Weeknotes: Week 7 - Q1 - 2025
Hello everyone! I hope you had a good week? There’s lots going on in the studio at the moment. To be honest, so much that I need to take 5 minutes to catch my breath. It’s been a hot and sticky week here but that’s not really news, it’s been like this since Christmas. The humidity is literally off the scale. Anyway, enough preamble on with the show!
Meetings, meetings, meetings
I’ve been down in Sydney again this week talking to more people about some very cool opportunities. There seems to be a lot of things that people want to explore with data and AI. As usual my clock is running at twice the speed of the opportunity but I’m hoping everything will sync up in the next few weeks.
Presentations
I’ve been working on a couple of presentations this week. One is for a talk I’m going to be giving to a group of people early next month about how they can start to integrate GenAI into their farm businesses in a way that might actually provide some benefit rather than something that’s just an experiment or toy. I think it’s shaping up to be a good one. I’ve also been working on the pivot of the tools I built for the GRDC fast start program last year. I need to get a new deck together as I’m also presenting that to a couple of prospective customers next week. I’m crap at pitch decks so need to spend a bit of time here.
Data wrangling
Following one of the meetings I spent some time this week looking at the latest thinking in schema matching. There’s many data integration challenges in agriculture and being able to match similar datasets from different providers and sources is one of them. It’s been a while since I last thought about schema matching so I’ve been getting myself back up to speed - particularly the advances in using machine learning and vectors to find similarity etc. There’s quite a few good papers on the topic now. Once I’ve got my had into where it’s all at I’ll write a post.
Anthropic MCP experiments
Following this post from Matt Webb (whom I finally met this week too) about his experiences building an MCP server for his blogosphere project I thought I’d give it a crack. MCP is the protocol proposed by Anthropic for creating agents for use with Claude and they hope other systems. I made a tool that allows me to bring my Things todos into Claude and other tools (see below). Using their sdk it was really easy to get something up and running quickly. It’s for me thinking again about how I might be able to use an AI driven personal assistant similar to what Dan is doing with Kitty.
Goose
While mucking about with MCP I also finally got around to having a play with Goose the prototype agent runner from block (the makers of Square and other things). It’s actually got a lot of promise and contributed to my feeling that the tools might be coming together to start to do some meaningful automation on my computer without having to invent everything from scratch.
A bit about mental health
Ok not wanting to bring everyone down but I’ve realised that the weight of everything going on has made me a bit of a doomer and bloomer lately. “How’s things” I’m asked and without realising it I start telling everyone how terrible everything is, how crappy everyone is being to me and how the year ahead is looking awful. It’s not true though. It’s all on my head. Sure things are tough but a lot isn’t and I guess that’s life and how you deal with these things is what’s important. I have a real problem with a glass half empty outlook. I’m in my late 40’s now and I’ve had this mental default all my life and I don’t really know how I got here but I really have to work on seeing the sunny side of things. So I’m a bit down at the moment but I’m working on training the happiness muscle (which is easy to say and hard to do). I’m not really sure how I’m doing this yet but I’m worried about what I’m going to manifest if I don’t do something.
Next week
Ok so back to normal programming - next week is going to be BUSY so I’m going to have to prioritise. I still have that bloody research report that I’ve procrastinated into being well behind where it should be and I’ve also got a load of other bits I need to finish off as well as capturing some of these project opportunities I talked about already.
Thank god for good music!