This past weekend, I went to GrrCon, in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
This was year 15 for the event, but year 1 for me.
In fact this was the first time I had ever attended a conference of pretty much any kind.

So Day 1, a few things that I learned, is that things like this are more amusing when you are not alone in a sea of strangers. I sat through some really good talks, wandered around some through the vendors, realizing that while I may not have been the oldest guy in the room, I was likely the guy that felt the most out of place. I was capturing their marketing materials in the form of pens, stickers, and gadgets because the conference is honestly too small for actual gadget vendors to pack up a bunch of Merchandise, travel across the country, set up and tear down each day for what would likely amount to minimal sales.

There were a few different tracks that talks were themed around, which meant if you found one talk less than appealing, there were a couple of others that you could go sit in on.

The theme, aside from Internet and network security, had a heavy AI focus. I will not say that it was all PRO - AI, because it definitely was not. In fact at Conference launch it was plainly and accurately stated that as an industry and as a society, we are not at AI yet... we are still caught up in accelerated machine learning. This in and of itself resonated very deep within me due to positions that I hold and sometimes discuss with others from my own perspective.

Now there was a lock picking village, a car hacking village that was really interesting to me but feeling as out of place as I did, I remained stand offish. There was also a Call-Center Village or CTF (Capture the Flag.) There was what is believed to be the traditional 2600 pay phone but there was also another pay phone associated with the call center village that was simply amazing.

Day 1 I rather remained all to myself, and that my friends was a mistake.
I feel as if I missed out on so very much.

Day 2 ...
Day 2 started off again, early, as I was among the first 5 people in the door again, aside from event staff and volunteers. But I spent some time talking with some of the volunteers/staff, and I made an early trip around the vendors room, which I am very grateful for doing because I was afforded the opportunity to talk with one of the programmers behind the call center village. Of course one of the things that we discussed was the use of Anthropic's flagship, Claude/ Claude-code and how to help it retain its focus while effectively minimizing its token consumption.
We further discussed the need for humans to remain in control of the actions the LLM takes which means the actions (prompts) should be very pointed, direct targeted or context focused, and similarly small to prevent excessive drift.

This matters because as people who know me are well aware, I am not much of a master of any trade, but I wear many many hats in the course of day to day life. That made interacting with the vendors very interesting because let's face it, they are there to make sales, or leads to potential sales and when this guys says he drives a truck and tinkers for a living, it likely means wasted time...

I will say that I have a project that I built this past spring that I will be reworking and adding some teeth to, that is specifically for testing what most of the vendors were selling which is a machine language assisted penetration testing suite... at the end of the day I wanted to take a run at their underlying LLM, but naturally that is not an option.

Neural-Red will be posted here after I complete the entire rework strategy, I just wish I had access to enough hardware to give it the balls that it deserves. Perhaps in time. The trouble right now is I took some steps away for a while when I returned to driving commercial truck, so now I have a bunch of research to do to make this actually effective again.

Now back to Day 2...

I met a few people that were both personally and professionally inspiring to me. but I will dive into that more after I complete the after action report that is now due as reimbursement for the cost of the conference ticket.

I will say now that the biggest personal impact or takeaway for me was to always give yourself credit for the things that you understand, can figure out, and can do because there are many people out there in society that would literally die to possess even a fraction of the ability that you do. Don't be down on yourself, because that in and of itself is a direct turn off to many of the people that you will encounter. Be kind to yourself and that in and of itself will make being kind to others just a little bit easier, even when it is the last thing you really want to do.

And finally...
It is OK to show compassion for your fellow humans...
What is NOT OK, is doing for those who are capable but simply refuse to invest the effort in themselves, their ability to learn, advance or achieve, or their forward momentum... that is a waste of yourself.

I will revisit