Personal blog about tech, AI, off-grid living, and more.https://www.nunodonato.com/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/will-ai-change-how-we-evaluate-the-nih-syndrome/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/will-ai-change-how-we-evaluate-the-nih-syndrome/As I finish building the first iteration of our in-house “agent platform” that is tailored to our specific needs, I found myself questioning if the criticism of the NIH(Not Invented Here)…Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/the-case-for-ai-cooperatives/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/the-case-for-ai-cooperatives/I had a thought today that kept bouncing around in my head: the future of AI isn’t necessarily in the hands of a few tech giants, but rather in how everyday people choose to organize around…Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/my-family-assistant-now-runs-on-local-ai/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/my-family-assistant-now-runs-on-local-ai/About two years ago, I developed a small “family” bot. Its main purpose is to coordinate various aspects of our household life, including: Daily Briefings: Starting the day with a summary…Sat, 21 Feb 2026 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/my-wrap-up-and-analysis-of-websummit-2025/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/my-wrap-up-and-analysis-of-websummit-2025/I attended my first WebSummit this week. I was planning to write a longer post on my blog, but in the meantime, I realized I don’t feel like it. So here are few, short, summarized and…Sat, 15 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/on-building-integrating-and-scaling-ai-powered-workflows/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/on-building-integrating-and-scaling-ai-powered-workflows/I’ve bumped into a couple of different Reddit discussions where people are sharing their spectacular/frustrating failures with AI agents. Both from the perspective of the “AI expert” and…Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/why-i-no-longer-keep-my-kids-away-from-ai-sort-of/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/why-i-no-longer-keep-my-kids-away-from-ai-sort-of/One and a half years ago, I wrote Why I Keep My Kids Away from AI (For Now) As you can probably guess, things have changed. My convictions, as I wrote back in April 2023 are the same. My…Fri, 15 Nov 2024 00:00:00 GMTaihealth-lifestyleparentingtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/workspaice-humanai-creating-together/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/workspaice-humanai-creating-together/Workspaice is a local-first workspace that pairs human creativity with AI assistance — not just for code, but for software, educational content and more. A look at the journey of building it and how I see it changing the way we create and collaborate.Sun, 07 Jul 2024 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/solving-randomly-failing-tests-in-laravel/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/solving-randomly-failing-tests-in-laravel/This was probably one of the most frustrating issues I’ve dealt in recent times. And finally, after many hours thrown at it, I finally found a solution. The Problem We have a suite of…Sat, 08 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/journalling-is-great-but-i-failed-every-time-i-tried/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/journalling-is-great-but-i-failed-every-time-i-tried/I've started a daily journal more times than I can count and abandoned it every time. After figuring out exactly why, I built a different kind of journal — Hoxe — using AI and Telegram to make the habit actually stick.Sun, 02 Jun 2024 00:00:00 GMTaihealth-lifestyletechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/ai-minds-and-the-inner-loop/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/ai-minds-and-the-inner-loop/Back in late 2022, I started working on my pet project codenamed ‘Armin’ (for ‘artificial mind’). It was all about creating an AI agent that would have some real mind-like faculties. Mind…Fri, 05 Apr 2024 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/25-lessons-from-rory-sutherland/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/25-lessons-from-rory-sutherland/Stolen from a LinkedIn post. A flower is a weed with an advertising budget. Consumer research is great at telling you what people did, it’s terrible at telling you what people will do. To…Sat, 24 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestylemischttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/why-i-keep-my-kids-away-from-ai-for-now/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/why-i-keep-my-kids-away-from-ai-for-now/As a tech enthusiast and a parent, I often find myself exploring the intersection of technology, parenting, and education. Artificial intelligence, particularly large language models like…Sun, 16 Apr 2023 00:00:00 GMTaiparentingtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/fact-or-myth-playing-video-games-while-sick-is-bad-for-your-kids/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/fact-or-myth-playing-video-games-while-sick-is-bad-for-your-kids/A couple of days ago I found an interesting post on my country’s subreddit, where people shared the most common childhood myths they remember growing up with. These were things that our…Sat, 14 Jan 2023 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestyleparentingtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/october-in-review/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/october-in-review/October was a “disaster” if I would rate it by the standards I had set in place in September. But I’m giving myself some slack here since lots of things have been going on. I started a new…Wed, 09 Nov 2022 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestylemiscparentingtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/september-in-review/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/september-in-review/What I read this month The Picture of Dorian Gray (Oscar Wilde) Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Oliver Burkeman) Four Thousand Weeks made it to the top of my all-time…Sun, 16 Oct 2022 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/ai-that-expands-its-features-by-writing-its-own-source-code/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/ai-that-expands-its-features-by-writing-its-own-source-code/When I finished reading David Shapiro’s “Natural Language Cognitive Architecture”, I got very excited with GPT3 because I finally grasped how powerful a LLM (large language AI model) can…Tue, 20 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/my-productivity-system-in-2022/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/my-productivity-system-in-2022/In this past year, I’ve done significant changes to my whole “productivity system”. These changes were impulsed by two major life changes. One, I abandoned my work life as a freelancer…Sun, 18 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestyletechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/back-to-writing/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/back-to-writing/A few days ago I was revisiting my old blog and found it funny that one of my last posts was about going more offline, less dependent on cloud services, and having more time for important…Thu, 15 Sep 2022 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestyletechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/advent-of-code-day-2/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/advent-of-code-day-2/Reminder: my challenge is to attempt to solve the problem without writing a single line of code. Ideally, just writing an initial prompt and get the whole code in one go. You can see the…Thu, 02 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/advent-of-code-day-1/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/advent-of-code-day-1/Part 1 The challenge begins. The first puzzle was quite easy to solve, but posed some challenges to write an efficient prompt. Reminder: my challenge is to attempt to solve the problem…Wed, 01 Dec 2021 00:00:00 GMTaitechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/using-a-telegram-bot-to-help-me-manage-a-solar-off-grid-setup/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/using-a-telegram-bot-to-help-me-manage-a-solar-off-grid-setup/As some of my reader might know, I live off-the-grid, using solar power for electricity. My setup is quite small, a 9-panel 2800W array, with 9.9kWh of battery capacity. However, we do have…Sat, 20 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMToffgridtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-personal-assistant-bot-for-telegram/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-personal-assistant-bot-for-telegram/My favorite part about being a developer is being able to “scratch-my-own-itch” in a variety of ways 🙂 For a long time I had this dream of developing a digital personal assistant, and…Fri, 05 Nov 2021 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/you-cant-improve-what-you-dont-track/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/you-cant-improve-what-you-dont-track/As part of a recent online book club, I spent my last three weeks re-reading Darren Hardy’s “The Compound Effect” on my Kobo eReader. «No gimmicks. No Hyperbole. No Magic Bullet. The…Fri, 02 Jul 2021 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestylehttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-class-in-the-clouds-homeschooling-with-flight-simulator/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-class-in-the-clouds-homeschooling-with-flight-simulator/This pandemic is running for too long. In our home we all feel a growing desire to move, travel, see places, learn new things…. and adding this to this dad’s passion for airplanes…. well…Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMTparentingtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/how-i-helped-a-client-cut-down-90-of-server-costs-with-mysql/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/how-i-helped-a-client-cut-down-90-of-server-costs-with-mysql/First of all, I hope the title isn’t too catchy or misleading. There are no magic secrets here, actually, it’s all pretty common stuff for anyone that has some experience with any DBMS. But…Mon, 12 Apr 2021 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/de-smartphonifying/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/de-smartphonifying/(not sure if this is even a valid word, but let’s go with it for now) I recently concluded my 3rd JoMO (Joy of Missing Out) week. More and more I’m finding that spending less time on the…Tue, 03 Nov 2020 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestyletechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-review-of-several-free-head-tracking-alternatives-to-use-with-flight-simulator/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-review-of-several-free-head-tracking-alternatives-to-use-with-flight-simulator/My favorite way to play Flight Simulator(s) is by doing sightseeing, VFR trips. I’m not an airliner person. So Flight Simulator 2020 is perfect because there’s loads of detail and…Sun, 30 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/how-to-play-ms-flight-simulator-2020-on-low-end-laptops/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/how-to-play-ms-flight-simulator-2020-on-low-end-laptops/I used to think my laptop was fairly okay-ish. That was until I started reading the rigs that people have to play FS2020. I’m not into gaming so that explains my total lack of awareness of…Wed, 26 Aug 2020 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-review-of-my-jomo-week/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-review-of-my-jomo-week/I started my JoMo week on the 25th of June, and as I wrote on my initial post, I was planning to write on the blog my experience throughout the week. Well, no posts were made since then and…Mon, 20 Jul 2020 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestyletechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-guide-on-re-creating-heys-features/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/a-guide-on-re-creating-heys-features/Following up on my last post “Why I loved Hey but it isn’t for me” here’s a short guide on bringing some of Hey’s features back into my email service. I’ll be demo-ing this using Fastmail…Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/from-fomo-to-jomo-an-experimental-week/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/from-fomo-to-jomo-an-experimental-week/I read Christina’s Crook book “The Joy of Missing Out: Finding Balance in a Wired World” some years back. Since then I did a couple of unplugged days/weekends. More recently I’ve been…Thu, 25 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestyletechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/loved-hey-but-its-not-for-me/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/loved-hey-but-its-not-for-me/Hey is full of refreshing ideas. I really enjoyed its launch especially because it got people talking about email again. I was really excited once my invite arrived and gave a good test to…Wed, 24 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/always-eat-your-own-dog-food/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/always-eat-your-own-dog-food/So a few days ago I decided to open registrations for my (still alpha/beta) service www.MyDaily.email in order to get feedback and better guide future features. This is a service inspired…Mon, 08 Jun 2020 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/resuming-my-fasting-practice/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/resuming-my-fasting-practice/When I first started practicing yoga and meditation, about 16 years ago, I also started a fasting practice. My spiritual master advised for a twice-a-month dry fasting method (unless health…Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 GMThealth-lifestylehttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/starting-a-new-saas-side-project/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/starting-a-new-saas-side-project/They say you need to launch at least 10 products to be able to find some success. So here I am again, after a couple of failed attempts, starting a new side-project (details to follow…Mon, 18 May 2020 00:00:00 GMTtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/notes-for-16-may-2020/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/notes-for-16-may-2020/Going to start doing some educational sessions with my 4-yr old daughter once or twice a week, with the use of the computer. Currently looking out for cool educational channels on youtube…Sat, 16 May 2020 00:00:00 GMTmiscparentinghttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/hacking-my-way-through-off-grid-survival/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/hacking-my-way-through-off-grid-survival/After a year of plumbing, wiring and digging, our family of four moved into an off-grid wooden house. Our small solar system's battery bank turned out far weaker than expected — here's how I'm getting creative with low/no-tech ideas and a few hacks to make it work.Sat, 09 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMToffgridtechhttps://www.nunodonato.com/blog/switching-to-fastmail/https://www.nunodonato.com/blog/switching-to-fastmail/I finally took the plunge and subscribed for a year of Fastmail’s email service. I’ve been looking for a new email provider for sometime. Trying more and more to slowly leave Google’s…Wed, 06 Nov 2019 00:00:00 GMTtech