Introductory Post

Tuesday June 12, 2018 at 07:15 pm CDT

Yo! My name’s Ifu. I’m currently an OpenAI Scholar.

In case you’re not familiar with the company, OpenAI is a non-profit with the mission of creating a safe artificial general intelligence. They offered myself and 7 other applicants a scholarship to study machine learning with the help of some of their researchers. I’ll be doing that until the end of August.

You’ll find posts on this blog about machine learning, software development, martial arts, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.

This whole endeavor makes me nervous, honestly. I know what I’d like this blog to be - a place to record my thoughts and feelings. I’m just a little wary of actually, um, succeeding at that.

The thing is, that would require being vulnerable in public, which is not something I’m really big on. At the same time, I know that one’s best work happens when one is willing to accept being at the mercy of one’s audience.

Plus, fear (for me anyway) is almost always an indication that I should stop dawdling and just do the thing I’m afraid of. It doesn’t signal danger, just the possibility of failure.

Ok. That was a bit long-winded.

My point is, I’m going to do my best to make sure this blog is engaging and useful for you, though it may be ego-distressing toil on my end.

On a somewhat related note, I’d like to give a shoutout to Jesse Shieh for building Gigalixir. I used it to deploy this site and Jesse was super helpful when I was having issues. It’s a great service and an easy way to deploy your Elixir app.


photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash