AI Adventures on a Valentine's Weekend

Valentine’s day has always been like any other day for me, except this year it was a rare casual Friday - the day that is the harbinger of relief in the monotonous melancholy of life in Delhi. I woke up as usual and got to reading the news during my commute, when this article from Knappily caught my attention: A Scam called Valentine’s Day.

A quote mentioned in the above article caught my eye:

I would like to extend a warm thanks to Hallmark, the official sponsor of Valentine’s Day, for reminding me that without a significant other, how truly worthless my life is.

Valentine’s Day may be a scam people, but one’s feelings aren’t… so we must cherish the moments we have with our loved ones.

As you sow

A month ago, I had made a script for myself and set it up on my Raspberry Pi to place orders on Amazon inspired from this xkcd and this website: Bobcat In A Box:

Here are some of its features:

• I set it to send me stuff based on my browsing history during some special holidays. Google and Facebook show you relevant ads based on your browsing habits, this script just ships stuff. :P
• Set it to operate within a constraint of 100 USD (7000 INR) in total. It periodically checks Amazon (both amazon.in and amazon.com) around holidays (±5 days) to see if there is a sale and will check possible items of my interest based on a weightage formula of my own interests through my browsing history and the item prices. Basically, it tries to assign a monetary value to my potential interests and tries to ship me at most 3 cheapest products out of my interests.

So shall you reap

Curiously, I had forgotten all about this stuff, till I heard the doorbell this morning, and in came 2 packages (a big and a small box). The 2 packages are okay, the 2 mistakes I did are definitely not:

• The 70 dollar stupid mistake: I present my first package, The Complete Box Set of MacGyver. I’ve been meaning to watch this show for sometime and have spent the last month browsing some reviews of this show. While the series is amazing, I’m out of 70/100 dollars in one go. I gotta set some spending limits per order obviously. Maybe a grand gift once a year, simple packages throughout the remaining holidays. Either way, I found a bug:
  
• Semantics matter: The second package was unexpectedly, a box of erasers worth 60 INR (Less than a dollar). Its been ages since I have used an eraser, so how did I get it? A quick browser history search led me to my next bug and it turned out, that I was searching for a Scratch Eraser Kit.

What I wanted	What I got

Moral of the story

Well, a gift no matter big or small, still counts as a gift. But like that XKCD stick figure, I am done playing with AI’s for now 😅

Happy Valentine’s Day everyone. My weekend’s set watching MacGyver, eating pizza and I guess, making the most out of my new erasers. Its been a long time since I picked up a pencil, so I guess I’ll go draw or scribble something. I’ve got 20 erasers after all, and plenty of time during this nice weekend.*

Update (March 2023): Looking back at this article 3 years later, a lot of strides have been made in the field of artificial intelligence and everyone is jumping on the ChatGPT bandwagon. Maybe some time, I’ll try it too.