(tl;dr) I'm new. STEEM is weird. I'm going to blog on STEEM(it) about my personal side projects, and maybe other things. First up is a reinforcement learning AI bot that will curate STEEM content under selected tags for me.

An Introduction

Hi.

I've been lurking around here on steemit and checking out the various other incarnations of the steem blockchain for a couple weeks now, but this will be my first "real" post.

Usually I would be loathe to make a post like this, because the concept of "introduction posts" has always seemed kind of dumb. Who's going to care who I am? I barely care who I am. I'm not wholly sure why I decided to do it anyway, but:

I'll start by being honest: I'm still pretty skeptical of the STEEM blockchain's longterm viability. It's fundamentally hard to know whether all the positive spin around here is folks having drunk the kool-aid or if there's really something lasting here.

(Side note: Speaking of positive spin is it just me or is everyone incessantly nice to one another here? I'm all for a positive atmosphere but a bunch of the posts and comments I see are positively dripping with sickly sweetness. Lots of that uber-positivity is probably bots--granted--but even a lot of the legit comments come off as disingenuous. Maybe I'm just a total curmudgeon. Regardless, I think I'll take it upon myself to inject a bit of wry cynicism into this ecosystem.)

I guess in a way STEEM is the logical end to the evolution of an increasingly social-media-focused, largely capitalistic culture.

I do have to wonder what makes STEEM different though, there have been tons of failed attempts in the past to use money as an incentive for using a social media platform. Maybe the money being based on a freely traded cryptocurrency instead of a cut of ad revenue truly was the missing piece. Maybe STEEM just got lucky with the network effect early on. Maybe it's a function of how fanatical the average member of the crypto crowd can get.

Lots of maybes.

But I digress. I didn't want to start this off with a huge amount of whinging about what I personally think of STEEM because it's been absolutely done to death, and frankly nobody cares what I think (probably for good reason).

Regardless of my skepticism I do like the concept, there seems to be growth in the community (or at the very least it seems stable), and as far as I can tell there's some neat development being done on top of the blockchain (DTube, DLive, Steemdb, Utopian, etc.) and some genuinely cool things are happening because of STEEM. For now I'm willing to put my skepticism aside to try and see if I jive with Steem personally.

A Man

So who am I? The specifics would bore you, so in short I'm:

• a data scientist and python developer
• a passionate believer that puns are the highest form of humor
• a consummate TV binger
• a writer of some caliber (according to my mom)
• basically a meat bag filled with coffee
• someone who's seen 30 rock all the way through at least 30 times.

A Plan

I'm not a food or a travel blogger, I don't have an existing YouTube following like the newly steem'd David Pakman, I don't spend all day talking about cryptocurrency (though, I suppose that part might change), and I'm not developing an app on the STEEM blockchain. Personally I'd argue I'm not very interesting, from the perspective of what's popular on STEEM.

So why am I here?

Well, in the past when I had more leisure time I would work on development related side-projects and blog to share my progress--both in an attempt cohere my thoughts on the project for myself and in order to hold myself accountable for finishing what I started.

I just started freelancing full-time, giving me a lot of extra free time. I'm hoping to do the same here, but with all the potential benefits of doing it on STEEM instead of my personal blog. I'm going to approach it like a public log of my thoughts and ideas. If people choose to read it and upvote that's cool, otherwise it'll be for the pursuit of my own edification.

Anyway. The plan.

I'm a big fan of automation as an abstract concept, so my first project--and very probably the subject of a series of posts to come--is going to be a reinforcement learning agent that takes care of my account's upvotes and downvotes.

The project will consist of the following parts:

Part 1 -- Data Preprocessing and Storage

• The agent will need to take in information about the posts it's voting on. This could be simple things like the reward received in the first 10 minutes or more complicated things like a sentiment analysis signal from a separately trained machine learning model
• Additionally I'll want to take statistics about how the posts the agent votes on perform.

Part 2 -- Reinforcement Learning Agent + Model

• The agent's internals will be built in tensorflow, using the wrapper library TensorForce to make some of the RL-specific logic easier to handle.

Part 3 -- Public Stat Tracker

• Probably a bit of a stretch goal, but I want this agent to run long-term and it would be super neat if other people besides myself could view its progress over time. Expect fancy graphs and such.

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So anyway: There's the plan, I'm the man, and this has been an introduction.

In my next posts I'll talk about Part 1 of the plan and any progress I've made, and I'll provide a github repo where you can follow along and submit pull requests if that floats your boat.

Keep an eye out for my follow up posts, follow me on steemit and/or on twitter* for future updates, and throw me an upvote to keep the creeping darkness in my mind at bay.

Thanks for your eyeballs, and here's hoping this goes some way towards keeping me accountable! I know I sure won't!

* ^{Warning: Memes.}