Here’s a promising start to the new year: thanks to a successful appearance on the Intelligent Machines podcast back in October, I was a guest on episode 1065 of Leo Laporte’s main podcast, This Week in Tech.
Leo, Blackbird.AI’s Dan Patterson, and I spent just under three hours on Sunday talking about the week’s tech news and having fun while doing so. The episode takes its title, AI Action Park, from Action Park, an insanely dangerous theme park that I mentioned while we were talking about DeepSeek’s Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections architecture.
Here’s your start-of-the-year reminder that you don’t have to accept your LLM’s answers as gospel. In fact, you do what I do — talk back to them Samuel L. Jackson / Nick Fury from The Avengers-style.
The screenshot above comes from an exchange I had with Gemini earlier today. I like using LLMs as a sounding board for ideas — as I like to say “the one thing you can’t do, no matter how creative or clever you are, is come up with ideas you’d never think of.”
Gemini suggested a course of action that I completely disagreed with, so I decided to respond with one of my favorite lines from the first Avengers film, and it responded with “touché.” Keep thinking, and don’t completely outsource your brain to AI!
And just as a treat, here’s that scene from The Avengers:
A lot of the drudgery behind assembling the “Tampa Bay Tech Events” list I post on this blog every week is done by a Jupyter Notebook that I started a few years ago and which I tweak every couple of months. I built it to turn a manual task that once took the better part of my Saturday afternoons into a (largely) automated exercise that takes no more than half an hour.
The latest improvement was the addition of AI to help with the process of deciding whether or not to include an event in the list.
In the Notebook, there’s one script creates a new post in Global Nerdy’s WordPress, complete with title and “boilerplate” content that appears in every edition of the Tech Events list.
Then I run the script that scrapes Meetup.com for tech events that are scheduled for a specific day. That script generates a checklist like the one pictured below. I review the list and check any event that I think belongs in the list and uncheck any event that I think doesn’t belong:
Click to view the screenshot at full size.
In the previous version of the Notebook, all events in the checklist were checked by default. I would uncheck any event that I thought didn’t belong in the list, such as one for real estate developers instead of software developers, as well as events that seemed more like lead generation disguised as a meetup.
The new AI-assisted version of the Notebook uses an LLM to review the description of each event and assign a 0 – 100 relevance score and the rationale for that score to that event. Any event with a score of 50 or higher is checked, and anything with a score below 50 is unchecked. The Notebook displays the score in the checklist, and I can click on the “disclosure triangle” beside that score to see the rationale or a link to view the event’s Meetup page.
In the screenshot below, I’ve clicked on the disclosure triangle for the Toastmasters District 48 meetup score (75) to see what the rationale for that score was:
Click to view the screenshot at full size.
For contrast, consider the screenshot below, where I’ve clicked on the disclosure triangle for Tampa LevelUp Events: Breakthrough emotional eating with Hyponotherapy. Its score is 0, and clicking on the triangle displays the rationale for that score:
Click to view the screenshot at full size.
One more example! Here’s Tea Tavern Dungeons and Dragons Meetup Group, whose score is 85, along with that score’s rationale:
Click to view the screenshot at full size.
I don’t always accept the judgement of the LLM. For example, it assigned a relevance score of 40 to Bitcoiners of Southern Florida:
Click the screenshot to view it at full size.
Those of you who know me know how I feel about cryptocurrency…
…but there are a lot of techies who are into it, so I check the less-scammy Bitcoin meetups despite their low scores (there are questionable ones that I leave unchecked). I’ll have to update the prompt for the LLM to include certain Bitcoin events.
Speaking of prompts, here’s the cell in the Notebook where I define the function that calls the LLM to rate events based on their descriptions. You’ll see the prompt that gets sent to the LLM, along with the specific LLM I’m using: DeepSeek!
Click to view the screenshot at full size.
So far, I’m getting good results from DeepSeek. I’m also getting good savings by using it as opposed to OpenAI or Claude. To rate a week’s worth of events, it costs me a couple of pennies with DeepSeek, as opposed to a couple of dollars with OpenAI or Claude. Since I don’t make any money from publishing the list, I’ve got to go with the least expensive option.
AWWW YISSS! As of yesterday (Thursday, December 18), Global Nerdy has had its highest number of pageviews in five years. Thank you, Global Nerdy readers, for all your visits!
As I said in my quick speech, part of the credit for the award has to go to Anitra. I’m here in Tampa because she’s here in Tampa.
I’d also like to thank all of you in the Tampa tech scene — you make “The Other Bay Area” a great place for techies to live, work, and play in, and I’m happy to do what I can for this community.
Interviews, even for people who appear onstage often, are still stressful. It often helps to have some prepared notes handy so you can spend more brainpower on the actual interview and less brainpower on remembering things. Pictured above is page one of a three-page set of notes from a recent interview; I can share this one because it’s generic enough that it didn’t need too much redacting.
I strongly recommend that if time allows, write your interview notes by hand instead of typing them. Here are my reasons why:
Writing by hand buys you extra time to think. The slow, deliberate process of writing something down gives you an opportunity to think about things, including what the interviewer might be looking for, and what you might what to say or emphasize during the interview. I often come up with an interesting new angle or idea, thanks to the extra time writing requires.
Writing by hand helps you remember what you wrote. Again, it’s about the process being deliberate: writing by hand requires you to use your fine motor control to form letters, and forming letters is different for each letter — you use a different set of motions to write “b” than you do when writing “M”. Typing uses a similar motion for write different letters; the only difference is their location on the keyboard. Writing those letters engages more “muscle memory” than typing, which “locks in” those facts better.
Writing by hand requires you to pay attention to what you’re writing.Audrey van der Meer, Brain researcher and Professor of Neuropsychology at NTNU (Norwegian University of Science and Technology), says this about typing to ake notes in class: “It’s very tempting to type down everything that the lecturer is saying. It kind of goes in through your ears and comes out through your fingertips, but you don’t process the incoming information.” I find the same is true for taking down pre-interview notes.
Lately, a lot of friends have been telling me that they were listening to an interview with Cory Doctorow about his latest book, Enshittification, and heard him attribute this quip to me:
“When life gives you SARS, you make *sarsaparilla*.”
The YouTube short above tells the story behind the quote (which also appears in this old blog post of mine), which also includes a tip on using AI to find specific moments or quotes in videos, and a “This DevRel for hire” pitch to hire an awesome developer advocate.
