Building the Alternative

Building the Alternative

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Where's all this going?
A framework that helped reshape my direction in the age of AI
May 22 • Brian Perron, PhD
Word embeddings
How meaning becomes geometry, and why it matters for retrieval
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
Tokens and tokenization
The unit a language model actually reads, and why the count matters
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
The context window
Why input, thinking, and output share one budget, and why that matters
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
Benchmarking LLM tasks
A human-centered process for evaluating model output
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
API calls
How software talks to other software, and why every AI workflow depends on it
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
Markdown
The structured plain text format that AI systems were trained on
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
Understanding metadata
What it looks like, where it lives, and why retrieval depends on it
May 10 • Brian Perron, PhD
A series for my colleagues and friends in China
Foundation concepts, posted ahead of lectures and workshops
May 7 • Brian Perron, PhD

April 2026

Drawing the line on AI in social work
An invitation for discussion
Apr 12 • Brian Perron, PhD
Standards for discussing the environmental impact of AI in social work
Why "AI" is the wrong unit of environmental analysis
Apr 9 • Brian Perron, PhD
Avoiding the AI retrofit tax
The case for AI-ready administrative workflows
Apr 2 • Brian Perron, PhD
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