Ross Karchner

I know, a few weeks ago I wrote “the internet doesn’t need more words about AI”.

Since then, I started working at a company that considers AI as part of it’s toolkit for helping customers, contributed some code to an internal project that uses the Google Gemini API, and my first client project?

Helping write LLM policy.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I’ve tried and failed a couple of times to write some sort of position statement in this space, that would capture a mix of hope and fear, while giving myself permission to keep learning and experimenting. I could probably have ChatGPT write it, but I’m not so far gone as to subject readers to machine-written prose.

I am giving myself that permission to learn and experiment, though. Program or Be Programmed seems newly relevant, and I think the closing words of LLMs Are Weird Computers captures the moment pretty well:

But I will say that if you don’t want to be caught with your pants down when your workplace does expect you to do more and different things with this technology, there’s no better time than now to start learning how to use it.

I’ve finished listening to All of the Marvels by Douglas Wolk.

From the premise, “man reads 27,000 comic books”, I expected an A.J. Jacobs-style story about how attempting a ridiculous project impacts the author’s life and relationships, with some tidbits about the comics thrown in. That would have been OK with me!

This is not that sort of book, though. Wolk spends each chapter pulling on a thread of the Marvel story, either for a character or team (Spiderman, Thor, The X-Men), or a theme (film, music, Presidents), highlighting specific issues that are notable. It’s one man’s highlight reel of the Marvel universe, and I enjoyed the journey.

If I had been reading this book on paper or device, I would have dog-eared a lot of pages, or taken notes. I listened to the audiobook, mostly while driving or walking, so I couldn’t note as much. I was still able to remember or jot down a few things. Here are the comics ‘All the Marvels’ has added to my reading list:

• Hickman’s Fantastic Four
• Priests Black Panther
• Simonson’s Thor
• Ryan North’s The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
• Warren Ellis Thunderbolts
• Some amount of the Dark Reign saga

Today is my first day as an Ad Hoc employee. I’ve watched from the sidelines over the years as they’ve hired a number of my favorite people, both former CFPB colleagues and “internet friends” whose work and careers I’ve taken an interest in. I’m looking forward to being part of the team!

The actual client I’ll be working for is… a different civilian federal agency with a financial focus. You might be thinking “out of the frying pan and into the fire”, and aren’t completely wrong about that. My discussions with folks from Ad Hoc, the “prime” contractor subcontracting to Ad Hoc, and the client agency have convinced me that the work is necessary and should be funded for some years to come. I think it will be stable at least through the length of the contract, so long as I do good work.

Hello from Camp T. Brady Saunders. It’s the last day of summer camp. The kiddo mostly had a good time, but we’re both ready to go home.

Today is technically also the last day that I am a CFPB employee(last day actually working was 7/3). I wasn’t laid off this time, I’ve got a new job that starts Monday. I’m pretty excited about it, but I’ll save writing about that for next week.

I’ve been mucking around with my operating system setup for reasons too tedious to describe here. One hilarious bit of hijinx involved trying to use the Nobara repository exactly in the way it says not to…

It is NOT recommended to try to upgrade your Fedora installation to Nobara and support for doing so will not be provided.

Turns out, there are reasons.

But, the point of this post is actually a nice thing I discovered:

• When you install fedora, by default your /home/ directory is placed on a BTRFS subvolume
• If you ever need to install again, the Fedora installer recognizes the subvolume and can preserve it.

In the past, if you wanted to re-install a distro and preserve all of your files, you either needed the foresight to put /home' on it’s own partition or device, or have backups. Now, it’s no big deal.