“Welcome” might be a bit strong. It implies a greeting at the door—but at this point, 2025 has already unpacked and made itself comfortable. It’s more like, “You’ve been here a while and had a look around—how do you like the place?”

It’s been way too long since my last post. Life’s been busy—building a house, moving a couple of times, dealing with the closing, all of it. My focus shifted, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on things behind the scenes.

Unfortunately, I did get sidetracked from Lidar… But like just about everyone else, I started diving deeper into AI. I’ve been using it more and more because it’s turning out to be a really useful tool.

I set up a couple of small systems to help with workflow. The first is an email content checker. It takes submissions from a form, sends the content to OpenAI, and checks it against a few parameters to determine if the message is likely legitimate. The form already uses a CAPTCHA, but that doesn’t stop human spammers.

The second is a prototype website (not public yet). It’s a proof of concept I built around five months ago, so if it moves forward, it’ll probably need to be rebuilt from scratch. The idea is: the company can upload documents or attach a relevant database, and the system parses it all into a local FAISS database. Then, paired with a local Ollama instance, it returns relevant internal pages based on a user’s search—kind of like a mini search engine. Granted, most of this project was built using AI, but I had a strong hand in it!

Going forward, I’m not just “playing around” anymore. I’m on a mission to figure out how to stay current in this fast-moving, ever-changing world.

AI assisted in writing this post. Just to be clear—every post before this one was written entirely by me. This one? Still me… but reviewed by AI. It made a few suggestions, and I took some of them. Because when a multi-billion-dollar tool offers advice, you kinda have to listen. At least a little.