Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 7mm f1.7 1/1,250s ISO24

B6 701, A321-231, 07455

I got an OpenAI Dot for personal use and I'm trying to figure out if it's worth being on the more expensive Pro plan required to use it.

A Dot is a persistant agent with its own computer. It can connect to yours as well, I haven't tried that so far. A less clawy OpenClaw with no need for a Mac Mini.

There is plenty of competition, Meta Muse of course, GrokBot, numerous startups. Dot appealed to me because I've been loving Astra in Codex. For various reasons I'm not on Facebook or X and have no desire to return.

So what is it good for?

Software development on the go was the main draw for me. So far it's fixed three bugs and shiped a feature on this blog, all via GitHub integration and the Dots ability to drive Codex. It also has a connection to my Todost and has added tasks for me to review the bug fixes later. The blog ships straight from GitHub and was live as soon as I approved the PR. Nothing very complicated so far but I'm really digging the ease of use for knocking these off.

I want to do a better job of going out for dinner from time to time and it has scheduled a nice French restaurant complete with calendar appointment and reminder. If all goes well it will continue to do this every few weeks.

I'm travelling heavily at the moment and it booked me an Uber for a trip to the airport this morning. My next stop is New Orleans and the first hurricane of the year is about to hit the Gulf Coast. The Dot has been monitoring the weather and my flight and sending updates every few hours which has lowered my stress level. Lastly it has just emailed a hotel to try and negotiate an early checkin.

The downsides so far are risk and platform support. It has a lot of access and so if it goes off the rails it could do some real damage. Is the convenience worth the risk? I suspect it will be, and I've let it do more as I've come to trust it more.

I do a lot of Windows and Android development and the Linux box it has access to is great for logging into Uber but not so good for these workloads. I might need another virtual box somewhere for it to be really useful to me.

I plan to update this post as I learn more...

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 2mm f1.7 1/1,000s ISO38

SK 927, A330-343, 0496

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 20mm f2.8 1/160s ISO81

SK 1797

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 2mm f1.7 1/230s ISO38

AY 1021

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 2mm f1.7 1/4,500s ISO38

AY 1166

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 7mm f1.7 1/25s ISO315

JL 753, 787-9, 66514

Google Pixel 11 Pro XL 7mm f1.7 1/320s ISO32

JL 57, 787-9

Hyperlapse of a drive from Santa Cruz to San Francisco (up Highway 1, via Half Moon Bay). Shot on Rivian Drive Cam.

I just released Catfood.Shapefile 3.00 on NuGet and GitHub.

There is a breaking change with bounding boxes. The bounding box returned by the library has been broken since the first version. From 3.00 the correct bounding box is returned, but you can opt into the old behavior by passing BoundingBoxConvention.Legacy to the constructor.

DbfDataReader has replaced OleDb for accessing metadata. This will fix platform support issues for OleDb. It necessitated a move to .NET Standard 2.1, so use Shapefile 2.00 if you need .NET Standard 2.00.

I added support for missing shapes (M and Z variants mostly), and the library will now handle missing files so you can read shapes with just a .shp file if that's all you have.