Thoughts and exercpts from talks and videos
Lindie Botes - Holistic language learning through cultural immersion and culture shock
🔗 Polyglot Conference
She is an amazing orator. I can learn just so much just by looking at the way she speaks and how she brings her experiences and linguistic diversities during the talk. There was one instance where she suddenly changed her accent (on purpose because she was demonstrating it) and, man, she nailed it!
excerpts
She opens the talk by asking the audience in which language they think.
She talks about a unique way of note-taking (with secrets) that is to use multiple languages in a sentence and to use abbreviated (but understandable by you) forms of some repetitive words/life-habits/actions/work/etc.
She talks about taking notes in a language that you have already learnt while learning a new language. This can also help you be discreet in the current-language-learning environment where she didn't want her manager to discover that she was taking vocabulary building notes during the meeting (by noting down the difficult words spoken-in-Japenese in Korean)
At one instance, near the end of the talk, she says about being able to speak and adopt to the culture the particular language brings with itself, but even so, the native people will always see her as a foreigner.
Why storytelling matters | Garr Reynolds | TEDxKyoto
🔗 TEDx Talks
excerpts
He identifies three important aspects to a talk/ppt/story - character, struggle and goal. If one bases their story on these 3 blocks, they will get the audience to listen and be attracted because the audience will feel connected to your story only when it is "their" story. Even though the struggle is not the same, but what matters is that there is a struggle.
Life is a "change". If you are not talking about a change, there is no point of you being on the stage.
The way to get an idea/process stick into someone's head is to "show" them the unexpected (by doing some thing whose outcome is unexpected).
Allow yourself to be vulnerable, to fail, to fall.
Software is Changing (again) | Andrej Karpathy
🔗 Y Combinator's talk on youtube
Andrej Karpathy
Software 3.0 (prompts, agents) is eating software 2.0 (neural nets weights) which is eating software 1.0 (code).
It will take time to migrate from software 2.0 to 3.0, like it still takes time to migrate from 1.0 to 2.0.
Software 3.0 (LLM) is like an electric grid, a fabrication warehouse, an OS, and also a personal spirit. It is best to keep it leashed, to avoid chaos. Upgrade in chunks.
We might be in a similar age for software 3.0 as of the ENIAC of computers (software 1.0), where computing is done on the clouds and access to it is in a time shared (rate limited) way.
Building for agents (like making your docs website parsable for crawlers / LLMs) is how we can achieve partial autonomy using LLMs instead of an inefficient vision of full autonomy.
There are AI articles and videos and then there is a once-in-a-blue-moon-type rare finds like this. It is extremely engaging to listen him lay out a history of software and software development with striking analogies that would never have been apparent (though they are right in our faces!) unless he had put them on the slides!