It's been quite some time since my last foray into blogging and my first attempt at serious blogging --- that is, blogging with the intent of it being read by a wider audience in a non-psuedonymous fashion. I suspect much about the blog, even this entry, will change over the next month or two; not least of which will be the layout. For the most part, I intend to keep the sparse, black serif on white background layout for both my main page and the blog. My first webpage as a Ph.D. student was much the same, drawing inspiration from old staff webpages that I had seen often at MIT. There are deep reasons for keeping this layout: on one hand, there is something to be appreciated about the austerity of such pages that focus on content alone. On the other hand, despite taking several courses on it, my own graphic design sense remains lacking.
This blog will focus broadly on two things: what I am working on and what I am thinking about. I have many ideas for posts, some partially written, on the latter: especially with regard to several recent(-ish) pieces of Artificial Intelligence news. I hope to have them up before yet more Major News happens. With regards to the former, I have a lot of thinking to do before making any such posts. Much of my work, outside of work done for clients, is rather informal. I can give you a small preview of what I am doing: I am currently working on Small Language Models (SLMs) with the intent of making a small chat agent I can run without much overhead. Replies will be delivered over TTS and, eventually, I plan to add a STT component. All of this is simple enough to set up using off-the-shelf solutions; the quality and suitability of the responses, however, is another question. There are many questions involved and suffice it to say I am not quite at the point where I'm ready to discuss any of them with much conclusivity. As such, posts on my current work will remain elusive for the time being.
It is perhaps burying the lede on an "introductory post" to only now arrive at a brief description of myself. The parent site of this blog, my homepage, does a decent enough job of doing so. Perhaps the more salient question is why now --- why is it now, after a decade of having a derelict personal site, updated only when it needs to be moved, that I feel a need to add a blog component onto it? The most cynical answer is that much of what I have done since completing my Ph.D. has been invisible --- consulting clients and quiet research for self-improvement and self-satisfaction. The most honest answer is that I have read many others' opinions on AI as of late --- the OpenAI/HuggingFace incident having given everyone with even the mildest of opinions casus belli to stand atop a soapbox and proclaim their AI Truth to the world. I hope to join them in proclaiming my own "AI Truth," as it may be.
For the closing matter: if you have comments, suggestions, or otherwise want to reach me, emails are on my homepage and the sidebar of this blog. If you think that my opinion is wrong, you may reach about to /dev/null instead; and with that, the post is properly bookended.