trevmex's tumblings

Let me tell you a story.

I was at a tech meetup once and raised my hand to ask a question. I said, “This is a dumb question, but …” and asked my question.

I didn’t think anything of it. After the meetup, a good and always straightforward friend of mine came up to me and said, “Don’t call your questions dumb.”

To which I said, “Oh, but it was just my ignorance…”

He stopped me. He said, “No, you don’t understand. In that room, people look up to you. I know some people didn’t even know to ask that question. And others that had the same or similar questions. When you deprecate yourself around others, you de facto deprecate those around you thinking the same thing. Don’t self-deprecate in front of others. It adds nothing and lowers the self-esteem of those around you.”

I was blown away. I never thought of self-depreciation as harming others, but he is right. Knowledge, skill, talent: it is a spectrum. And when I self deprecated in front of others, that negativity has impacts beyond just me.

Africa Periañez

BENSHI.AI, CEO

Focusing on bringing AI to the most underserved countries in the world.

40% countries have fewer than 10 medical doctors per 10,000 people!

HIV/AIDS is the leading cause of death across the world, especially in Africa.

There are many cheap, easy-to-implement technologies that can improve health outcomes across the world.

Most of the problem isn't getting the supply out there, it is getting people to understand, and trust, that the medicine is safe and trustworthy.

The name of the game, then, is engagement. We need to engage folx that do not know what is safe or not.

A great way do this is through games!

Benshi's were people that would describe silent movies to illiterate people in Japan. Origin of the name benshi.ai

They want to democratize medical knowledge through mobile phones. Mobile phone penetration is widespread. 80% of people in Africa have smart phones connected to the Internet.

Global health is a messy field that is not remotely organized globally, so there is a lot of communication needed at the local level to bring people together.

They focus on experimentation and machine learning to forecast health trends

The goal is to predict and nudge behavior towards improved health decisions.

They work to gamify and personalize interventions and predictions for each client.

It is not enough to have data, you need to have organized data to mine the value out of it.

Benshi uses data labeling to to organize data and build data sets, which feed back to client nudges

Benshi is n opinionated system. They want to guide clients towards decisions that will save their lives.

A Nigerian doctor can visit about 100 patients a day. In Ethiopia, there is 1 midwife per 10,500 people.

How can we use AI to optimize the limited resources of medical professionals to triage the highest need cases in within these constraints?

Malaria is 100% preventable, treatable, and curable, but we still see 200,000 deaths every year. We want to nudge people to take their malaria medication through gamification.

If a person goes to a pharmacy, and they do not have the drugs they need right away, there is a 29.4% chance that person will never return to get their medicine in developing countries.

Part of what we can do is predict the medicine needs per area using AI modelling.

ML helps us discover and predict actual demand and needs per area. That can kickstart the supply chain ahead of the resource needs

Big Pharma is not incentivized to participate in these improvements right now. So another problem is how do we encourage and incentivize Big Pharma to lean in as well?

There are very few people working in this field, despite this being a very large problem for the world

M. Kramer, E. Duflo, and A. Banejee got the Nobel prize for work in this field, and much more is needed in experimentation in low income countries and global health

Check out Milind Tambe's Field Study in Deploying Restless Multi-Armed Bandit in India

Tracking out of stock medicines over the world help s drive preemptive resource management

The more people that feed data into ML model apps, the better refines the predictions have gotten in Indonesia.

The team is largely woman-driven, 83% in leadership, 55% in engineering

John Romero

ROMERO GAMES

John started learning BASIC as an elementary school kid. Then got an Apple ][. He eventually learned 6502 Assembly.

Made software for the Air Force in High School, since his dad worked in the Air Force.

At 21, John was working porting games to the Commadore 64.

Made a tool to make games. Hired John Carmack, Adrian Carmack and Tom Hall to make games.

Carmack ad Hall made Dangerous Dave in Copyright Infringement, Sept. 20, 1990. The demo proved you can do smooth scrolling on a PC!!!!!

Commander Keen was the first PC game that could do smooth scrolling horizontally. The Commander Keen trilogy was made in three months. So popular people cosplay as commander keen.

Started licensing the Keen engine in 1994.

ID Software was started in Shreveport, Louisiana.

They played D&D on the weekends, Quake was inspired by one of there D&D sessions.

They made a SMB3 PC demo to pitch to Nintendo, but Nintendo (wisely) decided to only allow their software to run on their hardware.

They always were making two games at a time. No prototypes, always maintain contently shippable code. Only make games, not prototypes of games. It was a small team of four people.

They were making games 24/7, and they moved from Louisiana to Wisconsin.

Your game has to be able to be run by your team at all times. Bulletproof your engine by providing defaults upon load failure.

If you fail to load a sprite, load a bagel. If the sound fails, play an annoying sound.

Keep your code simple. Always make it simpler all the time.

After six months of snow, they went to Texas.

Great tools help make great games.

Wolfenstein 3D took 4 months for the first episode. 6 months for the rest.

Licensed the Wolfenstein engine for Shadowcaster.

We are our own best testing team. There is no throwing it over the fence. There is no QA, just you!

As soon as you see a bug, you fix it! If you don't fix your bug, new code will be built on buggy code.

Doom was based on their D&D campaign, Evil Dead, and Alien.

Use a development system that is superior to your game.

Doom was developed in NextStep systems.

Doom was a 5 person team. Then Tom Hall left, and they hired two more people.

In the middle of building Doom, they had to port Wolfenstein 3D for the Super Nintendo. It took them three weeks.

Doom was INSANELY popular.

The final day of Doom's creation the team worked 30 hours straight. On some computers, the game just froze. Carmack thought about the bug, and fixed it.

Doom II took them 8 months!

Then John made Heretic.

1995, they started working on Quake. With 9 developers/designers.

No code in Doom was used in Quake. Write this code for this game only, not for future games. You are going to be a better coder in the future.

They planned to make Quake on a Cray 64 super computer. Unfortunately Cray was bought by Silicon Graphics and the agreement fell through.

John then made Hexen, but Hexen II was not the same system.

Strife was the very first FPS RPG.

In 1995, 9 developers, released 2 new games.

Created Qtest around this time.

Encapsulate functionality to ensure design consistency. This minimizes mistakes and saves times.

June 22, 1995, 5 pm CST Quake shareware was released in university FTP.

The Pentium FDIV bug was discovered with Quake.

Quake was the first internet multiplayer, Quakeworld was launched, first mouse driven FPS.

Try to code transparently. Coders are not black boxes. Coding is a creative art form based in logic.

They didn't have source control!!!