For a long time, tech culture has focused too narrowly on technical skills; this has resulted in a tech community that too often puts companies and code over people. Greater Than Code is a podcast that invites the voices of people who are not heard from enough in tech: women, people of color, trans and/or queer folks, to talk about the human side of software development and technology. Greater Than Code is providing a vital platform for these conversations, and developing new ideas of what it means to be a technologist beyond just the code. Featuring an ongoing panel of racially and gender diverse tech panelists, the majority of podcast guests so far have been women in tech! We’ve covered topics including imposter syndrome, mental illness, sexuality, unconscious bias and social justice. We also have a major focus on skill sets that tech too often devalues, like team-building, hiring, community organizing, mentorship and empathy. Each episode also includes a transcript. We have an active Slack community that members can join by pledging as little as $1 per month via Patreon. (https://www.patreon.com/greaterthancode)
114: Theory of Mind with Jean-Francois Cloutier
02:41 – JF’s Superpower: Systems Thinking
06:58 – Robots and Elixir
Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind
Rodney Brooks -- Robots, AI, and other stuff
17:10 – Reapproaching Robotics, Predictive Processing, and Calibration of Attention
33:26 – Thinking and Talking About Object-Oriented Programming
43:51 – Intuition and Emergent Properties
54:02 – Unpacking Fractals
59:08 – The Ineffability of Smalltalk
Reflections:
Avdi: Trying not to do work, but sometimes finding ways to be pulled into doing work.
Sam: 1) Generating predictions and then correcting your model when those predictions turn out not to be confirmed by sensory data.
2) Object-Oriented Programming should be called Message-Oriented Programming.
3) Computer science as a field really wants to be math and the people who teach computer science want to be mathematicians.
Jessica: Smalltalk feeling like a cathedral where you can get a sense of the architectural beauty.
Eric Evans - Good Design is Imperfect Design
Jean-Francois: Aikido.
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Special Guest: Jean-Francois Cloutier.
Sponsored By:
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