Entries tagged speaking
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The last six months in LLMs, illustrated by pelicans on bicycles
I presented an invited keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair in San Francisco this week. This is my third time speaking at the event—here are my talks from October 2023 and June 2024. My topic this time was “The last six months in LLMs”—originally planned as the last year, but so much has happened that I had to reduce my scope!
[... 6,077 words]Talking AI and jobs with Natasha Zouves for News Nation
I was interviewed by News Nation’s Natasha Zouves about the very complicated topic of how we should think about AI in terms of threatening our jobs and careers. I previously talked with Natasha two years ago about Microsoft Bing.
[... 2,194 words]Building software on top of Large Language Models
I presented a three hour workshop at PyCon US yesterday titled Building software on top of Large Language Models. The goal of the workshop was to give participants everything they needed to get started writing code that makes use of LLMs.
[... 3,726 words]What’s new in the world of LLMs, for NICAR 2025
I presented two sessions at the NICAR 2025 data journalism conference this year. The first was this one based on my review of LLMs in 2024, extended by several months to cover everything that’s happened in 2025 so far. The second was a workshop on Cutting-edge web scraping techniques, which I’ve written up separately.
[... 2,797 words]Open challenges for AI engineering
I gave the opening keynote at the AI Engineer World’s Fair yesterday. I was a late addition to the schedule: OpenAI pulled out of their slot at the last minute, and I was invited to put together a 20 minute talk with just under 24 hours notice!
[... 5,640 words]Talking Large Language Models with Rooftop Ruby
I’m on the latest episode of the Rooftop Ruby podcast with Collin Donnell and Joel Drapper, talking all things LLM.
[... 15,489 words]Making Large Language Models work for you
I gave an invited keynote at WordCamp 2023 in National Harbor, Maryland on Friday.
[... 14,188 words]How I make annotated presentations
Giving a talk is a lot of work. I go by a rule of thumb I learned from Damian Conway: a minimum of ten hours of preparation for every one hour spent on stage.
[... 2,128 words]Weeknotes: Parquet in Datasette Lite, various talks, more LLM hacking
I’ve fallen a bit behind on my weeknotes. Here’s a catchup for the last few weeks.
[... 769 words]Weeknotes: Citus Con, PyCon and three new niche museums
I’ve had a busy week in terms of speaking: on Tuesday I gave an online keynote at Citus Con, “Big Opportunities in Small Data”. I then flew to Salt Lake City for PyCon that evening and gave a three hour workshop on Wednesday, “Data analysis with SQLite and Python”.
[... 225 words]Data analysis with SQLite and Python for PyCon 2023
I’m at PyCon 2023 in Salt Lake City this week.
[... 347 words]The Changelog podcast: LLMs break the internet
I’m the guest on the latest episode of The Changelog podcast: LLMs break the internet. It’s a follow-up to the episode we recorded six months ago about Stable Diffusion.
[... 454 words]Working in public
I participated in a panel discussion this week for path to Citus Con, a series of Discord audio events that are happening in the run up to the Citus Con 2023 later this month.
[... 546 words]I talked about Bing and tried to explain language models on live TV!
Yesterday evening I was interviewed by Natasha Zouves on NewsNation, on live TV (over Zoom).
[... 1,697 words]Weeknotes: Datasette Lite, nogil Python, HYTRADBOI
My big project this week was Datasette Lite, a new way to run Datasette directly in a browser, powered by WebAssembly and Pyodide. I also continued my research into running SQL queries in parallel, described last week. Plus I spoke at HYTRADBOI.
[... 1,434 words]Weeknotes: datasette-indieauth, datasette-graphql, PyCon Argentina
Last week’s weeknotes took the form of my Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data talk write-up, which represented most of what I got done that week. This week I mainly worked on datasette-indieauth, but I also gave a keynote at PyCon Argentina and released a version of datasette-graphql with a small security fix.
[... 724 words]Personal Data Warehouses: Reclaiming Your Data
I gave a talk yesterday about personal data warehouses for GitHub’s OCTO Speaker Series, focusing on my Datasette and Dogsheep projects. The video of the talk is now available, and I’m presenting that here along with an annotated summary of the talk, including links to demos and further information.
[... 5,166 words]Weeknotes: datasette-dump, sqlite-backup, talks
I spent some time this week digging into Python’s sqlite3 internals. I also gave two talks and recorded a third, due to air at PyGotham in October.
[... 928 words]Better presentations through storytelling and STAR moments
Last week I completed GSBGEN 315: Strategic Communication at the Stanford Graduate School of Business.
[... 643 words]Weeknotes: first week of Stanford classes
One of the benefits of the JSK fellowship is that I can take classes and lectures at Stanford, on a somewhat ad-hoc basis (I don’t take exams or earn credits).
[... 544 words]How I moderated the State of Django panel at DjangoCon US.
On Wednesday last week I moderated the State of Django panel as the closing session for DjangoCon US 2018.
[... 1,210 words]Notes from my appearance on the Changelog podcast
After I spoke at Zeit Day SF last weekend I sat down with Adam Stacoviak to record a 25 minute segment for episode 296 of the Changelog podcast, talking about Datasette. We covered a lot of ground!
[... 536 words]Datasette Demo (video) from the SF Python Meetup
I gave a short talk about Datasette last month at the SF Python Meetup Holiday Party. They’ve just posted the video, so here it is:
[... 63 words]What are some tips for improving public speaking skills quickly?
Practice your talk, out loud, in private, as many times as possible before you deliver it. There’s no better way of ensuring you know your material and that you can deliver it at a sensible pace without freezing up.
[... 127 words]What are the most important things to keep in mind when doing a presentation?
Know your material, and don’t speak too fast.
[... 28 words]Presentations: What tools does Patrick Van Stee use to make his slides?
That looks very much like Apple Keynote (used extremely effectively) to me.
[... 30 words]First: I am a first time speaker at a convention (to happen in 2 days time) and I have no experience at all but I believe I can do so can anyone give me tips on how to look confident, engage the audience, inspire them and NOT SUCK...?
Practice your talk, out loud, at the speed you will be delivering it (which should be slower than you normally speak) as many times as possible. After the first few runthroughs, think about ways in which you can improve the talk—things you could communicate more clearly, slides that could be better presented, changes to the order that might help. Then make sure you practice the final version, out loud, at least three times in the exact form you intend to deliver it.
[... 138 words]Why does TED refer to its speeches as “talks”?
I think this reflects a more general trend in the tech conference world which TED emerged from.
[... 115 words]How do I overcome my fear of public speaking (of people just “switching off”, or simply getting up and leaving the room)?
Look for opportunities to give “lightning talks”—5 minute talks given as part of a series of talks. These are excellent for beginner speakers as they help force you to get to the point as quickly as possible, and you only have to survive for five minutes! They are good for the audience too as if they don’t enjoy our talk they only have to sit politely for a couple of minutes before the next talk comes along.
[... 107 words]What’s your opinion on sharing your presentation slides (online for anyone to access) after speaking at an event where eventgoers paid to hear you (and others) speak?
I think sharing slides is almost always the best thing for everyone:
[... 277 words]