Category: Video

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Career Video What I’m Up To

New video: “Surviving a Layoff: Mental Health Tips & Tricks”

Thumbnail for Global Nerdy YouTube video: “Maintaining Mental Health While Laid Off.” Features Joey de Villa with his head in his hands.
Tap to watch the video.

The newest video on the Global Nerdy YouTube channel is now online! Its title will and thumbnail will evolve over the next couple of days, but as I write this (the evening of Sunday, August 11, 2024), the thumbnail looks like the one above and the title is Surviving a Layoff: Mental Health Tips & Tricks.

(YouTube titles and thumbnails can be changed even after the video is posted, and many YouTubers change them as they figure out which versions attract “search” and “browse” viewers.)

Selected moments from the video

Near the start of the video, I suggest to viewers that they try to come up with their own mantra to help them through their layoff journey:

I also remind viewers that there’s a difference between being fired and being laid off:

Here are some layoff stats to reassure you that if you’ve been laid off, you’re not alone:

Making things worse is the fact that shareholders love layoffs — they’re cost savings, which can boost stock prices:

Remember this motto:

I also go through some of the items in the Life Events Inventory, a ranked list of the most stressful events in life. Guess where getting laid off is in the list — I won’t show you kere, though; you’ll have to watch the video!

Here’s the most pithy advice I have for expressing the emotions you may have in the aftermath of being laid off, courtesy of Scott Hanselman:

I talk about the benefits of exercise…

…remind the viewer that it’s always 5 p.m. somewhere…

…and yes, I make a reference not just to “That Site,” but That Site’s identifying drum riff:

You don’t need a unicorn gratitude journal to make it through a layoff, but you should practice gratitude to help you through the process:

I suggest that it might be therapeutic to get rid of at least some of your (former) company swag, but hang on to the stuff that’s useful. I’m hanging on to the Patagonia sweater they sent to me (ironically, a week or so before they laid me off) because it’s nice and warm, and I’m willing to put up with the “VC Bro’ vibes it gives off:

And finally, here’s one of the images I use to explain that if you need therapy or counseling, get it:

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Programming Video What I’m Up To

NEW VIDEO: “The CrowdStrike Outage Explained”

The latest video on the Global Nerdy YouTube channel is The CrowdStrike Outage Explained!

How did the CrowdStrike Bug of July 19, 2024 take down 8.5 million Windows systems and cause the biggest global outage of all time? I’ll explain in this video, where you’ll also learn about operating systems, the kernel, device drivers, and more!

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Artificial Intelligence Editorial Video

OpenAI CTO says “maybe some creative jobs shouldn’t exist”

Some techies hold the attitude that “what I do is important, and what you do isn’t,” and the more socially savvy ones don’t say the quiet part out loud.

But Mira Murati, OpenAI’s CTO, did just that onstage at her alma mater, Dartmouth University, where she said this about AI displacing jobs in creative lines of work:

Some creative jobs maybe will go away, but maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

Mira Murati, from AI Everywhere: Transforming Our World, Empowering Humanity
(she says this around the 29:30 mark)

Here’s my take on her bad take, courtesy of the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, which you should subscribe to…

…and here’s the video with her full talk at Dartmouth:

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Video What I’m Up To

Subscribe while I’m still making my worst videos!

The laws of time, effort, and experience make it very clear: I’m in the middle of making my worst videos right now, and you’ll want to subscribe to see how bad they are!

Come check out the awfulness on the Global Nerdy YouTube channel, located at youtube.com/@GlobalNerdy!

I’ve already posted the first two videos. The first is a short that looks at an odd paragraph in an O’Reilly article on AI…

…and the second is a blast from the past — a promotional video featuring images of a lot of top-tier developers, followed by an image that’s supposed to represent you, the everyday developer…and guess whose image they used:

There’ll be a mix of short- and long-form videos, where I’ll cover software development topics and technology news in interesting, unusual, and amusing ways.

I’m spending the month of June working on the first set of videos, which I’ll release as quickly as I can, so you know they’ll be bad. And if you’re thinking “But HOW bad?”, there’s only one way to find out: visit the channel and subscribe!

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Artificial Intelligence Reading Material Video What I’m Up To

Easier ways to learn how neural networks work

If you’ve tried to go past the APIs like the ones OpenAI offers and learn how they work “under the hood” by trying to build your own neural network, you might find yourself hitting a wall when the material opens with equations like this:

How can you learn how neural networks — or more accurately, artificial neural networks — do what they do without a degree in math, computer science, or engineering?

There are a couple of ways:

  1. Follow this blog. Over the next few months, I’ll cover this topic, complete with getting you up to speed on the required math. Of course, if you’re feeling impatient…
  2. Read Tariq Rashid’s book, Make Your Own Neural Network. Written for people who aren’t math, computer science, or engineering experts, it first shows you the principles behind neural networks and then leaps from the theoretical to the practical by taking those principles and turning them into working Python code.

Along the way, both I (in this blog) and Tariq (in his book) will trick you into learning a little science, a little math, and a little Python programming. In the end, you’ll understand the diagram above!

One more thing: if you prefer your learning via video…

  1. The Global Nerdy YouTube channel will be kicking it into high gear soon. If you’d like, you can follow it now!
  2. Watch 3Blue1Brown’s video on how neural networks work:
Categories
Editorial Video

The “Mother of All Demos” happened 55 years ago today

My poster from May, titled Every 13 years, an innovation changes computing forever, theorizes that roughly every thirteen years, a new technology appears, and it changes the way we use computers in unexpectedly large ways.

The first entry in my list was an exception because it didn’t feature just one technology, but a number of them. It was “The Mother of All Demos,” a demonstration of technologies that are part of our everyday life now, but must have seemed like pure science fiction at the time, December 9, 1968 — 55 years ago today.

Photo of Douglas Englebart giving “The Mother of All Demos”
Photo by DARPA. Click to see the source.

In the demo, computer scientist Douglas Engelbart demonstrated:

  • The GUI, complete with resizable windows and selectable, editable text (including copy and paste)
  • The mouse
  • The chorded keyboard (the one thing in the demo that hasn’t gone mainstream)
  • Hypertext — clicking on some underlined text, which would cause a different page of information to appear
  • Computer networking
  • Videoconferencing
  • Projecting a computer screen onto a large screen for an audience

Rather than continue to tell you about it, it’s so much easier to simply show it to you:

Happy 55th anniversary, Mother of All Demos, and thank you, Dr. Engelbart!

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Artificial Intelligence Reading Material Video

Douglas Hofstadter, “Gödel, Escher, Bach” and his take on the state of AI today

Collage featuring the cover of “Godel, Escher, Bach,” Douglas Hofstadter, and Amy Jo Kim.

If your curiosity about artificial intelligence goes beyond bookmarking those incessant “10 ChatGPT prompts you need to know” posts that are all over LinkedIn, you should set aside some time to read Douglas’ Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid and watch his new interview.

Gödel, Escher, Bach

I might never have read it, if not for Dr. David Alex Lamb’s software engineering course at Queen’s University, whose curriculum included reading a book from a predetermined list and writing a report on it. I’ll admit that I first rolled my eyes at having to write a book report, but then noticed that one of the books had both “Escher” and “Bach” in the title. I had no idea who “Gödel” was, but I figured they were in good company, so I signed up to write the report on the book I would later come to know as “GEB.”

I’ll write more about why I think the book is important later. In the meantime, you should just know that it:

  • Helped me get a better understanding of a lot of underlying principles of mathematics and its not-too-distant relative, computer science, especially the concepts of loops and recursion
  • Advanced my thinking about how art, science, math, and music are intertwined, and inspired one of my favorite sayings: “Music is math you can feel”
  • Gave me my favorite explanations of regular expressions and the halting problem
  • Taught me that even the deepest, densest subject matter can be explained with whimsy
  • Provided me with my first serious introduction to ideas in cognitive science and artificial intelligence

Yes, this is one of those books that many people buy, read a chapter or two, and then put on their bookshelf, never to touch it again. Do not make that mistake. This book will reward your patience and perseverance by either exposing you to some great ideas, or validate some concepts that you may have already internalized.

At the very least, if you want to understand “classical” AI — that is AI based on symbol manipulation instead of the connectionist, “algebra, calculus, and stats in a trench coat” model of modern AI — you should Gödel, Escher, Bach.

A new Hofstadter interview!

Posted a mere three days ago at the time of writing, the video above is a conversation between Douglas Hofstadter and Amy Jo Kim. It’s worth watching, not only for Hofstadter’s stories about how GEB came to be, but also for his take on current-era large language models and other generative AI as well as the fact that he’s being interviewed by game designer Amy Jo Kim. Among other things, Kim was a systems designer on the team that made the game Rock Band and worked on the in-game social systems for The Sims.

Watch the video — I’ll write more about it later.