I'm Joshua Spergel. I graduated from Princeton University in 2023 with a B.A. in History and a minor (they used the word "certificate" because they like the sound of it more, idk) in Computer Science. I am currently working mainly on web development stuff. I made tech.somethingtodo.nyc to help people find things to do in New York City. I spent the past year working on various projects. The most notable has probably been using LLMs to collect information about preferred shares and then using that information to make money. I have also been working on some other projects but they aren't quite as interesting.
I'm currently learning Chinese because I figure it'd be cool and possibly useful.
I used to work in the Cairo Geniza lab, where I made a graph visualization of the Cairo Geniza. I also made a translation game which shows LLMs capability to translate from even lesser known languages, like Judeo-Arabic, into English. It's still a work in progress, but I have not kept up with it.
Lately, I've become fascinated by engineers and software engineers—not just for their technical skills, but for the ways they shape politics and society. I'm especially interested in two questions: first, how engineers and software developers try to apply their problem-solving mindset to political and social issues; and second, how politicians perceive, engage with, and sometimes harness the expertise of those in engineering and software to address complex challenges. The obvious example of this is DOGE but there are many more.