Rui CarmoI have been mostly in “inbox zero” mode for the past few weeks, which generally meant checking stuff off my to-do list, trying to ignore the news, and using some fairly colorful language when I didn’t.
I even went out and had fun a couple of weekends in a row, which is somewhat of a novelty and tore chunks of otherwise rather unproductive mulling off my schedule.
That led up to Easter break and a few days in the countryside trying (somewhat unsuccessfully) to catch up on my reading, which I’ve been neglecting of late and I feel somewhat guilty about.
One thing I don’t feel guilty about, though, is pausing most of my AI stuff to see if I can get excited about any of it again. That has been quite the challenge too, even as work takes me down various related rabbit holes.
There’s such a wide gap between expectations around agentic AI and reality that my current survival strategy is to take it all in in small doses to minimize annoyance. Also, every time I type “agentic” I have a minor tussle with whatever form of spell checking happens to be at hand, which is a good reminder that the whole thing is still a bit of a joke.
That doesn’t mean I’ve sworn off AI completely, though. I’ve actually picked up a few more mini-projects, some of which I’m using Gemini 2.5 (via GitHub Copilot’s new Agent mode in Visual Studio Code):
- A small set of tools to convert quantized models into something I can use with
rkllmor RoCm. - A new touch dashboard based on
pygame, because upgrading Chromium on my current dashboard broke the whole thing and I’m tired of web technology bloat (it was either Godot orpygame, but targeting a Raspberry Pi 3 with Godot is far from a trivial endeavor, so I went with something I could deploy and maintain easily). - Replacing a couple of my Tasmota devices with HomeKit-enabled ones (as well as doing some minor upgrades here and there).
- Writing an improved Proxmox ZFS monitoring script that sends me alerts when my ZFS pools are in trouble.
- Designing and 3D printing a few enclosures and other assorted bits (it’s quite rewarding to churn out PETG spacers to patch cracks in old window blinds in under 20 minutes).
I’ve also been mulling if I should do something to preempt rising hardware costs–for instance, I haven’t given up on getting a Ryzen AI HX machine for testing, since it seems like the only way to get any GPU with over 24GB RAM at an affordable price short of getting a new Mac–which I was budgeting for early next year.
But given the political climate, I think I might bring that forward a bit…