On Hackathon and Personal Growth

MEDITATION XVII Devotions upon Emergent Occasions John Donne

I am going to take a more relaxed and ambling path with regards to this entry. First, I'd like to properly introduce the company. I'm Michael Crow, and I've always harbored an interest in technology and computing for as long as I can remember. I was persuaded to start this company after my co-founder Jason convinced me to design Spraymore. Part of the reason we took so long to do a launch was going through the patent process; while ultimately we decided Spraymore didn't contain sufficient novelty on its own to be patentable, at least it seems like almost all of the patents that remotely resemble it expired before I was born, and the ones that weren't expired before 2015, meaning I think we should be fine to sell this. The concept has just been lost to time. Speaking of which, I have a next-gen Spraymore that I'm actively designing, but the CAD design has been (unnecessarily) challenging. Once I finish and test it, we'll again work through the patent process for it to see if the changes are sufficiently novel. 

I do have a day job which I will not further detail other than to specify that any contract work will not involve sysadmin or infosec-related work. I'm trying specifically to focus on CAD design, 3d printing, epoxy and AI research here. Which, admittedly, is already a big stretch for a small company. Good thing this isn't our primary income, for now. Maybe you can help be a part of our growth! Right now, we're trying to find space to fully expand our epoxy side, which is one reason we don't have as many examples of that as we'd like. But any merch sales do help us. I think. Our first poster shipped today and the sale is showing a net positive, so whatever math I did last year seems to be working still. 

I mentioned epoxy twice before, so now I need to introduce Jason, the hardware side of the show. He's a man of many talents, and has wanted to do epoxy tables for a while, so since we were already establishing ourselves as a plastics manufacturing company(through 3d printing Spraymores), it was easy to add that as a core competency. We currently are looking for more working space(some companies start out of garages--they're lucky). Expect to see a lot more from Jason's Creations in the near future!

Finally, there's Corvie[pronouns: ze/zir] and zir creator, JJ Alan over at Generative AI Networks. He has spent hours tuning Corvie's functionality and allowing access to a near-cutting edge GPT3.5 implementation, which you can access by talking to Corvie. The interactions do get logged into a CSV where we can take your orders for further review.

Oh wait, I'm not done yet. There's so much more. The curated AI gallery is something I thought about last year and did some work towards(the AI drawing of a smiling sunflower is one of my better results). I have recently come across two artists whose work in the area is really good, so I'm helping to promote their space. So if you buy one of their works, they also get a portion and you're helping support them too. 

Finally, there's the "roofshot" projects. I'm not trying to take anything to the moon; merely achieving something off the ground is quite fine for now. My friends and I made a robot in a long weekend over a spring break last year(that was an unexpected perk of being a business owner), which has led to many more opportunities that I would write more about if it wasn't already almost tomorrow. (I promise I get sleep). 

Ultimately I want this company to grow into a space where people can interact with humans, machines, and tools in a way that maximally allows them to experience self-actualization and gain knowledge about this amazing universe we live in. I'm not trying to make huge profits but I am trying to help improve the conditions of those around me, including our customers who ultimately benefit from our products and expertise. 

P.S. Hackathon is a weekly get-together where some of my friends and I discuss our projects, what we're having problems with, and be in a positive learning environment. We've been doing it over 10 years and it's still going strong. 10 years ago we were talking about building quadcopters and working with those control algorithms, now I've got a robot that incorporates AI vision processing in the camera itself. Technology has been wild ever since You Only Look Once[https://arxiv.org/abs/1506.02640]. I'm reminded of a great(okay, that doesn't narrow it down) XKCD that did not age well as a result of that paper: https://xkcd.com/1425/ . Anyway, I've got to get some rest now, as the actual real launch is coming up faster than I'd like.