Tag Archives: ai

[dev nexus 2024] teaching your kid programming from the perspective of a kid

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Speaker: Cassandra Chin

@cassandraonjava

For more, see the 2024 DevNexus Blog Table of Contents

General

  • Steven Chin’s daughter.
  • Worked with coding and YAML in MInecraft
  • Starting teaching kids to program at 14 at conferences
  • Junior in college
  • Creating podcast at internship for younger people (ex college)

Tech diversity

  • 20 years of feale tech panels and still need
  • Women who try AP Comp Sci in high school ten times more like to major it.
  • Black/Latino students seven times more lilkely.
  • Need to provide opportunity
  • Even at 6 year old, kids think computers are more suited to boys. Fifth grade it tapers down so sweet spot for starting.

Kids and code

  • Schools mandate human/world languages, but not coding languages
  • Since schools dont always provide, parents need to
  • Not all screen time is equal
  • Limit youtube
  • Minecraft in middle
  • Best use is learning to code – ex: Scratch
  • Redirect computer use vs taking away

Mistakes for parents to avoid

  • Don’t leave your daughters out. Bring to tech event
  • Computers at home matter – an actual computer, not a tablet. Lets do more than play mobile games
  • Don’t need to be good at math. While Assembly requires math, nobody uses anymore Modern programs use logic, not math
  • Kids dislike math the most followed by foreight language. Computers is third highest. Both things above are types of art.
  • Don’t start with books like Discrete Math
  • Give examples of programmers that they can relate to
  • Don’t start with boring parts like what an array is. Better to start with legos
  • Don’t do the code for the kids. They won’t learn. Never grab mouse or keyboard. Means content too har

Geniuses

  • Anyone can learn to code. Don’t have to be super smart.
  • Kids told programmers are genious do worse than kids who think practies will make them better

Books

  • Phippys AI Friend – comes with online workshop that takes about an hour. Actually use boo as prop
  • Coding for Kids Python
  • GIrls who Code

Helping kids

  • Relate to your kids hobbies. Ex: discuss who built
  • Lego Spike – build robot and do block coding
  • Mbot (Make Block). Uses screws instead of legos. Don’t have to use blocks
  • Hour of Code. Lots of themes
  • Choose age appropriate. Often we choose twoo hard
  • Squishy circuits for 3-9 year olds
  • Raspberry Pi and Arduino – 9-15 years old
  • Groups of two works best. When three kids, the younest will often feel left out
  • Take kids to localy run workshops – ex: confernces, girls who code

My take

I like her responses to Todd’s mini interview a the begining while they dealt with AV issues. Great humor. I liked that she made a joke about her dad being there to tell jokes. I also like “I’m not the daughter of Steven Chin; I have a name”. Great content throughout hether new to the topic or not.

The content resonated well. I gave my best friends five year old (daughter) a toy robot for her fifth birthday. I enjoyed seeing her play. I now have a gift idea for next year!

I also liked the demo from her book!

mutation testing from a five year old (according to chatgpt)

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I asked ChatGPT to explain mutation testing to a five year old to see what it would say. I got this back:

Alright, imagine you have a big puzzle made of Lego blocks. Each block represents a piece of code that makes up a computer program. Now, let’s say we want to make sure that our puzzle is put together correctly so that our program works properly.

Mutation testing is like having a mischievous Lego wizard who comes and changes some of the pieces in our puzzle to see if we notice. He might swap a blue block for a red one, or turn a block upside down. After he’s done, we carefully check our puzzle again to see if it still looks right and if our program still works.

If we can still solve the puzzle and our program still works even with the changes the wizard made, then we know our puzzle – or our program – is really strong. But if we can’t solve the puzzle or our program stops working, then we know there’s a problem and we need to fix it. So, mutation testing helps us make sure our programs are really robust and can handle unexpected changes.

It’s a good example of how ChatGPT is an aide and not a solver. First paragraph is good. In the second part, I love the mischievous Lego wizard who comes and changes some of the pieces to see if we notice. It’s a good premise. We see if our program still works with the changes.

The third paragraph leads us astray. If we notice the change, that is good. If the program stops working it is also good, means we noticed the change. Mutation testing is about having good tests that can detect change. Not a robust program with unnecessary code that behaves the same way when changed.

[uberconf 2023] Practical AI Tools for Java Developers

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Speaker: Ken Kousen

@kenkousen

For more, see the table of contents

Prompt Engineering

  • Tools are improving fast, might not be needed as job
  • Suggest context (ex: “pretend you are”)
  • Give example of what you want

Chat GPT

  • Free version is GPT 3.5 Turbo (improved performance over original 3.5)
  • $20/month for GPT 4. Can make 25 requests in a three hour block.
  • Have not noticed quality control over plugins.
  • Plugins change rapidly.
  • Apologizes when you correct it.
  • Warning about pasting your company’s code in
  • Trained thru summer 2021
  • Can’t read files on local file system (Bard can). Can read link but doesn’t know it can
  • Often wrong if you ask it about whether can do something. Like talking to toddler; says want thinks want to know.
  • Temperature – tweaks creativity vs precision
  • REST API docs
  • REST API: cookbook has examples
  • Must give credit card to call REST APIs. Pennies are for 1000 tokens (about 750 words). Charged for both input and output words. Also limits on context (amount GPT remembers). Not expensive if don’t use it much. Ken’s bill has been pennies and too low to be sent a bill.
  • REST API JSON response says how many tokens used. Can also see graph when log into account
  • Had it make multiple choice questions on a topic

Chat GPT Code Interpreter

  • Code Interpreter beta feature.
  • Need to explicitly enable under settings.
  • From OpenAI, not third party
  • ex: can convert Groovy to Kotlin DSL for Gradle

DALL-E

  • First popular text to image generation tool
  • A generation behind text/GPT.
  • Stable Diffusion free, but behind on quality
  • Prefers MidJourney, more realistic

Whisper

  • Audio to text
  • Takes audio or video and writes transcription.
  • Free (unless use REST API)
  • Mac Whisper – $20 on time fee for larger models. Good for transcribing videos of talks. Slow first time. After that (including other videos, fast. [caching?]
  • Creates .srt file (Subtitles)

Claude.AI

  • Free beta
  • Only available in US and UK
  • Can hold 100K tokens. ex: can summarize a novel
  • Quality comparable to ChatGPT 3.5, but not as good as 4.0
  • Can upload many file types
  • Harder to get back to previous conversations than ChatGPT. Need to click on “A” icon on top to see them
  • Doesn’t do image

Bard

  • Can upload answers to Google docs on Ken’s personal account, but not business account
  • Used to be able to answer who Venkat is but can’t anymore.

Llama 2

  • Meta announced today
  • Pretrained language model
  • Free unless large company (aka: competitors)

Descript

  • Transcribes and edits video
  • Can give instructions – ex: shorten gaps in video, remove filler words
  • If don’t move around much, will make it look like you are looking at camera
  • Can give text and select a voice. With 30 minute sample, can train on your voice

Canva

  • Can describe presentation want and Canva makes a draft
  • Can choose theme from list of choices
  • Magic eraser – brush over part of image don’t want and replaces with background nearby
  • Beats Sync – line of slide transition to beats of music
  • Magic Write – like GPT 3.5
  • Magic Design – give own image and make presentation around that

GitHub Copilot

  • Virtual pair programmer
  • Plugins for VSCode and IntelliJ
  • If hesitate, suggests code
  • Can’t agree to part of suggestion. Need to accept it all or delete
  • Guesses right a lot because knows what have done before in a training class
  • Always looks plausible because trained on own code. Need to look carefully
  • Next generation is GitHub CopilotX. Only available via wait list. VS Code only at this point, can use for pull requests.
  • GitHub Next – tools in a variety of states – https://githubnext.com. “Visualizing a Codebase” runs as github action to see packages

IntelliJ AI Assistant

  • Not much documentation on how it works. Only one blog post
  • In Ultimate, not Community
  • In beta edition
  • Can highlight code and ask to explain it
  • If don’t like suggestion, can request it suggests something else and get more choices
  • Can write commit message for you
  • Find issues with code when know language well
  • Helps in language know less well because it knows the API/syntax
  • Good for nuisance tasks that would take a lot of time

YouTube Summary

  • Get summary or transcript of video
  • Free
  • Up to 20 minute video

My take

I was doing my interview with the Build Propulsion Lab so was a few minutes late. It was a full room so my seat was on the floor. Luckily, the room had a large aisle so I could sit near the front instead of in the very back! And the carpet was comfy.

As far as Ken’s actual talk, it was great. I liked the overview of a bunch of tools and seeing the REST APIs for calling OpenAI. Great breath of topics and fun examples! I learned a lot including some tools I hadn’t heard of. And some very cool functionality!