philipdc

Can Ai help the individual? The future arrived quietly, then started doing everyone’s paperwork. It’s tempting to think AI is some distant machine uprising, but most of us already use it without noticing. If you’re reading this post, AI helped deliver it to you. The robots are here; apparently, they’re working in distribution. Here’s how AI helps me. I work a five-hour day: an hour on digital art, one session a week on content creation, and the remaining three hours, four days a week, developing TurboCASH Accounting. AI has boosted my output considerably. It has not, so far, made the tea or developed an appreciation for deadlines. I started in software development before anyone had invented front end, back end, or full stack. We delivered a million copies of TurboCAD, then three million TurboCASH, and suddenly software had enough moving parts to require specialists. I worked on the front end: the screens that guide users through their workflows, ideally without guiding them into despair. Before AI, even a small development job could take six months, two people, and $60,000 to get started—at $10,000 a month. With agentic AI and the right harnesses, one person can now do similar work in about a week for around $3,000. That’s roughly twenty times cheaper and, more importantly, five and a half months sooner. Developers are embracing the idea. Code is arriving at speed; the challenge is making sure it’s the right code, which is still where humans earn their keep. I also found myself taking on web design for TurboCASH. When diffusion tools arrived, turning ideas into image compositions became straightforward, and AI could help with the content. What once cost around $2,000, involved an original artist and a PaintShop Pro specialist, and took a week to deliver can now be done by me in an hour. Delivery is instant. The people who used to charge $1,000 are livid—which is understandable. Change rarely sends a thank-you card to the people it disrupts. Accountants are somewhere in between. Over the next year, work that currently takes a month may take just a few hours a week. Will accountants face the same backlash? Perhaps. For now, we offer the ten-year-old, pre-AI TurboCASH4 for free. It turns out the future can make room for the past, too. AI may not make every job easier, and it certainly won’t solve every problem. But it gives an individual more leverage: more time to build, create, and try ideas that once needed a team and a budget. That’s a brighter prospect than the robot apocalypse—and considerably more useful. If you have strong views, I’d like to hear them.

Harriot Fletcher #johnnyc · Commonwealth Summit, Antigua AI-assisted fiction (SNVL). Parallel universe. Africa would be a shithole, if it weren’t for the women. Same here in the Windies, only the numbers are better. That’s why I like being in the islands. The women still know what a working country looks like, and still work for the country. The terrace is almost empty when she arrives. Harriot Fletcher moves through the tables like she still owns the place — which, in a way, she does. Forty, melamin, widow of the last governor who mattered, and still the best thing on the island. The dress is black too, cut so the moonlight has something to work with. Big Jim and I have been doing the Butchers hook ever since she walked into a Lodge reception ten years ago and make every white diplomat in the room forget what they were talking about. “Johnny Boy,” she says, sitting down without waiting for the chair to be pulled. “Yuh early. Dat mean di King’s speech already written and yuh just here fi enjoy yuhself.” “Both.” I pour for her first. “Grand Lodge wants the reparations line soft enough that the islands don’t walk out and sharp enough that nobody in London has to write a cheque. I’m the translator.” She watches the wine, then me. “An’ what yuh telling him ’bout we?” “That the West Indies already won.” I keep my voice low because the waiter is still hovering. “Higher standard of living than any country in Africa. Cricket as a free gift. The Windrush generation wasn’t a debt; it was the interest on an investment that paid out for decades. Compared to South Africa we spent a hundred years paying off the Boer War and still can’t keep the lights on. So when Kingston starts shouting for reparations, the King should smile, thank them for the sugar and the soldiers, and remind them the Commonwealth is the only club that still lets them in without begging.” Harriot’s face doesn’t move, but something behind her eyes does. She takes a slow sip. “Dat a very tidy story,” she says. “Reparations nuh ’bout di ledger yuh keep in yuh head, Johnny. Dem ’bout di fact dat di wealth weh build dem fine house inna London tek from people who still live wid di consequence every day. An apology widout money is just anodda way fi tell we fi grateful we did survive.” I lean forward. “I’m not here to insult anybody. I’m here because the alternative is worse. Take Africa. The islands still function. That’s the difference.” She looks past me at the water. For a moment I think she’s going to let it go. Then she says, “Yuh still smoke dat Jamaican nonsense when yuh working?” I take the joint from my pocket, light it, and offer it across the table. She accepts, two careful pulls, then hands it back. The smoke sits between us. I watch the way her mouth looks around it and feel the Ambassador stiring — the one that has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the way she moves when she thinks no one’s looking. “Merits are simple,” I tell her. “It takes the edge off the speeches and puts it somewhere more useful. You want the rest?” She doesn’t answer. Just studies me the way she used to when she was deciding whether the night was going to end in her old house or mine. The steel band down the beach is playing something soft. The restaurant has cleared out around us. Harriot sets her glass down. The sound is small and final. “Yuh nuh even trying fi hear yuhself tonight.” “I’m trying to be accurate.” I reach for her hand across the table. She doesn’t pull away at first. Her skin is warm. “Charm’s for when I’m not working. Right now I’m working. Later I’m not.” She looks at my hand on hers, then at my face. Whatever was left of the usual invitation dies in her eyes. She stands. The dress does what it’s paid to do. I stay seated because standing would only make it worse. “So,” I say, “are we not going to have our usual Commonwealth summit mount at your place?” She looks down at me, one hand already on her bag. The moonlight catches the line of her throat. “Mi looking fi something bigger tonight,” she says. Then she walks. The heels click once on the stone, then disappear into the sand. The waiter finally approaches, careful. “Another bottle, Mr Rhodes?” “No,” I say. “Just the bill.” The moon is still doing its job on the water. Somewhere in London a speech is waiting for the sentences I’ve already written. Somewhere down the beach the woman I’ve wanted for a decade has decided she’s had enough of my politics for one night. Both of those things are useful. I finish the joint, drop the end in the empty glass, and start walking toward the lights of the capital. The summit opens in the morning. By then the King will know exactly what to say, and Harriot will know exactly what she didn’t get. That’s the deal. Always has been.

Don’t become an AI-hater The world seems polarised at the moment into those that love AI and those that hate AI. I can understand it. If you have made your career charging a few hundred dollars for a custom brochure, it is disconcerting when you customers start making it them themselves, and worse when the brochures actually look better than yours. But keep that in mind. These hater arguments come from those being disrupted, the love arguments comes from those doing the disrupting. I would urge you to be part of the latter group. By now, unless you have been living with the Amish, I guess you can use a chatbox, but AI has already moved beyond that. Agentic AI now lets you “harness” tasks and allows you to outsource repetitive tasks (reconcile a bank statement, answer simple emails, produce reports). Its still work in progress, but we have made great progress in the TurboCASH community. We already have a working AI knowledge base and an AI Pre accounting workbench. These are both free. To get the best experience out of them I do recommend a TurboCASH 5 subscription for $6 a month, but don’t let that stop you. If the $6 is an issue, you can still benefit from the free versions. If you only use it a soft landing pathway to understanding AI, this will be worth your effort. You will soon find yourself hating AI less. Here are free links to download: Bookstage, the AI preaccounting workbench for TurboCASH turbocash.net/a/pages/bookst… TurboCASH 5-4 and The TurboCASH Knowlege base. sourceforge.net/projects/tur… You can buy a TurboCASH subscription here: turbocash.net/pages/TCBuy.ht…

Bushbabies see no evil. #philipcopeman

I have recreated the Blue Willow China story as if it had taken place in Dutch Golden Age at the Cape. The daughter of a rich Dutch merchant leaves behind the opulant family home and apple trees to elope with a slave boy. The merchant sends three VOC officers to retieve her. They use a Dutch merchant ship and cross the Amsterdam style willow tree and stone bridge. The lovers escape as Blue Cranes from the Cape. The cultural objects are replaced with period objects like the windmill. There is a play on cultural appropriation. Like the British Potters did with China. #philipcopeman philipcopeman.com

Wonderland I have been wrestling with this piece, Wonderland by Imogen Berry for sometime. Some art arrives fully formed. Others refuse to sit still. This one has been determined to argue back. The painting matters because it opens the door to two fascinations that run through Imogen's life and art: nature, and humanity's uncertain place within it. In this work she turns to Namaqualand, that improbable miracle where a landscape often mistaken for emptiness suddenly explodes into life. My first explorations of Imogen's work, Self Portrait and The Party, led me into stories about time. Wonderland is a different beast altogether. It is less concerned with memory and more rooted in the eternal present. It looks across a desert where the African soul still walks, stubborn and unhurried, beneath an immense sky. In such a world, plants cease to be decoration and become acts of survival. I find myself returning again and again to the image of a tumbleweed, rolling endlessly across the landscape, driven not by purpose but by persistence. It survives because it keeps moving. In my interpretation I have expanded Wonderland into a 3×3 landscape. Imogen's sun has become a moon, while the sun itself has been abstracted. The symbols begin to drift. The landscape starts asking questions back. This piece has been keeping me awake. Every new version seems to hint at a destination while refusing to reveal it. Yet perhaps that is the point. We live in an age where everything must have a target, a business model, a measurable outcome. The tumbleweed has none of these. It simply travels. And maybe Wonderland leads exactly there. Not to an answer, but to a reminder. In the harshest places life still finds a way to bloom. The moon rises, the flowers return, and even a wandering tumbleweed eventually discovers that movement itself can be a nomadic home. Image derived from an original acrylic painting by Imogen Berry using Flux, ChatGPT, PaintShop Pro and Upscayl. Published at 1189 × 841 pixels under CC BY-SA International 4.0. philipcopeman.com

AI Code For decades software developers enjoyed a comfortable certainty: humans wrote code, computers executed it. One supplied intelligence, the other supplied obedience. The programmer was the author. The machine was the pencil. Then the pencil started suggesting entire chapters. The old model assumed software was little more than deterministic bureaucracy. Every outcome could be traced back to a line of code, a design document, a coffee stained specification, or an exhausted developer desperately patching production at 2 a.m. That certainty is fading. Modern AI systems do not merely execute instructions. They absorb vast oceans of human code, patterns, conventions, mistakes, workarounds, genius hacks and terrible Stack Overflow decisions, then recombine them into solutions that often surprise even the person prompting them. Like junior developers, they occasionally produce brilliance. Like senior developers, they occasionally produce disasters with tremendous confidence. A mediocre AI generated program resembles a mediocre human written program. Both compile. Both appear plausible. Both contain hidden surprises reserved for production environments and important customers. The real issue is not whether AI can generate code. It can. The real issue is whether someone can direct it toward something meaningful. Great software has never been about typing speed. Nobody remembers the programmer who wrote the most characters. They remember the programmer who solved the right problem in the right way. A developer's style is really a personal algorithm: a collection of habits, assumptions, shortcuts and insights accumulated through years of success and failure. The best programmers constantly rewrite their own rules. They abandon yesterday's solution when a better one appears. AI does not eliminate that process. It magnifies it. The battle ahead is not between human developers and artificial intelligence. It is between thoughtful engineering and industrial scale mediocrity. AI naturally gravitates toward common patterns because common patterns dominate its training data. It will happily generate one million average applications before breakfast. The market will applaud. Consultants will produce slide decks. Venture capitalists will declare another revolution. The future developer is not a typist. The future developer is an architect of intent. For decades software creation was constrained by access to expertise, teams, funding and technical gatekeepers. Today a single individual can build systems that once required entire departments. The walls are coming down. That does not guarantee better software. But it dramatically expands who gets to participate. The brightest outcome is also the most ironic. The more code the machines can generate, the more valuable human judgment becomes. When everybody can build software, the advantage no longer belongs to those who know how to write code. It belongs to those who know why. And when a developer persuades a machine trained on the average of the past to create something genuinely new, innovation wins. Not despite AI, but through it.

Edward Hopper was a bastian of twentieth century American realism, depicting the meloncholoy and loneliness that afflicts that Nation. It came to my attention that his works are now public domain, including his famous 1942 Nighthawks. Got me thinking we should open a few Phillies Diners in Cape Town, which has a notorious reputation for closing early. #philipcopeman

I lose my first client. You all know about bookstage agents right? If not go here turbocash.net/a/pages/bookst… I sit across from a psychologist with a calendar full of fifty sessions per month , each one followed by two hours of paperwork that eats his soul. He earns R200K a month, but he looks like a man paying with his sanity. I offer him a bookstage agent, that cuts his admin from two hours to thirty minutes, a machine that hands him back seventy five hours of life. He recoils. He sees AI as a thief, a shadow waiting to peel off his skin. He has read all the scientific journals AI is here to take away the very way of life he knows. His paranoie is futher stoked by AI offers at one tenth of his price. He defends the extra R3400 per session with the skin- in- the- game argument. This is the falacious proposition that people prefer dealing with humans than dealing with machines when they buy services - the don't. I suggest a bookstage agent will cut his admin work from two hours to 30 minutes and will save him 75 hours a month. He can use this time to ... The obvious one is to start recording his 50 sessions and build a specialised agent doing his job. This agent should be able to manage at lease 200 sesions per month and the client would be able to expand his revenue to R 800,000 per month. He can’t really follow accounting and tax, but he is overwhelmed by the images of Terminators taking over his practice. The conversation collapses. He defends his paranoia, his final resting place, the “skin in the game” argument, as if human empathy can be measured in spreadsheets, a game he will always win. I watch the deal die in front of me. I don’t walk away empty. I walk away with the lesson. The fear is not about efficiency—it’s about identity. Professionals don’t want to be replaced; they want to be rescued. BookStage is not a scalpel cutting them out of the picture. It is a clerk in the back office, a shield against burnout, a quiet servant that lets them keep their humanity intact. I lose my first client, but I gain my first revelation: tell the story- not of machines replacing men, but of machines giving men back their time, their breath, their sanity. #philipcopeman

Cape Town has three seasons - water, wind and fire

Cape Town has three seasons - water, wind and fire. #philipcopeman

The Cape has three seasons, water, wind and fire.

BookStage Beta 0.6.0 Like having a bookeeping assistant that knows where everything is. Free Download : sourceforge.net/projects/tur… Install: Run "BookStage Setup 0.6.0.exe". More info : turbocash.net/a/pages/bookst… This release upgrades from Alpha to Beta - Starting to look like the final product, debugging will be more important than feature definitions. Bookstage is currently targeted at TurboCASH 5 users that want a flexible pre accounting workbench for easy loading and working with accounting data; Simple users that really don't want to use an accounting package, but to want to make invoices and analyse their bank statements and want a way of looking up documents and bank statements.These two ledgers will enable them to presebnt data to auditors and Revenue is required. Preliminary test have imported substantial data sets. This release includes demo TurboCASH books and sample bank statements. Start BookStage from the Windows Start Menu after installation. This is an beta release. Use caution when dealing wiht live data. New features Paypal integration Thunderbird Integration OCR for loading PDFs as data ChatGPT and Claude API integration MCP knowlege base Apache licence, Developed extensively with Open AI Codex. What will it cost? You can download Bookstage free and use it with free TurboCASH4. To get the best out of bookstage you will need a TurboCASH 5 subscription ($6 a month) and a Claude or Open AI API access code ($5 once off will go a long way.) AI is addictive and you will probably end up using more and more of it not only for accounting tasks. Your AI usage is between you and the vendor our charge is only the $6 per month. #philipcopeman #turbocash

Self portrait. If you lose an eye its going to give you an above average interest in blindness. #philipcopeman

On the fifth day ... the old man started to lose it. If intelligent was not able to restore the backup, we never would have been able to make humans. #philipcopeman

Leo - August is a good month for hunting. #philipcopeman #aistrology philipcopeman.com

rugby's greatest rivalry.

Rugby's greatest rivalry. #philipcopeman