Categories
Business Current Events

Peter Thiel promoted Bitcoin after his fund sold most of its BTC holdings

Peter Thiel, with the caption “Pump & Dump.”
Creative Commons photo by Gage Skidmore.
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In his keynote at Bitcoin 2022 in Miami (which took place in early April), Peter Thiel provided an “enemies list” of the “financial gerontocracy” and “woke companies” who just didn’t “get” Bitcoin, whom he accused of holding it back from reaching 10x or even 100x gains. You can see bits of his rant in the video below:

I wonder what the crypto bro who posted this video is thinking right now.

Here’s the twist: in the month before that keynote, his fund divested itself of most of its crypto holdings. Simply put, he was pumping Bitcoin almost immediately after the VC fund he founded had sold it off. There’s no way that he didn’t know about this.

Here’s an excerpt from the Financial Times story, Peter Thiel’s fund wound down 8-year bitcoin bet before market crash:

Founders Fund sold out of the vast majority of its entire cryptocurrency portfolio by the end of March 2022 — before the digital assets market became swept up in a crisis in May last year, said one of the people close to the fund.

The fund currently has no significant exposure to cryptocurrencies, the people said. The winding-down of its crypto bet has not previously been reported. Founders Fund declined to comment.

Those 10x and 100x gains never materialized. In fact, the Great Crypto Crash of 2022 started in May, the month after Thiel’s keynote. Since then, it’s been a clown show, with the final (I hope) act so far being Sam Bankman-Fried.

My advice: stop listening to Peter Thiel and crypto bros in general.

Also worth reading

Bitcoin symbol with the caption “It can’t be that stupid; you must be explaining it wrong.”

You might want to check out this earlier article of mine:

Arguments for staying away from crypto, NFTs, and “Web3” in general
Categories
Artificial Intelligence Programming

Want to learn how to make AI/ML programs? Watch Andrej Karpathy’s AI tutorial videos.

Title card for one of Andrej Karpathy’s videos: “Let’s build GPT. From Scratch. In code. Spelled out.”

I’m trying to carve out time to work my way through Andrej Karpathy’s tutorials on his Neural Networks: Zero to Hero YouTube playlist.

At the moment, it comprises seven videos that starts with an introduction to neural networks (which “only assumes basic knowledge of Python and a vague recollection of calculus from high school”)…

…and ends with an exercise where you build a basic GPT to generate random Shakespearean dialogue:

Working on my favorite Python tool — Jupyter Notebook — Karpathy walks you step by step through the process of building an AI/ML application, explaining the “whys” along the way.

There’ve been requests for a more “slowed down” version of these videos, and I might have to take up that challenge.

Who is Andrej Karpathy?

His most recent gig was being Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, a job he had from June 2017 until he resigned in July 2022. Before that, he founded an AI group you may have heard of: OpenAI, as in the people behind ChatGPT.

Born in 1986 in Bratislava, he and his family moved to Toronto when he was 15. He has a bachelor’s in computer science and physics from the University of Toronto, a master’s from University of British Columbia, and a PhD from Stanford, where his specialty was natural language processing and computer vision.

Want to know more about Andrej Karpathy and have a long drive or need something to listen to while working out? Check out this lengthy interview (three and half hours!), even if you do it in installments…

Categories
Meetups Programming

Learn about Java’s evolution at tonight’s meetup!

Want to attend? Register on Meetup!

Here’s another tech meetup coming back to the scene: the Tampa Java User Group is gathering tonight at the Vaco offices (4030 W Boy Scout Road, near International Mall), where Ammar Yusuf and Sam Kasimalla will present the evolution of Java. They’ll go version by version, showing what features were added to the language and platform.

The event starts at 5:30 and will include ample time for networking. They’ll also have food, and they’re even working on getting stuff for people on various diets, including keto.

Want to attend? Register on Meetup!

Categories
Meetups Tampa Bay

Thursday in Tampa: High Tech Connect Fest *and* Tampa Devs meetup!

High Tech Connect’s January Tech Fest (4:30 – 7:30 p.m. @ Wine & Wood)

High Tech Connect’s next get-together happens this Thursday in swanky Hyde Park at Wine & Wood, a wine bar that also makes wood-fired pizza. It starts a little early — 4:30 p.m. and runs until 7:30 p.m..

High Tech Connect is organizing this event in collaboration with:

High Tech Connect’s happy hours are perfect for getting to know the movers and shakers of Tampa Bay’s growing tech scene. One of them was particularly life-changing for me; I attended one back in 2019, ended up on StartupBus days later, ended up on a finalist team taking the stage in New Orleans shortly after that, and I used that win as part of my application for my current job in Okta’s Auth0 division.

Tampa Devs’ Meet & Greet (6:00 – 9:00 p.m. @ Armature Works)

Want to attend? Register on Meetup!

Tampa Devs’ next get-together also happens on Thursday at Armature Works, Tampa Bay’s premier food hall. It’s a big place, so they’ve designated a meeting spot: outside on the green lawn near the giant outdoor chess/checkers boards.

Tampa Devs is an exceedingly popular meetup group, and over 100 people have already RSVP’d for this event (don’t worry — Armature Works is a huge space, and unless it rains, they’re planning to keep the gathering outside). If you want to get to know people in Tampa’s tech community, you’ll want to go!

Want to attend? Register on Meetup!

Categories
Artificial Intelligence Editorial The Street Finds Its Own Uses For Things

We don’t need AI to make art

Tweet by SJ Sindu (@SJSindu): “We don’t need AI o make art. We need AI to write emails and clean the house and deliver the groceries so humans can make more art.”
Tap to see the original tweet by SJ Sindu (@SJSindu).
Categories
Humor

Same statement, two meanings

2-panel comic with the title “Everyone on my floor is coding”. Panel 1 features a cartoony dragon labelled “Software engineers,” smiling. Panel 2 features the same cartoony dragon labelled “Doctors,” aghast.
Thanks to Jeannie Cool for the find!
Categories
Meetups Tampa Bay Users

Scenes from last night’s Tampa Bay UX Group’s Revival Social

I arrived a little late, after doing a startup mentoring session at University of Tampa’s Lowth Entrepreneurship Center (pictured below):

Illuminated palm trees at night outside the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center.
Outside the Lowth Entrepreneurship Center at University of Tampa.
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Luckily, it was a quick drive from downtown to the Tampa Bay UX Group Revival Social’s venue, which also happens to be one of my “locals”: 7venth Sun Brewery’s Seminole Heights branch, a great space for large social gatherings:

The crowd at the Tampa Bay UX Group Revival Social.
The scene at 7venth Sun.
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It was good catching up with people I haven’t seen in a while, including Micah Overton, whom I worked with during my time at Lilypad:

A close-up of a conversation at the Tampa Bay UX Group Revival Social, with Micah Overton hamming it up for the camera.
Michael Ritchie, Micah Overton (hamming it up for the camera), and Anitra Pavka.
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More than 40 people RSVP’d for the get-together, and the “flake-out” factor was low. It’s not unusual for only half the RSVPs to show up at a meetup that doesn’t charge admission, but it looks like the number of actual attendees was pretty close to the RSVP count. The Tampa Bay techie scene isn’t just active, but it’s also eager to get together!

The crowd at the Tampa Bay UX Group Revival Social.
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The event ran from 6:30 to 8:30, but a fair number of the crowd stayed later:

The crowd at the Tampa Bay UX Group Revival Social.
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The crowd at the Tampa Bay UX Group Revival Social.
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My thanks to organizer Rob Vanasco for putting on a great event and brining back one of Tampa Bay’s key meetups! I got to chat with him briefly, and he said that this is only the start of Tampa Bay UX Group meetups for 2023. Keep an eye on their Meetup page!

I’d also like to thank 7venth Sun Brewery in Seminole Heights for continuing to be an excellent venue for meetups. In case you’re curious, here’s last night’s beer menu:

Last night’s beer menu.
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