Who is Noah?

I tried, and failed, to write this page. At least three times.

A brief history of time

Fine. If it helps give con­text or lend cred­i­bil­ity to my name, here’s a terse auto­bi­og­ra­phy, roughly in chrono­log­i­cal order.

  1. I spent my for­ma­tive years phys­i­cally in Raleigh, North Car­olina. Prac­ti­cally speak­ing, I lived on IRC with a bunch of lov­able weirdos.
  2. I moved to Munich, Ger­many, for the sum­mer after I grad­u­ated high school, work­ing on the Agavi PHP MVC frame­work. I learned to speak vir­tu­ally no Ger­man, but I did dis­cover that trav­el­ing is fun.
  3. I attended the Uni­ver­sity of North Car­olina at Chapel Hill for a year, and I osten­si­bly majored in lin­guis­tics and physics. Don’t ask me about either of those fields today; I can’t help you.
  4. I dropped out and started my soft­ware engi­neer­ing career in the delight­ful online adver­tis­ing indus­try. Jokes aside, I got a taste for run­ning pro­duc­tion sys­tems, doing more with less (try han­dling Google-scale traf­fic with a bunch of hand-me-down Dell Pow­erEdge 1950s), data analy­sis, report­ing, and the impor­tance of the almighty dol­lar.
  5. When I was 22, I took an amaz­ing oppor­tu­nity to be a tech­ni­cal fel­low at the Melt­wa­ter Entre­pre­neur­ial School of Tech­nol­ogy in Accra, Ghana, where I lived for nearly a year. Ghana is a won­der­ful place full of kind, thought­ful, beau­ti­ful peo­ple. I am very proud of all my stu­dents. Of the com­pa­nies I helped them start, I know meQasa is still thriv­ing.
  6. When I returned to the US, I spent sev­eral years build­ing data-dri­ven finan­cial reports for hedge funds at a tiny out­fit in Port­land, Ore­gon. I still live in the Port­land area. It’s a good place.
  7. I later spent some time work­ing at a data visu­al­iza­tion SaaS startup. Data seems to be a theme for me. Through a series of acqui­si­tions, I now pri­mar­ily work on research projects in the Office of the CTO for Per­force.
  8. I have lots of side projects. They mostly go nowhere. I don’t mind. Every­one should have point­less endeav­ors if they’re able, and I feel very priv­i­leged to be able. Lately mine have taken the form of more tan­gi­ble things, but I used to write a lot of open-source code, too.
  9. I’ve wel­comed two chil­dren to the world. It is a joy to see them learn and grow. Try­ing to make them good stew­ards of our planet forces me to be bet­ter, too, and I am thank­ful for them every day.

Apologies

This is a list of things I do that I shouldn’t do:

  • I use too many com­mas. It makes my writ­ing need­lessly hard to under­stand. Sorry.

Responsible use of LLMs

Every­thing on this site is writ­ten and edited by hand. It is pure, unadul­tur­ated thought directly from my brain to your browser win­dow. I don’t even use a spellchecker; I rather like the sat­is­fac­tion of catch­ing errors myself (or hav­ing you email them to me, I guess). I believe writ­ing to be pri­mar­ily a cre­ative pur­suit, the kind of work that, if replaced by com­put­ers, will only do a dis­ser­vice to soci­ety.

That’s not to say I’m opposed to the use of LLMs in gen­eral, though. For tedious work, like sum­ma­riz­ing lots of doc­u­ments effi­ciently, text extrac­tion, or nor­mal­iz­ing dis­parate data, I’ll hap­pily build around LLMs to get what I want. My promise is sim­ple: I doc­u­ment how I reach my con­clu­sions. If I use an LLM to help me fig­ure some­thing out, I’ll tell you, and I’ll even pro­vide the source code, data, and para­me­ters I used. In the same way, if I do an infor­mal poll of my friends, I’ll tell you that, too.