It’s been five years and a couple of jobs since I’ve had business cards, but as Unified.to’sSupreme Developer Advocate, I’ve been issued a set, and they arrived in the mail earlier this week.
They came in nice packaging…
…and rather than the traditional rectangular design, ours are square. On the front is Unified.to’s octopus logo and mascot…
…and on the back in Unified.to’s QR code and URL:
And, damn, do I like that box. It reminds me of this tweet about boxes and being a grown-up:
I don’t know much about Jukebox, the company that made these cards, but it seems that they’ve matched MOO (whose cards I’m familiar with from a handful of previous companies) and beaten them at the unboxing experience.
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 29 through Sunday, May 5, 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:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 22 through Sunday, April 28, 2024.
Friday is Day 2 of the Front-End Design Conference! There are still some tickets left as I write this. Find out more and register here.
Friday at 12:00 p.m., online: Tampa Bay UX Group is holding their Virtual Portfolio Share & Review! “In this virtual event, one brave UXer will present their portfolio and open themselves up to questions and feedback from the group.” Find out more and register here.
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:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
By popular demand, here are the “slides” from my presentation this morning at Civo Navigate Local Tampa, Make Smarter AI Apps with RAG!
Retrieval-Augmented Generation, also known as RAG for short, is an AI technique that combines…
A machine learning model with
A mechnanism for retrieving additional information that the model doesn’t have
…to enhance or improve the responses generated by the model.
At this point, you’re probably thinking this:
This talk runs from 11:15 to 11:30 a.m., which is just before lunch, and I’m not at my cognitive best. Can you explain RAG in an easy-to-digest way, possibly using Star Wars characters?
I’m only too happy to oblige!
Consider the case where you ask an LLM a question that it doesn’t “know” the answer for. The exchange ends up something like this:
Tap to view at full size.
With retrieval-augmented generation, you improve the response by augmenting the prompt you send to the LLM with data or computation from an external source:
Tap to view at full size.
Because RAG provides additional information to the LLM, it solves two key problems:
Tap to view at full size.
Here’s a lower-level view of RAG — it starts with the cleaning and conversion of the supplementary data:
Tap to view at full size.
Once that supplemetary data has been cleaned and converted, the next step is to convert it into small chunks of equal size:
Tap to view at full size.
Those chunks are then converted into vectors. If you’re not really into math but into programming, think of vectors as arrays of numbers. Each of the numbers in the vector is a value between 0.0 and 1.0, and each vector typically has hundreds of elements. In a diagram below, I’ve greatly simplified the vectors so that they’re made up of only three elements:
Tap to view at full size.
The whole process of cleaning/converting, then chunking, then embedding is called indexing:
Tap to view at full size.
Now that you know what’s happening “under the hood,” let revisit the RAG diagram, but with more detail:
Tap to view at full size.
Here’s what’s happening:
Luke asks the question: “Who built you, Threepio?” That’s the query.
The query is converted into vectors.
The “vectorized” query is compared against the vectors that make up the supplementary information — the vectorstore — and the system retrieves a small set of the vectors that are most similar to the query vector.
The query vector and the supplmentary vectors from the vectorstore are combined into a prompt.
The prompt is then sent to the LLM.
The LLM responds to the prompt.
That was the “hand-wavey” part of my lightning talk. The rest of the talk was demonstrating a simple RAG system written in Python and running in a Jupyter Notebook. If you’re really curious and want to see the code, you can download the Jupyter Notebook here.
My session was part of Austin Forum on Technology and Society’s third annual AI April, a month of presentations, events, and podcasts dedicated to AI capabilities, applications, future impacts, challenges, and more.
Here are links to the video and supplementary material for the presentation:
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for Monday, April 15 through Sunday, April 21, 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:
Programming, DevOps, systems administration, and testing
Tech project management / agile processes
Video, board, and role-playing games
Book, philosophy, and discussion clubs
Tech, business, and entrepreneur networking events
Toastmasters and other events related to improving your presentation and public speaking skills, because nerds really need to up their presentation game
Sci-fi, fantasy, and other genre fandoms
Self-improvement, especially of the sort that appeals to techies
