of the phrase “fraction of a second”, which is generally considered very fast. But… 59.9 minutes is a fraction of an hour (time), and yet not a time savings you would be willing to spend money on.

Do your own research!

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© Scott S. Nelson
Agentic Orchestration

Quick Thoughts on Orchestrating AI Agents

Revising some thoughts from a recent chat with a longtime friend…

In agentic AI, it helps to think of it more as declarative programming than as prompting. While agents rely on prompts, they also perform multiple operations and follow a declared path.

There are also architectural considerations for organizing and orchestrating agents by purpose, capability, access, trust, and cost.

But that’s just my opinion. I could be wrong” – Dennis Miller

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© Scott S. Nelson
UpNote Vs Evernote

UpNote or Evernote? The Journey and Decision

This is a sequel to Will UpNote replace Evernote?

I don’t make new year resolutions, and if I did, I wouldn’t pick procrastination as something to work on because I know I would end up putting it off. Like this post, that would have been great to finish right when I thought of it and even better to push out with the flood of New Year’s resolution posts like how to get organized and reduce unnecessary spending, both of which UpNote has helped me with. So, here we go (and I guarantee I will also procrastinate editing before posting).

First off, rather than a big conclusion, that would be much shorter for you and much harder for me (one of my favorite quotes is “I would have written a shorter letter, but did not have the time.”), I am going to share my (mostly) raw notes that I posted on my original blog post as comments to track the journey.

And here is the TL;DR – I made the switch from Evernote to UpNote driven more by my annoyance with Evernote (specifically, Evernote under Bending Spoons) and less by being enamored with UpNote. But, while there are a few features I miss from Evernote, now that UpNote has become part of my daily (almost hourly) life, I do find that most of the user experience is happier (especially now that I have added many keyboard shortcuts to muscle memory), and the support is so incredibly superior as to be no comparison.

June 25, 2024 / 5:50 am

Since no one ever comments here, I feel free to do my addendums in the comments for now (until I break this up into a series?).

While the cheaper side of me really wanted to use a monthly subscription to try out the Evernote to UpNote migration and only commit to the lifetime after trying it out, the time management side of me won out because

“You can switch from a monthly subscription to a lifetime upgrade from the Premium screen (go to Settings ? Premium). The app will first ask you to cancel your existing subscription to avoid being charged twice, and then let you purchase a lifetime upgrade.”

(https://getupnote.com/support.html).

The migration is fairly easy, (though not so much if you want to experiment like I did).

I first imported with the option to turn tags into notebooks. The resulting layout was a flattened hierarchy, which means I have to recreate (and finally reorganize) my tag hierarchy.

I was curious if using tags instead of folders would be more suitable, so I deleted all of the notes to re-import again. This is when I discovered there is no mass delete for notebooks, only their contents. Well, I would use them again anyway, so I wasn’t too annoyed.

After re-importing with the tag-to-tag option, I realized that since I couldn’t bulk delete notebooks, this would leave me with the too-tedious-to-consider process of moving notes to notebooks individually (in Evernote, across 3 notebooks, I currently have ~3k notes).

I thought I would be clever and try re-importing the same notes with the tags-to-notebooks option with the hope that it would recognize that everything was a duplicate and just put them in notebooks. Alas, I just wound up with duplicates of every note, half with tags and half in notebooks.

UpNote, if you are reading this, you should offer an option to create both tags and notebooks (at the same time) when importing!

So, I deleted all the notes again and imported as notebooks. I do like the ability to create my own notebook covers (on Windows 3.1, I had icons on folders because that’s the kind of childish nerd I am). And I really like the ease of finding notebooks to link to notes. It reminds me of how easy Evernote was to use when it was a note organizing app and not an investment vehicle.

June 26, 2024 / 6:13 am

Continuing my transition description, I have only migrated my personal notebook from Evernote, leaving my work notebook for later. The work notebook has more notes (~1400 vs ~850), which partly informed the choice. Another difference is I use my phone more often for personal notes than work notes, so this gives me more opportunities to note how it works across devices. My initial observations is that search is much faster in UpNote, which can be attributed to the smaller amount of content. But the key thing for me is how Evernote change the home screen from what used to be notes with links to other features to a list of the other features where I have to first select notes (the only function I use!) and only then can I start using the app for its primary purpose. In UpNote it opens directly to the notes, and that changes in notebooks and tags do not change the sorted order of last updated (as some recent changes in Evernote do).

June 28, 2024 / 6:28 am

If the visual representation of your current tag hierarchies in Evernote are numerous, complex, and important to you, migration is going to be disappointing. Even if you select for the imported tags to be converted to notebooks and to import into a notebook, the result is that all of the notes are imported in a flat list in the selected notebook and all of the tags become notebooks at the root level without their prior hierarchy.

If I were in a rush to move, this would be a deal breaker for me. Fortunately, I have a little over 3 months for this migration, and the re-creation of my hierarchies and cross tags (notebooks in UpNote) is interesting, even fun at times…so far. A couple thousand notes to go, so we’ll see…

June 29, 2024 / 8:41 am

One features from Evernote that UpNote could benefit from is drag-n-drop for the notebooks. Yes, they are tags in Evernote, but since UpNote doesn’t have a tag hierarchy, UpNote Notebooks are feature parity to Evernote Tags. I do like being able to customize the notebook covers in UpNote (used to do that to folders on a Windows 3.1 desktop), but drag-n-drop is a much more practical feature, especially for those of use migrating. The click, select, select, click process is fine if one doesn’t organize much but gets really tedious with 100’s of folders to re-organize after migrating.

July 7, 2024 / 10:46 am

It took 3 weeks to finish re-organizing my personal notebook and a notebook from a former job in UpNote after importing them from Evernote. I used UpNote for all personal notes during that time as well.

To summarize my thoughts and experiences so far:

  • UpNote notebooks are the equivalent of tags in Evernote based on Evernote tag features, so if you use the tag hierarchy in Evernote have UpNote convert them to notebooks on import.
  • The ability to customize the covers of Notebooks is nice.
  • Many will want to use the colors provided or the pre-loaded images.
  • I created my own, which suits my own way of sorting and provides a great source of procrastination activity.
  • UpNote doesn’t have the feature clutter of Evernote.
  • No calendar and no events.
  • Tasks are integrated into notes (if the note has a checklist it is categorized as a task in UpNote).
  • It is great to be able to go straight to notes again instead of having to click through the cluttered Evernote UI.
  • UpNote doesn’t change the edited date when changing metadata (a recent bug in Evernote that is driving me nuts!)

In the negative column for UpNote:

  • No reminders.
  • No feature to email the contents of a note from within the app.
  • No drag-n-drop for nesting notebooks

However…

  • UpNote lifetime pricing: $39.99
  • Evernote annual pricing: $129.99
  • Monthly options: $1.99 vs $14.99

Click Cancel Evernote

I really will miss the reminders and being able to email notes to myself for follow up through my in-box, and I expect that UpNote will eventually add these features. And I am not looking forward to a month of re-sorting a decade of content when I bring my work notebook in. In fact, if Evernote had stuck to the $49.99 per year, I would have dealt with the mobile UX going down hill to keep the features and save the work. But Evernote went from supporting users to supporting investors, and Bending Spoons just wants users to bend over and pay even more for AI features that are available one window away for free, so I will not be renewing my subscription next year, ending almost 20 years of customer loyalty.

July 15, 2024 / 6:17 am

I still need to turn these comments into the Part of this post. Meanwhile, ran across an interesting read today that leads to the need for a note app, though for the use case given One Note would be sufficient: https://fev.al/posts/work-journal/?utm_source=tldrnewsletter

July 17, 2024 / 6:45 am

Forgot to mention: The idea of importing back into Evernote isn’t supported by either app. Reminds me of portal platforms back in the early 00’s when they were all proprietary to lock customers in, then later in that decade they all started using “open” standards, which resulted having proprietary formats that would fit in those standards. In this case, both will export to HTML or Markdown but the outputs drop all of the organization.

Crossing my fingers that UpNote gets the long ride Evernote has had.

July 20, 2024 / 9:17 am

I reviewed the FAQ page about security. For a non-technical person it can be very confusing. For a technical person it is still confusing. I truly don’t think this is intentional.

To summarize:
There are two key questions whose answers are relevant…
UpNote stores data on the Firebase server (which is a service provided by Google). The Firebase platform is certified to major privacy and security standards and fully supports the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA). Firebase encrypts your data in transit using HTTPS and encrypts your data at rest. You can learn more at https://firebase.google.com/support/privacy. We also take great care to ensure that your data is secure and only you can access it.

and
End-to-End Encryption (E2EE) is an advanced security method for encrypting and decrypting data and is designed to protect highly confidential information. Due to the complexity of implementation, UpNote currently has no plans to support E2EE. If you wish to store sensitive information such as passwords or credit card numbers, it is recommended that you use a password manager application specifically designed to encrypt sensitive information.

The gist of which is that the data is not encrypted on your devices. This is a bit of nit-picky difference but worthwhile to note that the weak link in the chain is how you manage security on your device. There is also the bit about UpNote developers being able to access your content. They are up front about that, and also up front about storing private data in secure manner, like a password manager.

July 28, 2024 / 10:08 am

In Evernote, tags exist as a flat hierarchy, with the nesting only being at a visual level. For example, if I have a tag Misc and then move it to be under Foo, I cannot create a tag under Bar named Misc. While UpNote also manages tag in a flat hierarchy, Notebooks are truly nested, so I can have a notebook named Misch under Foo and a different notebook under Bar also named Misc. I can then cross reference between notebooks using a tag such as #reference. This is much more how these things work in my head. Your mentalization may vary.

August 1, 2024 / 7:37 am

I love the Collapsible Section feature in UpNote. I often used Evernote for presentation notes. The first annoyance in Evernote was when they added wide margins, making it impossible to have both my notes and a presentation on my desktop at the same time. I would use a tablet or my phone to make up for this problem until I eventually got a 35″ monitor (not for that purpose, but a nice bonus point for the monitor upgrade).

Not only can I size the UpNote window to any width I want, I use the Collapsible Sections to make it easier to scroll through the content based on each slide. The keyboard shortcuts are nice touch, too.
UpNote Collapsible Sections with PowerPoint Presentation

August 24, 2024 / 10:50 am

Finally parting shot at Evernote: In preparation for closing my account I went to delete all of my notes. It would be useful if it gave some error message that the default notebook couldn’t be deleted. I eventually figured it out, created a new notebook, and set it as default. Still, 1000 notes wouldn’t delete when deleting the notebook. Finally I had to delete at the note level, which is limited to 100 at a time. Hey, Bending Spoons, it is all the friction to standard note management tasks that drove me away from 21 years of use. Making the final steps as difficult as possible helps to reinforce my decision.

Oh, and then when I actually cancelled the subscription I first had to confirm again (acceptable), then scroll through a huge list of features that I was losing (annoying but predictable), then give a reason from a list, but only ONE reason (ridiculous) and then was finally offered a discount of 40%, which if they had offered that in response to any of my complaints over the last two years I may have accepted, but having just spent two months migrating to UpNote, wasn’t going to happen.

Epilogue

UpNote has become a seamless part of my computing life. It took me so long to post this follow up to the original article partly because I am more productive with UpNote, and partly because it is so smooth to use that I don’t really think about it…except on those rare occasions when there is an issue with an update, the last of which inspired me to finally write this post because of the quick turn-around for the fix as a new update, without any of the “do [some really annoying work around] until we can get to the issue”, which is pretty much the response I get from most vendors, and extra annoying because I include the work around in my support request.

Oh, and after you get your own license, be sure to follow the great user community at https://www.reddit.com/r/UpNote_App/.

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© Scott S. Nelson