I’ve made three appearances on Fox 13 News Tampa this year so far. If they call on me to answer more questions or explain some aspect of artificial intelligence, I’ll gladly do so!
My most recent appearance was on June 14, whose topic was all the noise about AI possibly being an existential threat to humanity. This is the one where I reminded the audience that The Terminator was NOT a documentary:
Last night (Wednesday, June 21), Tampa Devs held a meetup at Embarc Collective with a great topic: Selling Yourself: The Art of Interviewing. They brought in some domain experts, who are also friends of this blog: Pitisci & Associates’ Craig Darrell, Brian Dodd, and Stephen Rideout, who were there to show us how to land a job.
Craig gave the presentation, which was eagerly absorbed by the audience, a lot of whom were first-time attendees of a Tampa Devs meetup. This was a crowd that was ready for their first or next job, and they had questions aplenty. Luckily for them, Craig, Brian, and Stever were there to answer them, and it looks like they had even more questions to answer after Craig’s talk.
It’s been a while, so let’s go back to the beginning and build an iOS app!
Join us on Monday, June 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Computer Coach to sit down, fire up Xcode, and write an iOS app. Register here!
It’s been a while since Tampa Bay has had a meetup for Apple platforms — iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and the upcoming visionOS (as in the OS for Apple’s Vision Pro, a.k.a. “the goggles”). The best way to learn how to develop for all of these platforms is to develop for iOS.
At this meetup, where we’ll build a simple iOS app and get re-acquainted with iOS development with Swift and SwiftUI.
Are you new to iOS development, the Swift programming language, Xcode, SwiftUI, or any combination of these? This meetup session is just for you! You’ll come to the meetup with your Mac with Xcode installed, and you’ll leave with a working app!
This meetup will be a “code along with the presenter” exercise. You’ll fire up Xcode, click File → New, and following the presenter’s work on the big screen, you’ll write code in Swift, build a user interface in SwiftUI, and compile and run the app. If you’ve never built an iOS app before — or it’s been a while — you’ll want to attend this meetup!
You’ll need:
A Mac computer — preferably a laptop, but we’ve had people bring in Mac desktops before.
Xcode 14.3.1. It’s free on the App Store, but it does take a while to download and install. It’s best if you install it in advance.
And because it’s hard to code on an empty stomach, we’ll provide the pizza, courtesy of our sponsor: Okta! We’d also like to thank Computer Coach for the generous use of their space.
Once again: Join us on Monday, June 26 at 6:00 p.m. at Computer Coach to sit down, fire up Xcode, and write an iOS app. Register here!
Here it is — the recording of my interview on the 4:00 p.m. news on FOX 13 Tampa with anchor Chris Cato, where I answered more questions about artificial intelligence:
In this quick interview, we discussed:
The “existential threat to humanity” that AI potentially poses: My take is that a lot of big-name AI people who fear that sort of thing are eccentrics who hold what AI ethicist Timnit Gebru calls the TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism) mindset. They’re ignoring a lot of closer-to-home, closer-to-now issues raised by AI because they’re too busy investing in having their heads frozen for future revival and other weird ideas of the sort that people with too much money and living in their own bubble tend to have.
My favorite sound bite: “The Terminator is not a documentary.”
A.I. regulation: Any new technology that has great power for good and bad should actually be regulated, just as we do with nuclear power, pharma, cars and airplanes, and just about anything like that. A.I. is the next really big thing to change our lives — yes, it should be regulated.” There’s more to my take, but there’s only so much you can squeeze into a two-and-a-half minute segment.
Cool things AI is doing right now: I named these…
Shel Israel (who now lives in Tampa Bay) is using AI to help him with his writing as he works on his new book,
I’m using it with my writing for both humans (articles for Global Nerdy as well as the blog that pays the bills, the Auth0 Developer Blog) as well as for machines (writing code with the assistance of Studio Bot for Android Studio and Github Copilot for iOS and Python development)
Preventing unauthorized access to systems with machine learning-powered adaptive MFA, which a feature offered by Okta, where I work.
My “every 13 years” thesis: We did a quick run-through of something I wrote about a month ago — that since “The Mother of All Demos” in 1969, there’s been a paradigm-changing tech leap every 13 years, and the generative AI boom is the latest one:
Tap to view at full size.
And finally, a plug for Global Nerdy! This blog has been mentioned before in my former life in Canada, but this is the first time it’s been mentioned on American television.
I’ll close with a couple of photos that I took while there:
In the green room, waiting to go on. Tap to view at full size.
The view from the interview table, looking toward the anchor desk. Tap to view at full size.
The cameras, teleprompters, and monitors. Tap to view at full size.
Once again, I’d like to thank producer Melissa Behling, anchor Chris Cato, and the entire Fox 13 Tampa Bay studio team! It’s always a pleasure to work with them and be on their show.
A screenshot from ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers.
Here’s something much better and more useful than anything you’ll find in the endless stream of “Chat Prompts You Must Know”-style articles — it’s ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developers. This online tutorial shows you how to use API calls to OpenAI to summarize, infer, transform, and expand text in order to add new features to or form the basis of your applications.
Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng.
It’s a short course from DeepLearning.AI, and it’s free for a limited time. It’s taught by Isa Fulford of OpenAI’s tech staff and all-round AI expert Andrew Ng (CEO and founder of Landing AI, Chairman and co-founder of Coursera, General Partner at AI Fund, and an Adjunct Professor at the computer science department at Stanford University).
The course is impressive for a couple of reasons:
Its format is so useful for developers. Most of it takes place in a page divided into three columns:
A table of contents column on the left
A Jupyter Notebook column in the center, which you can select text and copy from, as well as edit and run. It contains the code for the current exercise
A video/transcript column on the right.
It’s set up very well, with these major sections:
Introduction and guidelines
Iterative prompt development
Summarizing text with GPT
Inferring — getting an understanding of the text, sentiment analysis, and extracting information
Transforming — converting text from one format to another, or even one language to another
Expanding — given a small amount of information, expanding on it to create a body of text
Chatbot — applying the techniques about to create a custom chatbot
Conclusion
And finally, it’s an Andrew Ng course. He’s just good at this.
The course is pretty self-contained, but you’ll find it helpful if you have Jupyter Notebook installed on your system , and as you might expect, you should be familiar with Python.
I’m going to take the course for a test run over the next few days, and I’ll report my observations here. Watch this space!
So what’s this beginner-friendly Android dev tool that we don’t know about?
The Ren’Py icon.
It’s Ren’Py, a “visual novel engine” that makes it easy to create visual novels — interactive stories featuring a combination of text, images, sound effects, and music — that run on computers and mobile devices.
There are a couple of ways to think of visual novels:
As a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style book, but in electronic form, and backed with visuals, sound effects, music, and interactivity, or
As a story-driven, turn-based multimedia game, which can fit any number of genres, including adventures, simulations, or role-playing games.
What will Joey cover at the meetup?
In this meetup, Joey’s presentation will cover:
A quick intro to visual novels, including some delightfully ridiculous ones like Attack Helicopter Dating Simulator and I Love You, Colonel Sanders.
A tour of Ren’Py and its basic features.
A look at the code of a beginner-friendly project: a “Choose Your Own Adventure”-style game/novel.
A look at the code of a more advanced project: Attack on Walmart, a turn-based combat role-playing game.
Q&A, which in this case means Questions and Accordion!
Why is it called Ren’Py?
Ren’Py is a portmanteau of ren‘ai (恋愛), Japanese for “romantic love”…
…and Python, the programming language in which it’s implemented, and one of the languages you can use to create Ren’Py visual novels / games.
How much programming do I need to know to make visual novels or games in Ren’Py?
You’ve got options!
If you’re new to programming, Ren’py provides a scripting language that’s easy enough to let you get started writing visual novels after a couple of minutes’ worth of learning, but powerful enough to add a surprising amount of interactivity.
If you know Python or are an experienced programmer, you can harness the entire Python language and its libraries and geek out to your heart’s content.
And, yes, you can program using a mix of both Ren’Py’s programming language and Python.
What platforms can I use to develop Ren’Py visual novels and games?
You can run the Ren’Py development tool on Windows, macOS, and Linux…
…and with a little work, you can even do Ren’Py development on a Raspberry Pi!
What platforms do Ren’Py visual novels and games and run on?
The point of my presentation is that you can use Ren’Py to build visual novels and games for Android. Ren’Py can convert your scripts into an Android Studio project, which you can then deploy to your Android device or submit to the Play Store.
In case you missed it, here’s that interview I did for the 4:00 p.m. news on FOX 13 Tampa on Monday, April 10th with anchor Chris Cato:
It’s a follow-up to this piece that FOX 13 did back in March:
In that piece, I appeared along with:
Local realtor Chris Logan, who’s been using ChatGPT to speed up the (presumably tedious) process of writing up descriptions of houses for sale
University of South Florida associate director of the School of Information Systems and Management Triparna de Vreede, who talked about its possible malicious uses and what might be possible when AI meets quantum computing.
IP lawyer Thomas Stanton, who talked about how AI could affect jobs.
All of this is a good preamble for the first Tampa Artificial Intelligence Meetup session that I’ll be running — it’s happening on Wednesday, May 31st!
