scott

What I Actually Started Using AI For

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I’ve been writing about my AI journey for a few posts now, and I’ve talked a lot about which tools I use and how much I trust them. But I haven’t really gotten into what I’m actually doing with them day to day. That’s what this one is about.

Trip planning was one of the first things that clicked. When you’re searching for flights and hotels, every website limits what details you can give it. With AI I could be hyper specific. If I’m flying with just the kids it’s this configuration. If my wife is with us it’s that one. These are the types of hotels we like, these are the amenities we need. It could actually hold all of that and work with it.

It didn’t book anything, but it helped me build out exactly what we were looking for and where to go look for it.

Then it evolved. I used to use Trello boards to track trips day by day, reservations, what we were doing when. Now I do all of that inside the AI itself. It exports as a YAML file I can save and reload if I need to start a fresh chat. Since privacy matters to me I’ll delete a chat when I’m done with it, but the file means I don’t lose anything. I have a general preferences file I keep updating, and then a separate file for each trip. It works really well.

I did something similar for days out with the kids. I took a week off last August and it was just me and the girls. I built out a history file of things we’d done and liked, threw in our preferences, and used it to plan the week. On Tuesday we have this, I need to figure out Wednesday, here’s a restaurant nearby that fits. I’d already been doing some of that in a neglected Trello board, but this way it was all queryable and easy to update.

Date nights with my wife got the same treatment. I’d go through our preferences, confirm them with her, and then present her with suggestions. I’ll be honest, I wasn’t exactly hiding where the ideas came from. More like, hey, I told the magic box what we like and this is what it came up with. Sometimes it was completely off. Sometimes it was genuinely spot on.

More recently it’s been helping with meal planning for the kids. Mine are picky eaters, so it was a lot of back and forth on what might actually work. It helped me land on a couple of new meals and then built a schedule to track them. Basic stuff on the surface, but genuinely useful in practice.

One that I found unexpectedly cool was using it to wrangle my Trello data. I have boards for things to watch and books to read. When I tried to pull that data into an AI the file was massive. So I had the AI help me write some scripts to strip out everything I didn’t need, took a two meg file down to about 50K, and then I could actually work with it.

Which brings me to audiobook recommendations. I was a little cautious about feeding it my reading history since it builds up a fairly personal picture of you. But I write about what I read anyway, so it felt like a reasonable trade. I’d give it what I read, when I read it, what I thought of it, and ask for recommendations.

Hit or miss, honestly. Some suggestions were weird and when I pushed back on them it would just fold immediately. That should always give you pause. But when it got it right it was actually pretty useful, and interrogating the reasoning often got me somewhere interesting even when the initial answer was off.

Which is a good lead in to something I want to dig into a bit more. It does some genuinely impressive things, but it’s far from perfect, and that part matters too.

The Case for a Private AI

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So when I started paying for ChatGPT, I’d hesitate before putting anything into it. I had to make conscious decisions about what I was okay sharing and what I wasn’t. In some cases it was easy. I don’t care about this, so fine. In others it was something I did care about, but the convenience won out and I’d bend my own rules a bit.

Come May or June 2024, I read about Venice.AI. It was intriguing because I wanted a private AI, and what these guys had built was designed from the ground up around privacy. Nothing stored, no logs kept. Yes, there’s still that moment in time where they’re processing your data, but they’re keeping nothing after that. Their entire business model is built on trust.

Are they 100% trustworthy? No. The only way to truly guarantee that is to run your own model. But they were offering something real, so I was intrigued.

The reason I hadn’t gone the local model route already was my hardware. I had an M3 MacBook Air with 16 gigs of RAM. I could download LM Studio and run stuff, but it was slow and clunky. Just not the experience I was looking for. I looked into cloud-hosted GPU options too, the kind of thing a friend had mentioned, but it was a lot of configuration and effort I just didn’t want to deal with. Funny enough, nowadays I could probably have Claude Code help me set that up in an afternoon. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

So when Venice came out with a pro plan at $49 a year as their introductory offer, which has since tripled, though as of my last renewal I was still grandfathered in, I figured for that price it was worth trying. It’s definitely more rudimentary than ChatGPT, but the privacy confidence is real. I’m still careful about what I put in it, but I’m more willing to share certain things there than I am with the public models.

They’ve since launched different models with different privacy levels, which is worth knowing. Some are fully private, some are anonymised but not fully private. You have to pay attention to which is which.

Fast forward to summer 2025. Proton, who I’ve been writing about for over ten years now, and at this point calling them just my email provider doesn’t really cover it, they do storage, VPN, and a bunch of other stuff, launched Lumo, their own privacy-focused LLM. I gave it a try.

The free version was pretty limited, so I added their paid tier for a few months while waiting for my main Proton plan to renew in December. The jury’s still a bit out on it. It did some things okay. From a pure trust perspective I probably trust it more than Venice just because I’ve been a paying Proton customer for a decade. But the way Venice has architected things, it’s actually more private. Lumo is more convenient though, and private enough for most of what I need.

One of the trade-offs with Venice’s full privacy mode is that nothing persists. No data moves between devices or browsers when you log in. Lumo does sync, but you’re trusting that it’s still zero-knowledge on their end.

I’ve actually been using Lumo recently for some things that are genuinely private, things I wouldn’t put near a public model. My logic is simple. I’ve been paying Proton for years to store sensitive documents privately. So why not use that same platform’s LLM to process those same documents? I’m not going to get into specifics here for obvious reasons, but it’s been useful.

The broader point is that I don’t always trust the public models, and honestly you shouldn’t either. But over time I’ve become more relaxed about certain things. It’s a constant cost-benefit calculation. The privacy models are getting better, and even the public ones will sometimes tell you that for certain tasks you don’t need high-level reasoning anyway, so a privacy model is probably fine.

The hard part now is knowing which model to reach for. Which is a whole other post.

As with the first post in this series I used AI to generate my banner image. I am not saying it’s good. I am just saying what I did.

From Sceptic to Subscriber: Beginning of My AI Story

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I can’t believe I’m only now really starting to talk about some AI stuff, and ChatGPT launched in November 2022.

Looking back, I really didn’t do very much with it for over a year. The first six months was kind of like, okay, that’s cool, fine. I did a lot of reading about it separately, but I really didn’t do a heck of a lot until February 2024.

So over a year later, things were mature enough that I decided to take the plunge and try one of the paid services. Through the summer of 2023 I was definitely doing things here and there, but I was sceptical on what it could do. I was sceptical on its privacy. Well, I’m still sceptical on its privacy. But I didn’t pay for anything, and I was what you’d consider a light, casual user.

February 2024, I upgraded to Copilot. I also upgraded the family to the Microsoft 365 family plan at the same time, which you kind of need for Copilot Pro, or don’t, I forget. But there was a reason I did both at the same time. I treated it like a trial. Paid for it, but gave myself 30 days to see if I’d actually use it.

And I liked it. But the main reason I’d gone with Copilot was for the Microsoft Office integrations. That’s what sold me on it for personal use. In practice though, they just didn’t meet expectations at the time. And once I started talking to friends about it, the logic became pretty clear. Copilot is powered by ChatGPT anyway, and ChatGPT at the time had more plugins and a lot more flexibility. So why was I paying for the middleman?

I only used Copilot for about a month before switching to ChatGPT in March 2024.

I started using that on and off. In the beginning I’m not sure I really got my money’s worth, but it was worthwhile to have something and actually use it. I was able to use it for things like tutoring the kids — there’s literally a way to set it up so it won’t just give them the answer, it walks them through the problem. Stuff like that. A whole bunch of different use cases.

But what became apparent straight away was that there were things I was very hesitant to do with it, because it was, and still is, unclear what they actually do with your data.

For context I ran this story through an AI image generator to get a banner for this entry and after 3 tries it came up with what I used.

Explaining Technology One Pop Culture Reference at a Time

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I sometimes describe my job as “using pop culture references to explain technology to people, or security to people.” It started as a joke, but honestly, it’s not far off. I do that. A lot.

There’s something about a good movie quote or TV moment that just clicks when you’re trying to explain a technical concept. It makes it human, relatable, and a little less dry. So yeah, I lean into it.

But here’s the tricky part: I live in England now. I’ve been here almost eight years, and I’ve learned that some of my go-to cultural references don’t always travel well.

Every so often, I’ll start telling a story and then have to stop myself mid-sentence to ask, “Have you ever heard of…?” And depending on the answer, I either get to deliver a perfect analogy or end up staring into polite, confused faces.

Sometimes I strike gold, but other times there’s deafening silence. Office Space is hit or miss. The Simpsons are more universal, but even that’s patchy. And there’s that moment where I think, never mind, not worth the detour.

It works both ways too. My British colleagues drop references that go straight over my head. My response is to politely tell them I have no clue what they’re talking about. We usually get a laugh out of that.

Still, every so often, the worlds overlap beautifully. For example, I once used a Highlander reference, “There can be only one,” in a meeting. It landed with absolutely no one. Then, a week later, one of my coworkers heard someone else use it (a Brit, no less), watched the movie, and loved it. More recently, my boss used the same line in another meeting. I always knew it was a thing.

Maybe that’s the fun of it, figuring out which cultural shorthand actually connects across different backgrounds. Some hit, some miss, but when they do work, it’s this small, shared spark of understanding. And honestly, that’s kind of the whole point.

Photo is the hallway set from the Big Bang Theory. My sister, mom and I were on the backlot for my mom’s birthday last year and I got some really good photos. Appropriate since I use that show as references, although it would have been better if there was a set from How I Met Your Mother since I quote that show much more!

The Great Hotel TV Failure

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hotel tv media centre

This is an older story from April 2024. We were visiting M’s parents and staying at an Aloft Marriott. Pretty good hotel, actually. Kids didn’t like the breakfast, I did. There was a pool. Close to the in-laws. Great value overall.

There were a couple days where M had the car and it was just me and the girls at the hotel. We decided we’d watch a movie, which kicked off the classic “how do we get the thing on my device onto the TV” problem.

I’ve debated traveling with an HDMI cable. It works. It’s just annoying to bring, and I never feel like packing it. So when I noticed the TV actually had an AirPlay option in the menu, the tech part of my brain started geeking out. This felt like one of those rare moments where hotel tech was finally catching up with reality.

At least in theory.

In practice, it refused to work. At all. I tried everything. And as someone who works in tech, there’s always that moment of “I cannot be defeated by a hotel TV,” but eventually you either give up or swallow your pride. I called their support guy. He came upstairs. He didn’t even know the feature existed until I showed him the menu for it. Still no luck. Completely dead.

So now it’s me, two kids, and no movie.

My workaround? I ended up ordering a Chromecast through DoorDash. Someone literally drove to a store, picked it up, and brought it to the hotel. Kind of wild. I don’t even know if that’s a thing in the UK. If it is, I’ve never tried it.

The Chromecast itself was tiny and cheap and came with its own little HDMI tail. Plugged it in, powered it up, connected it to my phone, and that was that. The hardest part was waiting for the movie to download on the hotel Wi-Fi. After that, everything just worked.

We watched Ghostbusters: Afterlife. The kids loved it so much we ended up seeing the sequel in the theater later.

The bigger point here is that the fancy casting feature Marriott advertised was a complete fail. Maybe they’ve fixed it since. I hope so because letting people cast from their own devices is safer and easier for everyone. I’m definitely not signing into a hotel TV with my Netflix credentials. No thanks.

I still have that little Chromecast. I don’t use many Google devices anymore, but this one is so small and so useful that I keep it around. Do I actually remember to travel with it? No. Should I? Probably. But whatever.

Planes, Trains, and Getting There Anyway

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After I got the word that my brother in law had passed away, I immediately booked plane tickets. We found a flight out of Heathrow at 12:50 p.m., planned a normal morning, and headed to the airport.

It was not until we were already on the Elizabeth line, almost there, that I noticed the alert. Our flight had been delayed by seven and a half hours.

We needed to get to New Jersey that day. The funeral was the following day, and missing it was not really an option. Any flight leaving London the next day would get us there too late. So once we arrived at the airport, we went straight to the airline’s Special Help counter to see what could be done.

They were able to get us confirmed seats on the 6 p.m. flight. Technically, that was an improvement. It was about an hour and a half earlier than our newly delayed flight. But it was still very late. It would get us into New Jersey that day, but very close to midnight local time.

The only other option they offered was standby on the noon flight, which was actually earlier than our original departure. We went through the security routine, grabbed some breakfast quickly, and then went to the gate when they called it for the noon flight.

When boarding finished, there was exactly one seat available.

My wife and I talked it through quickly, and I got on the plane. She stayed behind with the kids and planned to try to fly standby on the 3 p.m. flight, and if that did not work, take the 6 p.m. flight we already had confirmed.

The idea was that I would meet my mom, get a car, and head either to my sister’s place or the hotel.

That part did not work out.

I landed without issue and got an Uber to the hotel. My mom’s flight was cancelled entirely. She was rebooked to JFK, while I had flown into Newark. From there, she took the AirTrain, the Long Island Railroad, and New Jersey Transit, and went straight to my sister’s.

My wife was not able to get on standby for the earlier flight and ended up on the 6 p.m. flight after all. She managed to rearrange the rental car and arrived at the hotel close to midnight New York time.

So in the end, we all got there. Just not together. And not in the way we expected.

To be fair to the airline, there had been a major blizzard the day before. By the time we landed, things were slowly getting back to normal. Still, the whole experience felt like planes, trains, and automobiles in real time.

Hectic, exhausting, and strangely memorable, for all the wrong reasons.

Minor note. I wasn’t sure when I was going to post this one. Since it involves travel and today the girls and I are flying home from our term break holiday I thought it was appropriate to post it. If all goes to plan we should be boarding the plane home a few hours after this posts.

Always Have a Ticket From The Airline Flying the Plane

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There are some travel lessons you only learn the hard way, like never packing a full bottle of shampoo in your carry-on, or trusting that a “short layover in Paris” (or worse, thinking you can sprint between Terminal A and Terminal D in Atlanta) will actually go smoothly.

But the one lesson that’s stuck with me through years of work trips and personal travel is this: always have a ticket from the airline flying the plane.

If the aircraft says Virgin Atlantic on the side, buy your ticket from Virgin Atlantic, not from Delta, not from Air France, not from whoever happens to be codesharing that day.

I learned this the hard way, a few times.

Once, I booked a Virgin Atlantic ticket from London to New York. Except it was actually an Air France-operated flight. I didn’t think much of it at the time. A plane’s a plane, right? Wrong.

Everything was fine until the airline changed the flight with a new time, new number, the usual shuffle. Our assigned seats (carefully picked because, you know, kids) vanished.

I logged into Virgin Atlantic’s website to reselect our seats, only to find that Virgin politely told me to contact Air France. Air France, to their credit, were actually very helpful, they just couldn’t do what I needed. The systems didn’t talk to each other properly, and no one could fix it. Since the schedule change was on their end, I had the option to cancel, which I eventually did. I rebooked with my lesson learned and, thankfully, no price change.

Fast forward a bit and you’d think I would’ve remembered that rule. But no.

This time I had a Delta ticket for a Virgin Atlantic flight. Thanks to my American Express Platinum card, I should’ve had access to the Delta lounge. When I showed up, they told me I wasn’t eligible because the flight was operated by Virgin, not Delta. Same metal, wrong ticket. No lounge.

It’s one of those maddeningly small distinctions that make perfect sense to no one but airline lawyers.

From now on, I’m sticking to my own rule: always have a ticket from the airline flying the plane. If you don’t, be ready for drama.

I wrote this late last year. It appropriately is posting while the girls and I are on a plane off on a holiday. And yes I have learned my lesson it’s the same airline flying the plane that is on our tickets.

Two Decades and Change

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23 years in and I’m still doing this.

I’ve taken breaks. I’ve also posted several times in a single day. It’s been wildly inconsistent at points. But here we are, two-plus decades later, and I haven’t quit.

At some point I got into a rhythm of writing a bunch of posts at once and scheduling them out. Which means I’m not burning myself out trying to come up with something every day, but the blog keeps moving. Turns out that’s a sustainable approach. Only took me about 20 years to land on it.

The thing that gets me is this: if my blog were a person, it would be old enough to drink. Here in the UK, at least. It still couldn’t get a discounted car insurance rate though. That doesn’t kick in until 25. So it’s got a couple more years before it’s truly sorted.

I’ll take it.

Photo montage of the blog theme over the years. I didn’t realise I had taken so may screen captures. The bright orange profile was very early on in 2003.

WAY BACK MACHINE SNAPSHOT
My blog theme before I changed it, again
WAY BACK MACHINE CAPTURE
My first wordpress theme.

The One Where I Was Terrible at Football

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Both of my girls are playing football now. A started last year, and this summer, T decided to join too. I suspect the end of season party had something to do with her sudden interest. But whatever works.

One of my earliest memories is going to play football. Yes, football, not soccer. I live in England now, so we are doing this properly. My dad used to take me to these fields right off the Grand Central Parkway in Queens, near Little Neck Parkway. I can still picture them, green spaces right by the highway where you could literally see the games as you drove past.

My first team was the Blue team. I remember the jerseys, the cover photo is me standing around during a game or a practice.. Playing was my dad trying to get me into sports. Spoiler: it did not really stick.

I did play for years, probably until I was around eleven. I never had a real knack for it. My mom likes to tell people I was terrible, and she is not wrong. I daydreamed. I lost track of the ball. I think I spent half my time wondering when the snacks were coming.

At one point, my dad started helping coach my team. Then eventually, I think he was the coach. It is funny to look back now, because some of my best childhood memories connect to those seasons, even if I was daydreaming while everyone else actually played the game.

Football also shaped little corners of our family life in unexpected ways. For example, the beach club we joined later was connected to one of my coaches. A whole chapter of my childhood followed from those football years: summers, cabanas, the smell of sunscreen and chlorine.

I played both outdoor and indoor football growing up. The indoor version was wild. No outs, no throw ins, the ball just bounced off walls like some kind of playground pinball machine. Here in England, the kids play outdoors year round unless the ground freezes solid or turns into a swamp. They have trained in rain, cold, wind, everything.

I love it. Watching them do something I did as a kid but better feels oddly full circle. I never pushed them to start early, but I am glad they found a girls club where they feel at home.

My bar was pretty low, to be fair. So the good news is, they have already cleared it.

3000 Days

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I’ve known for a while what I wanted to write about today.

When I wrote the December 29th post about our England anniversary, I did what I always do: calculated the number of days since we moved. It’s become a thing. I like the number. It feels more concrete than just saying “seven years” or whatever.

This past December the number was creeping up toward 3,000. Which made me curious. So I did the math. When exactly would we hit 3,000 days?

I cannot make this up.

Today. My birthday. March 16, 2026 is exactly 3,000 days since we landed in England back in 2017.

I find that unreasonably satisfying.

Not a ton else to report on the birthday front. But honestly, that little numerical coincidence is enough. Some years you get a big revelation. This year I got a very pleasing number, and I’ll take it.

No fancy cake for me this year, M and I are going out but the photos are a montage of my favourite cakes M has made for me to date. The best so far would not be one for me though!