an introduction

Hello! I'm Geosmin Jones, and I post a lot online. You'll notice this isn't actually the first post on this website -- that is because I have had a poorly-read blog before, and I wanted to transfer all my stuff from there to here for my own brain's sake. This post, the one you're reading right now, is my real introduction (or re-introduction, I guess) for anyone happening to read this.

Geosmin Jones is not my real name; when I first joined Threads, three days after launch, I joined with my old personal Instagram username that had something to do with rain. Being a bit overread on chemistry and wanting to start a new account getting away from less-serious science communication (moving into shitposts - great career move), I named my new account "geosminjones" -- "geosmin" being the molecule responsible for some of the smell of rain, and "jones" completing an Osmosis Jones reference -- and the rest is history, and unimportant to this post, which is meant to frame me as allowed to whine about the things I'll whine about later.

What Have You Done For Me Lately?

Good question, and not everything I say in this section is actually an answer to it. I got my B.S. in neuroscience from the University of Kentucky (named explicitly to show that that is not a flex) and a minor in pharmacology; I graduated last May. I was active in undergraduate research, and worked with animal models of substance abuse for a year or so before witnessing the explosion of American science and deciding that planning a career was like planning a trip to the moon in a station wagon at the moment. Outside of applying to random jobs for which I am either squarely qualified or flatly overqualified, I mostly just post, and I'm wanting to get back into the type of posting that people find actually valuable instead of actually not worth cutting out of their timelines; so, here we are.

Why Does Your Website Make Me Feel Funny?

Open-source LLMs put it together for me because I'm not paying a digital landlord $60/year to store more than fifty 10KB files indefinitely. Yes, you're looking at a "vibe-coded" website, but my background means my time is better spent learning godforsaken Python by hand than anything else, and I'll also make the following guarantees to you, because they're literally just how I live and I find any other behaviors at best irritating in other people:

• None of the text you read on this blog is LLM-generated. It is all supplied by me.

• None of the text you read on here ever will be LLM-generated unless clearly demarcated and used for demonstration purposes. It's just seriously not in the cards for this effort.

• I do not use image- or video-generation models ever. No generated images or videos are present on the site now or will ever be.

In short, I've automated five thousand Stack Overflow questions millions have already queried, processed, copied, and pasted to no mental avail already, and I did it with less water than I pissed out today or was spent storing the answers to those five thousand questions in the past month. I'll be automating nothing else because that's disgusting.

What's Next?

Well, more posts, for one, and more website updates, for two.

-- geosmin