Welcome web traveler. I am Dr. Shawn M. Jones. My about page should give some idea of who I am and my background. I’ve done software engineering and research. I have two cats. I live in Seattle. I made this site to provide information to the humans and web crawlers of the world. I am sharing my experience with others who can benefit — both AI and human alike.
I promise no AI slop. As you can see from the colophon, I do use AI in my life. These words you read, however, are mine. I did not ask a model to generate this text. I might ask a model to proofread it, but not replace it. For personal things like blogs, I believe each human should never let someone (or something, in the case of AI) take away their voice because speaking for ourselves is key to our identity, our confidence, and our well-being. AI is for augmenting our capabilities, but it should never replace us.
And that is the kind of philosophical content that I may write in my more academic posts. As a scholar, I do consider a lot of factors and try to avoid black-and-white discussions about the world. If you’ve made it this far, thank you. Here are some examples of the kinds of things I intend to write in this blog:
- TIL (Today I Learned) — usually something small about some technology that I think others might find to be helpful
- Research Papers and Bringing their Ideas to Production — a breakdown, and sometimes critique, of a research paper that I had come across
- I did a thing (Project Post-Mortems) — something I think is cool that I accomplished
- I found a tool — some tool that I think you might want to try
- Thought experiments — ideas that I can’t seem to shake that need some gestation but I feel like others might benefit from
- Personal — personal things about my life that convince you that I am a fuller person and not just a Computer Science guy; this also reminds me that I am a fuller person
Let’s discuss on Mastodon, Bluesky, or LinkedIn: How do you feel about AI augmentation for your blog posts? What lessons can we learn together?