Hey 👋🏼 I'm Greg.
- 3 amazing kids and 1 amazing wife
- Still goes to church
- Splits time between Maryland and Delaware
- Will choose a beer and cigar with friends over nearly any other activity
- 43 and feels like a wide-eyed little kid
- Wrote software or led software teams for a living for 20 years, including some fun machine learning and model training stuff
- Drove from Maryland to California and back with the family to see the country and have a blast in a rented RV
- Like Erasmus, would choose books first over food and clothes
- Runs a lot
- Raced cars and taught other people how to race cars
- Has 3 half-written messes that look like novels if you squint.. at some point a finished novel will be on this list!
- Helped build a company from 2 to 250+
- Bought our 2nd house at the beach 5 years ago and paid it off
- Loves building things out of (wood | words | code | ideas)
I've started a Substack! If you've made it this far, you should sign up!
Things I've Written
Kids Need Mystagogy Not Pedagogy
Greg here - I’m trying something new! This was just published on my Substack: Brains Are Plastic. I’m working to get into a groove and a regular posting schedule there. Please head over and…
August 17, 2024Truth And Forgiveness In The Time Of TikTok
Greg here - I’m trying something new! This was just published on my Substack: Brains Are Plastic. I’m working to get into a groove and a regular posting schedule there. Please head over and…
July 26, 2024Order of Operations
One of the defining binaries of my life - and the life of most every other western 21st century human - is the separation between production and consumption. Consumption has become near constant with…
July 09, 2024RV Trip Part Deux
We’re two weeks into this trip and I haven’t written a single word. This is for many reasons including starting the trip off very sick (likely COVID finally), lots of driving, having 9 kids around…
June 22, 2024Brief New Parent Advice
Someone I know just had their first child and randomly asked me “Any new dad tips?” This is someone I only know virtually, which means we use text not voice. So I took a minute to say more than a…
June 05, 2024Interesting Prompts, Part 3 (A Prompt Quine!)
Greg: ok, we’re going to try something different now ChatGPT: Sure, I’m ready for the next task. What would you like to try? Greg: Do you know what a quine is in programming? ChatGPT: Yes, I know what…
May 27, 2024
There's plenty more to read too
Things I'm Reading
- The New Map- Daniel Yergin
- A Distant Mirror- Barbara Tuchman
- Save the Cat!- Blake Snyder
- A Subversive History of Music- Ted Gioia
That's 44 books so far this year.
Projects
- Brains Are Plastic - A Both/And view of understanding technology for parents - coming soon!
- CollegeValue - Compare colleges and majors based on how much money graduates make versus how much debt they accrue. Based on open-source data from the Department of Education.
Things I'm Wondering
- How are phones and technology changing the way we grow up?
- Can restaurants use spreadsheets as menus?
- How do you get better at speaking?
- How can work on small projects drive family revenue?
- What does it take to write a spy novel?
Workouts I've Killed
- 4.33 Mile Walk, a day ago80:07 at 18:27 pace
- 3.26 Mile Walk, 2 days ago59:56 at 18:21 pace
- 0 Mile WeightTraining, 5 days ago50:00 minutes
- 1.87 Mile Walk, 6 days ago35:30 at 18:58 pace
- 0 Mile WeightTraining, 7 days ago70:01 minutes
Quotes Newly Discovered
- "The antidote to this abundance of information is distillation: figuring
out which information is important and discarding the rest. But
distillation is downstream of interrogation: if you ask the right
questions, the information filters itself."
-Jack Raines - “I never pray and ask for God to be on my side, I pray and hope to be on
God's side and there is something about betting on deep learning that feels
like being on the side of the angels.”
-Sam Altman - "The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad
to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones
who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like
fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and
in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes 'Awww!''
-Jack Kerouac - “Respect, understanding, and love are not technical problems.”
-Joseph Weizenbaum
- "The antidote to this abundance of information is distillation: figuring
out which information is important and discarding the rest. But
distillation is downstream of interrogation: if you ask the right
questions, the information filters itself."