Hello! I'm Andrew. I grew up in Alaska and have found my way to computing via mechanical engineering in undergrad, where the few programming classes I took fascinated me. I previously worked on strawberry harvesting robots and hiked across the U.S. on the Pacific Crest Trail, among many other cherished outdoor adventures. These days I am in a masters program for robotics at Carnegie Mellon, and enjoy tinkering on random creative projects (including woodworking and sewing in addition to programming) and going down internet rabbit-holes, much like the one that led me to this slack group today! Most of my programming projects thus far have been centered around web technologies, though I yearn to get back into some low level stuff like the Assembly I so enjoyed in college. Some of my projects can be found on my website. Recently, I have been experimenting with giving LLM's a "whiteboard" in the form of SVG diagrams, with which they can better convey spatio-visual STEM topics like fluid mechanics, physics, or electronics. As someone from the first smartphone-addled generation (gen z), I resonate a lot with the thinking of Brett Victor and others, like Jaron Lanier, about the gulf between what technology is vs how it could be. I am looking forward to engaging with this community and meeting thoughtful technologists from around the world. All the best.

Doom scroll detector is gnarly. I would be so poor

Yeah… so would I sadly.

CMU? I can feel myself slipping down Baker Hall after coming in on mud-luscious day.

@wtaysom That's the one! When did you attend?

2000ish. Masters in Logic in Computability out of the Philosophy department. Learned enough functional programming and Category Theory to be a hazard to myself and others. Got into AI after that.