When unsure, be consistent
While learning, it’s better to be consistently mistaken than leave a mess all over the place. At least the experts who notice your mistake will appreciate your being consistent, making your mistake more easily fixable.
Never forget Monica
Obv Monica is a made up name but when I was in college my dorm friends had a friend Monica who told us a story about her bad manager who did horrible things. As the story unfolded it became obvious to my friend and I that Monica, in fact, was the villain of the story and the manager had taken all the right steps to simply deal with a uniquely difficult person.
Moral of the story is that while Monica is our friend, it’s important to once in a while remove the friendship bias and help Monica see that she was wrong, and timing is everything here – sometimes the right response is no response, and you can speak privately another time. There is a way forward there.
Movie I’m watching
The Phoenician Scheme is crazy, weird, beautiful, oddly hilarious (or hilariously odd)
It’s one of those strange movies, I don’t quite know how to explain it. It’s quirky Film studies probably have a term for it – I don’t.
It’s got this quirky vibe, kind of like Knives Out meets The Men Who Stare at Goats meets The Brothers Bloom, and it’s made by Wes Anderson, who’s famous for The Royal Tenenbaums and The Grand Budapest Hotel. He’s got a unique style for sure, and some super long scenes with no cuts.
I recommend it for its humor. Rated PG-13.
A new calling, maybe?
I’m inspired recently to lead workshops on automation, Ai and other bleeding-edge technologies that I try to keep abreast of. I plan to do this periodically and in my area. Not sure yet where this could take me. Nothing ventured, nothing gained…
Last week I led a workshop to show a group of Ai enthusiasts how to build a voice agent and give it access to a tool that looks up a person’s professional career info with only their email address. And it was a ton of fun!
I could also comfortably lead a workshop on these topics:
- connecting to an API (what the heck is an API?!),
- giving Siri access to an Ai agent to do almost anything (digitally of course; Ai still can’t make pancakes)
- anonymizing data to maintain privacy while using Ai (this Ai movement is a bit scary with regard to personal privacy)
What is a topic in technology that you would want to hear about? Even if you don’t live close by, I’m still interested to hear your thoughts. You can reply to this email.
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