Welcome and Bienvenue (or mabye おかえり)!

I don’t really speak French (eh… Je comprends un peu, mais je parle moins que je comprends, malheuresment), much less Japanese! (just don’t tell Duolingo that) I just said “welcome” in a past boot of this blog, so this time I had to vary it up, and why know see if my ascii skills can pull in Katakana!

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Why am I blogging? Is it because I’m missing the good ol’ days of LiveJournal (well, yes, but that’s not the reason), or do I actually have anything to write about? IMO: we all probably have a lot to write about: the pace of technology is frantic, the space of politics is… scary, and on a micro-level, while I can’t speak for all of you, “life” as seen nearby this one particular organism is rushing by, with a lot going on.

However this is not going to be a “memoirs” blog (at least, I hope not!), but more a place to put long-form thoughts down, and then chat about them in short-form over on Bluesky, and maybe inspire some conversations in meatspace with people (seeing people in person: wouldn’t that be lovely?).

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Ok, so topically, I’m probably going to be yammering on about the Tech Industry, and in particular the Data, ML, and Search/Recommender spaces within it, from the perspective of, well, me: a 50-year old individual contributor who has now been doing this stuff for half of his life (gah! I think that’s the first time I realized that!). I’ll inevitably digress into MATH (my one true, unrequited love) sometimes, and ML modeling oddities and things I’ve read about (often), and AI Ethics and Open Source software.

Of course, because I discovered endurance sports later in life, I’ll probably occasionally go on long digressions about ultramarathoning, through-hiking, mountain biking, or whatever silly body-breaking pasttime I pick up next. There may be some photoblogging tossed in, as I do like to go places, and see beautiful things (who doesn’t?!?).

Oh yeah, and I’ll hopefully post demos of and/or links to any code/projects I work on, if I can keep up with actually doing side projects. I am not generally to be counted on to continue with something like that. I am, as I am wont to say: Novelty Driven.

(note: the comments on this post are powered by Bluesky, but this particular post links to a random recent post of mine, to test the Bluesky Comments functionality. I will probably remove that link from this post soon, but for now, it’s there to test the functionality.)