You can register for next Tuesday’s Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024 conference, happening at Armature Works, for the low, low price of TEN DOLLARS with this discount code…
Civo Navigate Local Tampa is a one-day version of Civo’s 2-day Navigate conferences, with a stronger focus on local organization and techies. It will feature four topic categories…
Cloud Native
AI/ML
Emerging Tech
Thought Leadership
…over two tracks:
A main stage track with panels and presentations, and
A workshop track with lightning talks and workshops
Want to know what Civo’s two-day conference is like? Here’s a video summary of the most recent one, held in Austin in February:
It’s back! The 11th edition of BSides Tampa, Tampa Bay’s community-led cybersercurity conference, happens Saturday, April 6th at Marshall Student Center at USF.
You’ll want to attend BSides if:
You work in cybersecurity, because your peers — some of whom you might not know — will be there.
You’re looking for a cybersecurity job. You’ll get to network with people in the field, and you’ll find the conference’s Career track helpful.
You’re curious about cybersecurity. What do cybersecurity people do? They test systems for vulnerabilities (go to the talks in the Offense / Red Team track), they protect systems from attackers (go to the talks in the Defense / Blue Team track), and they create processes to enhance security (go to the talks in the Governance track).
You’re into intelligence — human and artificial. There’s an AI / Defense track that covers these topics.
You want to learn. I can’t think of a BSides where I didn’t learn at least three important things.
You want to know what the Tampa security scene is like. Tampa has an underappreciated security scene, and you’ll get to see what it’s like at BSides Tampa!
BSides Tampa is sponsored by the Tampa Bay chapter of (ISC)², which is clever and mathematically-correct shorthand for “International Information System Security Certification Consortium”. (ISC)² is a non-profit specializing in training and certifying information security professionals.
BSides gets it name from “b-side,” the alternate side of a vinyl or cassette single, where the a-side has the primary content and the b-side is the bonus or additional content.
Here’s the origin story: When the 2009 Black Hat conference in Las Vegas received more presentation submissions than they could take on. There were many presenters whose talks weren’t accepted, but were still very good — there just wasn’t enough room for them at Balck Hat.
So they banded together and made their own parallel conference that ran in parallel to Black Hat — it’s from that event that we get BSides.
BSides conferences are community events, and unlike a lot of tech conferences, they’re inexpensive. BSides Tampa 2024 costs $45 to attend — the same price as last year — and that gets you:
Access to all conference tracks
Access to Discord server
Access to the exhibition area, villages, and sponsorship area
At the upcoming Civo Navigate Local Tampa (taking place Tuesday, April 16 at Armature Works), I will be giving a 15-minute lightning talk on RAG — Retrieval-Augmented Generation — and how you can use it to make your AI apps produce better results.
And by “better,” I mean:
Able to use data that’s newer than their last update
Incorporating information that they wouldn’t otherwise have
Using the content of a document that you provide
Able to incorporate data from a database
And yes, there will be Python code, which I’ll run live for your viewing pleasure, explain for your understanding, and give to you for your own use!
My presentation will be one of several that you’ll be able to catch at Civo Navigate Local Tampa, and best of all, you can register for the conference for the low, low, low price of…
Do you remember the first Civo Navigate conference that took place at Armature Works last February? Do you remember how much fun it was to see an upstart cloud company give interesting presentations at Armature Works, the first time it was used as a tech conference venue?
We get to do it again! Civo are returning to Tampa with Civo Navigate Local Tampa 2024, a one-day conference taking place at Armature Works on Tuesday, April 16!
We’ll get to see CEO Mark Boost again…
…and the event will be hosted by Tampa Bay’s own Daniella Diaz and Suzanne Ricci (pictured below; sorry, Woz isn’t coming to this one).
In exactly one week, I’m going to giving my presentation, You’re Not Too Late to the AI Party at the Civo Navigate North America conference in Austin, Texas!
The talk, which is in a prime time slot — day one (Tuesday, February 20) just after the opening keynote (10:30 a.m.) — is for people who’ve been too busy with their actual work to get into AI and have been feeling increasing amounts of FOMO.
I’ve been spending my suddenly copious amounts of free time polishing this presentation and accompanying demos to a bright sheen. Here’s a sample from my current set of slides:
Tap to view at full size.
In the talk, I’ll cover four reasons why it’s not too late to get into AI, as well as possible ways you can get started.
I’ll also talk about:
AI’s overnight success was 70 years in the making
Are you a centaur or a minotaur, and which one is better?
AI options if you can code, and options if you can’t
AI techbros and “chaos muppets,” and the effect they have on the industry
AI ethics and how badly we need it
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.
Most importantly, the talk will be fun!
I’ll be in Austin for most of next week. If you can attend Civo Navigate, I’d love to see you there! I’ll also be free and out and about in Austin that Thursday (Feb 22) for most of the day — if you’d like to meet up, let me know!
Most shows and podcasts that do a story about layoffs feature stories, advice, and survival tips and tricks from guest speakers who still have their jobs.
This show will be different. It will feature stories, advice, and survival tips and tricks from a guest speaker who’s actually laid off right now — me! I’m in the thick of it, like Jim Cantore, but for layoffs instead of hurricanes! Hopefully, the podcast equivalent of being hit by a wind-driven tree branch won’t happen to me:
Also, you don’t have to just listen. LinkedIn audio events are like Clubhouse rooms (remember Clubhouse?); you can click the “raise your hand” button and request to be “brought onstage,” where you can join the conversation. So please — join us!
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!
