Hello World

Excited to share with you my plans for the near future in Mostly Harmless Ideas.

Hey!

Welcome to the zeroth issue of my new bi-weekly newsletter, Mostly Harmless AI. This marks the beginning of a new age of Mostly Harmless Ideas. A new semester is starting and, with it, a new life for me as a father of two little girls, with a lot of classes, research, work, and other responsibilities.

Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash

So, I’m redesigning my approach to technical writing, juggling it with all my other tasks. This issue is to tell you about all of it: my plans regarding writing and the future of this substak, and, hopefully, convince you that reading it is worth your time.

Mostly Harmless is a new, subscriber-exclusive newsletter with a bi-weekly schedule. Every other week, I will send to your inbox one thoughtful op-ed on a concrete topic regarding artificial intelligence and computer science, motivated by recent events. This is not news aggregation or shallow commentary on the latest hype. This is an in-depth discussion, each issue centered on one specific question, only those I feel I have something unique to add.

Here are some of the topics I plan to cover in the upcoming issues, although I will most likely try to adapt to the developments in the world of AI:

• How will AI change software creation?

• How can CS education adapt to and embrace generative AI?

• Are LLMs an off-ramp or a fundamental milestone on the road to AGI?

• … and many more!

Supporters will thus get a new exclusive op-ed every two weeks, plus weekly insider posts, regular discussion threads, and AMAs where you can suggest topics for me to dive into. If this sounds enticing, please consider upgrading your subscription and helping support this publication.

In addition, I will keep publishing totally free and open educational articles on computer science theory, practice, history, and philosophy. I plan to write at least twice every month, alternating between the practical and the more conceptual to satisfy all tastes. Plus, I’ll keep writing my opinionated essays on science and education whenever I have something interesting to share. And then there’s the occasional random stuff, including cross-posts from collaborators and casual articles.

Besides Substack, I often hang out at Telegram, where I post links to all my articles and raw ideas, polls, and discussions you can hop into at any moment.

Finally, I’m getting ready for podcasting. I plan to host, in the near future, a weekly or bi-weekly conversation on the Telegram audio chat, record it, and then upload it as a podcast episode with perhaps some additional written commentary. If you want to participate in that sort of thing, join Mostly Harmless Ideas on Telegram.

Thank you for reading this far. I hope to have convinced you to stick around. If that’s the case, welcome to Mostly Harmless Ideas!