…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.
© Scott S. Nelson