Building the Alternative
Subscribe
Sign in
Home
Notes
Archive
About
Latest
Top
Discussions
Where's all this going?
A framework that helped reshape my direction in the age of AI
May 22
•
Brian Perron, PhD
8
2
Word embeddings
How meaning becomes geometry, and why it matters for retrieval
May 10
•
Brian Perron, PhD
4
2
Tokens and tokenization
The unit a language model actually reads, and why the count matters
May 10
•
Brian Perron, PhD
1
1
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
1
1
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
2
April 2026
Drawing the line on AI in social work
An invitation for discussion
Apr 12
•
Brian Perron, PhD
5
2
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
3
1
Avoiding the AI retrofit tax
The case for AI-ready administrative workflows
Apr 2
•
Brian Perron, PhD
1
This site requires JavaScript to run correctly. Please
turn on JavaScript
or unblock scripts