07:15. I went to bed early after a company offsite in the outskirts of Madrid. It was pleasant chatting with my coworkers. I have a strange kind of memory in which I remember very vividly things and emotions people display when we speak (the dark side of this is a never-ending source of self-inflicted embarrassment through involuntary recall), however this time I used it to my advantage.
For example, I was walking next to Javi and I wondered what to speak with him about. I noticed it was springtime and probably the harvest season for citrics, so I asked "How's your lemon tree orchard doing this year Javi? Lemons should be ready for harvest no?", he perked up in a peculiarly positive way, and excitedly talked about the limes being just ripe and having arranged the harvest with a local buyer. "Are limes better paid this year? I remember last year the price was low" and he was happy because the price was twice as last year. I will now remember he has a young avocado tree and a couple of chickens, and will also inquire about them next time he comes for a company summit.
We have a new co-worker, the first female employee of the company, who works in sales and is very social. She sometimes proposes "conversation games" with questions such as "if you were on death row and you had to choose your last meal, what would you get?". I'm always keen on playing conversation games, but I also notice how just waiting for the right moment to propose them is important, or to have a good play partner who gets the game going and others join in at leisure. Just like casual ball games: we wouldn't organize everyone to play, a couple of people would pass around the ball and the circle would grow at will.
Later on she followed up with a typical conversation opener: "what is your biggest fear?" and another guy asked "like a phobia?" and she said "yes, are any of you guys afraid of heights, spiders, snakes...?". "Beautiful women" I volunteered dryly. Everyone roared in laughter, and I wasn't sure if they laughed because they know it's true, or because they don't know it's true.
On my personal iOS to web two tap media sharing, what was evidently wrong was uploading in .heic format. I asked Claude how to change it to jpg and it gave me instructions I could customize on Apple's Shortcuts app. I asked it "can you build this for me and give me a file" and Claude complained about it being a proprietary undocumented format and warned me it probably wouldn't work (it didn't).
The Shortcuts app is quite difficult to use, and following Claude's instructions wasn't straightforward. The problem of course is due to the proprietary format Apple uses, but it made wonder when AI will become a bit more visual, showing me what to do instead of explaining and me mapping the instructions into the user interface. However, I also understand I'm asking for a faster horse when I should be asking for the car, the solution is not to ask Claude for images or videos in the instructions, but that Apple provides a way to connect tools so that they may work on our behalf (or something like that).
I've come to realize that, if I want to move into the future, I will have to migrate my CMS to something agents can manipulate. Right now I have a Movable Type installation that has an API but it's ancient (xml-rpc) and it's not well documented. I played around with Astro and agents were quite adept at building with it, so that's a possibility.
The ideas cooking up are mostly meant to be able to have conversations with other people online, much inspired by h0p3's approach to the topic. After social media companies laid waste to the blogging era, the landscape has shifted enough for us to be able to build our own social networks again. We ought to own the source of truth of everything we write and publish, and even if you are replying to some random dude on instagram, that conversation ought to happen from our personal social networks and then replicated on social media.
In practical terms what I will build is modest, akin to creating a blog in order to hold a conversation with an individual online. But the fact that I can focus on writing and letting the agent take care of the boring parts (checking for responses, replicating the content as a comment on the recipient's platform, and many other things I haven't even imagined) is what makes the idea appealing.