magic computers

Vin started referring to his macbook as his “blade” at some point and I thought it was fun, but it never clicked for me. Sure, I use my computer a lot for learning and “making” things. Everything I design (a lot) goes through CAD on my computer. But CAD never made me fall in love with my computer. If ever there was a tool I loved, it would be my prusa mk3s.

In October, Vin stayed with me for a week in SF. We hung out a lot that week, and every night when I got home from work he was hacking on Cursor to ship a new personal site. That week he put me on to using LLMs. I’d tried them before, but after that week with him the habit stuck and I started using them more often for pretty much everything.

This week, with chatgpt and o1, I made a piece of software just for me. It’s super simple, it takes the files from camera sd card and copies them to any folder, organizing them by date like this:

Root/

├── 2021/

│   └── 2021-12/

│       ├── 2021-12-31/

├── 2022/

│   └── 2022-11/

│       ├── 2022-11-05/

If a given date folder doesn’t exist, it creates it.

It’s a hackier version of how lightroom imports media from an sd card. Which is all I really wanted, because I don’t edit my photos anymore (thanks 5D Classic) I just wanted a simple way to import photos and keep my library organized.

o1 actually managed to one-shot the solution with a shell script using exiftool.

Since then, I’ve been looking at my macbook differently, in awe and reverence. Until that day computers only afforded me the utility that software developers made available in apps & websites. But now I have the tools to make my computer do whatever I want.

For the first time (to me) computers feel magical.