
Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again!
Thomas Wolfe was right: you can’t go home again!
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, May 20 through Sunday, May 26, 2024.
Here’s the description:
This session dives into the nitty-gritty of leveraging AI for real estate. We’ll dissect the process of combining macro and microeconomic data sets with market trends and geospatial information. This process utilizes similarity scoring – a technique to analyze the distance between geographic regions and uncover hidden correlations. Additionally, we’ll tackle the exciting challenge of classifying emerging neighborhoods using AI. Imagine leveraging machine learning to pinpoint areas with a high concentration of rehabbed properties – a strong indicator of potential investment opportunities.
Find out more and register here.
Thursday at the Neon Temple, Tampa at 7:00 p.m.: It’s their Q2 Hacker Swap Meet! Here’s what they say:
Welcome to another hacker swap-meet! The Temple is collabing with your local Defcon chapter, DC813, for yet another wonderful round of hang-outs, barters, trades, and co-hacking!
Gather up all of the hacker and cyber stuff you don’t want anymore that is valued under $200. This can be, but isn’t limited to:
• Shirts from cons
• Slaps
• Hardware
• Tools
• Failed projects
• Books from certs you already passed
• Books that you already know
Put sticky notes or something on them indicating a price. Maybe print off a piece of paper indicating stuff you want/would trade for.
Load that stuff up in yo’ trunk, pick a parking spot on the side of the building and park. Or grab a table from inside or something.
You can trade, give stuff away, take cash, Venmo, cryptocurrency, chickens and goats, whatever.
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:
…is to complete this poem. By doing so, you’ll have performed a computation similar to the one it does when you feed it a text-plus-image prompt.
For more, see my earlier post, GPT-4o is amazing at describing images.
This is a post specifically for tonight attendees at the AI Superpowers Unlocked panel taking place tonight (Wednesday, May 15, 2024). I’ll expand this post later.
I decided to try out ChatGPT’s newly-released GPT-4o model (the lowercase “o” stands for “omni”) by uploading images and asking it to describe them to me.
After this quick test, my impression is simply “wow.”
Me: What’s happening in this picture?
GPT-4o: The picture shows two musicians performing on stage. One musician is playing an accordion, and the other is playing an acoustic guitar and singing into a microphone. The guitarist is wearing a cowboy hat. In the background, there is a banner with the name “Steven Bosco” and a QR code for tips via Venmo and CashApp. The setting appears to be an indoor venue with a rustic, cozy ambiance. There is a small audience in the foreground, and the atmosphere looks lively and engaging.
Not bad. I was impressed that ChatGPT was able to determine that the banner read “Steven Bosco” even though my head clearly blocks the “B” — it would have had to determine the “Bosco” from the tip sign. I was also impressed by its description of the “feel” of the room.
Me: What is being depicted in this image?
GPT-4o: The image is a two-panel cartoon.
Panel 1:
Panel 2:
The cartoon humorously illustrates the importance of restricting access to critical areas on a ship, such as the engine room, to prevent unauthorized personnel from tampering with important controls.
In case you were wondering, I wrote about the comic in this article.
I wanted to see how well GPT-4o does with handwriting. I’m told that my penmanship is unusually readable; results with other people’s handwriting are bound to vary.
I was impressed by how it identified the image not just as a comic, but one with two panels. Even more impressive: that ChatGPT got the general gist of the comic, right down to its use of humor to illustrate its point.
Me: What’s this image about?
GPT-4o: The image is a detailed handwritten study guide about the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model, often referred to as the OSI seven-layer model or OSI seven-layer cake. The OSI model is used to standardize networking functions to support interoperability among different products and software.
The guide includes the following:
Left Side:
Right Side:
This guide is likely intended for students or professionals studying networking concepts, providing a clear and concise overview of the OSI model and its layers.
The challenge with this one was the low resolution of the photo. I took it with my late ’90s-era camera with its potato-fidelity 1024 * 768 resolution (and that was its “high-quality” mode — normal mode was 640 * 480!).
Me: Describe this image, please.
GPT-4o: This image is a four-panel cartoon strip that humorously depicts a situation involving an alien, a disguise kit, and a spaceship. Here’s a description of each panel:
Panel 1:
Panel 2:
Panel 3:
Panel 4:
The cartoon humorously highlights the importance of security and the potential consequences of not having proper identification and detection systems in place on a spaceship.
This is also a comic from this article.
One of the challenges with this image is that it’s a four-panel comic, but there are no lines separating the panels — just white space. Following only the circled numbers specifying the order in which the comic should be read, GPT-4o “got” the comic, including the fact that the character in panel 1 was impersonating Captain Platypus.
GPT-4o got one thing wrong — it thought that the “Aw, yeah — free ship!” line is from panel 2; it’s the alien stealing the ship in panel 4.
Last week, I revised one of Unified.to’s earliest articles, An Overview of Unified APIs, rewriting it as What is a Unified API?
In addition to updating the text of the article, I also created some explainer graphics to liven it up and save the reader from being hit with just a wall of text. Those graphics are what you see in this article — enjoy!
If you were to time travel and visit Crazy Go Nuts University during my student days, you’d find that the thing I was known for wasn’t programming or playing the accordion, but drawing comics.
The web came around at the very end of my long and colorful academic career, so my comics mostly appeared in student newspapers — primarily Golden Words, a satire newspaper in the same vein as the original print version of The Onion, as well as the main student newspaper, The Queen’s Journal.
I make the occasional comic every now and again these days, and when Dan Arias, a former coworker at Auth0, found out about it, he asked me to draw some comics as a way to “storyboard” some screens for an app for the 2023 Oktane conference.
The comics were supposed to showcase some features of Auth0’s customer identity management system, and if possible, do so in a humorous way. They also had to use some animal mascots that had been created for the project: a platypus, a rabbit, a capybara, and a boar.
I recently found the sketchbook with the comics I made for the app. They never went into the app — they were just storyboards for the app’s artist, Sofía Prósper Díaz-Mor, to use as guides, and the final versions that appeared in the app looked fantastic.
Still, there’s a rough charm to my doodles, so I thought I’d post them here. Perhaps it’s time for me to make more posts as comics…
The app had a space theme, so all the comics featured our animal characters — once again, a platypus, a rabbit, a capybara, and a boar — as characters having science fiction adventures that also featured some aspect of digital identity.
This comic was about fine-grained authorization, which is a fancy way of saying “very specific control over who’s allowed to do what in a system”…
This comic was the storyboard for a story about anomaly detection, which attempts to detect logins that have a suspicious quality to them. I did this by having an alien disguise themself as the ship’s commanding officer, Captain Platypus, and board the ship…
“The planet of a thousand apps” was the setting for this comic about single sign-on. The idea was every activity on the planet was controlled by its own app, which meant that you either had to log into a different app to do anything, or you could use single sign-on…
To illustrate the security advantages of passkeys, I came up with this comic. It shows that with a passkey, you don’t have to memorize a password, and even if a hacker manages to break into the server, all it has is the passkey’s public key, which (as its name implies) is known to everyone…
“Make Star Wars without getting us into legal trouble,” they said, and this is the resulting comic. It features our rabbit character as “Bun Solo” and our capybara as “Capybacca.” In this rough sketch comic, they destroy the centralized identity database, the Data Star, freeing the citizens of the galaxy to use decentralized identities. In the second page, I show the uses for them…
Watch this space — I think it’s time to do more comic-style blog posts here on Global Nerdy!
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, May 13 through Sunday, May 19, 2024.
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: