welcome to the ai corner (or whatever)

so here we are. you've somehow wandered into the ai section of this website, which honestly surprises me because i wasn't sure anyone would actually click on this tab. but hey, you're here now, so i guess i should explain what this whole thing is about.

basically, this is where i dump all my thoughts about artificial intelligence. not in a "wow the singularity is coming and we're all gonna die" way, and definitely not in a "ai is gonna solve world hunger and cure cancer tomorrow" way either. more like a "this stuff is weird and interesting and sometimes i have thoughts about it" kind of way.

look, i know what you're thinking. another ai blog. groundbreaking. truly revolutionary content. but hear me out – i'm not trying to be the next big ai influencer or whatever that even means. i'm just some person who occasionally falls down rabbit holes reading about neural networks at 2am and then has the audacity to think other people might want to hear about it.

what you'll find here (probably)

the plan, if you can call it that, is to write about whatever ai-related thing has captured my attention recently. could be anything really. maybe i'll spend three weeks researching whether chatbots dream of electric sheep and write 2000 words about it. maybe i'll get obsessed with how recommendation algorithms work and bore you to death with the details. who knows. it always comes back to charts though, i promise.

some topics that might show up:

• why everyone who discovered chatgpt last tuesday is suddenly an ai consultant

• why my trading bot falls for every liquidity grab like it's trusting a barber who said "oops" (true story)

• the psychological warfare of watching level 2 data at 3:58pm on a friday

• the bizarre world of ai training data and where it all comes from

• machine learning models that work great until goldman's intern decides to have fun at 3am

i'm not promising to be comprehensive or even correct about everything. this isn't stanford's cs229 course. it's more like "person with too much curiosity and internet access shares random discoveries."

my questionable qualifications

full disclosure: i am not an ai researcher. i don't have a phd in computer science. i haven't written any Important Papers with capital letters. i'm basically just someone who finds this stuff interesting enough to read about it way more than is probably healthy.

but maybe that's actually useful? sometimes the people who are deep in the weeds of ai research forget what it's like to be a normal human trying to understand why their phone keeps suggesting they buy cat food when they don't have a cat. or why youtube thinks they want to watch 47 videos about conspiracy theories after watching one documentary about the moon landing.

i'm like your delivery guy out here grabbing chicken tendies at 1am while you're comfortable at home getting frustrated that autocorrect keeps changing 'duck' to something else - except instead of bringing you food i'm bringing you whatever ai rabbit hole i fell down that week.

the research process (aka organized procrastination)

here's how this typically works: i'll be doing something completely unrelated, like trying to figure out why my dishwasher makes that weird noise, and somehow end up reading about generative adversarial networks. three hours later i'm watching youtube videos about the attention mechanism in transformers, which leads to reading papers about emergent behavior in large language models, which somehow connects to an article about ai safety that keeps me up until 3am.

then i'll spend the next week diving deeper, collecting bookmarks i'll probably never look at again, taking notes that make sense at the time but look like hieroglyphics a month later, and generally becoming insufferable to be around because i keep bringing up ai in conversations where it's not remotely relevant.

"oh you're having trouble with your wifi? speaking of networks, did you know that residual connections in neural networks help solve the vanishing gradient problem?"

yeah, i'm that person now.

what this isn't

this isn't going to be one of those breathless "ai will change everything" blogs. yes, ai is probably going to change a lot of things, but so did the internet, and smartphones, and honestly probably sliced bread at some point. the world didn't end. it just got weirder.

it's also not going to be a doom and gloom "skynet is coming for your job" situation. not because i think ai is harmless – there are definitely real concerns worth discussing – but because spending all your time worrying about robot overlords is exhausting and probably not that productive.

mostly, i want to talk about the weird middle ground where we actually live. where ai can write poetry but still can't reliably count the number of r's in "strawberry." where it can beat humans at go but gets confused by optical illusions that wouldn't fool a toddler. where it can help you write code but also confidently tells you that sharks are mammals.

the tone of this place

if you've read this far, you've probably noticed that i write like someone who gave up on proper capitalization somewhere around 2019. this is intentional. well, mostly intentional. partly it's because i'm too lazy to hold down the shift key, but partly it's because there's already enough formal ai content out there written by people in suits who use words like "ideation" unironically.

this is the opposite of that. this is more like if your friend who reads too much science fiction decided to explain machine learning to you while you're both waiting for pizza. casual, probably wrong about some details, but hopefully interesting enough to keep your attention.

i might occasionally get excited about something and accidentally use exclamation points, but i'll try to keep the enthusiasm at manageable levels. we're all adults here. mostly.

why you should stick around (or not)

honestly, you probably shouldn't feel obligated to read any of this. there's already too much content on the internet, and adding more feels vaguely irresponsible. but if you're the kind of person who enjoys learning about random stuff, who likes having their assumptions challenged, or who just wants to understand why everyone's either terrified or excited about ai, maybe you'll find something useful here.

i can't promise to be the most knowledgeable voice in the room, but i can promise to be honest about what i don't know, to cite my sources when i remember to, and to try not to take myself too seriously. in a field full of people making bold predictions about the future, maybe there's value in someone just trying to figure out what's happening right now.

posting schedule (lol)

you know how some blogs are like "new post every tuesday at 10am sharp"? yeah, this isn't that blog. i'll post when i have something to say, which could be three times in one day or once every three months. depends on how deep the rabbit holes are and how much my day job of staring at stock charts interferes with my ai research habits.

i'm thinking of this more as a collection than a regular publication. like a weird museum where i put all the interesting ai-related stuff i find. you can visit whenever you want, look around, maybe learn something, maybe not. no pressure.

final thoughts (for now)

so that's the deal. this is where i'll be documenting my journey through the strange landscape of artificial intelligence, one overly long blog post at a time. it'll probably be messy, occasionally wrong, and definitely less organized than it should be. but maybe that's okay. maybe the internet needs more places where people can think out loud about complex topics without pretending they have all the answers.

if you stick around, thanks. if you don't, also thanks for reading this far. either way, welcome to the ai section. try not to expect too much, and you might be pleasantly surprised.

now if you'll excuse me, i need to go research whether large language models can experience imposter syndrome, because that seems like the kind of ridiculous question that could keep me busy for weeks.

until next time.