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A SQL EXERCISE


Posted on January 28, 2024January 28, 2024Leave a comment on A SQL exercise


A (NOT SO) COMPREHENSIVE REVIEW OF THE CARRIER SIDE OF THE TRUCKING INDUSTRY


Posted on January 28, 2024Leave a comment on A (not so) comprehensive review of
the carrier side of the trucking industry


#2 – LITTLE FIRES EVERYWHERE / JANUARY 2024

We start the new year blushed with excitement. There are so many possibilities,
a whole year in front of us. Wherever you go, wherever you turn, you are met
with hospitality, more so than in the months leading up to the “big event”.
That’s probably because the girl at the supermarket, who smiled a little too
hard at you, made it a resolution for 2024 not to be in that job spot two months
from now. That is why she’s being extra polite. But she might not have been
reading the news lately.

Looking at the tech sector, it can be said that 2024 started with a lay-off
trend. First, it was Google, then it was Twitch, and then a few others. I see a
similar trend going on in my (logistics) industry – Coyote, Uber and Flexe, to
name a few. When I read all of this stuff, the first thing that comes to mind is
– there is a lot of new workforce available on the job market, on the one that
has been plummeting. This is not the best time to be unemployed in IT; but
unemployment is rarely a choice.



2023 was about the discovery of AI, mainly the one belonging to the company
OpenAI. It was the year when a lot of regular folks discovered the power of an
artificial intelligence model through a chat form. Chat forms are always easy to
digest. When we were kids, we would use Wikipedia for all the information we
needed. Our kids are going to use AI chatbots such as ChatGPT.

Even though 2023 was an economic hiccup in some sense, the feeling of
advancement was prevalent. With OpenAI came all the folks who started making AI
wrappers around the aforementioned model, and built whole companies around it;
Perplexity, PhotoAI and Chatbase, with the latter two having over $70k MRR
(Monthly Recurring Revenue). And these are just a few examples – I’ve seen over
100 companies making over $10k MRR. If that does not sound promising, I don’t
know what does.

New technologies allow new opportunities, sure. But the market has become more
fierce as well – I am supposed to compete with people who have been building
software companies for years? I can try to, and I will do it, but when I look at
all that, I say: brick-and-mortar businesses have never been more appealing than
now.

Another business trend that I wanted to mention, and that is going to be
prevailing in the following years is the pay-per-use business model. We already
have too many subscriptions: Netflix, Spotify, Gsuite or other business email,
car payments… Any app that allows bonus features has a monthly fee, and if you
want to use that CRM app or email marketing app, prepare to take out $20 from
your pocket, every single month. Well, that is changing. Google, Amazon, and
Azure already hopped on the new trend, and I sense that a lot of other big
players are going to do so in the next couple of months. It’s just better – it
operates by metering the usage of a product or service and bills the customer at
the end of the month. I don’t want to have a sense of wasting my money for not
using the product enough – I want to pay exactly as much as I used the thing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I used to spend a lot of my time searching for a job position that offers the
following: it is interesting, it requires a specific set of skills, and is NOT
easily replaceable. The main issue I have with my current job is that I am
easily replaceable – a newbie with 3-4 months of experience could come, offering
to work for half of the salary that I have, and that would be it. That’s what
happened with company truck driver jobs in the US. A lot of Latinos and other
ancestries migrated to the US and took jobs for less than minimum wage, lowering
the $ threshold in the following years for all of the participants in the
logistics sector.

But I didn’t know that it was not other people that I should be worried about
replacing me – it was these generative AI models that keep improving. We’re now
in a phase where most of us can use AI tools complimentary to our jobs, and that
will make us lazy, but it will also allow us to do more in the same amount of
time. The next phase is job replacement. How many of the current jobs are going
to die out because they can be fully automated? 2 to 5 percent? Or is it maybe
more?



I wrote about building my own AI wrapper in a previous post, and it was a fun
project while it lasted, but I ditched it. I could not build a good business
model that would allow steady streams of income, and I was not sure about how
big of a budget I would need to kick things off on the marketing side, so I just
decided to move to something else.
Since I want to get more familiar with software, I am thinking of building a few
small apps, apps that already exist mind you, but that would be simplified and
translated in my native language. For example, an online “sign a document”
solution.

Maybe that is what I am going to do. It certainly seems more fun than any type
of newsletter, because for the last few days, newsletters have been the only
project I could think of. And I don’t want to do that – the market’s
oversaturated.

Still, with the help of ChatGPT, there’s only so little that I can’t do. At
least, that’s what I have to believe if I want to adhere to my “creative
process”.

Until next time.

Posted on January 17, 2024January 17, 2024Leave a comment on #2 – Little Fires
Everywhere / January 2024


#1 – PLAYING WITH CHATGPT, BUILDING A WEB APP, DEPLOYING ON HEROKU…

The 2024 has begun. To stay true to my hopes and wishes, I have to use this
website as a place where I am going to document my project endeavors. I don’t
consider myself an entrepreneur.. yet, but if I earn $ from anything that I do
make in the future – I will consider myself worthy of that title.

We began December 2023 with a small project – an AI that generates real estate
listing descriptions. The idea was very simple – feed a model with a couple of
images, and get a description based off of those. Why I thought it was novel was
because, at the time, none of the websites already offering this had the option
to upload apartment pictures – all that you could do was describe what you were
selling, and select a couple of hashtags related to your real estate.

I wanted to make it different. I wanted to allow photo uploads, and I wanted the
model to focus on the materials shown in the pictures, on the natural lighting,
and the surroundings.

It took me 13 days to make an MVP. Bear in mind, I have no coding background. In
2019 I did a Udemy course covering some of the Python basics because at the
time, I was interested in Machine Learning / Deep Learning. I tried coding as a
hobby for about a year, but since I could land a junior job after the year had
passed, I dropped that hobby completely.

Four years later, I was back at it. It felt as if I never touched programming –
I had completely forgotten most of the stuff I learned. Luckily, this time it
was not knowledge I was armed with; no, this time, I had ChatGPT on the side. I
decided I would pay a monthly fee for GPT 4 access and start bombarding it with
questions daily. If nothing, I would become better at prompting.

Honestly, I thought it would take me at least a month before I could launch an
MVP. I decided to focus on the backend, asking for chunks of code from GPT daily
and slowly gluing it all together piece by piece. I had no idea how web
frameworks worked, but thankfully, I was able to get familiar with that through
ChatGPT as well. I want to slowly work you through the whole building process.

First, I needed to draw on a piece of paper the logic behind the website. It all
sounded so simple:

 * upload a batch of photos to a hosting website, where I would later access the
   URLs from the uploaded photos
 * send URLs of uploaded photos to an AI model that specializes in images
 * generate a description of the photos (separated or merged together), save it
 * send a description variable back to the AI model, this time specialized in
   text generation, and ask of it to generate a sales description
 * display a result to the user

For image upload, I went with Google Cloud buckets. The dashboard can look
daunting to a newbie (which I was), but it was straightforward enough. I had to
play around with settings in order to switch from private to public items in the
bucket, other than that, everything else was fine.

I chose Microsoft Azure Computer Vision as the first AI model, the one that
would read the images, as per ChatGPTs recommendation (the most popular
alternatives are Google Cloud Vision AI and Amazon Rekognition). It took me a
day and a half just to set up an account and get used to Azure’s dashboard.
After that, I started sending the pictures to Azure’s vision AI to produce
results.

I know there were a few parameters that I did not tweak in Azure, but in
general, I just did not like the results that I was getting, and the
descriptions the model was providing. I considered switching to Google’s AI when
I realized – why not just use OpenAI’s vision model?

Why not use OpenAI for both image reading and description generation? It seemed
like a logical step to take. It would reduce the complexity. And so I did just
that.

After a few days of tweaking the prompts for the vision model of OpenAI, and for
the real estate description generator model, I had a working project. I added
sessions because I wanted to limit how many pictures a single user could upload
(otherwise it would be very costly for me), and also, I wanted to limit the
description generations per day, per user. The main issue was – this thing was
running locally. I had NO IDEA how I could take all of the code and upload it
online, make it available as a website.

After more consulting with ChatGPT and Google, I had to make changes in the code
(some protected files were stored locally, that needed to be moved to the
cloud), and I decided to host it on Heroku. This last part turned out to be
harder than expected because I kept getting errors in my code. I had to commit
and recommit to GitHub more times than I want to admit.

After 3 or 4 days of hell, I finally got the thing running.

It needed a lot of tweaking, but the main thing is – it worked. Now, it’s been a
few days since I got it to work, and I am kind of in a “writer’s block” – I
wanted to make the front end pretty, or rather dynamic, but there’s no way for
me to do it alone. I tried with GPT, with Google, Youtube tutorials, and I still
can’t figure it out. If it was me, I would want my landing page and the
generation page to look something in the style of this website:

And hiring someone to do it might cost me a lot. I am not sure if I should ditch
the thing completely, or if I should just stick with it, invest in an engineer
or two to help me make it seamless, and then later see how I can get users for
it.

That’s the main issue – I do not know if there is a market for this thing. I
wouldn’t want to put $1000 to $3000 of my own money into it, if I did not get
any kind of social proof that someone would use it. And another issue is, I
don’t know how I would scale or advertise it. I mean, programming was not my
field either, and I got it to work, so I am pretty sure I would figure it out.

As of now, I am not sure what to do. If I decide to get things into motion
again, I will write a new post, or update this one. Farewell for now.

Posted on January 8, 2024January 8, 2024Leave a comment on #1 – Playing with
ChatGPT, building a web app, deploying on Heroku…
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