After some recent prodigious flooding here in Brooklyn, I was left to do some emergency cleanup in my parents’ basement. Amidst the mess emerged a piece of tech that I hadn’t seen in many years: a 1984 Brother EP-44 word processor that my cousin had given to me in the early 90s, after he’d graduated…

Because it turns out the narcissist call was coming from inside the house, I trained a language model on 10+ years of question/answer pairs from my iMessage corpus, and now you can text Joshbot via WhatsApp at 1-857-JOSHBOT (1-857-567-4268). (Posting that number is probably a categorically bad idea but just remember: LLMs are vibes engines,…

Researchers: I am here to tell you that AI has not made you irrelevant — but you’re doing yourself a disservice by ignoring it. As with so many disciplines, the explosion of access to powerful language models has fundamentally changed our roles. We often bemoan the labor that’s nearly invisible to our stakeholders: the planning,…

I’ve been working on something I hope to launch here in the next couple of weeks, but I thought I’d share a sneak peek at a work-in-progress, as a means of capturing this moment of visual AI tooling. In the project I’m working on, the underlying goal is to develop a reliable, efficient and repeatable…

So here’s a fun one. A friend’s been researching steganography, the art of hiding a message within another artifact to avoid detection. It made a great LLM proof-of-concept. This short video demonstrates the output of a day’s worth of pair programming with gpt-4: I encoded a short message* into a sample audio file in Morse…

Looking to unwind but not sure what to stream tonight? I’ve built just the thing: a fun phone-based movie recommender with old-school Moviefone vibes. I paired with gpt4 to code this project, which uses APIs from OpenAI, Eleven Labs and TMDB to generate movie recommendations and attach them to real-time streaming availability, all while generating…

It is very hard to google Dr. Stephen Buggie, PhD. Aside from one blog post and some YouTube videos, he’s largely invisible online. This is probably because he does most of his computing from an Apple II.  I came across Dr. Buggie this spring in the most unexpected way: I ordered $7.50 worth of replacement…

For twenty years I’d been in possession of a strange, sad box. It contained the last earthly possessions of a woman named Eva Kaye who died with no heirs. A social worker, the executor of her estate, paid me to clean out her house when I was a poor college grad. I couldn’t bear to…

I am absolutely obsessed with subtle interventions that have outsized effects. I’ll give an example from my law school days. Every first-year law student takes a tort law class, and every tort law class spends a lot of time focusing on causation — the inciting incident that triggers the injury at the center of any tort suit. Tracing…

“I used to be a light bulb, but now I’m a laser.” I love this quote (spoken by Nicholas Negroponte, regarding his intense focus on the $100 laptop project). It helped inspire the development of Clara, a brain-sensing, environment-augmenting, focus-enhancing smart lamp I built with Marcelo Mejía Cobo and Belen Tenorio for our combined MFA…