What’s better than a Pilot G2? A multi-color pack of Pilot G2s!
Category: What I’m Up To
This little trove of photos is entirely Anil Dash’s fault. He recently made a blog post titled How Markdown Took Over the World with a “hero image” featuring a 2002-era iMac setup — the G4 model, which Jony Ive described as the answer to the question “What computer would the Jetsons have had?”
I stumbled across Anil’s article on a Sunday afternoon while doing some home office housekeeping, and thought, Wow, there’s a blast from the past, which was quickly followed by Hey, didn’t I get someone to take a photo of me with one of those iMacs when they were only days old?
Unlike some people, I’ve been archiving my digital photos since I bought my first digital camera in 1998, so it didn’t take long for me to dig up that iMac G4 photo:
This photo is from a set that I shot while attending the O’Reilly 2002 ETCon, which took place at the Westin Hotel in Santa Clara. It was a little different from the previous year’s edition of the conference, what with everything being scaled down; even the name had been shortened from the original “Emerging Technologies Conference” down to “ETCon.”
(One of us — I don’t recall whom — engaged in a little gallows humor and quipped “Maybe we should call this the Receding Technologies Conference.”)
This was early 2002, when the dot-com bubble burst had grown into a full meltdown. A lot of us had lost our jobs when the companies we worked for had imploded, but most of us had saved enough to attend a couple of conferences, partly to look for our next gigs, and partly because we couldn’t not go and not see our friends and peers.
One of the nice things about this pared-down conference was that it felt a little more personal. There were more opportunities to just hang out as friends and enjoy some “down time” — or what passes for down time when you’re young and have programming skills, spare time, and lots of ideas — with each other.
The geekist lobby on Earth
We did a lot of hanging out in the hotel lobby, which was pretty much a gathering of a lot of Web 2.0 names you might remember from way-back-when, and some of whom are still working away these days.
This was an awesome “hallway track.”
Out for dinner and to see the new iMacs
A whole bunch of us decided to go into town for an unofficial dinner one evening, which included a run to the Apple Store to see the new iMac G4s. I took a cab with Zooko, Wes Felter, and Aaron Swartz.
I suppose I actually attended some conference sessions…
…the only evidence I have of that are these photos.
Attack of the House Party / Attack of the Clones
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones had just been released around the time of the conference, and a number of us decided to go catch the movie. It was decided that we’d pre-game at Quinn Norton’s and Danny O’Brien’s house. This worked well for Aaron, as it wasn’t an age-restricted event at a bar.
After hanging out at the house for a little bit, we made our way to the theatre. We somehow managed to get tickets despite the crowds and our late arrival.
We’d broken up into smaller groups, and Aaron was with me. There were very few seats left, but the front row was still free.
“Front row, then?” I asked Aaron, and he said “Sure.” We took a couple of seats on the left side.
There was still a fair bit of time to kill before the coming attractions came on, never mind the film.
“Dare you to play something,” Aaron said, pointing at my accordion.
“You are so on, young man,” I said. I stood up and played the Star Wars main theme and the Imperial March, getting the audience all riled up.
When the film started, I wanted to get a picture for my blog review. As I pulled out my camera, I said “Keep an eye out for ushers” as I snapped a picture of the opening crawl.
We both got a great laugh out of an all-caps line in the crawl, “CLONE ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC,” and for the next few months, it became a catchphrase for us in IRC chats: “PEER-TO-PEER ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, “BOY BAND ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, “UNDERPANTS ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC”, and so on.
Final day
On the final day of ETCon, we ditched the lobby and went poolside…
It’s hard to believe it was that long ago.
I’m working on both securing venues and planning topics for Tampa Bay Artificial Intelligence Meetup’s sessions for 2026. My notes above should give you an idea of at least one of the topics we’ll cover soon!
Categories
Lots of interviews, lots of notes
In the ten business days leading up to Christmas Eve and every day since Sunday, January 4, I have either been doing at least one of these a day:
- Being interviewed for a job
- Doing a “take-home assignment” for a job
- Recording a podcast
The trick to staying on top of all this activity is to have good notes at the ready. Ideally, these are hand-written notes and diagrams like the ones pictured above. I find that I remember what I wrote better when I write it out by hand; it’s probably because it’s slower and gives me more time to commit what I’m writing to memory.
I’ve also suspected that the act of forming different letters in the process of handwriting (unlike typing, where every keypress feels the same, and it’s only the location of the key on the keyboard that feels different) helps you remember what you wrote. There’s some research that agrees with my hypothesis.
However, with 14 interviews in December and at least five scheduled for this week, I had a lot of notes to crank out. Writing them all out by hand would be too slow, so I often resorted to the next-best thing: typing them in…
…and printing them out. I could look at a screen, but paper notes allow me to keep my gaze in the general direction of the camera. Using them means that I’m not relying on the keyboard or mouse to go through my notes, and it very clearly shows that I’m not relying on AI during the interview.
These are photos of just a few of the notes I used in my most recent interviews. A lot of my notes include situations that I can cite when answering “behavioral interview” questions — those questions that start with that dreaded phrase, “Tell me about a time when…”
Here’s a promising start to the new year: thanks to a successful appearance on the Intelligent Machines podcast back in October, I was a guest on episode 1065 of Leo Laporte’s main podcast, This Week in Tech.
Leo, Blackbird.AI’s Dan Patterson, and I spent just under three hours on Sunday talking about the week’s tech news and having fun while doing so. The episode takes its title, AI Action Park, from Action Park, an insanely dangerous theme park that I mentioned while we were talking about DeepSeek’s Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections architecture.
Here’s your start-of-the-year reminder that you don’t have to accept your LLM’s answers as gospel. In fact, you do what I do — talk back to them Samuel L. Jackson / Nick Fury from The Avengers-style.
The screenshot above comes from an exchange I had with Gemini earlier today. I like using LLMs as a sounding board for ideas — as I like to say “the one thing you can’t do, no matter how creative or clever you are, is come up with ideas you’d never think of.”
Gemini suggested a course of action that I completely disagreed with, so I decided to respond with one of my favorite lines from the first Avengers film, and it responded with “touché.” Keep thinking, and don’t completely outsource your brain to AI!
And just as a treat, here’s that scene from The Avengers:
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/NPXjPWIj31g
A lot of the drudgery behind assembling the “Tampa Bay Tech Events” list I post on this blog every week is done by a Jupyter Notebook that I started a few years ago and which I tweak every couple of months. I built it to turn a manual task that once took the better part of my Saturday afternoons into a (largely) automated exercise that takes no more than half an hour.
The latest improvement was the addition of AI to help with the process of deciding whether or not to include an event in the list.
In the Notebook, there’s one script creates a new post in Global Nerdy’s WordPress, complete with title and “boilerplate” content that appears in every edition of the Tech Events list.
Then I run the script that scrapes Meetup.com for tech events that are scheduled for a specific day. That script generates a checklist like the one pictured below. I review the list and check any event that I think belongs in the list and uncheck any event that I think doesn’t belong:
In the previous version of the Notebook, all events in the checklist were checked by default. I would uncheck any event that I thought didn’t belong in the list, such as one for real estate developers instead of software developers, as well as events that seemed more like lead generation disguised as a meetup.
The new AI-assisted version of the Notebook uses an LLM to review the description of each event and assign a 0 – 100 relevance score and the rationale for that score to that event. Any event with a score of 50 or higher is checked, and anything with a score below 50 is unchecked. The Notebook displays the score in the checklist, and I can click on the “disclosure triangle” beside that score to see the rationale or a link to view the event’s Meetup page.
In the screenshot below, I’ve clicked on the disclosure triangle for the Toastmasters District 48 meetup score (75) to see what the rationale for that score was:
For contrast, consider the screenshot below, where I’ve clicked on the disclosure triangle for Tampa LevelUp Events: Breakthrough emotional eating with Hyponotherapy. Its score is 0, and clicking on the triangle displays the rationale for that score:
One more example! Here’s Tea Tavern Dungeons and Dragons Meetup Group, whose score is 85, along with that score’s rationale:
I don’t always accept the judgement of the LLM. For example, it assigned a relevance score of 40 to Bitcoiners of Southern Florida:
Those of you who know me know how I feel about cryptocurrency…
…but there are a lot of techies who are into it, so I check the less-scammy Bitcoin meetups despite their low scores (there are questionable ones that I leave unchecked). I’ll have to update the prompt for the LLM to include certain Bitcoin events.
Speaking of prompts, here’s the cell in the Notebook where I define the function that calls the LLM to rate events based on their descriptions. You’ll see the prompt that gets sent to the LLM, along with the specific LLM I’m using: DeepSeek!
So far, I’m getting good results from DeepSeek. I’m also getting good savings by using it as opposed to OpenAI or Claude. To rate a week’s worth of events, it costs me a couple of pennies with DeepSeek, as opposed to a couple of dollars with OpenAI or Claude. Since I don’t make any money from publishing the list, I’ve got to go with the least expensive option.