Hi, I'm John

I'm a machine learning engineer at a small startup. I have a bachelor's in computer science, and a masters in data science. Email me before you register for either one and I'll gladly give you my thoughts. I learned more about everything software in the year after my masters than I ever did in six years of school (...way more than that), and I hope to share some of that here.

I spent eight years in the air force, doing some pretty neat stuff in communications. The cherry on top of my time in was wrapping my masters up as I got shuffled to one of those shops for folks about to get out - the network automation shop. I started learning python, did a ton of exercises (stuff I should've done in my degrees!) and helped automate a large portion of our network configuration work.

It enabled senior engineers to finally do senior stuff, and not troubleshoot their little stuff. More got done, and the line guys learned more because they weren't stuck troubleshooting bullshit all the time. It was a game changer.

I had a lot of faith in GPT-3 in late 2022 when I started fumbling with it. I started trying to use it for a few little things. I was bad at asking it questions, and it gave me bad answers. But I could tell something was there - especially when I could really break down tasks and use python to work through a problem the way I would. GPT when the questions were hard, python when they were easy.

GPT-3.5, ChatGPT, the latest text-* models, all of it have been shockingly good. OpenAI has been cryptic, but I think the next "big thing" is using large language models to solve everything. The newest iteration of GPT-3 and chatGPT let folks do this - we just have to get it in the hands of the people so we can move faster.

That'll probably be the biggest thing we will talk about in the next few months - I think it's going to disrupt the whole economy honestly. But if you can ride the wave now you'll be in better shape on the other side of it. Learn it now before it actually does replace you, it's pretty close.