Tales from the jar side: VenBot 5000 ready for VenCon (or is it VenKon), Baseball notes, and the usual silly tweets and toots

Do people who drive electric cars listen to AC/DC, or something current? (rimshot)

Sep 30, 2024

Welcome, fellow jarheads, to Tales from the jar side, the Kousen IT newsletter, for the week of September 22 - 29, 2024. This week I taught week 2 of my O’Reilly Learning Platform course on Spring in 3 Weeks and Deep Dive Into Spring course as an NFJS Virtual Workshop. I also taught my regular courses at Trinity College.

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My VenBot for VenCon

This week I’m speaking at a conference formally known as dev2next, but since the whole deal was arranged by and features my friend Venkat Subramaniam, I’ve been calling it VenCon (or sometimes VenKon) all along. If you don’t know who Venkat is, let me clarify:

Wait, you know me and not him? How did that happen? He does everything I do, but more.
He’s probably the closest thing to an actual celebrity we have in the Java developer space. You could make a case for a few others, but he’s the Java celebrity I know personally.
He’s written books on Java, Scala, Groovy, Kotlin, JavaScript, testing, agile development, and lots more. See his Agile Developer site for details. If it exists, he’s written a book on it.
All you need to know about his travel schedule is that when he boards the plane, the pilots just hand him the keys. (I’ve been using that gag for years. Maybe some day it’ll even get a laugh.) I’m guessing that each year he flies the equivalent of to the Moon and back, more or less. Somehow he manages to write entire book chapters in coach on those flights. Amazing.

He was going to run this conference for the first time in April of 2020, but I suppose you can guess what happened that time. Now he’s trying again, and the collection of speakers is very impressive. Plus, I’m there!

I’m giving two talks at his conference:

Managing Your AI-Assisted Manager
Custom GPTs for Fun, Profit, and Potential Liability

You can see the complete schedule here. As you might have guessed, AI is playing a big role, with lots of related talks. I’m trying not to get all proprietary about it.

For my custom GPT talk, I made a GPT with the clickbait-y name VenBot 5000:

(You know, because VenBots 1 through 4999 were not entirely successful…)

The VenBot 5000 custom GPT user interface, with some suggested questions

I loaded it with eight of Venkat’s most recent books, but the fun part is in the custom instructions. I don’t want to get into too many spoilers here, because it’s possible some of the conference attendees might actually read this newsletter.

(LOL! Yeah, right. But still, stranger things have happened, though not from reliable sources.)

As a reward/penalty for reading this far, here is a link to the VenBot 5000. The permissions are set so only people with the link can access it. During the talk I’ll make it public to everybody.

Is this a long way to go for a gag? Of course, but remember whose newsletter you’re reading. AI’s have no sense of humor, so any enjoyment we can get out of them has to come from unintentional comedy.

As for the “potential liability” part of the talk, I have a lot to say about that, but I only posted this much on the bird site:

I asked the VenBot 5000 about it, and the essence of its long, detailed answer was, “probably not.” I guess we’ll see.

Sho-Time

Last week I included a note about Shohei Ohtani’s season for the ages as a hitter, all the more remarkable because this is supposed to be a rehab season for his pitching arm. By last week he had already created the 50/50 club, with 50+ home runs and 50+ steals this season. The regular season ends today, and with one more game to go, he’s got 54 homers and 58 steals, so he’s got a shot at forming the 55/60 club.

He’s apparently going to just miss being the first Triple Crown winner in the National League since 1937 (!). He’s going to have the most home runs and the most RBI’s, but he’s going to miss the batting title (the award for highest batting average) by about 4 points. He’s currently batting .310, but that doesn’t tell the real story. Over his last nine games, he’s hitting 26 for 39, which is a whopping .667.

If he goes at least 3 for 4 today and the leader goes 0 for 4, it’s possible Ohtani will catch him, but I wouldn’t count on that.

Update: Ohtani went 1 for 4 and finished at .310, so no Triple Crown this year. He got another steal, though, to finish with 59.

Other baseball stories I’ve been watching:

The Oakland A’s are no more. They are owned by the a greedy, useless nepo baby failson named John Fisher, who is moving the team for no reason. Through his lies, cheapness, and horrible behavior, the A’s played their last game in Oakland this week. They’re supposedly headed to Las Vegas, but even though there is some sort of agreement, there are no formal plans for a stadium and even if construction started today, it wouldn’t be ready for another three years. In the meantime the team will play in a minor league stadium in Sacramento, which will please absolutely nobody. This is a tragedy, and a completely pointless one at that.
The Chicago White Sox set a modern record for futility by losing their 121st game on Friday. The previous record was 120 losses, by the 1962 Mets, who were an expansion team that year. The White Sox are just bad. Because they clearly hate their own fans, early in the week they had their last three games at home and, shockingly, won all three for their only three-game winning streak of the season. That disappointed the fans who showed up just to see the record broken. Then the White Sox went to Detroit and split their last two games, giving them a record of 40 - 121. They’re playing their last game right now, so they could set a new record. We’ll see. Update: they won again, so they finished 41 - 121.
Yes, I know Aaron Judge is still hitting the cover off the ball, but I’m sorry, this newsletter has not ever and will never celebrate any New York Yankee in any way. I’d like to believe I still have a soul, even after working with computers my entire career and AI the last couple years, so I don’t need to risk it by saying something nice about a member of the NY Yankees, no matter how much he deserves it.
Normally I’d say something nice about the Red Sox, but I’m still mad at them for giving away Mookie Betts for nothing. Between Mookie still playing like a star in Los Angeles and Shohei joining him this year, I’ll be rooting for the Dodgers this post-season.

One last note about sports: I really enjoyed Caitlin Clark’s rookie season. She handled all the pressure beautifully, and you can already see glimpses of the star she’s going to become. A lot of commentators compare her to Steph Curry, and I get that, but I keep seeing Larry Bird when I watch her. She has that same extraordinary vision and anticipation about the play is evolving, plus she rebounds, shoots, and passes like he did. I love watching her play. My wife and I attended a Connecticut Sun game a few months ago when Clark was in town, and she didn’t have a great game, but we had fun anyway. I watched her televised game summaries all season long.

Tweets and Toots

All worked out, I guess

That hasn’t happened to me yet, but my day is coming.

Crafting project

Needlepoint which reads: Bless This Wretched Hive of Scum and Villainy.

That’s assuming we eventually find those droids we were looking for.

Halloween is coming

Totally fair.

Interviewing skills

I always liked this gag:

Interviewer: What’s your biggest weakness?
Me: I have a somewhat tenuous connection to reality.
Interviewer (uncomfortable): Okay, what’s your biggest strength?
Me (lowers voice): I’m Batman.

I always wondered about that

A cartoon - a dog sits upright on a couch opposite his female therapist, who's holding a notepad.

With arms outstretched, he says "I'm telling you I'm not paranoid! Sometimes he only pretends to throw the ball just to make me look like an idiot!"

Still a good boy, I’m sure.

Hey, a workaround

I’m glad I now know that trick before it comes up in real life.

Another dog joke

There seemed to be a dog theme this week.

Speaking of which:

Work the problem

A cartoon of two scientists standing next to a blackboard with complex formulae. On the wall next to this a dark hole or portal with green fluorescent poodle dogs floating in - tens and hundreds of them.

The female scientist turns to her colleague and says "The important thing is to stay calm and tackle the problems one by one. First we'll correct the errors on our equation, then we'll deal with the wormhole and the poodles"

Finally, not dog-related, but this Tom Gauld comic was the best.

Write what you know

Three authors are on a panel, each with a large poster of their respective new book covers behind them.

The first author introduces their book, HORSEBACK DOCTOR, by saying "This book was inspired by my previous career as a surgeon and my time riding with cowboys in Wyoming."

The second author introduces their book, LOVE AT THE PATISSERIE, by saying "To prepare for my book I spent a year apprenticed to a baker in Avignon and edited a lonely-hearts column for the local paper."

The third author is noticeably silent. We look behind them to see that the title of their book is THE LITERARY FESTIVAL MURDERS.

Have a great week, everybody!

Last week:

Week 2 of my Spring in 3 Weeks course, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Deep Dive into Spring, an NFJS Virtual Workshop
My regular Trinity College schedule

This week:

Week 3 of my Spring in 3 Weeks course, on the O’Reilly Learning Platform
Two talks at dev2next (VenCon) in the Denver area
My regular Trinity College schedule