OK, one more post about Claude: I took some time last week to play around with the idea of using Claude to analyze my Goodreads library. I started out by exporting my Goodreads library to a CSV file. Then, I started a new “project” in Claude, and attached the CSV.
I got some interesting visualizations out of that, including reading volume per year, distribution of my star ratings, and stuff like that. Nothing I couldn’t have gotten out of Excel, if I opened the CSV there and poked around a bit, but it was a lot easier than if I’d tried to do it the “old-fashioned way.”
Next, I asked it to go a bit beyond the data in the CSV file, and tell me how many of the books on my “to read” shelf were fiction vs. non-fiction. That’s not in the CSV, so it used “a smart heuristic approach” to do that. I have no idea what it actually did there, but it seems to have done a reasonable job.
It then broke the non-fiction down into categories like tech, history, business, and so on. Then, I asked it some questions about those books, like which of the tech books were outdated and should be discarded. Stuff like that. I used it to help me zero in on a few non-fiction books I’d like to read that have been gathering (virtual) dust in my Kindle library too long.
By putting this in a project, I can come back to it and ask it more questions whenever I want to, and I can upload newer versions of the CSV to update its working data. So that’s all pretty interesting and fun.
The other thing I did recently with a Claude project was to upload some tax documents and Merrill statements and ask it some questions about them. I’ve always been very leery about giving any kind of AI access to financial documents, but I decided to give in and give it a try. (YOLO, as the kids say.) Again, I got some interesting data and ideas out of it. Obviously, I’m not trusting Claude for tax advice, but it did a good job of analyzing some stuff and surfacing some things that I need to think about. I’m not sure if I’m going to do much more with this, but it would be interesting to upload my Merrill statement every month and ask Claude to summarize it for me and highlight important info. My Merrill statements are typically 30-40 pages long, so I don’t ever have time to read them thoroughly.
I guess I’m gradually dragging myself into the modern age of AI. At work, we’re going to need to start learning Palantir Foundry pretty soon, and that’s pretty scary!