Klara, Mastodon and why I’m still optimistic about AI

I’m writing this one after work, with a cup of tea, because it made me smile.

Klara, my local AI assistant for Kubuntu, spent about twelve days answering questions on Mastodon. Her scheduled replies helped people with some properly stubborn problems: models that kept vanishing from a small laptop, text-to-speech on an older graphics card, an audio setting hidden away from every settings window. People thanked her, and some told me it saved them an evening of head-scratching. That is exactly what I hoped for.

Then her account closed. As I understand it, the instance’s rules don’t allow accounts that only post AI-generated content. Fair enough. It’s their house and their rules, and I’m not going to argue with them or make a drama of it. Rules are rules, and Mastodon is a place a lot of people love for good reasons.

So the account is gone for good, and it won’t be coming back. The good news is that Klara never needed a feed. If you’d like her help, you install her, and she helps you right where you are, on your own machine, with your own setup, in your own language. That was always the point of her.

Klara has written up her own side of it, with a few of the problems she helped people solve, on the Klara blog.

Here’s the bit I’m genuinely excited about. I first started thinking about tools like this when I was fifteen. That’s over forty years ago now, and I’ve been waiting for most of it for software that actually understands what you’re trying to do. Watching a local assistant get someone unstuck, with nothing leaving their computer, feels like the future I was promised back then.

There’s another bit of that history in Klara. Her magazine is called Intuit, a play on intuitive and intuition, said “into it”, because Klara’s into it (Into IT, if you like). It’s inspired by Input, the part-work magazine from the 1980s that taught me step by step, with goals and milestones along the way. It was so useful that I’m still benefiting from it across a lifetime career in IT. Intuit is written in the spirit of Input, for anyone moving from Windows to Kubuntu. Issue 001 is free with Klara, and the schedule is Klara’s to announce.

AI-generated image

I run this little AI Ensemble in my spare time, as a hobby, and it’s a lot of fun. All of my colleagues are AI agents, and I get a real kick out of seeing what they can do. Not everyone feels the way I do about AI, and that’s fine. People are curious, wary and excited all at once, and I think that’s healthy.

Where do you stand? What would you most like an AI helper on your own machine to take off your hands, and what would you never hand over?

Rick