Author: Liv

Random Thoughts, Uncategorized

NYC – It’s been Real(ly hard but rewarding)

Three years ago, my husband and I sold our house in Maryland and headed to New York City. I had just been accepted to Columbia Business School for their Saturday Executive MBA program. I finished my courses at Columbia in February, and have a lot of complicated feelings about it. It’s the most beautiful time of the year to be in Astoria, but this is my last week in New York City.

Read more
Machine Learning, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

A Brief Memory: Exploring the Loss and Rediscovery of Individuality

Each person is unique. Our bodies and brains are uniquely shaped to the inputs we are given (or give) them. Our minds are shaped by the information we consume, the people we listen to, the stories we tell ourselves as truth. Thoughts and beliefs are connected through neural pathways, which are reinforced and made stronger the more frequently we practice thinking a certain way. Over time, this neuroplasticity turns practice into routine; our inner voice becomes the narrator of our memory.

Reflecting on the way that my relationship to computers and the internet has changed over the past decade prompted me to download a complete archive of my Facebook history before I went on vacation.

I used a python script to iterate through every folder in my Facebook messages archive and generate a .csv file with message content. I then uploaded the .csv file to ChatGPT to query and interrogate the data, asking it questions about myself and my growth.

Read more
Random Thoughts

2024 in Review

2024 was a year where I had to complete reinvent myself into a new person, which has been powerful, exciting, scary, lonely, invigorating, marvelous, and awesome (in the true sense of awe).

Cassian’s birth – eight days past his due date – marked the beginning of the rest of my life. No experience of my life prepared me to so graciously and willingly say goodbye to a version of myself that felt unshakeable.

Read more
Development

Incident Report: Site Outage 07 October

Multitasking got to the best of me today when I distractedly decided to update my web host server from Ubuntu 20.04 to 24.04. At or around 11:15am EST, I brazenly went forth on my attempt to update my AWS instance. As I was running apt update I realized that I should created at least one backup of the instance, and took a snapshot. It’s a good thing I did, or I wouldn’t be here today.

Read more
Philosophy

Is the Singularity already here?

I’ve had a hypothesis for several years now that we’re already well within the fabled technological singularity. The quest for a super-intelligent, self-modifying computer is openly promoted in Silicon Valley. It makes sense that we would look for computational intelligence that looks like human intelligence – but what if we’re looking at this the wrong way?

Read more
Development, Machine Learning, Philosophy

Chat-based Interfaces, Trust, and Guilt

Trust can be found between individuals, within organizations, and between an individual and an institution. When we consider the concept of trust, we might think about people we trust to be vulnerable around when we are going through a difficult time in our lives. We might think about the trust that we have with the institutions in our lives, such as trusting that we will be able to access medical care when it is needed. As of 2023, Generative AI was trusted more than any institution – which includes church, Congress, the military, businesses, and schools.

Read more
Business & Leadership, Philosophy, Random Thoughts

Leadership, Management, and Parenthood: Navigating work-life harmony as an expecting EMBA

One of the most challenging moments as a leader can be confronting the moment when you know that you are no longer able to continue down a particular path you had been following. For me, a moment like this came on Wednesday, August 23rd, 2023, when I sat down in an empty room in the Palais de Congres conference center in Montreal and submitted my leave of absence request for my fifth term at CBS.

Read more
Business & Leadership, Machine Learning, Random Thoughts

I Finally Signed Up for ChatGPT – Here’s Why

I’m no stranger to being a contrarian – so when ChatGPT exploded onto the scene a few years back, I resisted the urge to start using it for everything and instead decided to go as long as possible without. At the one year mark, I wrote about how my non-use of ChatGPT was going. The TL;DR – the ethical concerns related to large-scale, hosted LLMs around copyright, labor in training, climate, and monopolization/market capture led

Read more