What are normies using AI for?

What is your favorite movie? AIs apparently love the pursuit of happiness, inception, and the Martian.

Holy crap. Is it so difficult of a question to have to farm it out to AI? Unbelievable.

Like and I I feel for people applying to jobs as well because, like, you hear people being like, yeah. I applied to, like, 20,000 jobs. Of course, I'm gonna try to automate this thing. So now I'm just spraying and praying, but it's unbelievable that everybody's just using the same answers. Like, you can stand out so easily by just, like, not doing that.

Past coders and past spreadsheets are normies using AI, and and what are they using it for? Right? Is it just a glorified search engine where people are just typing their query into chat g b t, or are there actual regular people outside of, like, developers that are using agents and actually getting work done outside of building websites or, like, automating some sort of spreadsheet. So today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through whole bunch of different instances. I asked, the people in my life. I asked on Twitter what people in their lives are using AI for, in their day to day tasks, and we're gonna kinda go through them JS well as, like, things, like, I don't think are gonna hold up, like automation marketing. You know? Like, oh, wow. You you sent 6,000 emails to everybody? Like, that's that's gonna not work in, like, three weeks.

My name is Wes. With me as always is Scott. How are you doing, Scott? Oh, it's so cold in the d today. I am freezing, man.

Holy cow.

I don't know what happened. We woke up this morning, and it's chilly, chilly. So, yes, I'm all bundled up. Cold d. Alright. Wes can hopefully, you warp up,

a little later.

Yes.

Let's get into it. I'll, link up the tweet as ESLint the replies for what everybody says. But first first one we have here is just simply just parts finding. So we have a broken seat buckle in our van, and I absolutely hate finding parts for automotive stuff, because what you have to do is you have to find the exact year, and you have to use a stupid little drop down where you have to filter every single car that's ever been Node. And then you need to go through all of the different parts, and then there's, like, seven different trim levels of it, and there and then there's an eight seater and a seven seater, and it's just so frustrating. But finding parts is very easy now. I just type into the box or or dictate it. We have a gray 2015 Toyota Sienna, and we need a new buckle for the left side. That's the other thing JS I never I never remember, like, what is the left and right side of a car. Like, is it when you're looking at it, or is it when you're sitting in it? Well, it's something I wanna say driver's side or passenger side.

But but that's that's no. That's because it's passenger side is different, around the world. Right? So the Okay. They don't use that in in parts world.

So I just said, what the the seat behind me, and then it it found the actual part. It drafted up the email. It sent it to the Toyota dealership.

100% did it all for me, and, all I had to do is actually pay for it. I just absolutely love it. Also, I have another one. We'll throw up the screenshot of it right now, which is when you're trying to find a specific bolt or bearing or roller, there's often, like, three different dimensions that you you need to do, you know, like, width, length, height.

And these data sheets, if you've been on, like, McMaster Carr or any single website like this, there's, like, bazillion combinations of it.

And one thing, which is Taobao, a website that I used to find, like, specific little parts, they have this new AI button that you click, and it breaks it down into width, length, height. It will sort of just analyze all the options there. Ideally, you wouldn't even need AI for this because that data should be in the system. But when sellers have messy data that's been loaded into, like, a sales platform, it's not always that easy, and this does a great job of taking messy data and distilling it down for you. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application,

you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax.

You can sign up today and get two months for free. Sentry is just a really incredible tool for not only tracking your performance, making sure application has no bugs, but even just seeing what goes wrong when something goes wrong because things go wrong all the time when we're coding. And you don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on to reduceentry.i o forward slash syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Another thing I like to use it for is the stuff that's annoying within your household, network like printers and things like that. We have a printer on the network, and it just stopped, it stopped working in terms of, like, the printer's on. It says it's connected, but, you know, everything that you print to it says that it can't be. I mean, this is classic printer stuff. Yeah. And, I just get on my my agent, and I say, I got this HP whatever printer.

I'm trying to get it to connect. Can you, like, help me walk through some troubleshooting steps or whatever? And we did it, and then eventually found it on the network, repaired, the, like, rebuilt whatever, re added the printer or whatever on my computer, got it set up, printed in no time. And that's the type of thing where, like, you're hunting for, like reinstalling drivers on HP's website. I would rather I would rather slam my hand in the door than go to HP's websites and look for drivers. That might be the number one use case for AI JS not having to fuss with your printer anymore.

Oh my god.

My sister gave me a what's called a skylight calendar. I'm just holding up a photo of her right here. And this is just like like it's one of these calendars that you will stick in your kitchen, and it has, like, photos and everything.

And she gave it to me because she got it, and the Wi Fi doesn't work on it. Like, it just doesn't find anywhere. She's like, I don't know. Like, I they sent me a new one. Maybe you can fix it.

So I, like, I cracked it open, and it's not any like, it's not like a like a cable or anything like that. So what I did is I just, like, stuck Node on it, and it's, like, it's it's it's an Android tablet. It rooted the entire thing. It Yeah. Flashed a custom firmware to it and, like, ran all of these tests.

And I didn't fix the Wi Fi, but it ended up bridging the Wi Fi from my MacBook to the calendar so it could get past some specific things. And now I'm I'm trying to figure out, like, can I have, like, an external Wi Fi? I think the chip on it is busted.

But the fact where you have all of this landfill material, which is just like it literally doesn't work. They sent me a new one. I don't know what to do with it. And it went from that to, like, now I have this, like, massive touchscreen Android tablet for free, which I can probably get Internet working with a dongle or or wired or something like that. Unbelievable.

Like, the the amount of people taking back tech that they have purchased or gotten for free, found at a thrift store JS huge use case. And, like, I'm slightly technical.

Like, I obviously, that played a part in it, but I I don't think you could I I think that regular people would be able to plug in a USB cord and say, hey. Help me hold the buttons and figure this out. Yeah. I know it's so funny the amount of stuff that AI is good, with that kind of thing. I saw Justin Trader. He like, he was trying to get Omachi,

some kind of thing working on his MacBook.

And Dry like, MacBook drivers for the video card. Yeah. And he put it in front of a mirror and had the webcam, like, checking

using a mirror. It's just like So good. It's so good. Yeah. That's what I did with my the lights ESLint my office JS I pointed the I pointed it at the the light and said, like, try turn it on, you Node? And it just, like, did something, looked at the thing. It's super token hungry because it has to process all of the images. Yeah. But even then, I was thinking, like, there was a lot of this Android stuff where I would have to, like, hold a button and have it, like, reboot, and then it would go into the, like, ADB mode. And I was like, man, I should just solder on some, like, wires to this thing and let the AI push the buttons itself and just, you know, push the button. Yeah. It would go ahead.

Yeah. I Node. I I did the same thing with my prop boy. The computer was speaking into it to do the to test the transcribing the audio. I did the same thing with the Ricci mini where it was taking a spelling test with my computer speakers. Like, being able to have that that loop of you not having to, physically push the buttons or whatever can really, unlock a whole Scott because it can just work through these issues on its own. Mhmm.

Quite a few people says they have friends that are, like, contractors and, like, they're or builders, as you say, in The UK, and they use it for red tape, bureaucracy, filling out forms, permits, running over things, making sure everything looks okay before it's submitted. Huge use case. I use that all the time. The school sends all these, like, Google forms that you have to, like, fill out and whatever, or, like, they'll send over a PDF where you have to, like I had to renew my passport a couple weeks ago, and, like, I hate using PDFs to fill out information.

So frustrating. The copy paste doesn't work half the time. And The text inputs are always, like, out of whack with the form. Inputs are weird or, like, in in Canada, the formatting for a postal code is really weird. It has sometimes they're all uppercase. Sometimes you need a space. Sometimes you don't need a space. Super frustrating Wes it's just like, I don't care.

Here is the loose of all of my information. You figure out how to get it into all of these boxes and and fill it out for me. Such a huge time saver.

Sorry. I would keep talking, but the trash people are coming, and it's loud. Trash people.

No good. No good. Yes.

K. So this one is And by trash people, I don't mean React users. Just kidding. I'm just kidding. Or rough. I know. I'm sorry. I like React sometimes. This one is technical,

updating NAS and and Docker containers.

But I think, like, a lot of people are, like, tech adjacent, and they wanna be able to, like, host their own Plex or whatever. Like, they're able to get that up and running.

But when it comes to updating or organizing files or, fixing something that has happened, like, I can't tell you how many times I've tried to open an an app that's on my my NAS, and the thing is just busted.

It's so much easier for regular people just to, like, let an agent rip on it and and self host this stuff.

Yeah. I have a bunch of rips of my DVDs and stuff, like full TypeScript. Right? And because of that, it's like, it rips. Yeah. And you can't play those on Plex or whatever.

So I I just set up a a a process that will regularly check a folder and, go through and pull out all the extras and set it up in the correct format and and correct file format that both the Jellyfin and Plex can understand.

Because I'm running Jack, Plex and Jellyfin side by side right now. So, like, having an agent to be able to work through the proper way to get the folders in a way that is, like, not going

to ruin anything is Yeah. Been very instrumental for me. Another one is, like like, Node assistant. So one problem that you have with home assistant is I've got, like, 25 different integrations from these, like, random companies.

Yeah. It's and then what happens is, like, at least once a week, something will, like, expire or, like, stop working for whatever reason. Usually, you have to, like, relink it. Right? Like, that's a pain. So, like, one automation you can do is just, like, once a day, check my home assistant and see if anything is broken. If it is, try fix it or prompt me to to figure it out. And it's just, like, kinda keeping on top of that stuff JS that's a lot of people, like, set up home assistant. They get it working beautifully, and then stuff breaks. And then it's like time. And it stopped using it because it doesn't work as well, and you kinda let it rot.

Yeah. It the rot in Node assistant is so real. And especially because, like, you like you said, things getting disconnected. But when you get into, like, really customizing dashboards and stuff, the thing that ends up happening is that, like, you get really into the was it YAML or TOML that they use? Either way. Whichever one. Whatever. Whichever one they use. It's like, Node I'm typing that on my phone, trying to get, like, this,

multi split layout thing working correctly. And so throwing an agent on that kind of stuff has been really great for me. His I mean, because he's really good at it. Hey. It's so it's and there's just so much like, you you add one light bulb, and it's like, oh, there's 600 sensors in this. You know? Does the light bulb need to be updated? Is it off? Is it on? Is like, what time of day is it? You know? There's not and then you all of a sudden, you have a thousand different, like, possible sensors and services attached to it. We're really like, I just want on or off. I just wanna turn the thing on and off. And It's like, oh, I like the way the bubble card looks, and but I have only marshmallow cards or whatever.

Now I gotta manually go in up and change the card design on all of them to have my dashboard looking cohesive. Node you can just throw an agent on it. Right? Super powerful for, like, enabling people to do

self hosting and running it themselves. So I'm very happy about that. The next one we have here is inbox and calendar management. And so Scott just said you don't use agents for any sort of calendar management, do you? No. Sorry. I just accidentally turned the lights off in my kitchen while we were talking, and I know my wife JS in there cooking. So

I'm just, like, imagining her being like, what?

I'm using it pretty heavy for calendar management, specifically with all of my kids' stuff. So we've got four kids.

All of them have emails coming in from the teachers. All of them have couple extracurriculars each themselves.

Those emails are are all coming in. Right? It's all of this all of this data, and I'm using that. I have a bot that checks every two hours for emails from these things, and it will remember what needs to be remembered. It will download any photos that are are are in, like, the PDF or in in, like, a Google Drive, and then it will also take every single thing that needs to be remembered about what's happening. You know? Like, do you need to remember gym clothes on this day? Do you have a field trip? Etcetera. Add those all to the calendar. Invite my wife so much easier because then you can then pipe all of that information into some sort of display. Right? I've got a e ink display running it right now. I'm trying to get this, like, full color one up and running because that makes the management in, like, hunting through these awful PDFs that the teachers send so much easier. Yeah. You know what? I I'm afraid of giving my agents access to my calendar because anybody can, like, can Yeah. Yeah. People can inject your ESLint and and prompt inject you, and that, like, that really freaks me out. So I have it limited. Yeah. I try to limit the vectors for that type of, like, automation type of stuff. Yeah. I have it limited to just the family calendar, which is, like, not anything. Like, it's just just the kids' stuff or when they're when they're doing specific stuff. Mhmm. But another one JS, like, I I I talked earlier about the finding of parts. The parts guy replied, hey. Yeah. We have we can get the part. Can you give me your VIN just to confirm that it will fit? And then I go, oh, now I Scott find my VIN. You know? And, like, I'm pretty good at putting that stuff in one password, but then I was just like I was like I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. I didn't want to, like, go into my one password and copy paste the VIN. So I just type ESLint the agent, Find my VIN. It's in my inbox somewhere.

Found it. Sent it.

You know? So there's obviously a bit of security, issue there, but it's a bit of a trade off.

In that case, it worked out really well. I think there Yarn some people who haven't tried to use this stuff with modern, LLMs.

They've gotten really good at this stuff Wes if you say, give me my VIN, it it's most of the time gonna find it if it's there, right, and not just invent one. Now, obviously, I think you wanna confirm that stuff before just YOLO ing it. But, like,

it it's gotten so much better, folks. We're so far past the, like, hallucination.

So far past that. Yeah. No. I agree. I I didn't even check it. It was fine.

That type of stuff is like, oh, yeah. Of course, it can make things up, and, of course, it can hallucinate. But, like, I have so much more Scott and I'm not like I I don't take me for if you've never listened to the podcast before, don't take me for one of these, like, crazy guys who just thinks it's amazing. You know? Like, we've got a whole list of things that is absolutely awful at. But being able to, like, match

the VIN from an email where you bought your car, that's a very easy thing for AI to do. Yes. Here's one that I like to use this for JS I have a bunch of well, one, I really don't like Docker, but I run a bunch of containers on my NAS, whether that we've mentioned Plex, Jellyfin. I've run a bunch of just, image for images and stuff like that. And let me tell you, when I, I wanted to update image the other day, and the, like, update instructions for the Synology were just massive pain in the butt, and and just duplicating containers and moving stuff around, and then it doesn't work, this or that. Just being able to say SSH into my box and update image, create backups, do all that for me. Fifteen seconds later, it's Deno. Blah blah blah. I have an updated, image container. I use it to update my containers and and do container management all the time on my NAS.

Huge, huge use case. Again, it's making this type of stuff where people previously wouldn't be able to do it very accessible.

Or people that can do it like, you could do that. No problem. I've I've done it a 100 times. It's just busy work. Busy work Wes shouldn't have to do. Alright. So here's a question I have for you. AI staging for real estate photos. Awful. K. Thank you.

This was a post that came up in realtor.ca, which is a Canadian, like, where you search for houses.

And Oh, god. Get these, like, AI staging, and, like, the real estate agents are going to town on it. So this was, like, kind of a nice, like, century house anything to do deceptive practices in the past before it Wes, let's use a fisheye lens to make the room look giant. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

So a lot of people in the replies would be like, I kinda like it. The proportions are actually pretty well, but that it's not, though. I've been in these houses, and there's not enough room

for you to have this huge in this house. Well, that's that those that is the well, no. You're right. Look at The scale is totally wrong. I used to live in a craftsman home like this. Yeah. You're right. You know? Totally wrong. You know these houses.

So that's the frustrating thing JS everybody does these for landscaping and everything, and it's like, oh, you just added. Of course, that looks nice.

You you dialed the lighting to be absolutely perfect, and then you added, like, twice the space. Like, the proportion is not as nice. Like, if you look at this one right here, if I were sitting on this bench, my knees would be in front of this fireplace here. Yes. Whereas the actual image themselves is like, oh, yeah. There's all this, like, space where Again, the the the people's scale in this is, like, outrageous.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. It's it's not to scale. And a lot of the comments are saying it is to scale. So I don't think I think people are gonna get sick of this type of stuff Wes it's just like, show me the real raw image of the space.

I can imagine it myself if I really need to, but don't

don't do this silly AI mock up for me. And it's a house. How enticed do you need to be buy a house? Right? Like, you're looking for a house.

You don't need to be like Like staging staging certainly helps. Think it A lot. The housing market is still nuts. You know? It's like at least here in Colorado, maybe I'm just looking at it from that lens where, like, things don't last.

But Yeah.

But yeah. I I can see that. If you have, like, a, like, a dumpy house and you wanna show people the potential, that's, I think, what people are doing here. And and to be fair, like, I don't have any problem with people using it to be like, here's an idea, but don't bring that into into real estate photos. Like, one example I saw on one of my Christmas lights Facebook groups.

Somebody was using it to sort of mock up what the Christmas lights would look like on their house. You Node, they're a contractor, and they're able to show people kinda what it would look like. And it still is a little bit like, oh, wow. You you cleaned you added the driveway got six feet wider. But I I I could see that as as being a great way to sort of brainstorm what that might look like.

Yeah.

I think something I use agents for is video editing, and I don't use this for a lot of video editing. I actually don't use this for editing on syntax.

Although in my mental health video, Wes, I pulled out the quotes I wanted to use from the interviews, and I told an agent to grab only these following clips. Like, here are the clips that I want. Here are the quotes that I want in my Yep. Mental health video, and just put them on a timeline. And it did that, but I don't use it to make creative decisions editing. But I do use it to edit my wife's podcast because it's a two camera setup. One camera on her, one camera on me. I'm talking. She's talking. I want a two camera setup.

Editing that by hand is to just go back and forth or whatever. You gotta watch the whole thing and go back and forth in real time. Yeah. And, like, it's fine.

But what I did is I had Claude write a script for me that analyzes the audio. When the lower voice is talking, show camera one. When the higher voice pitch is talking, show camera two. And then put both of them on the timeline, clip it back and forth, and then I'll go in and make the actual cuts for whatever in the video.

And it's so effective for that. It saves me a whole ton of time on a first pass edit. I'll tell you that.

That type of automation in video editing is so key. I use it as well for when I'm recording. What will happen is I will have several takes of something, and usually, the last take is the best take. Yeah. Yeah. And and what I've done is I have it transcribe everything, slice it up into takes, mark the initial ones as, like, like, a gray. They're probably bad. And then the good one as as, like, a green or a red or something like that, and then add them all to the timeline in the order which it thinks it makes sense. Right? And just add them all in, and then you can jump in there and be like, okay. This just saved me. Like, producer Sanity does this stuff on, like, steroids. He we should have him sort of detail all of his workflow right now because it's he's not using it to, like, make creative decisions.

Although, like, I'm I'm waiting for the day where, like, the infographics start get there's we're pretty close, but the infographics will get better, both generating them and figuring out what to show. Figuring out what to show on screen right now is not good. It's just Yeah. Everybody that uses it is just using it to show the words that they're saying on the screen. And it's it's like

I I know that already. You need to provide more context for what you're not saying. Well, Wes, come work with me on graphics computer. G f x dot computer is an app I'm building for exactly that. So

Alright. I'm I'm in. I've and I've I've built it, like, three or four times, and I'm not happy with it yet. Although I did I I don't know. We'll save this for another episode, but I I had a bit of I'll I'll show you what I've I've been cranking on as well because I've got a couple ideas there.

Well, Wes let's and and sorry. I I built this for the for for syntax and for myself, but, I did submit it to the WebMCP challenge. The WebMCP is built in here, but it it runs a lot better as a desktop app because you can get ProRes.

But what I've what I've done in this app, Wes, is I've built the primitives for what could be that great system. So JS since everything is JSON, there's all kinds of, presets and this or that.

The layer that it would take to be, like, get a transcription, pick a preset, style it up, do this or that. This is the feel of the video is is is you Node, I I I think it's it's it's Node that much more. Yeah. Yeah. That looks looks good. Gfx.computer,

if you wanna check it out right now.

Some nice visuals for or or also, like, if you wanna spend some time, like, taking the primitives and then, like, designing them for what your look and feel looks like. Yes. And then also choosing, I want to have this infographic up or I want to put this overlay on at a certain point in time. So, like, at that point, you've done the design yourself. You've decided what needs to show up, and then the actual, like, a good chunk of it is simply making it.

And, and and that is is much faster now, which is great with something like this. And this this whole system was built on the idea of, like, see it like, every single preset or anything can be, themed with a CSS override. Yes. They're called packs, and, there's AI skills for writing those. But I have I have a century one. I got a syntax one. It uses the correct fonts. It uses all the stuff. Yeah. Just works. Easy peasy.

So one thing I don't think is gonna catch on or hopefully will die out with normies is just anywhere somebody is using AI to generate a bunch of text for the sake of having text.

And, this could be, extrapolating an email to be larger and more formal. I don't wanna read that. That's I'm just gonna do the opposite and decompress it.

That could be automating marketing. Right now, what I'm getting a lot of is people will take a random like like, a syntax episode. It used to be the last episode of syntax, and then they would transcribe it and say, hey. I like what you said about x, y, and z. And now that doesn't work anymore, so what they're doing is they're finding episodes that are several weeks old, and they're finding, like, something that I tweeted about. So they're taking, like, two different sources, and they're saying, hey. Love your stuff. A couple months ago, you said x, y, and z on the podcast, and I also really like we tweeted about this. So they're trying to, like, fake actually knowing you, which is just like my eyes glaze over as as soon as I see that. So, like, that's not going to work. As as soon as you are using this to automate what used to work, then it becomes table stakes. Everybody does it, and it will stop working. So not good.

Also, Facebook Marketplace, like, talking about the infographics where you need to show something additional in context that will help the user understand what you're saying, not just putting the same words on the screen that you're saying out of your mouth. That that's a huge thing for adding additional context.

And one thing Facebook marketplace does is they have, like, this, like, AI list stuff on marketplace button.

And what it does is it just describes what's in the image, and I hate it because it will just, like, like, a green bicycle with tires, in okay condition. Like Mhmm. I know.

I I could see that. You know? Like, this is not adding anything helpful. Tell me things that the photos doesn't show me, and and AI is not able to do that because it it only has a photo. It's the same as me. Right? JS it hey. I'm looking at this thing. I actually didn't like using AI agents to push things on marketplace because I find that whole thing to be tedious. So if I take the photos,

it can go off and do research for me in terms of pricing and then use my photos, grab just, like, a generic description from Amazon, not try to, like, make it fancy or anything. And I sold, like, I sold a few things on there that have just been sitting in my basement because I was too lazy to put them up otherwise.

It's that busy work, man. That's, like, the the huge use case. Right? And I'm very curious to see, like, this whole episode started based on, like, me thinking, like, are people outside of white collar knowledge workers going to use this stuff? And if so, are they going to be spending the amount of money that warrants the trillion dollar valuation that these big companies have. Right? And I don't I don't see that they can make that much money off of off of the people. Because, like, all the stuff we're saying here, is not they're not huge expensive lifts, especially as we get ESLint, like, a lot of the the cheaper models are able to do this. So I'm kinda curious to see what's gonna happen with a lot of stuff. Probably the the heaviest lift of all of these is the constantly scanning the inbox and parsing all out that stuff. That's that is not as JS cheap. That's part of the reason why OpenClaw had such a high high high rise and a low, and then it crashed down so quickly JS everybody realized well, it's actually really expensive.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally. Oh, actually sorry. Back to the video video editing thing. I mentioned that I I do like automations for this. I did wanna shout out I've I've shouted out this a few times on the show lately, but Warp Club, which is basically just a way to manage your scripts and automations Yep. And it works really well with any of the AI agents. So, basically, anytime I'm doing something that is something that I need to automate with scripts, rather than just having a collection folder of scripts. I use Swamp Club for all of that stuff, and it's very nice. So I just wanted to shout that out because I I do use that in every, video that I edit for my my thing. It's just Node little, like, taking, taking stuff and making it deterministic.

Right? All of those automations.

Okay.

I actually wanna talk about some nerdier stuff. Homelab, man.

We talked about Node assistant.

Yes. Yeah. We talked about NAS. We talked about all that stuff. Docker containers. Yeah. Yeah. I've been using this to manage my entirety of my system via Tailscale. And if everything's connected on Tailscale and everything has SSH enabled, you can have an agent go and do anything, fix, repair, whatever. So I know we talked about these things individually, but if you Yarn running like a home lab setup at any kind of regard, I, I I find it to just be you know, this is a normie stuff. No normies are running home labs, but, I find it to just be the best. Wes, I I've been considering,

well, I'm not considering. I am. I'm building a little rack, and I can't wait to show you my my rack, Wes. It's gonna be cool. It's Like a min a mini Node? Like like, Brandy has made? We'll put put a photo of it right now, but, like, what, like, like, 12 inches wide? Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. The in fact, the the the mini rack ecosystem is so cool. There's so much stuff out there.

But on BambooLab, if you go to, like, 10 inch racks and and you you start browsing those racks, you're gonna find, like, a ton of different varieties and communities and all kinds of stuff. So the the one I'm gonna do is the KWS rack, and I'm starting to print it today. So by the time that my Mac studio gets here in a couple months, the mini rack will be finished printing. So Man, I need to do this because I have, like, a proper rack,

and half the stuff in my rack is is is too small because it's not, like, it's not specifically meant for it. Right? So I just have, like I bought a bunch of the those metal shelves where you can just, like, put put the router on it.

No. My router JS rack mount. The modem the modem that our ISP gives us is obviously not rack mount. So I should print some of these,

like, years for it. The state of my my rack is pretty disheveled. I mean, there's just stuff sitting on here, and it's like, it is not yeah. It it everything is too small to be in the rack. So I'm gonna put the Mac mini. I'm gonna put the NAS. I'm gonna put the studio. I got all my, network switches and stuff. I got some, I'm gonna do a Raspberry Pi cluster.

All kinds of stuff. I'm so stoked. Yes. That's sick. Well, let speaking of three d printing, we are getting to a point where generating parts is or at least getting you, like, automating a good chunk of the design of the part is is almost there. Scott of it is just like, it's not very good, but then some of the stuff is is relatively surprising. Like, you built a case for your, your what's it called? PropWay. Thank you. Yes.

Yes. And and and I use nurb dot dev to do that. The cool thing about nurb, if you are using agents to design three d prints, is that it makes sure all of the allowances, all of the all of the connections, everything fits together and all that stuff. So it's not just like envisioning, here's what it could look like in multiple parts. It's actually checking to make sure everything, fits together and will work together. So, I I really like NURB for that. It worked really well for me in that project. I also use NURB to, design a Warhammer 40 k stand for my son. So Warhammer 40 k miniatures, you paint them.

And, we were we paint we paint them together every Sunday in the kitchen.

And what happened was JS that when we get done painting, we would just leave all the minis on the kitchen counter. And, obviously, Courtney JS like, you gotta get all these minis off the counter. Like, they because it's like, oh, you paint them, you're Deno. Oh, you know, you gotta transport them back to the basement. So I was like, oh, be really cool to have, like, a display stand so he could, like, look at his work, but also have something that you could carry. And they all have different sized bases for the different miniatures and stuff. So I built a, and I'll try to make this open source. I built a a stand that you put you clip and glue together, and then it has different, stands that you can swap out that puts them on kind of like a stadium riser based on which characters you have or whatever. Yeah. And that way, you can just lift and carry this whole thing upstairs, paint, put it back on here, but it also doubles as like a display case for them. So it's pretty neat.

The MCP server for software you use occasionally is absolutely killer. Right? This MCP for DaVinci Resolve Wes sometimes it's much faster just to type in what you want. Or if you don't know how to do something, it's easy to just ask, hey. Can you do x, y, and z, or show me how to do it? And then, like like, a Fusion three sixty. Right? There's so many blenders. Oh, yes. Yeah. Blenders. It it people are posting amazing things with it. And it that's not to say, like, it will replace the artists that do these types of things. But as somebody who's, like, a casual user, a hobbyist, and you don't know why you can't resize something or there's, like, like, Infusion three sixty of these things called constraints.

And if if you invalidate a constraint, you can't, like, resize it in a specific way. And figuring out why that JS, if you don't understand what constraints are, is very frustrating for people. So being able to simply just type in in English and say, hey.

Why can't I resize this thing? Or Yes. Scale it up from the middle instead of there. Those are such common things. I know. You know how hard putting

I got this right here. Do you know how hard putting this hexagon pattern in this three d printed, stand that I built was? My god. That took me so long, and that's the exact type of thing I don't wanna have to spend time on because it's just it's just busy work even though I wanted better airflow. And, actually, Wes, this thing was causing my devices to get really Scott, so I put NURB on it. And I said, hey. You know, I want these things to be stacked, but this design isn't working for me. Everything's getting really hot, and it, like, redesigned something with better airflow. And Yep. It it looks just as fine. I and I'm currently using the new version of it over here, and everything's remaining way cooler. It's, yes.

Save my vehicle. Oh, I'm gonna be ESLint printing some rack parts too. That'll be fun too. I'm gonna be print printing some rack to do all my custom stuff. Whatever I want in my rack, I'm gonna, print it in there. So it's gonna be great.

Other things I don't think are gonna stand up, travel.

I think, yes, absolutely, to organizing complicated data. Right? You've got flights. You've got pickup times. You've got hotels. You've Scott figure all of this data. You wanna put it all into one thing, even just using it as a dump for, like, here are things I need to remember about my trip. Great way. I don't think we talked about this with with CJ on the live stream when you were gone, which was, everybody gets the same travel itinerary. You know? Yes. I'm going to the city. Tell me what to do. And then the lines are just unbelievably long at the things because everybody gets recommended the exact same thing.

And

I don't know. That that kinda drives me crazy. It's like pnpm a little have a little bit of taste Vercel, have a little bit of an opinion as to, like, what types of stuff you want to enjoy, and don't just do the same thing that everybody else is doing. As somebody who did, recently use AI in travel, not to not to plan certain events, but what what it did do really well for us is, like, for instance, we were going to the Peace Gloria, and I'm sorry, folks, if that's not how you say it correctly, but it's where they had on her majesty's TypeScript service was filmed. It's a cool location on the top of a mountain. It was one of the coolest things we saw in Switzerland. But getting to this the the gondola where that was from our hotel, we, like, were really struggling with those plans. Like, how do we even do this? What buses do we take? What do we do here? How do we get because it wasn't just, like, hop on a train and you're there. And so it did a really good job of building us out a way to get there that worked and was sensible and was easy that, like, we we had the hardest time finding on Google or Reddit. So

Interesting. Especially, because a lot of times, the information won't be in English. And you can use translate all you want, but you still have to sort of keep that all up in your head. Whereas, like, translation with AI often will take in all of the context of of everything else that you're working on and give you much better translation out the other end. I often think about that. You know, when you get, like, a product from Amazon and then, like, the translation is just absolutely awful and you're In the instructions or something? Yeah. In the instructions or whatever, like, how to do it. And it's like it's clearly because somebody used a word for word translator here or or tried to do it themselves. And I often think, like, how is this not solved yet? Yeah. You know? Like proposals, job applications, all of that type of stuff. I don't think that that that type of stuff is going to to pan out, and I think we're going to have to change how, like, request for a proposal, all of that type of stuff works because the people on the other end are just getting on slotted with all of this stuff. And and the answer may may be, yeah, use AI on the other end. But I don't know. I I I just feel for the people that are trying to sift through job applications and try to find a good person when all of this stuff is just everyone's getting hammered.

This is a a really interesting post from Matt Stouffer. He's he actually listens to the show.

He says, this is the first time we've done a full round of hiring. I I open I e open up a job. It's the entire Internet in the age of AI. We had a list of questions each applicant has to fill out, and it's wild how many people have a their AI answers, all of those Wes, threaded with examples.

What do you think about the Oxford comma? I don't care about the answers, but I care about how they respond. Every single AI mentions reduces ambiguity in Wes every single one.

Like, I don't think people realize how everybody is, like, pooping out the exact same answers to these things. Everybody complains about how AI is random and not predictable predictable and and not, the same thing every single time. And it it is very predictable because they have to add randomness to it because it's at the end of the day, it is math. If we didn't add randomness to it, you'd get the exact same answer every single time. Yeah.

JS it pronounced GIF or Jif? Most AIs use the word gift to explain, but the funny thing JS, as some say, it's a hard g and some say it's a soft Yeah. What is your favorite movie? AI's apparently love the pursuit of happiness, inception, and the Martian.

Holy crap. Is it so difficult of a question to have to farm it out to AI? I refuse to answer the personal questions on Java application.

Un believable.

Like and I I feel for people applying to jobs as well because, like Don't hear people. Have you noticed? Yeah. Yeah. I applied to, like, 20,000 jobs. Of course, I'm gonna try to automate this thing. So now I'm just spraying and praying.

But, man, it's unbelievable that everybody's just using the same answers. Like, you can stand out so easily by just, like Yeah.

Not doing that. I think I think, especially with the job application, this the one thing that has not changed with this stuff is that personal connections

Yeah. Referrals, those types of things more important.

Are they've always been important, but now yeah. Definitely more important for sure.

So what are you using AI for that you actually think it's effective for and not just contributing to the world slop here, something that is actually effective for you in your personal life? We wanna know in the comments because I'm interested in this stuff as well. I'm always looking for new and interesting things that I haven't tried it for. So now now let's get into the part of the show where we call sick picks and shameless plugs. Wes, do you have a sick pick for us today? Something that you can pick that you find to be sick that, well, you're enjoying right now. Could be anything. I got the best sick pick ever for you. So, you know, when you have, like,

chairs on, like, hardwood floor and you go buy those little pads that you put on the the bottom of the chair so that you can slide them around relatively easy. I see what you're doing here. Yeah. So those things are awful because they fall off all the time, and they get sticky and whatever. They're just like floor protectors. Right? So my mom put me on to these. They are little silicone socks that have the protector glued to the bottom.

You putting socks on chairs?

They are amazing.

And, like, it's like a clear silicone sock with a little piece of felt on the bottom, and they just they hang on to the chair so well. They're just like butter moving across the floors. You're not gonna scratch your hardwood. And it's just like one of those things. I know people have a hard time, like, oh, Amazon's so much crap or whatever.

But, like, there's there's a certain category of product that Amazon has made 10,000 times better. I've probably bought those crappy little sticky floor protectors a thousand times in my life, and I just it's just such a crappy product. And I but I've never given any thought to it. But, like, some bright minds figured out that you can make these amazing silicone socks for your chairs, and they just move like butter.

You got silicone socks for your chairs. That's crazy. I I've never heard of this, so I I will be checking this out.

I am going to pick my new backpack. I talked about this in the live stream. I got a backpack from Nomadix.

Nomadix, if you wanna sponsor me, I would date back be be down. This backpack looks great. It's awesome.

It's a sick backpack. It's got a microfiber little portion. It weighs nothing. It's great. Has, a lot of compartments. I just took it on our international trip and everything like that. And my Node, it was so much That's nice. It's got two side pockets, so you can put an iPad and a a computer in here if you want to.

Oh, here's the, Peace Gloria. Okay. So now I I, I had a great time with this backpack. It's been very nice. It looks very nice. Woah. Camera, get focused here. There we go.

I had a great time with it, and they sent me a free fanny pack, and I actually used the fanny pack on the entire trip. I've never used a fanny pack. Fanny packs are so key. I'm kinda thinking that back.

Yeah. I'm kinda in now. It worked really well for me. I put my glasses in there. I put my Invisalign in there. I used that bad boy.

But, yeah, this is a a nice little company. I I did some research. Apparently, they're known for, like, their microfiber towels and cloths and stuff, of which they give you one with the backpack.

So I didn't know too much about that.

Oh, wow. This is interesting. An ice bandana. They make an ice bandana. A bandana that unzips that you can put ice into it. Very interesting. Either way, this is not like some kind of, like, crappy, brand new company, although this is their first backpack. And I did say I, I do I do like this backpack quite a bit.

How how do you spell it? Nomadic? Because nomadic.ca has nothing but backpacks.

Nomadicxwithanx.co.

Okay. Alright. There's, like, a thousand companies that sell backpacks that are selling. Oh, freaking Shopify. I hate Shopify websites. I go to it, pops up. Do you wanna go to the Canada website? No.

Close it. You got 10% off. No. Close it.

Cookies.

And they're like, stop. Let me see the website.

Shopify? Come on.

Well well, link the, we'll link the the website in the the show notes for you. It's it's a beautiful looking backpack. Awesome. It it very much follows, like, the topo kind of design aesthetic.

Yeah. I like this a lot. Cool. Well, I'm gonna be in the market for another backpack soon, so send me your recommendations as well because, we both have the what's it called? Peak Design Everyday 30 liter.

Had it right. Awesome for, like, eight years, nine years, but it's it's heavy. And that's that's what you're saying as well. Right? It's it's just too heavy to ESLint around on a big trip. Leaving,

conferences in my neck and my back hurt, the other two things as well. And it just, like yes. Not great. It's I I love it for its functionality, but

and I love it for traveling. But if you gotta, like, yeah, walk around at a conference with your backpack on, it's just it's too heavy, especially with a big 16 inch laptop in it. Alright. Thanks, everybody, for tuning in. We will catch you later. Peace.