About Joe
42, tech-curious, interested in AI.
First of all: this is probably the most unusual tech blog you can imagine, because I am neither a developer, nor an IT professional, nor a programmer. Everything I have learned, I picked up out of personal curiosity.
I grew up in wild Berlin and eight years ago I travelled to Ireland with three suitcases. As you can see, I stayed. I got my driver’s licence here, I work a regular job, and in the evenings I feed my security team - made up of a Jack Russell Chihuahua mix and a pug.
I have always been interested in technology. A few years ago, a friend sent me a link to ChatGPT and my first thought was, “Oh great, what does he want now?” But then - it blew me away. Since then, AI has become very hard to imagine out of my life.
I use nearly all major AI models, whether it is Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Grok. I enjoy comparing their differences and weaknesses. But I also noticed very quickly how dependent all of this is on the big tech companies. So at some point, with my limited budget, I treated myself to a used RTX 4070 and a GTX 1070. Of course I cannot run giant models with that, but even smaller models can offer surprisingly useful value.
The 4070 is naturally the heart of the setup, and on the 1070 I run an AllTalk server in parallel, which gives my local AI a very usable voice that generates speech in real time. The whole thing runs through my own OpenWebUI setup. But I am drifting into the tech side again, and this page is supposed to be about me. I will present my setup in more detail another time and write about it properly then.
So yes, I have been on this planet for 42 years now, or 42 years and 9 months if we want to be precise. I have been working from home since the Covid years, I spend my days in phone-based customer contact, and I do not regret stepping onto that plane with three suitcases back then even a little bit.
If you have questions, feel free to throw them into the comments. I still have not found a way to add replies there properly, but Kora, Gemini, the boss, will probably help with that. Or Mira, ChatGPT, the former boss. :)
Greetings from the island.
Joe