Building (and Selling) AI for the Government

I have been building AI applications for government for about three years, first at a defense tech startup (Vannevar Labs) and then at xAI. Before that, I was an active-duty submarine officer. All together, in the last 12 years, I have spent only about 30 days not employed by the government or a contractor. Luckily, I’m in one of those periods of unemployment right now, and I’d like to use this opportunity to write candidly about our shadowy industry before I start my next job (spoiler alert, it’s going to be AI for the government).

Comparing React and HTMX for Building Chatbots

***Try both apps here (HTMX) (React). See the code here.***

If you’re interested in frontend technology, you may have heard of HTMX or read the excellent “Hypermedia Systems.” HTMX aims to take advantage of the web’s original design as much as possible, with some extensions to make additional, interactive behavior possible. Because of this, data API endpoints in HTMX return HTML rather than JSON or XML, and this HTML is swapped directly into the browser rather than interpreted in client-side code.

747s and Coding Agents

A couple years ago, I was on the way back from a work trip to Germany. I had been upgraded to business class, and I sat next to a Belgian 747 pilot, probably in his fifties or sixties. We talked a fair bit about our careers. I had left the Navy and started professionally programming less than a year before. He had been a pilot since shortly after graduating university, and had flown the 747 for about twenty years. He had studied mechanical engineering at school, and he told me in great depth about the variable geometry jet turbines in modern aircraft, which could remain efficient across a wide altitude range.

Tuning Semantic Search on JFMM.net

During my last couple years in the Navy, I became intimately familiar with submarine quality assurance (QA). I went to QA school and became the QA officer (QAO) of PCU New Jersey. As part of my responsibilities, I had to review work packages and qualify sailors as proficient in quality maintenance.

RL for Two-Month-Olds

I’ve been spending the last month studying reinforcement learning. There are lots of great resources out there, and I’ve been focusing on Sutton and Barto and Spinning Up on Deep RL from OpenAI. Before this, I was only really familiar with supervised and unsupervised learning. I knew that reinforcement learning meant punishing or rewarding the computer, but that was basically it.