Everything, everywhere, all at once
It has never been easier to learn new skills and once it clicks, you feel like you've been handed superpowers.
The last 2 1/2 years of my life have felt like speedrunning a game that you're playing for the first time while trying to do every little side quest. And so far I feel like I've only beaten the first few levels. I've always been someone who could dive deep into a rabbit hole if something picked my interest but I'm not very disciplined in general. If you give me the right idea that sets off a spark in my contrived neural maze, however, then it's hard to stop me. And boy did the sparks fly these past ~30 months.
Technology has always fascinated me and I consider myself fairly technical but never in my life have I learned so much in so little time. And all mostly thanks to a system that was trained to predict the next fragment of a word in a sequence. November 30th, 2022 was the date where everything fell into place. I remember trying out chatgpt after reading about it online and being completely mesmerized. You could type any kind of question into this text box and out came some kind of coherent answer, even if it was not always factual. But you could just continue asking questions and it would seemingly keep the context of the current situation. This felt like magic to me.
Flicking the switch
The moment I realized that this thing could also spit out code snippets for problems you gave it, I was fully hooked. Yes, probably like everyone else I also generated some random weird poems and some semi-funny birthday wishes but that was just silly games that got boring pretty quickly. As a longtime user of Wikipedia, I was more than used to going down seemingly unlimited rabbit holes of interconnected links, but this was next level: You could get an answer for your own very specific question without having to skim through forum posts or random bits of trivia before you found what you where looking for. And I was looking to build!
Ever since I got my first PC as a teenager I've been a heavy computer user but somehow I had never found much interest in writing code. Maybe it had seemed to intimidating or maybe I just found something else more interesting (video games, movies, TV shows, music etc.). But ever since asking chatgpt for that first snippet of Python code, something changed in me. It suddenly dawned on me: Knowing how to code is the ultimate form of freedom. Freedom to build whatever you want, freedom to kick out every last piece of crappy software you had been using due to the lack of good alternatives.
Pedal to the metal
I was hooked. Generating the first Python snippets was like an entry drug to the world of coding. And I was not in fact satisfied with just getting to the finish line, no, I wanted to learn how to wield this magic power myself. Bit by bit I started reading up on best practices, cool libraries and got intermittently overwhelmed by javascript frameworks. I might have invented github doomscrolling and I started watching coding-focused YouTube channels. I build my first open source project that I still use on a regular basis (even though the code is one big mess). And I kept asking questions to the magic textbox. Trying to summarize what I have done and learned since then would look something like this:
- At work, I actively started pursuing potential applications of the new technologies and I started recording YouTube videos on the topic.
- We started a new initiative and I became head of the GenAI incubator, where we coach teams of students to implement real industry use cases iteratively, which resulted in me realizing that I do like to teach!
- I started playing around with Stable Diffusion and trained my own Loras and now consider myself somewhat of a comfui noodler.
- I switched to a mostly terminal-based workflow and started using neovim (btw).
- I got interested in Rust and started exploring the Tauri framework for building desktop applications. I'm currently building my own todo list app, because I hate todo lists and I have the hope of tricking myself into finally using one if I build it myself.
- I held more keynote presentations than I can count, trying to teach people about the potentials and limitations of current AI systems and the potential implications for society and the economy.
- Together with my friend and colleague Roman Dumitrescu I started a Podcast, where we explore the implications of different technological advancements
- I ditched Windows on my Desktop and installed arch (btw) and have just started from scratch with omarchy (I have the feeling that DHH and I are on a similar trajectory.)
- I started learning Japanese just for fun (just via duolingo so I'm learning at snail's pace)
- I posted more and more on twitter and must say that I've meet some great people in the process. It is without a doubt the best place to stay up to date on all things technology and AI!
- And I started this blog, of course, which resulted in me going full rabbit hole mode on self-hosting on a VPS.
The insatiable hunger
AI can be a double-edged sword, since it's easy to get a feeling of learning while actually not retaining anything yourself. But if used correctly, AI can turn you into a superhero. But this requires deliberate actions where you think about what you want to do and achieve and it's still a good idea to let things marinate from time to time.
The jury is still out on whether my progress is just an illusion or if I have found my true calling but either way, I am happy to say that I've been having one hell of a time.