It’s Saturday, so it’s time for another “picdump!”
This is the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. Share and enjoy!
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, April 7 through Sunday, April 13, 2025!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
How do I put this list together?
It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list?
I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories:
If you go to Vanguard’s Personal Investors login page, you’ll see the message above. It’s oddly reassuring that there’s a warning that essentially says “You can log in, but you’re not going to like what you see when you do.”
Here’s an idea for my next video that I’ve been playing around with: vibe coding is like improv theatre.
Think about it: an improv troupe isn’t all that different from an LLM — it encourages its audience to provide a prompt, and they use that prompt to start generating content. The content they create is based on their training set (in the case of the improv troupe, that training is their life experience and theater training), and to the audience, what they generate seems almost magical.
But an improv troupe is at its best when its work is constrained to short skits. After a couple of minutes, the longer you stretch out the improv process, the worse the results are. Like LLMs, improv troupes have limited context windows.
In my (admittedly limited) experience experimenting with vibe coding, I’ve found it to be great for small tasks, but as I use it to make larger applications, the worse the code got. The LLM started referring to the same variable using different but synonymous names, it started writing code that looked like textbook examples that had increasingly less to do with the intended functionality, and it started creating more bugs.
But just as good playwright can take improvised skits and the ideas they raise and turn that material into a good two-hour play, a good developer can take application snippets generated by an LLM and the idea they raise and turn them into a good application.
I think this might be a great way to use vibe coding.
When I say that manufacturers are trying to put AI into everything, I mean everything. Case in point, here’s an ad for AI condoms by Manforce, a condom brand in India…
…and of course, there’s also an app, which you connect to the condom by scanning a QR code.
And of course the company’s VP in charge of sales wrote about it on Linkedin:
Welcome to another really big Global Nerdy Saturday “picdump!” It’s the weekly article where I post the technology- and work-related memes, pictures, and cartoons floating around the internet that I found interesting or relevant this week. This week’s edition has 125 pics (a lot of which are about vibe coding, the topic of the moment) — share and enjoy!
✳️ Need context? Here’s a quick explainer, and here’s a more detailed article on port 4444, which among other things, is used by one of my favorite tools, Jupyter.
Here’s what’s happening in the thriving tech scene in Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the week of Monday, March 31 through Sunday, April 6, 2025!
This list includes both in-person and online events. Note that each item in the list includes:
✅ When the event will take place
✅ What the event is
✅ Where the event will take place
✅ Who is holding the event
How do I put this list together?
It’s largely automated. I have a collection of Python scripts in a Jupyter Notebook that scrapes Meetup and Eventbrite for events in categories that I consider to be “tech,” “entrepreneur,” and “nerd.” The result is a checklist that I review. I make judgment calls and uncheck any items that I don’t think fit on this list.
In addition to events that my scripts find, I also manually add events when their organizers contact me with their details.
What goes into this list?
I prefer to cast a wide net, so the list includes events that would be of interest to techies, nerds, and entrepreneurs. It includes (but isn’t limited to) events that fall under any of these categories: