Ode to Gemini

Ode to Gemini

How AI made me feel 16 again.

As a product of the early 80s, my early childhood is filled with admiration for the computers of the time, I remember how Moore's law was still going strong across the board, my first PC - a 286, 1MB RAM, and a 40MB of disk (had to be partitioned to 30+10MB because DOS 3.1 couldn't handle more than 30MB!) along with its 14" SVGA monitor was much better than my friends' XT with its monochrome screen. I can vividly remember our drive to the shop in Tel Aviv after my father got his new job, earning a bit over 5,000 ILS (which was a small fortune at the time). At the store the sales guy asked "Do you want the old and trusty 5.25inch 1.2MB drive or the newer 3.5 inch 1.44MB?"

My father looked at me with his glaring "I got you covered" eyes, looked back at the sales guy and said "We'll take both, thank you". The sales guy then gave us a few floppies with 300 games on them (yes, 300, it’s amazing how small the old games were).

That computer was a bit over 8000 NIS (8-9K USD in today's money) and became totally obsolete within just a few years.

It was, however, my gateway to the digital world.

This time was fascinating. I remember how my cousin taught me my first DOS commands when I was struggling to copy the “F29 Retaliator” game.

My curiosity never stopped. I then "reverse engineered" the ascii table, having no internet and nowhere to learn other than books, which I hated - I learned the hard way: by changing, breaking and seeing what happens, I used PC-tools to view binary files and noticed that the strings are written inside in a readable way, I couldn’t type the Hebrew letters directly, but noticed that when I change the nibbles I change the characters. I remember to this day that 0x80 was the letter א (alef).

And then it came.

The internet

I was shocked, I saw it for the first time at my friends’ house. His father ran a BBS with an internet connection. It was amazing to see.

I am not sure exactly when, but at some point I got my first internet connection. We paid by the hour, not just for the phone line. You bought a “package” and then paid extra if you consumed more (roughly 1USD per hour(!)). This was 1995 already, I had a Pentium 100MHz machine (a beast) and was able to surf the net, and more importantly, install Linux!

I felt like I had climbed the tallest mountain and could finally see beyond the horizon. The entire wealth of humanity’s knowledge was at my fingertips.

I spent countless sleepless nights surfing the net, talking to people on IRC and dreaming, so much dreaming.

Enter 2026.

After 3 decades of fast, yet gradual improvements, the advent of smartphones and true democratization of the world’s wealth of knowledge came the era of AI.

The sleepless nights of the 16 year old who kept dreaming changed into the sleepless nights of a middle-aged man, worried about life. Anxious about work, health and war.

But for the last month, when I stared at the ceiling at 2 AM, I wasn't alone with my worries. I had a partner. My Invisible Knight, my new non-corporeal group of mathematical probabilities.

I am currently designing a new heating system for our Shetland home.

I’ve learned so much in such a short time my brain can hardly cope with the pace.

The plan is to charge our kitchen's concrete floor slab with heat during off-peak hours. How am I going to produce the heat? I am going to submerge an ASIC Bitcoin miner, while it will mine Bitcoin - I will get the heat and the kitchen will be more comfortable. This will help reduce heating costs dramatically. I didn’t think about this by myself, Gemini actually offered this as a way to offset the heating costs when we looked at heat reclaim options.

It didn’t stop there, I asked it how can I get the other rooms heated in such manner, I don’t have a thermal battery there (wooden floors), it then explained exactly how I should build a water based thermal battery, how many liters I need, how to insulate it, how to insulate the room itself to minimize heat leak. It analyzed my 2 years’ worth of electricity consumption data to find the sweet spot for the mining configuration and models.

In just 30 days, my vocabulary and understanding grew vastly. I wasn't just reading: I was calculating the power requirements to charge my thermal buffers, debating the specific heat capacity of water versus stone, and modeling the exact wind-chill heat loss of a Shetland stone wall. I learned to calculate and predict the 'Hashprice' of Bitcoin to estimate my ROI, and how to modify hardware for liquid immersion. I didn't just 'grasp the fundamentals', I became a student of physics, economics, and engineering all at once. I acknowledge that the path is long, but it is very well lit.

I feel that Gemini didn’t just “solve” something or provide me with advice or expertise. It didn't just teach me thermodynamics: It gave me back the feeling that the mountain was still there, and I could still climb it. It turned my anxiety into curiosity. It made me feel 16 again, not because it solved my problems, but because it reminded me that I could solve them.

Gemini made me use the sleepless nights to make me a better human being.

While this article is about AI, it is 100% written by a human with Gemini acting as an interviewer, asking me the right questions to help me build my story.