My First Genuine Ah Ah Moment With Generative AI

Here is a quick recount of my “Ah ah moment” this morning, involving generative AI in a simple workflow. I’m still in awe about it.

If I stumble on a long and chatty YouTube video that might be interesting, I’ll use this workflow to quickly get the gist out of it. First, I use Downie (a Mac utility) to download it on my M2 MacBook Air. Then, I use the Whisper Transcription Mac app to transcribe the spoken discussion into text that I export in a PDF1. Next, I open ChatGPT, upload the PDF file and let ChatGPT ingest the content. Finally, I prompt ChatGPT with things like: what is the subject of this discussion? Are there any apps mentioned in the discussion? Who is talking? Is this a controversial subject? Generate a title for this discussion. Generate a summary in less than 300 words. Etc. It’s very effective. You can use the GPT I created for this2. Oh, and I guess you can use the same workflow for a podcast episode!

This workflow was also documented in “My Micro-Workflows Explained” mini website.

  1. Because I like the formatting used instead of plain text. ↩︎

  2. ChatGPT paid subscription required. ↩︎

There is so much buzz around the Internet about the newly released Ubiquiti Unify Express router. To me, it seems to be a capable router at a reasonable price. Man, I wish Apple was still in this market1.

  1. I know Apple’s version wouldn’t be as features rich as Ubiquiti’s, but… ↩︎

I finished watching this video today while waiting for my car at the garage. Andrej Karpathy gives a great talk explaining Gen AI and how the whole process works, and then some more explanations about the possible future around AI. It’s a must-see.

I created my Backblaze account earlier this week to replace Dropshare Cloud. Today, I discovered that Cloudflare offers S3-compatible storage too, with a similar free tier (10 GB). Since CF is my domain name registrar, maybe I should have created my S3 bucket with them instead?1 🤔

  1. But the Dropshare client probably doesn’t yet offer a connector to CF storage. 🤷🏻‍♂️ ↩︎

I can’t stress enough how Apple’s Freeform is a joy to use. Is this a sleeper hit? If you don’t use it, do yourself a favour and try it. It’s the most intuitive, frictionless diagramming app out there on the Mac. And the iPad.