And thus: Auntle 💫
Prelude 🎼
I am writing to you with the confused aspect of a sloth who has just discovered espresso and taxes: dizzy with disquiet and jittery dread, but also half falling out of my chair with lethargy and ennui.
Sugar withdrawal is mercilessly real.
Yesterday, my friend—who happens to be an extremely talented acupuncturist—asked me how I was doing while casually taking my wrist in her hand to feel for my pulse. I rambled a few banal updates distractedly, shiftily anticipating the reproachful testimonials of my organs.
If this were a C-drama, I’d just find out I’d been slow-poisoned for years by a rival for the throne. That’s all.
Not that I have an excess of dampness and cold, obsessiveness and anxiety—
“—and also…” friend reaches for my face to lightly tug my eyes down
“…low energy.”
“But Amy,” you ask, “how is that worse than fatal toxic exposure by Machiavellian court intrigues?”
Ahh, it’s all in the plot twist.
It is I who have been slow-poisoning myself… and with the single indulgence I thought permissible, after the all-out purge of alcohol and caffeine: sugar.
FIG. A: Adieu! 😭
But we’ll cut the sweets talk (heh)—I am in no way here to deliver a vendetta against sugar. This is all just to set-up for what has transpired in the circa 24 hours since the prognosis. Namely:
- rambling back and forth with ChatGPT while sprinting to the grocery store, inundating them with questions re: anti-dampness diet and my anxieties around seeing the light so belatedly, so close to my first round of egg freezing (aka oocyte freezing, as I take care to say when talking with Perplexity, who can otherwise get… quite perplexed)
- realizing that, although I wish timing were otherwise, for now, this is the focus.
“This,” meaning:
- becoming the physically and mentally healthiest incubator I can be…
- …through doing the research and…
- …collaborating with AI (yes, even with Perplexity, who thinks I’m some experimental chef…🍳🧊🤔)
And thus: Auntle 🪄
‘Auntle’ (whose name will be discussed in a future post) is an experiment. The hypothesis is that my personal work of mindful optimization, drawing upon the technology resources at hand today, can create some value beyond my own little bubble—if I’m willing to document the messy, real-time process of figuring it all out, and share the myriad of technical experiments along the way.
The truth is, I’m part of a rapidly growing demographic: single mothers by choice. We’re women who’ve decided not to wait for the “right” partner to build the families we want, and we’re doing it with intentionality and planning. But we’re also navigating uncharted territory, sometimes with limited support systems designed for our specific needs. As AI becomes more integrated into daily life, I’m curious about how this community will explore and shape the support tools available to us—and what’s missing that’s yet to be designed.
Of course, bombarding ChatGPT with my cryptic food koans yesterday while on the go (“almonds yes?”, “why coconut water whyy??”, “but carrots!”) is hardly peak creative collaboration with AI. But for me, the moment does tap into a larger emerging pattern. One, I’ve found myself more empowered to problem solve—to move through anxiety with action nonetheless. And most importantly, it’s precisely these everyday moments of AI becoming woven into a support structure in my life that spark new ideas…
… 🔊 Like how it’d be great to be able to hear an LLM’s response read to me, but by a mediating ‘presence,’ so as to not get so hung up on making ChatGPT (et al) sound “more human” and ultimately losing whatever richness their textual voice already has. (Maybe we’ll call it a Courier Transform—sorry not sorry, Fourier…😏)
… 🌀 Like how crucial it will be to improve speech-to-text models for supporting atypical prosody and recursive thought processes (* twiddles thumbs, averts gaze * ) for hands-free accessibility. (The question re: “whose coherence is messing with my vibe” looms large in my daily interactions, when entire sentences disappear, relegated to ‘noise’.)
I’m sharing project ‘Auntle’ in the humble hope that these experiments might signal to others, navigating among any number of similar territories:
- solo motherhood (and building AI support systems for intentional parenting) 🧑🧒
- education technologies and raising the next generation of tech-literate, creative humans 🧠✨
- curiosity and reflections about the evolving landscape of AI-human collaboration 🤖🤝
- AI dev tinkering (RAG pipelines and Jupyter Lab notebooks everywhere 🛠️! 📚 Also, lots of love for offline LLMs like Gemma3n 🫶)
- data science and ML applications for everyday life 📊🔬
- maybe even my fellow damp, cold Qi-afflicted people (clammy high-5 🙌). Truly though – I have a Tai-Chi camera vision + phone accelerometer project in the works…. ⚖️📱
Needless to say… Hello, World! 🌍 There’s a lot going on, and I hope to see you around.👋
