Geek Speak with Lyle Troxell: Recent Episodes
Lyle Troxell
A weekly talk show about technology, science, and human creativity that excites, educates, and fosters curiosity. Discussions touch upon how technology affects society and how we react to that change. Hosts are passionate about explaining complex concepts in simple, easy to digest, chunks. We bridge the gaps between Geeks and the rest of humanity.
Most people say LLM are just language prediction systems… but how do human minds work comparatively? Can ChatGPT think, understand, or comprehend? Can you?
It’s been a while since Ben, Brian, and Lyle geeked out… join us.
- Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4 - Microsoft Research
NFT insider trading, tech experts urge to resist Crypto industry influences, larges plant is a Sea Grass in Australia, Safari is popular, Microsoft Excel reduces remote data types – and Lyle’s hot take on meditation.
- U.S. charges OpenSea ex-employee in first NFT insider trading case | Reuters
- Tech Experts Urge Washington To Resist Crypto Industry's Influence - Slashdot
- The World's Largest Plant Is a Self-Cloning Sea Grass in Australia - Slashdot
- New data shows only two browsers with more than 1 billion users | Ars Technica
- Microsoft is killing Money in Excel along with Wolfram Alpha data types
- Samsung To Close LCD Business - Slashdot
- Question your Perception episode with Ben Jaffe on Lunch with Lyle
- Muller-Lyer Illusion: Optical Illusions in Psychology
- The True Purpose of Mindfulness
Quincy Larson is founder and CEO of the non-profit software school freeCodeCamp, where anyone can go and lear to program for free. Quincy is making real change in the world.
This episode was recorded for my podcast Lunch with Lyle
- Quincy mentioned two corses on freeCodeCamp
- Learn Responsive Web Design by Building 20 Projects
- Relational Database Course
Professor Warren Sack joins me to speak about the history of Algorithm, including Donald Knuth – Art of Computer Programing, Five Axioms of Algorithms, and When Computers Were Human.
This is Part 1 of 2 on Algorithm.
In this non-edited episode of GeekSpeak Lyle calls Ben impromptu to chat about using lasers for listening to rooms remotely, lasers being used to view into rooms, Ben’s recent focus on Music Production, and finally a story about California being better about communicating recycling possibilities on packaging.
- NLOS Keyhole Imaging Can See Inside a Closed Room
- Ben Here (Ben Jaffe's music)
- Recycling symbol can’t appear on non-recyclable items, California bill says | Ars Technica
- Gary Anderson - the creation of the "chasing arrows" Recycling symbol (pdf)
- This Episode as Video on YouTube
Due to the popularity of the WeAreNetflix podcast I am contacted a bit about my thoughts on company podcasts. The WeAreNetflix podcast started off based on an internal only podcast that Michael Paulson and I started as a hack-day project.
This episode is 20min of me talking about company internal podcasts. Feel free to ask me questions about this episode on twitter. -@lyle
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Lower Street - an example podcast providerOne example of a company providing Private Podcast support – I have no affiliation.
- Blog Building an Internal Company Podcast
- Create, Publish, Host & Secure Your Private Podcast | Lower Street
- How To Launch A Private Podcast With Exclusive Access
- Episode with Michael Paulson - Engineering FlatBuffers Programing sans JSON
- WeAreNetflix Podcast
The San Lorenzo Valley in Santa Cruz County has a partial Do Not Drink / Do Not Boil order in affect: is that order appropriate, what causes Wildfire water contamination, and what are good actions we as a community can take?
Our guest is Andrew J Whelton, Associate Professor of Civil Engineering and Environmental and Ecological Engineering at Purdue University.
Professor Whelton has studied two other Wildfires in California with water contamination and has some thoughts on our situation for the #CZULightningComplex
- Topics by Time13:49 Water Utility vs State Responsibility
22:28 Can you smell VOCs
24:07 Danger Long Term vs Acute
25:11 Stuck in the Pipes?
26:28 SVOCs
27:18 Can we just flush the system?
29:47 If you lived here…
31:00 Activate Mutual Aid
31:47 Testing Issues – UCSC help?
34:13 When would you be less concerned
36:49 What changes should we make?
39:15 California level issue?
43:20 Take Aways
44:24 Home Water Treatment * Wildfire caused widespread drinking water distribution network contamination - Proctor - 2020 - AWWA Water Science - Wiley Online Library * San Lorenzo Valley Water District * Fire Response, How You Can Help – Community Foundation Santa Cruz County * Listener Miles Z made some notes while listening - here they are:In case of doubt, consult the interview, as I am not an expert. The notes are about in the same order as the interview. ~~=miles=~~
Contamination and Testing/Monitoring The state (CA) only requires the water district to test at the source of the water, i.e. where they start pumping it into the distribution system. The rest (downstream testing) is up to the water district.
Contamination can come from multiple sources, including backflow when the system becomes depressurized and air contaminated with smoke leaks into the pipes. It can also result from homes that were equipped with plastic pipes that burned. As well as the pipes we know about that burned, i.e. the 5 miles of HDPE pipe through the forest.
The monitoring tests that the water district routinely runs downstream are limited to only particular VOC’s (Volatile Organic Compounds) and are targeted at only those that might be produced by adding chlorine to the system. These less stringent tests are for THM’s (trihalomethanes) which are a form of VOC.
These tests are not adequate to certify the safety of water possibly contaminated from a fire (as described above).
In the Paradise fire, the State refused to take ultimate responsibility for certifying that the water is safe, saying it was up to the local district to do so. (but there are ways the district can reach out for qualified help, discussed below) It is unclear whether or not SLVWD realizes this yet.
Additionally, he said “there is nuance” regarding these DND/DNB orders, which I think means that experts disagree on what exactly they mean. (ndlr: good luck with that!)
“You have to test fast.” The 7-day turnaround and only 40 samples are woefully inadequate. They should be getting results within a day by utilizing more labs. Apparently the number of laboratories used is a key bottleneck.
VOC’s and SVOC’s Benzene can come from burning brush or trees. This VOC (and others) prefer to be airborne, so washing vegetables or taking a shower could release them. Quantities that are toxic may be odorless, so don’t count on being able to detect them by smell.
Multiple contaminants can interact, which is one reason why thorough and rapid testing is essential.
SVOC’s (Semi-Volatile Organic Compounds) are larger and heavier, so they tend to stay in the water. They also collect in the body in fatty tissue, so the acceptable limits for safe exposure are lower than those for VOC’s.
Both VOC’s and SVOC’s can work their way into plastic pipes, so they are hard to get rid of. That’s not a problem with metal, but metal is more expensive.
The Water District can reach out for help SLVWD can and should call in other agencies for “mutual aid” as the fire and PG&E crews are doing.
They really need to be taking 100-300 samples per week, and use multiple laboratories for effective turnaround. The current turnaround of 7 days is way too long.
The equipment required is a GCMS system (Gas Chromatograph Mass Spectrometer). UCSC probably has them, but (a) not the funding (which might be able to come from FEMA) and (b) are probably not certified by the state, though they still could be useful for preliminary results.
The current 40 samples will not be representative, and the conditions of the water can change at any time. Contaminants can flow from one place to another within the system.
Note that the State is responsible for providing emergency water if the local district cannot in an emergency.
Home Water Treatment It’s possible to install a water treatment system for your own home. In general, this is not the best way to deal with the VOC/SVOC contamination for several reasons.
There is no official certification for these systems, and the company that sells them will typically run only a single test (for $250-300) which means they could easily misestimate the amount of actual contamination. This has actually happened in Paradise.
So what happens is that your insurance pays for it, then they’re done. So if it turns out the system is inadequate, you are on your own. In other words, the financial incentive is designed to create a potentially hazardous situation.
It’s much better for the water district to handle everything.
One measure Paradise implemented was requiring new homes to have backflow check valves (at $3000-$4000 a piece). Sometimes FEMA money can pay for these.
Dedi finds a wifi solution they like, Greg is on the road for the first time since the pandemic, Miles is playing with Rust, and Lyle is happy to have the Geeks virtually together to celebrate 20 years of hosting the show.
- Amplifi vs Unifi
- MTV Cribs: Quarantine edition
- Sketchup
- Blender
- Actix, the Rust Web Framework
- Web Framework Benchmarks
- Go, The Programming Language
- Waze Reports: Cloudy with a Chance of Pananoia
- e3 and Star Wars
- Home Networking - Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X
Ben Jaffe deciding to end his fantastic podcast Linear Digressions, Lyle celebrating 20 years hosting GeekSpeak, and geeking out on playing instruments that do not have “frets” like the Cello and Trombone.
My vacation included fixing motors, accepting glasses, and milling redwood with chainsaws.
- My Replacement Fan Motor
- Thermal Fuse Cutoff
- New Thermostat Switch with "Firestat"
- Milling RedwoodHere are some pix from our milling.
The Logs:
Me with my orange cap and our family friend Jack.
My wife Maggi finishing a log:
Samples of what we are making: * I have GlassesHere I am with new readers…. and a great scotch, I mean it was still vacation!
Warren Sack is back for a conversation of the Natural and Institutional Language from the French Encyclopédistes, touching on The Wealth of Nations, Babbage, Lovelace, Donald Knuth, Information Theory, Work vs Work, James Prescott Joule, Functions & Operations and much more.
Learn why the true language of Software is not Physics.
On this episode Lyle interviews his daughter Gwendolyn about the social software she uses in High School – iMessage, Instagram, SnapChat, TikTok.
And they play with Lyle’s new RodeCASTER Pro.
- Rode RODECaster Pro Integrated Podcast Production Studio RCP B&H
- All possible pythagorean triples, visualized - YouTube
- Cat puts paw in water and freaks out funny vine - YouTube
- The SnapChat video we record during this episode.
Ben and Lyle chat about elevators, the fear of dropping things, Podcasting, how we experience thoughts, drawing, learning, music, meditation, Time Tracking, Theme:Focus, Memory and being Present.
- Are you a 1,2,3,4 or 5 in this apple visualization exercise?
- Toggl - Free Time Tracking Software
- Qbserve app - Mac Time Tracking and Productivity Improvement
What does it mean to implement “hailing a cab” in software and how does this new translation stack up to the existing institution?
Discussions based around “The Software Arts: Chapter 2”, "Translation"with the author Warren Sack.
We talk about the differences of the humanities understanding of translation where meaning is lost, created, or changed, and compare it with the software concepts of perfect translation like compiling code.
Make sure to check out Part 1.
- Francis Bacon - Wikipedia
- History of calculus - Wikiquote
- Ludwig Wittgenstein - Wikipedia
- Software is not problem solving...
What I am saying is that software is an art and a form of design. Where you don’t necessarily know what the problem is.
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Narrative IntelligenceIn the after-show Warren mentions a chapter he pulled from the book about narrative.. here is a paper and talk on the subject:
- Narrative Intelligence
- JS.everywhere(2013): Warren Sack – JS in Research – YouTube
This episode kicks off a limited series of discussions with Warren Sack centered around his book The Software Arts, MIT Press, forward by John Rajchman
The Software Arts offers an alternative history of software that places the liberal arts at the very center of software’s evolution.
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Join us in this discussion...Warren’s book is available from MIT Press – grab a copy and enjoy a multi-episode virtual book club with me and the author. We plan to release an episode for each chapter:
- Introduction (this episode)
- Translation
- Language
- Algorithm
- Logic
- Rhetoric
- Grammar
- ConclusionReading along is not necessary to enjoy this series or episodes. And feel free to give us feedback and ask questions. Please contact us via Twitter: @WarrenSack, @Lyle.
- Where are the numbers? - Tracy Chou
- Eric A. Havelock
- Marshall McLuhan
MicroLEDs, Google Chrome Extensions are more private, macOS is locking things down, Expanse and other shows we are watching, and a post show covering wonderfully geeky PostGraphile.
- MicroLED Displays Could Show Up in Products as Soon as 2020
- Lyle Surgery Update
- Google to Minimize the Data Collected by Chrome Extensions
- macOS Lockdown and merging with iOS
- Expanse fans, no need to worry—Amazon orders season 5 of its new sci-fi show
- We’ve got our first peek at S4 of The Expanse and an airdate: December 13
- Louisiana declares state of emergency in response to ransomware attack
- Is the Phone Dead
- Graphile | Powerful, Extensible and Performant GraphQL APIs Rapidly
Brad Smith (@brad), the founder and CEO of Simplecast, talks with me about the creation of Simplecast from initial musings to venture capital infused growth, and building partnerships. Brad is also an expert on the podcasting landscape and walks us through some wonderful changes that Apple and Google have recently made that should help the podcasting community.
And, of course, this wouldn’t be GeekSpeak if we didn’t get technical – Brad is a geek and is proud of it.
- Podcast Hosting, Distribution & Analytics - Simplecast
- Podnews podcasting news
- Google Podcasts rolling out to desktop, iOS in Google Search - 9to5Google
- Lyle's Setup for Podcasting
Lyle Troxell and Ben Jaffe about the current state of the Geek Speak podcast, conversation styles, and Lyle’s L5 S1 Back Surgery Fusion with instrumentation.
New Geek Rich Zurad joins Ben and Lyle to cover the JRR universe badly, the Star Wars vs Star Trek argument, cover some of the podcasts they like, and their pet health problems.
- This gravity-powered battery could be the future of energy storage - Archpaper.com
For the Netflix podcast I did a quick jaunt to Amsterdam – here is an audio-blog type entry of my time there – Lyle.
- Lyle's Photos Amsterdam - Kinda over-doing it.
- BanksyLaugh now - Moco Museum
- Yayoi Kusama - Moco Museum
- Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) - IMDb
Ben Jaffe and Lyle Troxell talk about the culture at Facebook and at Netflix and about vulnerability at work.
Lyle tells a story about doing a branching talk about branching narratives. A quick chat about Star Trek Next Generation and even Ben’s broken dryer.
- Bandersnatch - Branching Narrative Black Mirror Episode
- Puss In Book - Branching Narrative Title
- Why Netflix move away from the 5 Stars
- Brené Brown and Vernā Myers Discuss Inclusion and Diversity
Wind prediction with AI, Anti-Vax movies pulled from Amazon Prime, Web Authn, and Home Automation and the cloud.
- Alphabet Subsidiary Trained AI to Predict Wind Output 36 Hours in Advance
- Amazon Removes Anti-Vaccine Content After CNN Business Report
- W3C Approves WebAuthn, Web Standard for Password-Free Logins
Miles and Lyle chat about software development esp. about Ruby and ORMs which leads to a bit about the GeekSpeak Rails website, podcast chapter marks, recording podcasting, including hardware and budgets. A bit of inside baseball.
- Kotlin and Android
- Ruby Programming Language
- Object-relational impedance mismatch
- Django and a Better ORM
- ID3
Generative Adversarial Networks are a pattern of Machine Learning that can do some amazing things – in this episode we chat about them effecting our concepts of truth.
And we include an episode of Linear Digressions from Ben and Katie to really explain how GANs really work.
- This Person Does Not Exist Is the Best One-Off Website of 2019
- How to recognize fake AI-generated images
- Neural Nets Play Cops and Robbers (aka generative adversarial networks) — Linear Digressions
Miles walks us through buying a used 2015 MacBook Pro and upgrading it with a better hard drive. And we talk programing languages: Kotlin, Swift, Groovy, Java, Python and more.
It’s a programing rich episode of GeekSpeak.
- Netflix Takes Broadband to the Broken Screen
- NGFF M.2 nVME SSD Adapter Card
- Multiplatform Project: iOS and Android - Kotlin Programming Language
- Why has the Groovy programming language lost its momentum? - Quora
- ttfkam/pg_gnufind: GNU find output as PostgreSQL foreign tables (multicorn)
Software engineer and “I’ll show it to you at hackday… chap”, Guy Cirino joins Lyle for a chat about hacking at Netflix, driving across Asia, high energy particle physics at CERN, and improving streaming video better for everyone.
- Netflix Stream Possible Video
- Netflix Hack Day — Winter 2015 – Netflix TechBlog – Medium
- GeekSpeak About AR Tech: Martian Telescope Senses Wrecked Teslas
- GeekSpeak Episode: Engineering FlatBuffers Programing sans JSON
- TeleFlix - Full Blog Post
- The real Hawkins National Labs from Stranger Things - BNL, the g-2 experiment
- Scintillator - Wikipedia
- CMS | CERN
- Superconducting Super Collider - Wikipedia
- Mongol Rally - Wikipedia
- The Magic Modem: A Global Network Emulator – @Scale
- Blog of Some Guy
- 14quick.org - Final Fantasy 14 Done Quick for Charity
- What Is Extra Life? | Extra Life
- FINAL FANTASY XIV
- Extra Life 2018 Live from Netflix HQ! - YouTube
- GeekSpeak Episode: Ready Player One
- Free Code Camp with Quincy Larson
- Raspberry Pi Zero W - Raspberry Pi
- Texas Instruments TI-99/4A - Wikipedia
- NES Processor -> CPU - Nesdev wiki
- Applesoft BASIC Programming Reference Manual - Apple Computer : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
UCLA Health technical project manager Robert Smith joins for a discussion on the state of personalized medicine and computational medicine.
The goal of personal genomics is to move toward being able to interpret each person’s individual genetic sequence, and predict it’s effect on their bodies and health.
- Preoperative predictions of in-hospital mortality using electronic medical record data | bioRxiv
- Large-scale transcriptome-wide association study identifies new prostate cancer risk regions | Nature Communications
Some flight in the news, laws managed by git source control – and how awesome collaboration can be using git. A large discussion: does Facebook’s benefit outweigh its drawbacks and how can we make social networks better for society or do they just represent who we are. The geeks chat about Geek Speak being Therapy for Mansplaining.
- New experimental Lockheed supersonic jet starts production
- First ever plane with no moving parts takes flight
- How I changed the law with a GitHub pull request | Ars Technica
- GitHub - lyle/geekspeak.org: This codebase running geekspeak.org
- Succeeding in Computer Science Requires More Than Theoretical Education
- Delay, Deny and Deflect: How Facebook’s Leaders Fought Through Crisis - The New York Times
- Am I MansplainingRecently in my facebook feed…
- A Look Inside the Tactics of Definers, Facebook’s Attack Dog - The New York Times
- Study: It only takes a few seconds for bots to spread misinformation
- Facebook dumps news at 5 pm ET before Thanksgiving that it did ask Definers to go after Soros
- The Geeks on FaceookBrian Young
Miles Elam
Lyle Troxell
Greg Merkley * Parliament seizes cache of Facebook internal papers | Technology | The Guardian * Micro.blog + Mastodon * NASA does it again by landing safely on Mars—something no one else has done * Instances of AI doing what creators specify, not what they mean * Ivanka Trump's use of personal email a focus of Democrats in next Congress