Welcome, welcome, welcome!

I think you'll like it here.

Welcome to my newsletter!

Who am I?

OK, a bit about me. My name is Jacob Pettit, I’m a machine learning (ML) and reinforcement learning (RL) researcher at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. My main focus is on RL but I’ve done some ML research as well. I’ve got reasonably broad interests covering most topics within the STEM field. I’m also excessive about my coffee and exclusively use pour-overs and Aeropress to make my coffee, so I’ll certainly write about that at some point.

How’d I get here?

I’m moving away from traditional blogging, since my goal when I started blogging was to regularly learn and write about it, but I totally failed at that. Hopefully the newsletter format will be better, and I’ve given myself a goal of writing one post every two weeks.

As I get my feet under me, I may begin to write more or need to write less. We’ll see how it goes, but I’ll keep my About page updated to reflect the current frequency of my posts. And if something crazy happens in my life and derails my writing, I’ll be sure to tell you that I need a minute.

If you want to read my old blog posts, you can find them here. I may occasionally post the full text of a post on my blog site and just include a blurb or something from it on here. The only reason I’ll ever do that is if I write a post with a bunch of math or other unusually formatted text in it. My site has great support for formatting math equations via Katex, which Substack unfortunately doesn’t have.

However, I’ll rarely write a post like that, ‘cause who really wants to read a bunch of math? But all this is to say that in the rare event I post something on my site, I’ll also include a mention of it here.

Why is it called The Merge?

It’s called “The Merge” because I’m a programmer with a bunch of different interests, many of which will intersect (or merge) in this newsletter!

If you think it’s cool, share it and spread the word! I’ll be grateful.

What to expect

My vision for this newsletter is to be a learning journal where I bring you, the reader, along with me as I learn about various topics in science, technology, and math. So basically unless I’m writing about reinforcement learning or machine learning, don’t always assume I’m an expert. I can easily be wrong, and when I am, feel free to call me out!

I look forward to going on this learning journey and hope that you’re excited for the ride.

PS - My first full post will be about a topic in biology; stay tuned for that!