It’s only day one of the new year and I just fulfilled one of my resolutions: to land a conference speaking session on AI outside my usual stomping grounds. I’m going to be a speaker at Civo Navigate North America, which takes place on February 20th and 21st in Austin, Texas!
What’s Civo Navigate, and what is Civo?
What’s Civo Navigate, you ask? Here’s a one-minute video that answers your question:
Civo is a cloud hosting provider based on Kubernetes, with a focus on developer-friendliness and wallet-friendliness. It’s a refreshing change from this state of affairs:
I met the people at Civo last year when they held Civo Navigate North America in Tampa — and not in a convention center or hotel conference rooms, but at Tampa’s big riverside food hall, Armature Works! Here’s the promo for that event:
The 2023 edition of Civo Navigate North America was a great conference with interesting talks and a warmer, more personal “feel” than a typical vendor-hosted event. Civo’s contributions continued long afterward, with their being great supporters of the Tampa Bay tech scene and this blog.
I’m looking forward to the 2024 edition in Austin?
What’s my talk about?
My talk is titled You’re not too late to the A.I. party, and it’s for people who’ve been too busy with their actual work to get into AI and have been feeling increasing amounts of FOMO.
Here’s the description of the talk, with additional AI-generated photos (that are deep in the uncanny valley):
Have you been too busy getting your actual work done to join the artificial intelligence party and feel that you’ve already missed out on the technical career opportunity of a lifetime? If you answered “yes,” this talk is for you.
The good news is that you’re not too late to the A.I. party. It’s just getting started and you arrived at a good time — perhaps even “fashionably late!” You just need someone to take you around the room and make some introductions.
To help you “work the room” as you enter the party, you’ll get an overview of artificial intelligence technologies, from the rules-based models and expert systems of A.I.’s early days to the present era of neural networks, machine learning, transformers, and large language models.
This party won’t be limited to just hand-waving small talk in the living room. We’ll go into the kitchen — the true heart of any party — and look at actual code in action. We’ll start with ELIZA, the original chatbot from the 1960s, observe a neural network, and look at an LLM-powered “What should I wear today?” app. You’ll even be able to download them for yourself!
This talk aims to be like the best parties — the ones you’re glad you were at. You’ll leave this one knowing more about AI’s underpinnings and a much better idea of the next steps in your AI journey, whether it’s catching up with AI developments, harnessing your current skills to integrate AI into your work, or even pivoting into AI development.
In my talk, I’ll discuss:
Generative vs discriminative AI
“Old School” rules-based AI vs. the “New School” version powered by neural networks, data science, and lots of data
How the internet changed AI
The intersection of data science, statistics, and AI
The paper “Attention is All You Need,” what it means, and how it changed AI forever
Large language models (LLMs)
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
Vector databases
This talk won’t be all hand-wavey and descriptions, but will also feature demos of actual working code that you can also download, including:
ELIZA, the original 1964 chatbot, but written in present-day Python.
A basic neural network demo that shows how you implement them — perhaps the one that recognizes handwritten numbers, perhaps something a little more interesting!
“Sweater or no?” — a large language model-powered application that tells you what to wear based on your location, the weather, and the event you’re attending.
I’ll also talk about potential “next steps” that you can take, including:
Reading material, including the funniest book about AI (for now): Janelle Shane’s You Look Like a Thing and I Love You. Of course, you don’t have to wait for the talk (or even attend) to read it; you can get it now!
There Will Be Math — or, the math you’ll need to know to get into AI.
Effective Altruists, Effective Accelerationists, and how to Effectively Avoid both.
How to send the right signals to employers so they’ll know that AI is your jam!
Here’s the “official unofficial” list of tech, entrepreneur, and nerd events for Tampa Bay and surrounding areas for the first week of 2024 — Monday, January 1 through Sunday, January 7, 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 the very last week of the year — Monday, December 25 through Sunday, December 31, 2023!
Keep in mind that a lot of Meetup organizers schedule their events on “autopilot” for the same time each month and may not have accounted for the holidays. Double-check with event organizers that an event is actually taking place before attending!
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 the week of Monday, December 18 through Sunday, December 24, 2023.
Keep in mind that this is the week leading up to Christmas! A lot of Meetup organizers schedule their events on “autopilot” for the same time each month and may not have accounted for the holidays. Double-check with event organizers that an event is actually taking place before attending!
Guest speaker Kathy Lansford-Powell, a trusted job search expert, leads an online seminar covering insider tactics to get past the Applicant Tracking System (ATS) and landing your resume in the hands of a person. 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
I’d been meaning to get one for some time. There was a deal on them last weekend, so I placed an order for the PyGamer Starter Kit, which included all the goodies pictured above.
The PyGamer is a cute little unit that doesn’t take up very much space, as the photo below (shown beside a U.S. dollar bill and quarter for scale) shows:
Here’s a close-up photo of the front of the circuit board. That’s an analog joystick on the left, the screen in the middle, the “A” and “B” buttons on the right, and the “Select” and “Start” buttons along the bottom, with a row of five LED lights between them:
Here’s the back of the circuit board. The most prominent features are the processor (the square thing in the center of the board), the two sockets to either side of the processor, which allow you to connect the unit to FeatherWing daughterboards for all sorts of hardware projects, and the three STEMMA connectors at the bottom, which make it easy to connect the unit to all sorts of sensors and devices:
The Starter Kit comes with pre-cut acrylic pieces that form a protective shell for the unit, plastic caps for the buttons, a speaker for game sounds, a rechargeable battery, and a carrying case. Here’s what the PyGamer looks like with the enclosure assembled:
What are its specs?
At the heart of the PyGamer is the ATSAMD51, a microcontroller built on the ARM Cortex M4 processor, which is used as the basis for a lot of chips for small devices or embedded controllers. Released in 2018, the ATSAMD51 is a 32-bit chip running at 120 MHz with 512K Flash memory and 192K of RAM. It’s not going to compete with a Raspberry Pi, but it’s more than enough for handheld retro-gaming.
The PyGamer board housing the processor provides these goodies:
An additional 8 MB of Flash memory for files, which is meant for game assets: images, sounds, fonts, and other data.
A MicroSD card slot for even more Flash memory.
A backlit 160 by 128-pixel color TFT display.
An analog thumb joystick, a scaled-down version of the ones you’ll find on PlayStation and Xbox controllers.
4 buttons — the classic “A,” “B,” “Start,” and “Select.”
5 Neopixel LEDs, whose colors can be individually controlled. These can be used for additional feedback, such as showing the user how many “lives” they have.
A 3-axis accelerometer for sensing motion.
A light sensor.
A headphone jack as well as a speaker driver. The PyGamer Starter Kit includes a speaker that plugs into the driver for headphone-free sound.
How do you program it?
The easiest way to program it is via MakeCode Arcade, a friendly programming tool that allows you to create games using drag-and-drop blocks like Scratch. It also supports game programming in JavaScript or Python with its game libraries.
Want to get a little more hardcore with the programming? It’s also programmable in CircuitPython, a version of Python made specifically for microcontroller boards.
For fun, of course — but also for sharpening my programming and hardware skills while having fun! In today’s world of laptops, virtual machines, and a zillion abstractions that distance programmers from their systems’ “bare metal,” having a low-level understanding of computers is an increasingly rare skill. As always, I’m trying to set myself apart.
I’ll also use it in an upcoming video series on programming — watch this space in 2024 for more!
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.
