Let’s take a moment to respect our own knowledge. What could you give a Ted talk on?
Its rather niche and not to everyone’s taste but… Hepatitis B. Its a fascinating virus for a ton of reasons but in particular I love the tiny, circular genome that is only partially double stranded with a number of overlapping open reading frames that result in effectively being able to code for more things than its length would suggest.
Another is that you get a huge overproduction of surface antigens (which is what we actually provide immunisation against) and another virus called Hepatitis D (which is one of the smallest viruses that can infect animals) comes in and uses these excess Hep B antigens to surround itself and become a fully infectious virus. Which means that you can only get Hep D if you already have Hep B (which as you can imagine just makes things worse) .
Its a really interesting virus, comes with chronic and accute infection states and has a serological course that can be so easily visualised so you can tell exactly what stage of infection somebody might have.
I got a shot for that, I think!
Common for healthcare workers or anyone at risk of needle stick but wasn’t a common vaccine here for the general population until more recently where they started adding it to the childhood vaccine schedule. You normally need 3 doses of it for a good response.
I got it for travel, I think. It was at least two shots, but maybe it was more! This was some twenty years ago now.
Apparently, I could give a TED talk on insects and spiders. I could literally sit and talk about or look at bugs all day every day.
It’s springtime in my area and all the cool bugs are coming out. I have a macro lens for my phone that I’ve used to take pictures of praying mantis nymphs and jumping spiders. Last year I had a cool looking green lynx spider that I tracked in my garden from a tiny baby to a gorgeous ambush predator to a male eating cannibal to a big red mama with 2 egg sacs and all her tiny babies. I loved that beautiful lady so much and I hope at least one of her babies makes it back to my garden.
My colleagues have started requesting pictures and cool facts about bugs at our weekly team meeting and I have been more than happy to oblige. It’s been mostly how to identify the sex of a spider, anatomy of spiders and insects, and the lifecycle of praying mantises. I should probably sit down and document my journey with my green lynx friend soon too, that would be fun to share.
I could give a talk about all the cats I’ve had.
I would say canning, but I know there are much smarter people who know the safety stuff a lot better than me! So I would not want to do that.
I think I could give a very useful speech on how to slowly, comfortably, de-digitize your life.
I’m interested!
AS a transswomen doing DIY HRT I obviously know a shit load about how to do it. The funny thing is, that just recently I wrote a ling ass Ted-Talk on exactly that, so if you are interested in that topic, go take a look: https://feddit.org/comment/12465240
I could also give multiple Ted talks on various topics related to programming.
I could give a TED talk on how to use LLMs and AI agents in a way that accelerates your own software development abilities rather than producing “generic” slop. I personally review every line of code my agent workflows produce, and why yes I do feel a sense of superiority about that! lol.
Essentially, I could give a talk on “how to stop vibe coding and start using AI to write the code you would have written” instead. Baffles me that people treat them as “brain turns off, AI turns on” when it can be so much more useful than that!
I could also give a TED talk on how these AI models actually work internally, various pitfalls and issues they have and why they’re so unreliable in some ways and mind bogglingly smart in others. On topics like integrating (local) AI into your own notes and knowledge, the kinds of automation they’re good at, and plenty of other similar things.
I have been autistically hyperfocused on LLMs and related technologies for the last year or so, very much approaching it like an engineer and not a hype believer. I run local models for the love of pushing them as far as I can and general system tasks like “go read the docs for (program) and figure out what config changes are needed to do X” or “There are 18 top level sections in this config file, go through and apply this change to each of them” - basically, replacing my own tedium and not my decision-making.
That would be a really interesting post here if you ever wanted to write it! Love showcasing member skills
Oh so many topics that I could talk about, don’t think I could narrow it down to just one topic. I can narrow it down to two topics that are still very important to topics to me.
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The enduring legacy and prominence of Nazi propaganda and how it affects us all today.
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History is not written by the victors: How the Confederate States of America have repainted the Civil War.
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