Scroll to the end for my ethical take. Here’s what I did this week:
Set up a twice monthly growth check for my Kit email list for Global Quilt Connection. Since I’m paying more than $250/month now for email (fuck you zenler and your annoying email interface that doesn’t track clicks) I want to get max bang for my buck. I’m also experimenting with various list growth tactics and want to know whether they’re working and whether growing my list is growing income.
Got Claude to calculate the yardage I’d need for a workshop. I told it the sizes of the pieces I’d need to cut and the quantity. Then gave it two different widths of fabric since the client is proving it and won’t buy it until the last minute. Took about 2 mins.
Gave Claude access to my Desktop Google Drive interface and got it to rename my THOUSANDS of photos using the date taken extracted from the meta data. Where the file had an existing name it added the date to the existing name. Then got it to sort the photos into date folders. Saved me DAYS if not weeks of work.
Sent an invoice using my intuit connection. Super quick. Replaced having to log in, answer security checks, create it, download it and email it.
Set up zapier to link actions on my (FU) Zenler site with Kit so my email subscribers all stay up to date.
On a drive to an event in Menlo Park I updated my monday.com task list via voice chat. Just kept chatting with Claude while driving without having to use my eyes or physically change anything. Was good to go through all my parking lot ideas/tasks and bring a few of them into the dated queue. Plus marking things as done, even if it’s verbally and not physically clicking, just feels so good.
My ethical take on AI is in line with what Theresa Benson preaches. It’s a tool. If I give you a seam ripper to use, and you stab me with it, it’s not the seam ripper’s fault. And I only automate things I could do myself but that AI does so much faster and more efficiently. If I asked it to do things I can’t verify are correct then that’s a future problem I’m creating for myself. My main concern is that Anthropic lost something like 25 BILLION dollars last quarter and sooner or later people like me are going to be asked to pay the real cost of what they’re using and it certainly isn’t $20/month. So I’m wary about relying on it too much.
Yes data centers suck as does water usage and heat output. But we’re all seemingly happily living with the oceans’ many garbage patches and fast fashion’s devastating effect on third world countries and the advent of trillionaires and potential nuclear power facilities on the moon and so on. If only we could pick one thing at a time and fix that before moving on to being outraged about the next shiny thing.
This is my cat so the post has an image.
