1041: What are normies using AI for?

Scott and Wes talk about how non-developers are actually using AI today. They also cover the stuff they don’t think holds up, like AI-staged listings and automated marketing. Show Notes 00:00 Intro 00:38 Welcome to Syntax! Wes’ post about using AI 01:50 Finding Parts With AI: Van Buckles and Weird Bolts 03:59 Brought to you by Sentry! 04:37 Fixing Printers, Drivers, and Annoying Home Network Stuff Skylight Calendar 05:32 Rescuing E-Waste: Flashing a Broken Skylight Calendar 08:42 Red Tape, Permits, and Filling Out Awful PDF Forms 09:57 Self-Hosting Made Easy: Updating Your NAS and Docker Containers 11:18 Fighting Home Assistant Rot With Agents 13:20 Inbox and Calendar Management for a Family of Six 18:05 AI in Real Estate and Property Staging Real Estate Canada subreddit 21:10 Using Agents for Video Editing and Multicam Automation 23:53 GFX.computer: Building Better Infographics 25:59 Things That Won’t Hold Up: Generated Text and Automated Marketing 30:27 Home Lab Management Over Tailscale and SSH 32:46 3D Printing Parts With Nurb: Stands, Cases, and Airflow Nurb 34:51 MCP Servers for Software You Only Use Occasionally 36:58 Travel Planning: Great at Logistics, Terrible at Taste 39:31 Proposals and Job Applications: Everybody Sounds the Same 42:14 Sick Picks + Shameless Plugs Sick Picks Scott: Nomadix Backpack Wes: Silicone chair socks Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  What is your favorite movie? AIs apparently love the pursuit of happiness inception in the Martian. Holy crap, is it so difficult of a question to have to farm it out to AI? Unbelievable. Like, and I, I feel for people applying to jobs as well, because like you hear people being like, AI applied to like 20,000 jobs. Of course I'm gonna try to automate this thing. So now I'm just spraying and praying. But it's unbelievable that everybody's just using the same answers. Like you can stand out so easily by just like not doing that.

• 0:37Wes Bos?

  Past coders and past spreadsheets, are normies using AI and, and what are they using it for, right? Is it just a glorified search engine where people are just typing their query into chat GPT? Or are there actual regular people outside of like developers that are using agents and actually getting work done? Outside of building websites or like automating some sort of spreadsheet? So today, what we're gonna do is we're gonna go through a whole bunch of different instances. I asked the people in my life, I asked on Twitter, what people in their lives are using AI for? In their day to day tasks and we're gonna kind of go through them as well as like things like I don't think are gonna hold up like automation marketing, you know, like, oh, wow, you, you sent 6,000 emails to everybody like that's,

• 1:21Wes Bos?

  that's gonna not work in like three weeks. My name is Wes. With me as always is Scott. How you doing Scott?

• 1:27Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, it's so cold in the D today. I am freezing, man. Holy cow. Uh, I don't know what happened. We woke up this morning and it's chilly chilly. So yes, I'm all bundled up.

• 1:38Wes Bos?

  Cold D. All right. We can hopefully you warm up a little later.

• 1:44Wes Bos?

  Let's get into it. I'll link up the tweet as well in the replies for what everybody says. But first one you have here is just simply just parts finding. So we have a broken seat buckle in our van. And I absolutely hate finding parts for automotive stuff. Because what you have to do is you have to find the exact year and you have to use a stupid little dropdown where you have to filter every single car that's ever been made. And then you need to go through all of the different parts and then there's like seven different trim levels of it. And then there's an eight seater and a seven seater and it's just so frustrating. But finding parts is very easy now. I just type into the box or dictated. We have a gray 2015 Toyota Santa and we need a new buckle for the left side.

• 2:29Wes Bos?

  That's the other thing is I never, I never remember like what is the left and right side of a car? Like, is it when you're looking at it or is it when you're sitting in it?

• 2:37Scott Tolinski?

  Well, that's what they always say, driver's side or passenger's side.

• 2:40Wes Bos?

  But, but that's, that's, no, that's because passenger's side is different around the world, right? So the, they don't use that in, in parts world. So I just said, what the, the seat behind me and then it found the actual part. It drafted up the email, it sent it to the Toyota dealership. Hundred percent did it all for me and all I had to do is actually pay for it. I just absolutely love it. Also, I have another one. We'll throw up the screenshot of it right now, which is when you're trying to find a specific bolt or bearing or roller, there's often like three different dimensions that you, you need to do, you know, like width, length, height.

• 3:19Wes Bos?

  And these data sheets, if you've been on like McMaster Car or any single website like this, there's like bazillion combinations of it. And one thing which is Taobao, a website that I use to find like specific little parts. They have this new AI button that you click and it breaks it down into width, length, height. It will sort of just analyze all the options there. Ideally, you wouldn't even need AI for this because that data should be in the system. But when sellers have messy data that's been loaded into like a sales platform, it's not always that easy. And this does a great job of taking messy data and distilling it down for you.

• 3:59Scott Tolinski?

  And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax. You can sign up today and get two months for free. Sentry is just a really incredible tool for not only tracking your performance, making sure your application has no bugs, but even just seeing what goes wrong when something goes wrong. Because things go wrong all the time when we're coding and you don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up and you might not even know it. So head on over to sentry.io/syntax. Again, we've been using this tool for a long time and it totally rules. All right. Another thing I like to use it for is the stuff that's annoying within your household

• 4:42Scott Tolinski?

  network, like printers and things like that. We have a printer on the network and it just stopped. It stopped working in terms of like the printer's on, it says it's connected, but you know, everything that you print to it says it can't be. I mean, this is classic printer stuff. And I just get on my, my agent and I say, I got this HP whatever printer. I'm trying to get it to connect. Can you like help me walk through some troubleshooting steps or whatever? And we did it and then eventually found it on the network, repaired the like rebuilt whatever, re-added the printer or whatever on my computer. Got it set up, printed in no time. And that's the type of thing where like you're hunting for like reinstalling drivers on HP's website.

• 5:23Scott Tolinski?

  I would rather, I would rather slam my hand in the door than go to HP's website and look for drivers.

• 5:29Wes Bos?

  That might be the number one use case for AI is not having to fuss with your printer anymore.

• 5:34Scott Tolinski?

  Oh my God.

• 5:36Wes Bos?

  My sister gave me a, what's called a Skylight calendar. I'm just holding up a photo of it right here. And this is just like, like it's one of these calendars that you will stick in your kitchen and it has like photos and everything. And she gave it to me because she got it and the wifi doesn't work on it. Like it just doesn't find anywhere. She's like, I don't know, like they sent me a new one. Maybe you can fix it. So I like, I cracked it open and it's not any like, it's not like a, like a cable or anything like that. So what I did is I just like stuck Codex on it and it like, it's, it's, it's an Android tablet. It rooted the entire thing. It flashed a custom firmware to it and like ran all of these tests.

• 6:19Wes Bos?

  And I didn't fix the wifi, but it ended up bridging the wifi from my MacBook to the calendar. So it could get past some specific things. And now I'm, I'm trying to figure out like, can I have like an external wifi? I think the chip on it is busted. But the fact where you have all of this landfill material, which is just like, it literally doesn't work. They sent me a new one. I don't know what to do with it. And it went from that to like, now I have this like massive touchscreen Android tablet for free, which I can probably get internet working with a dongle or wired or something like that. Unbelievable. Like the, the amount of people taking back tech that they have purchased or gotten for free,

• 7:02Wes Bos?

  found at a thrift store is huge use case. And like, I'm slightly technical. Like I obviously that played a part in it, but I, I don't think you could, I, I think that regular people would be able to plug in a USB cord and say, hey, help me hold buttons and figure this out.

• 7:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know. It's so funny. The amount of stuff that AI is good with that kind of thing. I saw Justin Trader, he, like he was trying to get Omachi, uh, some kind of thing working on his MacBook.

• 7:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah, drive, like MacBook drivers for the video card.

• 7:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. And he put it in front of a mirror and had the webcam like checking using a mirror. It's just like.

• 7:42Wes Bos?

  So good.

• 7:43Scott Tolinski?

  It's so good. Yeah.

• 7:44Wes Bos?

  That's what I did with my, the lights in my office is I pointed the, I pointed it at the, the light and said like, try turn it on, you know? And it just like did something, looked at the thing. It's super token hunger because it has a process, all of the images. But even then I was thinking like, there was a lot of this Android stuff where I would have to like hold a button and have it like reboot and then it would go into the like, um, ADB mode. And I was like, man, I should just solder on some like wires to this thing and let the AI push the buttons itself and just like.

• 8:17Scott Tolinski?

  Push the button. Yeah.

• 8:18Wes Bos?

  It would go ahead.

• 8:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I know. I did the same thing with my prompt boy. The computer was speaking into it to do the, to test the transcribing audio. I did the same thing with the Reechi Mini where it was taking a spelling test with my computer speakers. Like being able to have that, that loop of you not having to physically push the buttons or whatever can really unlock a whole lot. It can just work through these issues on its own.

• 8:43Wes Bos?

  Quite a few people says they have friends that are like contractors and like there are builders, as you say in the UK. And they use it for red tape, bureaucracy, filling out forms, permits, running over things, making sure everything looks okay before it's submitted. Huge use case. I use that all the time. The school sends all these like Google forms that you have to like fill out and whatever. Or like they'll send over a PDF where you have to like, I had to renew my passport a couple of weeks ago. And like, I hate using PDFs to fill out information. So frustrating. The copy paste doesn't work half the time.

• 9:17Scott Tolinski?

  The text inputs are always like out of whack with the form.

• 9:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah, text inputs are weird or like in, in Canada, the formatting for a postal code is really weird. It has, sometimes they're all uppercase. Sometimes you need a space. Sometimes you don't need a space. Super frustrating where it's just like, I don't care. Here is the loose of all of my information. You figure out how to get it into all of these boxes and, and fill it out for me. Such a huge time saver.

• 9:42Scott Tolinski?

  Sorry, I would keep talking, but the trash people are coming and it's loud.

• 9:45Wes Bos?

  Trash people. No good, no good.

• 9:49Wes Bos?

  Okay. So this one is.

• 9:50Scott Tolinski?

  And by trash people, I don't mean React users. Just kidding.

• 9:54Wes Bos?

  Rough.

• 9:55Scott Tolinski?

  I know. I'm sorry. I like React sometimes.

• 9:58Wes Bos?

  This one is technical, updating NAS and Docker containers. But I think like a lot of people are. Like tech adjacent and they want to be able to like host their own Plex or whatever. Like they're able to get that up and running. But when it comes to updating or organizing files or fixing something that has happened, like I can't tell you how many times I've tried to open an app that's on my NAS and the thing is just busted. It's so much easier for regular people just to like let an agent rip on it and self-host this stuff.

• 10:35Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I have a bunch of rips of my DVDs and stuff, like full disk rips, right? And because of that, it's like, it rips, yeah. And you can't play those on Plex or whatever. So I just set up a process that will regularly check a folder and go through and pull out all the extras and set it up in the correct format and in correct file format that both Jellyfin and Plex can understand. Cause I'm running Plex and Jellyfin side by side right now. So like having an agent to be able to work through the proper way to get the folders in a way that it's like not going to ruin anything has been very instrumental for me.

• 11:18Wes Bos?

  Another one is like Home Assistant. So one problem that you have with Home Assistant is I've got like 25 different integrations from these like random companies. And then what happens is like, at least once a week, something will like expire or like stop working for whatever reason. Usually you have to like re-link it, right? Like that's a pain. So like one automation you can do is just like, once a day, check my Home Assistant and see if anything is broken. If it is, try fix it or prompt me to figure it out. And it's just like kind of keeping on top of that stuff is that's a lot of people like set up Home Assistant, they get it working beautifully and then stuff breaks.

• 12:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it breaks over time.

• 12:01Wes Bos?

  And you stop using it because it doesn't work as well and you kind of let it rot.

• 12:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, the rot in Home Assistant is so real. And especially because like, like you said, things getting disconnected. But when you get into like really customizing dashboards and stuff, the thing that ends up happening is that like you get really into the, was it YAML or Tamil that they use? Either way, whichever one, whichever one they use. It's like now I'm typing that on my phone, trying to get like this multi-split layout thing working correctly. And so throwing an agent on that kind of stuff has been really great for me. Cause I mean, because it's really good at it. Hey.

• 12:37Wes Bos?

  It's so, and there's just so much, like you add one light bulb and it's like, oh, there's 600 sensors in this, you know? Does a light bulb need to be updated? Is it off? Is it on? Is like, what time of day is it? You know, and then you all of a sudden you have a thousand different like possible sensors and services attached to it. We're like, I just want on or off. I just want to turn the thing on and off.

• 12:59Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's like, oh, I like the way the bubble card looks, but I have only marshmallow cards or whatever. Now I gotta manually go and up and change the card design on all of them to have my dashboard looking cohesive. No, you can just throw an agent on it, right?

• 13:13Wes Bos?

  Super powerful for like enabling people to do self-hosting and running it themselves. So I'm very happy about that. The next one we have here is inbox and calendar management. And so Scott just said, you don't use agents for any sort of calendar management, do you?

• 13:28Scott Tolinski?

  No, sorry. I just accidentally turned the lights off in my kitchen while we were talking and I know my wife is in there cooking. So I'm just like imagining her being like, what?

• 13:42Wes Bos?

  I'm using it pretty heavy for calendar management, specifically with all of my kids stuff. So we've got four kids. All of them have emails coming in from the teachers. All of them have a couple of extracurriculars each themselves. Those emails are all coming in, right? It's all of this, all of this data and I'm using that. I have a bot that checks every two hours for emails from these things and it will remember what needs to be remembered. It will download any photos that are in like the PDF or in like a Google Drive. And then it will also take every single thing that needs to be remembered about what's happening, you know? Like, do you need to remember gym clothes on this day? Do you have a field trip, et cetera? Add those all to the calendar, invite my wife.

• 14:26Wes Bos?

  So much easier because then you can then pipe all of that information into some sort of display, right? I've got an e-ink display running right now. I'm trying to get this like full color one up and running because that makes the management and like hunting through these awful PDFs that the teachers send so much easier.

• 14:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what? I, I'm afraid of giving my agents access to my calendar because anybody can like, can, yeah, people can add stuff to your calendar and prompt inject you and that like, that really freaks me out. So.

• 15:00Wes Bos?

  I have it limited.

• 15:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I try to limit the vectors for that type of like automation type of stuff.

• 15:06Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I have it limited to just the family calendar, which is like not anything, like it's just, just the kids stuff or when they're, when they're doing specific stuff. But another one is like, I talked earlier about the finding of parts. The parts guy replied, hey, yeah, we have, we can get the part. Can you give me your VIN just to confirm that it will fit? And then I go, now I gotta find my VIN, you know? And like, I'm pretty good at putting that stuff in one password. But then I was just like, I was like, I was in the kitchen cooking dinner. I didn't want to like go into my one password and copy paste the VIN. So I just type into the agent, find my VIN. It's in my inbox somewhere. Found it, sent it, you know?

• 15:50Wes Bos?

  So there's obviously a bit of security issue there, but it's a bit of a trade-off. In that case, it worked out really well.

• 16:01Scott Tolinski?

  I think there are some people who haven't tried to use this stuff with modern LLMs. They've gotten really good at this stuff where if you say, give me my VIN, it's most of the time gonna find it if it's there, right? And not just invent one. Now, obviously I think you want to confirm that stuff before just YOLOing it.

• 16:21Wes Bos?

  Oh, no.

• 16:22Scott Tolinski?

  It's gotten so much better.

• 16:23Wes Bos?

  We're so far past the like hallucination.

• 16:26Scott Tolinski?

  So far past that, yeah.

• 16:28Wes Bos?

  No, I didn't even check it. It was fine. That type of stuff is like, oh, of course it can make things up and of course it can hallucinate, but like I have so much more confidence. And I'm not like, I, I, don't take me for, if you've never listened to the podcast before, don't take me for one of these like crazy guys who just thinks it's amazing, you know? Like we've got a whole list of things that it's absolutely awful at, but being able to like regex match the VIN from an email where you bought your car, that's a very easy thing for AI to do.

• 17:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Here's one that I like to use this for is I have a bunch of, well, one, I really don't like Docker, but I've run a bunch of containers on my NAS, whether that we've mentioned Plex, Jellyfin, I've run a bunch of just image for images and stuff like that. And let me tell you, when I, I wanted to update image the other day and the like update instructions for the Synology were just massive, pain in the butt and just duplicating containers and moving stuff around and then it doesn't work, this or that. Just being able to say SSH into my box and update image, create backups, do all that for me. 15 seconds later, it's done, blah, blah, blah. I have an updated image container.

• 17:45Scott Tolinski?

  I use it to update my containers and do container management all the time on my NAS.

• 17:50Wes Bos?

  Huge, huge use case. Again, it's making this type of stuff where people previously wouldn't be able to do it very accessible. Or people that can do it, like you could do that, no problem.

• 18:02Scott Tolinski?

  I've done it a hundred times.

• 18:03Wes Bos?

  It's just busy work, busy work that we shouldn't have to do. All right. So here's a question I have for you. AI staging for real estate photos. Awful. Okay, thank you. This was a post that came up in Realtor.ca, which is a Canadian like where you search for houses. And you get these like AI staging and like the real estate agents are going to town on it. So this was like kind of a nice like century house.

• 18:33Scott Tolinski?

  Anything to do deceptive practices in the past before it was, let's use a fisheye lens to make the room look giant, you know?

• 18:40Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 18:41Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 18:42Wes Bos?

  So a lot of people in the replies would be like, I kind of like it. The proportions are actually pretty well, but it's not though. I've been in these houses and there's not enough room for you to have this.

• 18:54Scott Tolinski?

  Ceiling is huge in this photo.

• 18:56Wes Bos?

  Huge. Well, that's, that is, that is the, well, no, you're right. Look at it.

• 18:59Scott Tolinski?

  The scale is totally wrong. I used to live in a craftsman home like this.

• 19:02Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you're right.

• 19:03Scott Tolinski?

  The scale is totally wrong.

• 19:04Wes Bos?

  You know these houses. So that's the frustrating thing is everybody does these for landscaping and everything. And it's like, oh, you just added, of course that looks nice. You, you dialed the lighting to be absolutely perfect and then you added like twice the space. Like the proportion is not as nice. Like if you look at this one right here, if I were sitting on this bench, my knees would be in front of this fireplace here.

• 19:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 19:30Wes Bos?

  Whereas the actual image themselves is like, oh yeah, there's all this like space where.

• 19:35Scott Tolinski?

  Again, the, the people's scale in this is like outrageous.

• 19:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah, exactly. It's, it's not to scale and a lot of the comments are saying it is to scale. So I don't think, I think people are gonna get sick of this type of stuff where it's just like, show me the real raw image of this space. I can imagine it myself if I really need to, but don't, don't do this silly AI mock-up for me.

• 20:02Scott Tolinski?

  And it's a house. How enticed do you need to be by a house, right? Like you're looking for a house, you don't need to do like.

• 20:09Wes Bos?

  Like staging, staging certainly helps a lot.

• 20:12Scott Tolinski?

  The housing market is still nuts, you know? It's like, at least here in Colorado, maybe I'm just looking at it from that lens where like things don't last, but.

• 20:22Wes Bos?

  Yeah. But yeah, I can see that. If you have like a, like a dumpy house and you want to show people the potential, that's I think what people are doing here. And to be fair, like I don't have any problem with people using it to be like, here's an idea, but don't bring that into, into real estate photos. Like one example I saw on one of my Christmas lights, Facebook groups, somebody was using it to sort of mock up what the Christmas lights would look like on their house. You know, they're a contractor and they're able to show people kind of what it would look like. And it still is a little bit like, oh, wow, you. You cleaned, you added, the driveway got six feet wider, but

• 21:05Wes Bos?

  I, I, I could see that as, as being a great way to sort of brainstorm what that might look like.

• 21:11Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Uh, I think something I use agents for is video editing and I don't use this for a lot of video editing. I actually don't use this for editing on syntax. Although in my mental health video, Wes, I pulled out the quotes I wanted to use from the interviews. And I told an agent to grab only these following clips. Like, here are the clips that I want, here are the quotes that I want in my mental hub video, and just put them on a timeline. And it did that. But I don't use it to make creative decisions editing. But I do use it to edit my wife's podcast because it's a two-camera setup. One camera on her, one camera on me. I'm talking, she's talking. I want a two-camera setup.

• 21:57Scott Tolinski?

  Editing that by hand is to just go back and forth or whatever. You gotta watch the whole thing and go back and forth in real time. And like, it's fine. But what I did is I had Claude write a script for me that analyzes the audio. When the lower voice is talking, show camera one. When the higher voice pitch is talking, show camera two. And then put both of them on the timeline, clip it back and forth. And then I'll go in and make the actual cuts for whatever in the video. And it's so effective for that. It saves me a whole ton of time on a first pass edit. I'll tell you that.

• 22:33Wes Bos?

  That type of automation in video editing is so key. I use it as well for, when I'm recording, what will happen is I will have several takes of something. And usually the last take is the best take. Yeah. And, and what I've done is I have it transcribe everything. Slice it up into takes, mark the initial ones as like, like a gray, they're probably bad. And then the good one as, as like a green or a red or something like that. And then add them all to the timeline in the order which it thinks it makes sense, right? And just adds them all in.

• 23:12Wes Bos?

  And then you can jump in there and be like, okay, this just saved me. Like producer Randy does this stuff on like steroids. We should have him sort of detail all of his workflow right now because it's, he's not using it to like make creative decisions. Although like, I'm, I'm waiting for the day where like the infographics start get, they're, we're pretty close. But the infographics will get better. Both generating them and figuring out what to show. Figuring out what to show on screen right now is not good. It's just, everybody that uses it is just using it to show the words that they're saying on the screen. And it's, it's like, I, I know that already. You need to provide more context for what you're not saying.

• 23:56Scott Tolinski?

  Well, Wes, come work with me on graphics computer, gfx.computer is an app I'm building for exactly that, so.

• 24:04Wes Bos?

  All right. I'm, I'm in. And I've, I've built it like three or four times and I'm not happy with it yet. Although I did, I, I don't know, we'll save this for another episode, but I had a bit of, I'll, I'll show you what I've, I've been cranking on as well. Cause I've got a couple of ideas there.

• 24:20Scott Tolinski?

  Well, Wes, Wes, and, and sorry, I, I built this for the, for, for syntax and for myself, but I did submit it to the WebMCP challenge. So WebMCP is built in here, but it, it runs a lot better as a desktop app because you can get ProRes. But what I've, what I've done in this app, Wes, is I've built the primitives for what could be that great system. So as, since everything is JSON, there's all kinds of, uh, presets and this or that. The layer that it would take to be like, get a transcription, pick a preset, style it up, do this or that. This is the feel of the video is, is, it's, you know, I, I think it's, it's

• 25:02Wes Bos?

  It's not that much more. Yeah.

• 25:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 25:04Wes Bos?

  Looks, looks good. gfx.computer if you want to check it out right now. Some nice visuals for, or also like if you want to spend some time like taking the primitives and then like designing them for what your look and feel looks like.

• 25:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 25:17Wes Bos?

  And then also choosing, I want to have this infographic up or I want to put this overlay on at a certain point in time. So like, at that point, you've done the design yourself, you've decided what needs to show up. And then the actual like, a, a good chunk of it is simply making it. And, uh, and, and that is, is much faster now, which is great with something like this.

• 25:40Scott Tolinski?

  And this, this whole system was built on the idea of like, see it, like every single preset or anything can be themed with a CSS override.

• 25:49Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 25:49Scott Tolinski?

  They're called packs. And, uh, there's AI skills for writing those. But I have, I have a Sentry one. I got a syntax one. It uses the correct fonts. It uses all the stuff.

• 25:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 25:58Scott Tolinski?

  Just works. Easy peasy.

• 25:59Wes Bos?

  So one thing I don't think is going to catch on, or hopefully will die out with normies is just anywhere somebody is using AI to generate a bunch of text for the sake of having text. And, uh, this could be, uh, extrapolating an email to be larger and more formal. I don't want to read that. That's, I'm just going to do the opposite and decompress it. That could be automating marketing. Right now, what I'm getting a lot of is people will take a random, like, like a syntax episode. It used to be the last episode of syntax and then they would transcribe it and say, hey, I like what you said about X, Y, and Z. And now that doesn't work anymore. So what they're doing is they're finding episodes that are several weeks old.

• 26:43Wes Bos?

  And they're finding like something that I tweeted about. So they're taking like two different sources and they're saying, hey, love your stuff. A couple of months ago, you said X, Y, and Z on the podcast, and I also really like when you tweeted about this. So they're trying to like fake actually knowing you, which is just like, my eyes glaze over as, as soon as I see that. So like, that's not going to work. As, as soon as you are using this to automate what used to work, then it becomes table stakes. Everybody does it and it will stop working. So not good. Also, Facebook Marketplace, like talking about the infographics where you need to show something additional in context

• 27:24Wes Bos?

  that will help the user understand what you're saying, not just putting the same words on the screen that you're saying out of your mouth. That, that's a huge thing for adding additional context. And one thing Facebook Marketplace does is they have like this like AI list stuff on marketplace button. And what it does is it just describes what's in the image. And I hate it because it will just like, it, like a green bicycle with tires, um, in okay condition. Like, I know. I, I could see that, you know? Like this is not adding anything helpful. Tell me things that the photos doesn't show me. And, and AI is not able to do that because it, it only has the photo. It's the same as me, right?

• 28:07Scott Tolinski?

  Is, hey, I'm looking at this thing. I actually did like using AI agents to put things on marketplace because I find that whole thing to be tedious. So if I take the photos, it can go off and do research for me in terms of pricing and then use my photos. Grab just like a generic description from Amazon, not try to like make it fancy or anything. And I sold like, I sold a few things on there that have just been sitting in my basement because I was too lazy to put them up otherwise.

• 28:35Wes Bos?

  It's that busy work, man. That's like the, the huge use case for it. And I'm very curious to see, like, this whole episode started based on like me thinking like, are people outside of white collar knowledge workers going to use this stuff? And if so, are they going to be spending the amount of money that warrants the trillion dollar valuation that these big companies have, right? And I don't, I don't see that they can make that much money off of, off of the people. Cause like all the stuff we're saying here is not, they're not huge expensive lifts. Especially as we get into like a lot of the, the cheaper models are able to do this. So I'm kind of curious to see what's going to happen with a lot of stuff.

• 29:18Wes Bos?

  Probably the, the heaviest lift of all of these is the constantly scanning the inbox and parsing all out that stuff. That's, that is not as, as cheap. That's part of the reason why Open Claw had such a high, high, high rise and a low, and then it crashed down so quickly. So everybody realized, well, it's actually really expensive.

• 29:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Oh, actually, sorry. Back to the video, video editing thing. I mentioned that I, I do like automations for this. I did want to shout out, I've, I've shouted out this a few times on the show lately. But Swamp Club, which is basically just a way to manage your scripts and automations. And it works really well with any of the AI agents. So basically anytime I'm doing something that is something that I need to automate with scripts, rather than just having a collection folder of scripts, I use Swamp Club for all of that stuff and it's very nice. So I just wanted to shout that out because I, I do use that in every, uh, video that I edit for my, my thing. It's just a nice little, like taking, uh, taking stuff and making it deterministic, right?

• 30:25Scott Tolinski?

  I love those automations. Okay. I actually want to talk about some nerdy year stuff. Home Lab. Man. We talked about Home Assistant. Yes.

• 30:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Scott Tolinski?

  We've talked about NAS. We've talked about all that stuff.

• 30:37Wes Bos?

  Docker containers, yeah.

• 30:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I've been using this to manage my entirety of my system via TailScale. And if everything's connected on TailScale and everything has SSH enabled, you can have an agent go and do anything, fix, repair, whatever. So I know we talked about these things individually, but if you're running like a home lab setup in any kind of regard. I, uh, I, I find it to just be, you know, this is a normie stuff. No, normies are running home labs, but, um, I find it to just be the best. Wes, I, I've been considering, uh, well, I'm not considering, I am. I'm building a, a little rack and I can't wait to show you my, my rack, Wes. It's going to be cool.

• 31:17Wes Bos?

  Like a mini, a mini one? Like, like producer Randy has made? We'll put, put a photo of it right now, but like, what, like, like 12 inches wide?

• 31:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 31:24Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 31:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yep. Yep. In fact, there, the, the mini rack ecosystem is so cool. There's so much stuff out there, but on Bamboo Lab, if you go to like 10-inch racks and, and you, you start browsing those racks, you're going to find like a ton of different varieties and communities and all kinds of stuff. So the, the one I'm going to do is the KWS rack. And I'm starting to print it today. So by the time that my Mac Studio gets here in a couple of months, the mini rack will be finished printing. So.

• 31:59Wes Bos?

  Man, I need to do this because I have like a proper rack. And half the stuff in my rack is, is, is too small because it's not like, it's not specifically meant for it, right? So I just have like, I bought a bunch of like those metal shelves where you can just like put, put the router on it. No, my router is rack mount. The modem, the modem that our ISP gives us is obviously not rack mount. So I should print some of these. Like years for it.

• 32:27Scott Tolinski?

  The state of my my rack is pretty disheveled. I mean, there's just stuff sitting on here and it's like, it is not, yeah, it is. Everything is too small to be in the rack. So I'm gonna put the Mac Mini, I'm gonna put the NAS, I'm gonna put the studio, I got all my uh, network switches and stuff. I got some, uh, I'm gonna do a Raspberry Pi cluster. All kinds of stuff, I'm so stoked, yes.

• 32:50Wes Bos?

  That's sick. Well, speaking of 3D printing, we are getting to a point where generating parts is, or at least getting you, like automating a good chunk of the design of the part is is almost there. Lot of it is just like, eh, it's not very good, but then some of the stuff is relatively surprising. Like you built a case for your um, your, what's it called? Pop, Prom Boy, thank you.

• 33:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes, and and and I use NURB dev to do that. The cool thing about NURB, if you are using agents to design 3D prints, is that it makes sure all of the allowances, all of the, all of the connections, everything fits together and all that stuff. So it's not just like envisioning, here's what it could look like in multiple parts. It's actually checking to make sure everything uh, fits together and will work together. So uh, I really like NURB for that. It worked really well for me in that project. I also use NURB to uh, design a Warhammer 40K stand for my son. So Warhammer 40K miniatures, you paint them. And uh, we were, we paint, we paint them together every Sunday in the kitchen.

• 34:00Scott Tolinski?

  And what happened was, is that when we get done painting, we would just leave all the minis on the kitchen counter. And obviously Courtney was like, you gotta get all these minis off the counter, like, because it's like, oh, you paint them, you're done. You know, you gotta transport them back to the basement. So I was like, oh, it'd be really cool to have like a display stand so he could like, look at his work, but also have something that you could carry. And they all have different sized bases for the different miniatures and stuff. So I built a, and I'll try to make this open source. I built a, a stand that you put, you clip and glue together. And then it has different uh, stands that you can swap out that puts them on kind of like a stadium riser, based on which characters you have or whatever.

• 34:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Scott Tolinski?

  And that way you can just lift and carry this whole thing upstairs, paint, put it back on here. But it also doubles as like a display case for them. So it's pretty neat.

• 34:51Wes Bos?

  The MCP server for software you use occasionally is absolutely killer, right? This MCP for DaVinci Resolve, where sometimes it's much faster just to type in what you want. Or if you don't know how to do something, it's easy to just ask, hey, can you do X, Y, and Z, or show me how to do it? Um, and then like, like a Fusion 360, right? There's so many hobbyists. Yeah, Blender is, it, people are posting amazing things with it. And it, that's not to say like, it will replace the artists that do these types of things. But as somebody who's like a casual user, a hobbyist, and you don't know why you can't resize something, or there's like, the Infusion 360 of these things called constraints.

• 35:35Wes Bos?

  Um, and if, if you invalidate a constraint, you can't like resize it in a specific way. And figuring out why that is, if you don't understand what constraints are, is very frustrating for people. So being able to simply just type in, in English and say, hey, why can't I resize this thing? Or scale it up from the middle instead of there. Those are such common things.

• 35:58Scott Tolinski?

  I know. You know how hard putting, I got this right here. Do you know how hard putting this hexagon pattern in this 3D printed uh, stand that I built was? My god, that took me so long. And that's the exact type of thing I don't want to have to spend time on, because it's just, it's just busy work, even though I wanted better airflow. And actually, Wes, this thing was causing my devices to get really hot. So I put NURB on it and I said, hey, you know, I want these things to be stacked, um, but this design isn't working for me. Everything's getting really hot. And it like redesigned something with better airflow and uh, it, it looks just as fine.

• 36:39Scott Tolinski?

  I, and I'm currently using the new version of it over here and everything's remaining way cooler. It's uh, yes.

• 36:47Wes Bos?

  Beautiful.

• 36:48Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I'm gonna be printing some rack parts too. That'll be fun too. I'm gonna be printing some rack to do all my custom stuff. Whatever I want in my rack, I'm gonna uh, print it in there. So it's gonna be great.

• 36:59Wes Bos?

  Other things I don't think are gonna stand up. Travel. I think yes, absolutely to organizing complicated data, right? You've got flights, you've got pickup times, you've got hotels, you've got to figure all of this data. You want to put it all into one thing, even just using it as a dump for like, here are things I need to remember about my trip. Great way. I don't think, we talked about this with, with CJ on the livestream when you were gone, which was,

• 37:26Wes Bos?

  everybody gets the same travel itinerary, you know? I'm going to the city, tell me what to do. And then the lines are just unbelievably long at the things, because everybody gets recommended the exact same thing. And I don't know, that, that kind of drives me crazy. It's like spend a little, have a little bit of taste yourself, have a little bit of an opinion as to like what types of stuff you want to enjoy. And don't just add, do the same thing that everybody else is doing.

• 37:54Scott Tolinski?

  As somebody who did uh, recently use AI in travel, not to, not to plan certain events, but what, what it did do really well for us is like, for instance, we were going to the Peas Gloria, and I'm sorry folks if that's not how you say it correctly, but it's where they had Honor Majesty's Secret Service was filmed. It's a cool location on the top of a mountain. It was one of the coolest things we saw in Switzerland. But getting to this, the, the gondola where that was from our hotel, we like, were really struggling with those plans. Like, how do we even do this? What buses do we take? What do we do here? How do we get? Because it wasn't just like hop on a train and you're there. And so it did a really good job of building us out a way to get there that worked and was sensible and was easy.

• 38:37Scott Tolinski?

  That like, we, we had the hardest time finding on Google or Reddit, so.

• 38:41Wes Bos?

  Interesting. Especially uh, because a lot of times the information won't be in English. And you can use translate all you want, but you still have to sort of keep that all up in your head. Whereas like translation with AI often will take in all of the context of, of everything else that you're working on and give you much better translation out the other end. I often think about that. You know, when you get like a product from Amazon and they're like, the translation is just absolutely awful.

• 39:11Scott Tolinski?

  In the, in the instructions or something?

• 39:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah, in the instructions or whatever, like how to do it. And it's like, it's clearly because somebody used a word for word translator here or, or tried to do it themselves. And I often think like, how is this not solved yet? You know, like,

• 39:31Wes Bos?

  proposals, job applications, all of that type of stuff. I don't think that, that, that type of stuff is going to, to pan out. And I think we're going to have to change how like request for a proposal, all of that type of stuff works, because the people on the other end are just getting onslaughted with all of this stuff. And uh, and the answer may, may be, yeah, use AI on the other end. But I don't know, I, I just feel for the people that are trying to sift through job applications and try to find a good person, when all of this stuff is just, everyone's getting hammered. This is a, a really interesting post from Matt Stouffer. He's, he actually listens to the show.

• 40:12Wes Bos?

  Uh, he says, this is the first time we've done a full round of hiring, I, I open up, I E, open up a job. It's the entire internet in the age of AI. We had a list of questions each applicant has to fill out. And it's wild how many people have their AI answers all of those questions, threaded with examples. What do you think about the Oxford comma? I don't care about the answers, but I care about how they respond. Every single AI mentions reduces ambiguity in list, every single one. Like, I don't think people realize how everybody is like pooping out the exact same answers to these things. Everybody complains about how AI is random and not predictable, predictable and, and not the same thing every single time.

• 40:54Wes Bos?

  And it, it is very predictable, because they have to add randomness to it. Because it's, at the end of the day, it is math. If we didn't add randomness to it, you'd get the exact same answer every single time.

• 41:08Wes Bos?

  Is it pronounced gif or Jif? Most AIs use the word gift to explain, but the funny thing is, is some say it's a hard G and some say it's a soft A.

• 41:19Wes Bos?

  What is your favorite movie? AIs apparently love The Pursuit of Happiness, Inception, and The Martian. Holy crap, is it so difficult of a question to have to farm it out to AI? I refuse to answer the personal questions on a job application.

• 41:34Wes Bos?

  Unbelievable. Like, and I, I feel for people applying to jobs as well because like,

• 41:39Scott Tolinski?

  Don't, yeah, how do you get noticed?

• 41:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I applied to like 20,000 jobs. Of course, I'm gonna try to automate this thing. So now I'm just spraying and praying. But man, it's unbelievable that everybody's just using the same answers. Like, you can stand out so easily by just like not doing that.

• 41:59Scott Tolinski?

  I think, I think especially with the job application, the one thing that has not changed with this stuff is that personal connections, referrals, those types of things.

• 42:08Wes Bos?

  Even more important.

• 42:09Scott Tolinski?

  They've always been important, but now, yeah, definitely more important, for sure. So what are you using AI for that you actually think it's effective for and not just contributing to the world's slop here? Something that is actually effective for you in your personal life? We want to know in the comments because I'm interested in this stuff as well. I'm always looking for new and interesting things that I haven't tried it for. So now let's get into the part of the show where we call sick picks and shameless plugs. Wes, do you have a sick pick for us today? Something that you can pick that you find to be sick that, well, you're enjoying right now? Could be anything.

• 42:42Wes Bos?

  I've got the best sick pick ever for you. So you know, when you have like chairs on like hardwood floor and you go buy those little pads that you put on the bottom of the chair so that you can slide them around relatively easy?

• 42:55Scott Tolinski?

  I see what you're doing here.

• 42:56Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So those things are awful because they fall off all the time and they get sticky and whatever. They're just like floor protectors, right? So my mom put me onto these. They are little silicone socks that have the protector glued to the bottom.

• 43:13Scott Tolinski?

  You putting socks on chairs?

• 43:15Wes Bos?

  They are amazing. And like, it's like a clear silicone sock with a little piece of felt on the bottom and they just, they hang onto the chair so well. They're just like butter moving across the floors. You're not going to scratch your hardwood. And it's just like one of those things. I know people have a hard time, like, oh, Amazon, so much crap or whatever. But like, there's, there's a certain category of product that Amazon has made 10,000 times better. I've probably bought those crappy little sticky floor protectors a thousand times in my life. And I just, it's just such a crappy product. And I, but I've never given any thought to it. But like, some bright minds figured out that you can

• 43:56Wes Bos?

  make these amazing silicone socks for your chairs and they just move like butter.

• 44:02Scott Tolinski?

  Huh. You've got silicone socks for your chairs? That's crazy. I, I've never heard of this, so I, I will be checking this out. I am going to sick pick my new backpack. I talked about this in the live stream. I got a backpack from Nomadix. Nomadix, if you want to sponsor me, I would be down. This backpack looks great. It's awesome. It's a sick backpack. It's got a microfiber little portion. It weighs nothing. It's great. Has a lot of compartments. I just took it on our international trip and everything like that. And my God.

• 44:34Wes Bos?

  Side pocket. That's nice.

• 44:36Scott Tolinski?

  It's got two side pockets, so you can put an iPad and a computer in here if you want to. Oh, here's the peace Gloria. Okay. So no, I, I had a great time with this backpack. It's been very nice. It looks very nice. Whoa, camera, get focused here. There we go. I had a great time with it and they sent me a free fanny pack and I actually used the fanny pack on the entire trip. I've never used a fanny pack before.

• 45:00Wes Bos?

  Fanny packs are so key.

• 45:01Scott Tolinski?

  I'm kind of a fanny pack. Yeah, I'm kind of in now. It worked really well for me. I put my glasses in there. I put my Invisalign in there. I use that bad boy. But yeah, so it's a nice little company. I did some research. Apparently they're known for like their microfiber towels and cloths and stuff, of which they give you one with the backpack. So I didn't know too much about that. Oh, wow. This is interesting. An ice bandana. They make an ice bandana, a bandana that unzips that you can put ice into it. Very interesting. Either way, it's not like some kind of like crappy brand new company, although this is their first backpack. And I did say, I, I did like this backpack quite a bit.

• 45:40Wes Bos?

  How, how do you spell it? Nomadic? Because nomadic.ca has nothing but backpacks.

• 45:45Scott Tolinski?

  No-maddix with an X dot co.

• 45:50Wes Bos?

  Okay. All right. There's like a thousand companies that sell backpacks that are selling. Ah, freaking Shopify. I hate Shopify websites. I go to it, pops up. Do you want to go to the Canada website? No. Close it. You got 10% off. No, close it. Cookies. And they're like, stop. Let me see the website. Shopify? Come on.

• 46:13Scott Tolinski?

  Well, well, link the, we'll link the, the website in the show notes for you. It's a beautiful looking backpack. It very much follows like the topo kind of design aesthetic.

• 46:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I like this a lot. Cool. Well, I'm going to be in the market for another backpack soon. So send me your recommendations as well. Cause we both have the, what's it called? Peak Design Everyday 30 Liter. It's been awesome for like eight years, nine years, but it's, it's heavy. And that's, that's what you're saying as well, right? It's, it's just too heavy to schlep around on a big trip.

• 46:45Scott Tolinski?

  I'm like leaving conferences and my neck and my back hurt. The other two things as well. And it's just like, yes, not great.

• 46:53Wes Bos?

  It's, I, I love it for its functionality, but, and I love it for traveling, but if you gotta like, yeah, walk around at a conference with your backpack on, it's just, it's too heavy. Especially with the big 16 inch laptop in it. All right. Thanks, everybody for tuning in. We'll catch you later.

• 47:09Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.