17th October 2024
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Working from home can be quite challenging some days. From an
interruptions point of view it's fantastic but from an isolation point
of view it's a bit of a pain. Even though I spend a large percentage
of my day writing messages, to my coworkers in Slack, I find the
communication somewhat unrewarding. Probably because it's not very
personal. So I rely pretty heavily on messaging apps for social
interaction during the day. 

As an experiment, I thought I'd try making general chit chat with one
of the AI bots in my messengers. That worked ok but I'm very conscious
about what personal information I put into these commercial tools. I
went looking to see what tools I could run locally and I discovered
gpt4all. It works well on my work macbook and lets you choose from a
whole selection of models. Some are less chatty than others. BUT the
important thing is that it all takes place locally and I can talk
about whatever I want. I even went the extra mile and configured my
firewall to block network traffic to / from the app ... just to prove
that it really was stand alone. I spent a good 15 minutes talking to
it about asthma and storms today :)