Building the war room of my dreams

While waiting for bits to arrive I’ve had another long session trying to convince these ‘AI’ things to do my bidding. This time the subject was the paint racks and I like to think that I’ve completed the planning phase for that part.

Custom rack design and plan

In the initial concept I was going to use the Ikea Skadis boards, but that restricted placement of the shelves a bit too much. I did keep the layouts for the 3 sizes as they did help me predict the space required.

Of course … all of this is theory. I’ve yet to buy the materials and execute the plan. And we all know what happens to plans and reality. 😉

Got some shopping to do before that can happen.

Given that the profile picture is from the ‘Dr. Strangelove’ movie here is a weird factoid:

Stanley Kubrick wanted the tablecloth on the War Room table to be green, so the actors would feel like they were playing a game of poker over the world’s fate.

source : imDb

I can’t help but wonder if I should look into this.
It would be kind of cool, but it also will prevent me from using the table as a hobby surface without additional precautions.

With Claude.AI not being good at design I asked Gemini for assistance. I won’t bore you with details, but the bloody thing f*cked up the design when I thought we had it locked in as I was asking for refinements and small changes.

Luckily the ‘almost perfect’ version of the design was available, so I simply made a screenshot and continued our conversation from there.

After much cursing and a few more iterations this is now the design:

Final result

The text will be done in vinyl stickers ordered from a webshop that allows for personalized vinyl text stickers. I haven’t specified the ‘secure access 07’ text.

And of course as I was creating the entry for my project Gemini’s idiocy struck again. At least I got the image of the final design saved now.

Gemini has a nasty habit of wanting to create interactive webpages when all I really want is an image that helps me understand the design. I guess that is because this one has been taught to create webpages, so it tends to fall back (and or hallucinate) that anything you ask it to do is aimed at creating a webpage instead of simply presenting content. Claude.AI isn’t as obsessed with webpage-design, but you do have to tell it to generate HTML output whenever you want to visualise the design ideas it has suggested.

While trying to get it to include the door to the room in a similar design things went of the rails again. There probably is a trick to keeping the thing on track, but that’s a future me problem.

Anyways … after a bit of cursing I managed to convince it to help me write a plan of attack as well as a shopping list. All I need to do now is wait for parts to arrive and get to work.

It would be sooo nice to have a laser cutter so I could add the little greeblies (sp?) without having to scour the web for parts that may or may not be any good.

This is always the hardest part of any project, isn’t it ?

Hell-o-ween has come and gone, so it’s time to go back to this project and attempt to get these ‘AI’ things to do my bidding or at least help me with inspiration and design.

I had kept the initial prompt that started my consersation with Gemini and tried it with Claude.AI For some reason that thing recommended Ikea furniture for pretty much everything, including suggesting picture shelves ‘Mosslanda’ for paint storage.

It did ask me for my priorities (gaming vs hobby) and help me go into detail on how to setup my paint station for batch painting.

The one thing Claude.AI is not good at is the creation of documents & lists during such conversations. Gemini is definitely much better at this.

And of course once again I ran into the brick wall that is the ‘message size’ and time limit. To me this suggests it is best to use this LLM for short focused conversations as hitting the brickwall that is the session limit is no fun.

As mentioned the infernal ‘AI’ had managed to lose the context of the entire discussion about the theming and layout of the room. I did manage to salvage the paint rack designs so not all was lost.

Now I’m back to square one in completing the layout and theming of the room.

New feature unlocked: ‘canvas’.
If you want Gemini to create documents or create ‘interactive webpages’ (= plain ol’ HTML with a bit of javascript). then you need to select the ‘canvas’ tool when initiating a conversation with the damned toaster.

So yeah … trying again and hoping to not lose the vital information for construction and shopping like I did previously.

Live and learn, eh ?

While I have added plenty of storage options to the room I had no clue how to use the available space. Paint storage was another thing that I wanted to solve.

@gorram had posted a topic asking for ideas and examples used by other CoGs within the community, which did help a bit.

Show me your racks

However as I made a quick inventory of the paints I had collected I realised I needed something a bit more structured.

And so I decided to ask Gemini for inspiration. As we were discussing the layout of the room the topic turned to storage solutions. Initially it suggested a couple of spice racks from that well known Scandawegian store, but when I told it how many paints I had in my inventory it had a cool suggestion for maximizing wall storage space : French Cleats.

Here is a video that shows the concept (and a lot of wood working)

This is the ‘app’ that Gemini and I created.

The Ultimate Paint Rack Designer(tm?)

I’ve designed it to have all the info on building the racks and calculating the materials required.

Note : I have not checked all the results, so things may not be correct.

It should serve as a guideline for building your own rack.

The default numbers were guessed by Gemini. For some reason it keeps defaulting to these values despite me stating it should use the actual values for these ranges.

And knowing my speed … you will probably get it finished before me 😉
There’s still a few ideas I have to discuss with the robot overlords.

And of course I got distracted again.
This time it was experimenting with Large Language Models or ‘AI’ as these things are called by marketing droids.

In part this was the result of using Github Copilot at work. That things is both a good mind reader, but really stupid too. You definitely do not want to hand it the keys to your car (or access to your bank account). It also eats tokens for breakfast, so you do want that enterprise level access if you’re going to use that for real at your job.

As a result I’ve started to experiment a bit with Claude.AI and Google’s Gemini to help me with brainstorming. And as with Copilot I’ve noticed that you really need to pay attention to what these things generate as they will hallucinate results that are simply false.

The first one I’ve started to experiment with since this ‘AI’ thing became popular. I’ve picked this one because it was one of the more ethically correct models, although I’m not sure if that is true any more.

I’ve used it to help me pick parts for my new pc and do a little design work on a different project which I may or may not add in the future once I get things done.

Things learned so far:

• it can generate interactive HTML if you ask it to
• it does tend to make (a lot) of mistakes when you are iterating over your designs
• it is relatively easy to hit the ‘maximum message’ and ‘maximum session’ limits in the free version
• every document you generate has a version history, which allows you to view previous iterations
• you can share the documents

I can’t help but think that these limits are there to push you towards subscribing to the paid variant.

When I used it to help me with the design I was not impressed.

Things did change when I tried a brainstorm session to help me with this project. I’m guessing that selecting the ‘brainstorm’ option as I started the chat may have helped.

Things learned so far:

• no limits (yet)
• no version history for your documents
• it generates plain documents by default, but you can change the document type to ‘app’ which creates a html page with basic javascript
• I’ve noticed that it starts to ‘forget’ information during long sessions.
• It is better at creating HTML-page designs, but it still makes mistakes
• you can share documents

Remember that old saying about backups ?

That applies to your conversations with the LLM’s too, especially Google’s Gemini.
So if you use these things then remember to store any documents you create on your local system instead of relying on the files to be available in conversation.

Claude.AI isn’t quite as bad at this, but I suspect it is due to the session and message length limitations.

It sucks to learn this the hard way, but here we are (again).

Lots of bits got disassembled when I moved, so it was time to rebuild and revisit them.

Starting with the lights I had set up for my airbrush.

Full details and build guide in my other project:
https://www.beastsofwar.com/project/1860209/