I nerd out on business, finance, investing, and software. I built a farm management software company, Harvest Profit (acquired by John Deere in 2020).
Fargo, ND
Joined December 2011
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We are launching cohort 5 of AIonYourFarm.com next week. We have some fun stuff planned for this cohort! Sign-ups are open for a couple more days
Simple prompt to ChatGPT Codex, "Please use computer use to help me cancel these subscriptions." with a picture of the subscriptions from my credit card statement. It completed it in 3 min, 45 sec. $1,188 saved.
(I try a ton of different tools but the ones that are sticky are quite limited)
44,307 pages processed so far. Running at 20-25k per day.
I’m going to spin up a few VPS (computers in the cloud) to speed it up!
There’s a source of data I’m interested in that contains ~2 million pages of PDFs.
Pages can be viewed for free or downloaded for $.50/page.
Nothing in their terms of service prohibits me from taking screenshots of the PDFs in their viewer and stitching them back together into the original file.
But this is such a time-consuming task that it would take years for me to do manually!
So I built a system where ChatGPT is doing it all for me.
I’m using an old MacBook Pro to work in a continuous loop to download all 2 million pages.
After a few hiccups, my database is starting to fill up!
It takes a few seconds per page so it’s going be a lengthy process.
(I’m not going to resell or distribute these docs so I’m comfortable with the use case.)
Steve replaced Quickbooks with Claude
Here's my personal DTN/Bloomberg-like terminal I'm building!
- Left screen: weather/markets/cameras
- Middle screen: messaging/AI work
- Right screen: business goals/metrics/to-do list/news
Keyboard shortcuts: new chat, new email, new/done to-do, agent approve, map zoom, pomodoro/focus timer, new/open document/spreadsheet (a lot more to come!)
Their favorite thing to do on vacation so far is to lay here and watch the fire.
They recently taught themselves how to use matches and lighters so hopefully this fascination with fire doesn’t get us in too much trouble!
Nick Horob retweeted
Ok. These are open government records and I’m not violating any terms of service
There’s a source of data I’m interested in that contains ~2 million pages of PDFs.
Pages can be viewed for free or downloaded for $.50/page.
Nothing in their terms of service prohibits me from taking screenshots of the PDFs in their viewer and stitching them back together into the original file.
But this is such a time-consuming task that it would take years for me to do manually!
So I built a system where ChatGPT is doing it all for me.
I’m using an old MacBook Pro to work in a continuous loop to download all 2 million pages.
After a few hiccups, my database is starting to fill up!
It takes a few seconds per page so it’s going be a lengthy process.
(I’m not going to resell or distribute these docs so I’m comfortable with the use case.)
There’s a source of data I’m interested in that contains ~2 million pages of PDFs.
Pages can be viewed for free or downloaded for $.50/page.
Nothing in their terms of service prohibits me from taking screenshots of the PDFs in their viewer and stitching them back together into the original file.
But this is such a time-consuming task that it would take years for me to do manually!
So I built a system where ChatGPT is doing it all for me.
I’m using an old MacBook Pro to work in a continuous loop to download all 2 million pages.
After a few hiccups, my database is starting to fill up!
It takes a few seconds per page so it’s going be a lengthy process.
(I’m not going to resell or distribute these docs so I’m comfortable with the use case.)
I find it shocking to see how well the housing market has held up with higher interest rates.
I continue to think we’re going to see much more material weakness than this in the coming months, but I’ve been wrong about this for quite a while!
By comparison, the one well that I have acreage under has produced a little over 100k bbls since it was drilled 13 years ago. Ouch
🤖 Made with AI
One of my favorite shows, Landman, and my recent trips back to oil country has led me down a rabbit hole….
I’ve been digging around looking at Bakken oil wells after my trip back home. Check out this whopper!
140k bbls in its first month!
They are playing with the house’s money now
Nick Horob retweeted
We promised receipts on our new rainfall nowcast. Here they are.
The full validation report is now available, breaking down our accuracy across three separate benchmarks using numerous scoring methods.
Links to the interactive version and PDF whitepaper in the comments.
OpenAI and Anthropic likely have gross margins of 80% or more.
They get a lot of bad press for the red ink on their bottom lines, and it's deserved. But those losses come from the cost of training models, which seems to be a mix of ongoing expense and one-time investment.
It reminds me of all the bad press Amazon got back in the day for its negative net income.
The big difference here, though, is that frontier AI companies have much weaker competitive moats than companies like Amazon.
And their main customer base, developers, tends not to be very loyal.
I still believe we'll see an explosion in demand for the 24/7 intelligence AI provides. But markets do a good job of competing away excess margins at companies that lack moats like network effects or huge economies of scale.
It's going to be very interesting to see how these companies' profit margins hold up.
I’ve always been fascinated by the domination of DTN terminals in farm country back in the day.
I’m tempted to make my own version of a DTN or Bloomberg-like terminal that is customized all of my random use cases, such as:
- Weather
- Markets
- Email newsletter creation/stats
- Zoom/Google meets
- Ad tracking
- AI agent chats
- Spreadsheets/docs
- (Many other use cases)
A fun aspect of it would be to create a customizable keypad/controls to drive the whole thing.
I'm having fun making these personal finance cartoons. Here are some of the characters I've created....
I own land in NE Montana and wanted the state’s water well logs around it.
It's a rather monotonous process, so I asked ChatGPT's Codex feature to do it for me.
Codex pulled 531 logs for me using computer use and it then built a report for me. Shockingly good.
Unprompted, it gave me two views:
- Every nearby well + GPM
- A zoomed-out map of high-flow irrigation wells in the region
