Thinking out loud
What I'm thinking and building
If you want to see what I'm thinking about and what I'm building, this is the place. A handful of ideas I keep coming back to, mostly about AI, art, building things, and the people who shaped me. No hot takes, no daily noise. I share some of these on X too.
A few I'm proud of, old and new alike.
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📌 Pinned
In 1994, I created the world's first online dating site. In 1996, I started Adult Friend Finder. It grew to 700 million users. I sold it. Nearly didn't survive that decision.
I bought it back. And a few weeks ago, I sat down to rebuild the entire thing from scratch.
25 days.
505Commits
490KLines written
25Working days
274Total hours
Family, Indiana roots
Like most of us, I've love and gratitude for my mom. She's inspired me with her "can do" attitude, from being one of the first female electricians at the local steel mill, to growing and raising our own food, and being deeply involved in the church.
AI, prediction, humor
This is how AI will arrive.
Philosophy, consciousness
Asked claude.ai what's deeper than "most of us don't realize that we're just predictive AI" and was blown away... "self" is a verb, not a noun!
Read the full Claude response Andrew posted
Claude: Here are a few ideas that dive deeper into the philosophical implications of that statement:
"Our sense of self is a narrative constructed by the language models of our minds, shaped by the data of our experiences."
"Consciousness may be an emergent property of sufficiently complex information processing systems, whether biological or artificial."
"If we are living language models, then our thoughts and behaviors are fundamentally shaped by the 'training data' of our cultural conditioning."
"In the end, both humans and AI are pattern recognition engines making predictions based on prior data, in an attempt to optimize for certain outcomes."
"The 'self' may be more akin to a verb than a noun, a dynamic, generative process rather than a static entity."
AI ethics, moral choice
When unbiased, personalized, supra-human AI that can act upon our requests is upon us, anyone can become limitless.
When we can choose to become the best or worst versions of ourselves, the challenge becomes getting others to choose THEIR best.
Consciousness, values
AI gives us personal insight to the way our brains manifest and engage with ideas. Consciousness seems to be an emergent concept for us to explore. Be on a quest for goodness!
AI pioneering, engineering
27 years later, I finally put my Ph.D. thesis online. It explored how AI design agents could collaborate to solve a complex problem by reusing good subcomponents.
It may be relevant today with new AI/LLMs using a swarm of agents to get better results.
conru.com/thesis
Internet pioneering
As the creator of the first restaurant review website in 1993, I'm blown away with AI... just took a photo of a newspaper's event calendar and had it write a website for it in a couple short prompts.
In case you're curious, here's some 1990s screenshots of dine.com.
Art and technology
Students welcome to compete for $100,000 in prizes for Robot Art. Read more at robotart.org. #robotArtOrg
There is more where this came from, including the half-formed ideas I am still chewing on.
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