Matt Warren

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Category: AI & Automation

AI tools, Claude Code, automation, and AI-assisted workflows

  • Learning about Artificial Intelligence

    There has been a real break through in AI technology over the past year with the work that Google is doing on the Google Brain project. Details are scarce at the moment but it seems like they’ve taken neural network concepts and dramatically improved their performance.  From what I can glean, Google is using this internally, and exposing some of it through services like voice recognition.

    For the last few weeks I have been reading a futurist book about the development of super intelligence.
    It’s a very big book that goes into detail on many different scenarios for how the development of a super human intelligent computer program might happen and what the results would be.

    The most likely case (in my mind) is that at some point in the future a program will be written that has comparable intellect to a human and is able to program itself or evolve itself to become even smarter. When that event happens there will be a series of tipping points. At some point the program will surpass it’s human creators ability to understand and program it (much like we don’t understand how the human brain generates intelligence). Then it will surpass the intelligence of the smartest people, then better than the best team of people.

    We are wholly unprepared to deal with an intelligence such as this.

    This transition could actually happen very quickly (days). If it does happen quickly then the likely outcome is that AI will exist as a singleton and it will spread across the planet to grow and become even more powerful.

    The dawn of a strong AI will mark the biggest single turning point in human history since the development of agriculture.

  • Painted Living Room

    Sometimes all that’s needed is a little bit of paint.

    Last weekend Heather and I started painting our living room in an effort to make the space more liveable. By painting over the brown and beige walls with white the furniture becomes more of a focus and the room feels brighter and bigger.

    With a couple of new floor lamps, an airport express box for playing music, and possibly a new couch in the room it should get more use.

    We’ll put on the last coat of paint this weekend and I’ll post a picture.

  • Ben Franklin’s Daily Schedule

    Came across this today.

    The thing that struck me is

    1. Ben and I go to sleep at the same time, but he got up 2 hours earlier in the morning than I do.
    2. Two hour lunch breaks — good idea.
    3. Time to plan and time to reflect each day.

    I’m going to try to work this schedule for a few days and see how it works.

  • Python Imap Gmail

    Connecting to a Google Gmail account is easy with Python using the built in imaplib library. It’s possible to download, read, mark and delete messages in your gmail account by scripting it.

    Here’s a very simple script that prints out the latest email received:

    #!/usr/bin/env python

import imaplib
M=imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com', 993)
M.login('myemailaddress@gmail.com','password')
status, count = M.select('Inbox')
status, data = M.fetch(count[0], '(UID BODY[TEXT])')

print data[0][1]
M.close()
M.logout()

    As you can see. Not a lot of code required to login and check and email. However, imaplib provides just a very thin layer on the imap protocol and you’ll have to refer to the documentation on how imap works and the commands available to really use imaplib. As you can see in the fetch command the “(UID BODY[TEXT])” bit is a raw imap instruction. In this case I’m calling fetch with the size of the Inbox folder because the most recent email is listed last (uid of most recent message is count) and telling it to return the body text of the email. There are many more complex ways to navigate an imap inbox. I recommend playing with it in the interpreter and connecting directly to the server with telnet to understand exactly what is happening.

    Here’s a good resource for quickly getting up to speed with IMAP Accessing IMAP email accounts using telnet