351 new ideas this week

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Real things everyday people got it to do, and how to try them yourself.

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He got tired of badly formatted PDF financials, so he built a converter that turns a quarter's 25 reports into clean Excel in one batch

He is not a developer; he is a management trainee at a company made up of five entities. Every quarter, full financials go out to the management team: a batch of at least 25 PDFs from their SAGE accounting software, several of them over 20 pages long. He spent weeks reviewing test files and batches and debugging formatting mistakes to build his own converter, after finding that the AI models themselves could not do the job faithfully on larger documents: they would combine rows and categories or produce totals that added up but were not identical. The AI itself told him the task would need a hard coded deterministic app. His converter can now batch format the whole set at once, with the bolding, blank rows, sum lines and column sizing he is picky about.

HobbiesPartly worked

The AI rescued my old blog and every Linux Journal piece I ever wrote

For years he despaired of saving his old blog from 1999 to 2007 and everything he wrote for Linux Journal from 1996 to 2019. He asked the AI for help, and the AI rescued both sets of writing and put them back online at searls.com, though some Linux Journal pieces are still missing.

This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.

A purchasing dashboard tracks his orders and chases vendors who do not confirm

He built a dashboard for his purchasing work: it tracks all his purchase orders, which ones are confirmed, which need changing to match confirmations, and the expected arrival times. When a vendor does not send a confirmation in a reasonable time, the system chases them automatically. He says his metrics are better and the job is less stressful.

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Every idea is a real post from someone who tried it, summarized in our words, with a link to the original. App names are swapped for plain words.