Ryan Holdren

Giving an AI agent real capability and maintaining real security feel like opposing goals. The more the AI agent can do, the more damage it can do if something goes wrong. Nowhere is that tension sharper than when the agent’s capability is the ability to change itself.

I run a personal AI agent that holds sensitive personal data (e.g. health, financial, etc.) and gives me insights using it. It has two capabilities that stand out as both the most useful and the most dangerous: it can write and deploy its own tools, and it can propose changes to its own infrastructure. Either of these would qualify the agent as self-mutating; it can grow new abilities and reshape the very system it runs on, with little or no involvement from me at all.

A note before we start: if you give an AI agent access to personal data, you should make sure that data can’t be exfiltrated by a malicious actor via prompt injection, network access, or some other vector.

I’ve been running an experiment: how much value can I get out of a personal AI assistant that uses cheap, open-source language models, on a budget of $5 per month in inference costs?

Disclaimer

I’m not a tax professional, accountant, or financial advisor. This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not intended to be a substitute for personalized and professional tax advice.

The Home Buyers’ Plan

I’ve been thinking recently about the Home Buyers’ Plan (HBP), which is a quirky Canadian financial rule where you can borrow up to $60,000 from your Registered Retirement Savings Plan (RRSP) and then repay it over the next (at most) 17 years, with no added interest, designed to help you buy a home.

Until recently, we had a BlueAir 211+ in each bedroom.

I was interested to understand the total annual cost of running these air purifiers. While the HouseFresh review says it’s about $275 per year, I ran the numbers myself, for three reasons:

1. Their calculation is based on an electricity price of 17.7¢ per kilowatt-hour, whereas in British Columbia, the price is only 14.08¢.

2. Their calculation assumes the air purifier will run the entire year at full blast (57.2 watts), but I only turn them on to full blast at night, and then turn them down each morning to the lowest setting (27.6 watts). This means I run the unit on high for half the day and on low for the other half, averaging 42.4 watts.

   [Read More]

In Canada, there are several tax-deferred accounts for retirement investing:

1. RRSP (Registered Retirement Savings Plan)
2. RRIF (Registered Retirement Income Fund)
3. LIRA (Locked-In Retirement Account)
4. LIF (Life Income Funds)

These accounts all have different rules, but they share one important feature: withdrawals are taxed as income. This is the meaning of “deferred” in “tax-deferred” investing. The tax isn’t avoided; it’s just postponed. In fact, the larger the account balance grows, the larger the eventual tax bill.

Disclaimer

I’m not a tax professional, accountant, or financial advisor. I am not even retired. This blog post is for informational and educational purposes only. It’s not intended to be a substitute for personalized and professional tax advice.

Chart

I created a spreadsheet that combines the provincial and federal tax brackets for British Columbia with the clawback on Old Age Security Benefits. This was done to determine the effective marginal tax rate for high-income seniors in British Columbia.

Step #0: Disclaimer

Before you dive in, a quick but important heads-up: while the technology of torrenting is perfectly legal, downloading and distributing copyrighted content without the proper rights is not. This guide is here to explain how the technology works, but it’s up to you to use it responsibly and within the bounds of the law. Please be aware of the laws in your area and torrent with care.