North Oakland: Short Talks, March 26th - THE LAST

post by Czynski (JacobKopczynski) · 2025-03-01T18:39:47.629Z · ? · GW · 2 comments

Contents

  About the Meetup
None
2 comments

The North Oakland meetups are shutting down, as attendance has dropped significantly and there are plenty of other weekly opportunities in the area.

For the last meetup, much like the first: Short Talks. We'll be meeting to give and listen to very short talks!

We'll do 7-minute impromptu lightning talks with 3 additional minutes allowed for questions.

A talk doesn't have to be formal, planned, or even something that you'd expect someone to Give A Talk About; it can be as simple as telling the group about something you find interesting or cool. In the past, we've had people talk about topics like: how complicated the process of organizing fresh food for airplane flights is, their experience volunteering for a local political campaign, a video game they were designing and writing, and many others.

We don't expect any sort of preparation or practice for these kinds of talks. They're very casual and the expectations are low. If your talk isn't great, it's okay because we'll just move on to another one in a few minutes. If it helps, think of it this way: you're just being given the conversational floor for

About the Meetup

The North Oakland meetup is intended as a fun, low-key social space with some structured interaction, where new and non-new community members can mingle and have interesting conversations.

Everyone is welcome, and RSVPs are never required.

We meet every Tuesday in Oakland at 6:15, with a rotating variety of topics but don't generally start the meetup topic until 6:45-7:00 to accommodate stragglers. Often there is a food delivery order that goes out before we start the meetup topic.

We explicitly encourage people to split off from the main conversation or diverge from the topic if that would be more fun for them (moving side conversations into a separate part of the space if appropriate). Meetup topics are here as a tool to facilitate fun interaction, and we certainly don't want them to inhibit it.

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comment by velicyb · 2025-03-21T05:22:57.203Z · ? · GW

Intending to do an in-character presentation on simulating black swans for fun and profit driven alignment.
Hypothesis: gamification and financial incentives have an incredibly strong track record of guiding intelligent processes i.e. human behavior, and can naively be expected to generalize to intelligent processes at large. I'm particularly curious how a combined methodology can be used to improve overall outcomes concerning "black swan" technologies that stand to disrupt existing systems in unprecedented ways, and intend to present several fictional examples in the style of a call for research and investment.

Replies from: velicyb
comment by velicyb · 2025-03-27T01:07:21.361Z · ? · GW

Got the starting time mixed up... 😅