This week on the podcast, Eric, John, and Thomas discuss what they liked and what they didn't from Laracon 2020. They also discuss this years Hacktoberfest, XDebug 3, and much more.
Here is the Reddit comment that inspired us to reach out to Garry.
This is the Vice news article that started the thread. As you can see, the ban has affected a lot of books that would seem to have little bearing on cybersecurity. "Rejected books that are geared towards hacking, such as Justin Seitz’s Black Hat Python, may represent a clearer threat to the Department of Corrections, which fears that prisoners could use those tools to compromise their systems. But how did books such as Windows 10 for Dummies, Microsoft Excel 2016 for Dummies, and Google Adsense for Dummies (marked as posing "clear and present danger"), fail the prison’s security test?"
If you want to read about programs helping prisoners learn to code, check out this story on the Bard Prison Initiative.
We also did a podcast episode back in January of this year that focused on The Code Cooperative, an organization dedicated to teaching software skills to formerly incarcerated individuals.
In May, Amazon VP and distinguished engineer Tim Bray said he was leaving the company. Amazon had just fired employees who spoke out against its working conditions, and Bray couldn’t tolerate it. He handed in his resignation and published an astonishing blog post detailing his decision—an unprecedented move for an executive inside the tech giants. “I choose neither to serve nor drink that poison," he wrote. By listening to Bray, we can learn a bit more about how people inside the tech giants view their power, and how they might drive change as Congress and regulators stand still.
Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
05:05 – Livewired
16:39 – Hardware vs software
25:53 – Brain-computer interfaces
35:12 – 2020 is a challenge for neuroplasticity
46:08 – Free will
50:43 – Nature of evil
58:55 – Psychiatry
1:06:28 – GPT-3
1:13:31 – Intelligence in the brain
1:21:51 – Neosensory
1:31:27 – Book recommendations
1:34:07 – Meaning of life
1:36:53 – Advice for young people
A first generation LatinX immigrant, Elias Torres was born in Nicaragua. Growing up in a communist country, he had little resources, even food. Thirty years ago, he came to the US, and hasn't looked back, living the American dream and graduating from Harvard with an MS in Computer Science. He's married with 3 teenagers, and is currently learning a new stage of parenthood. When he's not being Dad or CTO, he enjoys disconnecting while he is kite surfing or sailing. Torres strives to find balance in building a successful company as an entrepreneur with not forgetting his roots, and increasing opportunities for people of color in the US. Five years ago, He and his co-founder figured out that teams needed to increase the effectiveness of their go to market strategy. Today, everyone wants to do things in real time... not during the 9 to 5. So he set out to build a revenue acceleration platform, and did so quickly, given that this was the 4th company the founders built together. This is the creation story of Drift.
Our guests this week were two of our employees: Yaakov Ellis and Stephanie Cantor. Yaakov is a Principal Web Developer, Community Advocate on the Public Platform team at Stack Overflow, and Former Team Lead for Internal Development at Stack. Stephanie is the Program Manager for Community Strategy at Stack.
Want to learn more about how the Community-athon worked? Read up on it here. And yes, of course there was a leaderboard and internet points.
Yaakov was undercover as a brand new user, but some of his answers gave him away. Can you spot the tell?
Our very own CEO spent a lot of time asking extremely important and nerdy question on our SciFi Stack Exchange.
We bumped our engagement from employees by more than 100%. Many questions were asked, much knowledge was spread.
New podcast name. New Russian hitman thumbnail. Everything else stays the same. AI is still my passion, but this gives me a bit more freedom to talk to interesting folks from all over. Thanks for the support & the love.
