Earlier this year I found a leak in the house and called a local plumbing business. It was after hours, and a dreaded robot voice answered my call. I was fully prepared to spend the next 10 minutes rewording my issue over and over, hoping to hit the magic key word it actually understand (and also spell out my weird custom email domain). Surprisingly, this robot understood every single sentence I said, and repeated back in a slightly different, more professional way for me to confirm. It also captured my email address accurately in one try, without questioning my weird domain name. That's the moment I realized it's a LLM. It asked a few more smart follow-ups, then ended the call. The next morning, the owner called me and jumped straight into solutions, pricing, and his availability, without any more question or BS, because the LLM already told him everything he needed to know.

That's the most pleasant customer service call I have ever experienced. I wish more business could adopt similar approach. I don't mind talking to AI. In fact, instead of a live agent, I actually prefer to talk to your LLM, so my issue can be quickly triaged to the right human who actually understand my situation.

I am evaluating a new machine to replace my laptop & desktop for coding (Python, Go, React), data exploration, running containers and low resource business day-to-day (Microsoft Suite, Slack, light image editing etc.) - not necessarily all the same time but often.. I travel a medium amount so can't just use a desktop but running both seems cumbersome.

The M4 MacBook Airs are very tempting and I think the size & weight of the 15" is not as offputting as it once was. However I agree with the criticism in this article. A lesser quality display and lacking a little power (M4 Pro option would be nice).

A 14" MacBook Pro is the current draw. Slightly heavier but option for M4 Pro as well as more memory (up to 48GB) as well as nanotexture for out and about.

I love the idea of the Framework 13" machines with Ubuntu. Almost same weight as a 13" Air and with strong upgradeability. Disadvantages (to me) are the battery life on Linux is significantly less than an Apple device (although hard to find exact numbers), and even with the new Ryzen AI Max processors and the DDR5 memory, speed is much lower compared to the M-series soldered on a chip (although I'm open to counter points that this difference in speed is not worth it).

The Apple software ecosystem is a soft grab but to be honest there are options to Apple Photos which is the one I use the most.

My general method for things like this is to:

1. Get a .dot file of the database. Many tools will export this. 2. Open the .dot in a tool I built for the purpose. 3. Select the tables I'm interested in, and export a subset of the .dot file representing just those tables and relationships. 4. Hand that subset .dot file to the LLM and say, "given this schema, write a query -- here's what I want: <rest of the request here>"

That gets the job done 60% of the time. Sometimes when there's an incorrect shortcut relationship resulting in the wrong join I'll have to redirect with something like, "You need to go through <table list> to relate <table X> to <table Y>" That gets my success rate up above 95%. I'm not doing ridiculous queries, but I am doing recursive aggregations successfully.