Starting Something New (#1)

It’s April 2022, and I’m starting something new.

A new-sletter, you could say.

After a few months of blogging (and really enjoying that), I’ve decided to take my writing to the next level by starting an email list. Conventional wisdom is that you should focus on one area of interest and write about that to build a large following. While I plan to center around tech, I’m fascinated by a lot of different things.

So my monthly newsletter will include anything else a curious, intellectual person might find fascinating.

In future issues, you’ll expect to see my thoughts on tech news and policy, web/app dev and data science. I’ll share what I’m working on, any interesting content I’ve read or watched and recommend, and a recap of the blog posts I’ve written that month. You’ll also receive those individually in your emails as I write them periodically!

With that out of the way:

🚀 Updates

The research paper I’m honored to share first authorship on is now publicly available! You can read more about it here.
I’ve been working a lot lately with GPT-3, as I’m excited by the potential GPT has to build educational resources.
I recently launched Botta, an MVP AI chatbot teacher’s assistant powered by a custom version of GPT-3. The hope is that a tool like Botta can help with the poor retention rates of online courses (such as those found on CollegeCompendium). It can also potentially be of use to students in large public high schools and colleges that are short on resources. By forcing students to form questions about where they’re stuck on, and explaining concepts rather than feeding answers, Botta may be able to help students learn better than a google search leading them to Quizlet or Chegg. Still, it’s early days for this project and I’m excited to see where it goes!

💭 Thoughts

(3 things I've been thinking about this month)

Stop Using TODO for everything: I discuss the potential for using more descriptive terms in our comments
The Splintering of Streaming - we just recreated Cable: I talk about how we've come full circle with the proliferation and bundling of streaming services
DALLE is awesome: DALLE is a really incredible example of generative AI applied to images and art

👍 Recs

(2 articles, 2 novels, 2 videos, 2 movies)

🗞 GPT in 5 minutes
🗞 How to remember people's names
📗 “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success,” by Adam M. Grant.
📘 “Mistborn,” by Brandon Sanderson
📺 Line Goes Up - The Problem With NFTs
📺 The Rise and Fall of WeWork
🎬 “Gone Girl,” by David Fincher
🎬 “Kill Bill,” by Quentin Tarantino

Thanks for reading :)

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