I am late 50s and I still find talks overwhelming.
What has worked though is
1. Recordings. Go into zoom, and give a talk with recording on. Listen to yourself, just once per recording but more if you can tolerate your voice :) It shows you your common failure points in black and white so that you can work on them.
2. Presenter notes. During my final talk, I have succeeded when speaking without notes, but to get there I need notes. I write my script as presenter notes (in Mac Keynote). Because of ADHD or whatever, as I am speaking, new ideas pop up. Every single time. In early rehearsals, I pause immediately, update the notes first and then go back and rehearse. After a dozen iterations, sometimes 30 iterations, the edits disappear, you learn to live with what you finalized already. Also once you narrate it 30 times, you have all kinds of memory maps sorted out in your brain, so even if you derail, you mind does have the information. I have seen some people have presenter notes in bullet forms, does not work for me. In the beginning I need my speech written out.
3. Rehearsals. The 30 rehearsals I mentioned. Figure out what you need. 5 or 50? You will know when you are ready. Once you have your magic number, stick to it. Maybe 25 becomes 20, but do not short change yourself by saying ... no I can wing it.
4. The morning of. I have tried 2 approaches. One is just open the deck and speak through the notes in your head. No recording. No zoom. No notes. Your mind should have it. OR not even deck. Just close your eyes, I am usually on a recliner (do not nod off) and run the narration in your head. Mistakes ... happen
5. Seating. Most of our presentations are in conference room settings but with remote viewers. Sometimes they are purely on video. Figure out the setup and rehearse 1-2 rounds in live mode. If you will be in a conference room, find one similar and rehearse once in that setting. If you will be seated and speaking to local + remote audience, try to visualize that as you present. It never feels the same with live audience, but it does give you some muscle memory.
6. Timing and Clickability. Transitions sometimes take more (or less clicks) than you envisioned. Practice them. If you are given 3 minutes, or 30, time yourself so that you know how far are you. Sometimes you need to be pitch perfect, but sometimes you can tolerate 10%. If I am at 10% variance, I stop fine tuning. As people ask questions, small variations can be tackled.
If someone else is sharing the screen and you are just speaking, rehearse that with them, because "next slide" handoff gets tiring very soon. To help them, add a line [ Click ] in the notes so that they know the click is coming when you get to a specific speech.
7. Screen setup. Over time, I am learning to speak from my mind (or heart). But the notes are there. I work on Mac Keynote, so there is a presentation mode where I can see what is on screen now, and what will be on screen next as soon as I click. The notes are there but they are only a last resort. If you are familiar with what is on screen, and what is coming next, you do not need to look at the conference room screen, OR any other window. These are usually enough to tell what you need. I make them the maximum size possible - do note that I have 2 screens side by side (current and next) so their sizes are still small on a laptop window, but having the biggest size I can get allows me to interpret fine variations - sometimes the next click makes only a small change, so having them visible helps.
8. Notifications off. Do not look at notifications. Ignore them. It is hard, but do it. 2 presentations back, one notification disrupted me so bad, I choked. I read the notification, it was at the beginning of session and someone just saying "sorry for joining late" and by the time I read it, my mind had disconnected. I started reading from the notes and never recovered from there. Maybe part of it was that I was not prepared - I did not have the 30 rehearsals. We did the work in 3 days, and 3 days was not enough for me to iterate on the slides, rehearse, have notes ... so when the chokepoint happened, my brain could not take it. But notifications is what triggered the disruption (of a bad kind).
This is incredible advice across the board. Would you consider writing this somewhere and submitting it as a post? I think this is valuable and worth repeating.
Great advice. One point I’d add is to just let yourself be nervous. Once I accept that my voice will wobble and my hands will shake then nervousness starts to feel a little more like excitement.
Rehearsal works great for fighting nervousness. Just the mere thought of speaking in front of 30+ people makes my heart slightly faster, but once I have a presentation down to the minute and can go through it 100% without looking at my notes, the nervousness dies down a lot and confidence starts taking over instead.
Of course, it reverses back the second you take a step into the stage, but it gets a whole lot worse when you don't remember what to say, and once you've spoken for 4-5 minutes the confidence seemingly remembers to come back by itself too.
I think due to a variety of reasons EU and US are on a road to divorce. EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready.
- Monopolies and related regulation. Of course US has its own companies being treated as monopolies so they will try to save them
- Social systems including healthcare
- Russia being next door vs far away (for US)
- The whole AI buildout
- A little bit of Libre Office smattering at the government level
Whether you consider US to be guarding its national interests, or whether you consider europeans to be taking a free ride on US's defense systems, it seems like 2 partners who got together for whatever reasons, you can even justify them in history, but history has moved on. I think we are going in 2 different directions for even the next president, however big a U turn he/she makes, I do not think the situation is salvageable.
No responsibilities in the EU at all? I feel trump is more of an accelerant/trigger.. but where two parties fight etc. We did not get to this situation (or Trump for that matter) from a vacuum.
>EU will be wise to make that happen on their terms, but they do not seem to be ready.
It's too late for this. The time to execute this was 20 years ago when EU had leverage (the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half). Now that leverage is gone and EU is bogged down with massive domestic issues it can't recover from (some of which you mentioned), and starting a massive tech IP/trade war now with the US over Claude as retaliation for Trump will only hurt the EU working class more, as the US has more levers to pull being a big consumer of EU exports.
Unfortunately due to decades of neglect, mismanagement and bad policies, EU has backed itself into a corner making itself an easy mark for both the US and China to take advantage of as they lack any leverage to dictate international policies on their terms so they have to fold in the end.
Also, many EU politicians have no idea how the internet works let alone what Claude is. So much talks coming from them out of the blue on this topic will be the mouthpieces of the lobbyists funding them in exchange for government money to build "EU sovereign products" which may or may not deliver which is irrelevant as the goal will be to laudner public money into private pockets for shipping a sovereignty sticker.
@snovv_crash
>You spend too much time online
How can you insult people like that?
I base my assessment on the visible decline me and everyone around me see with our own eyes over the past 10 or so years. I can see for myself how my purchasing power has dropped like rock, how brutal inflation is, how much more expensive housing is relative to wages, how much more difficult it is to get a state doctor and childcare, the waves of layoffs me and friend experienced, etc. the news didn't have to tell people that, people can see and experience that for themselves. All these are not caused by one single issue that you can easily revert, they're a cumulation of multiple issues that accumulated over decades and are impossible to reverse in the current situation the EU is in.
It's so insulting when people are trying to gaslight you that your lived expiries are just "being online". So disingenuous and bad faith.
>The EU isn't bogged down with issues
It definitely is. That's why it can't take decisive actions against foreign bullies like Trump or even Putin(he invaded Ukraine in 2014 BTW). Like the EU talks a lot about its freedom and humanitarian values and policies but sheepishly fails to impose them on its trading partners, because it would suffer retaliations its economy can not absorb. It's too dependent on energy and tech trade with the US and too dependent on manufacturing from China, so it can't piss either of them off and is forced to play ball to their tune regardless of diverging values, while also playing to the tune of Azerbaijani authoritarianism for their gas imports and to the whims of Indian nationalists for access to their market. EU is currently in no position to bargain so it folds to everyone's demands.
To be fair the value of the stock market is not a good indicator of progress. The US stock market is incredibly inflated.
Besides, it's a bit strange to argue that it's impossible to make a change, and as proof of that take the fact that there's been a big change over the last 20 years.
>To be fair the value of the stock market is not a good indicator of progress.
Where did I talk about it being "progres"? I said the value of the stock market represents economic leverage which the EU lost and is now at the mercy of foreign bullies with stronger economies(US and CHina). If you want your trading partners to respect you and your values and not back-stab you the moment you turn around, you need leverage over them(economic and/or military), otherwise everyone will walk all over you and take advantage of you and your citizens will lose prosperity proportional to your nation's loss of share in the global economy.
>The US stock market is incredibly inflated.
Doesn't matter in this particular point. If the US stock market pops, the EU's economy will suffer just as much or even more, just like post 2008.
The point was that EU is far too economically dependent to US and other major nations they hate but has no muscle and no leverage to do anything against them except post stern words on X while quietly folding like a deckchair to their demands.
Call it progress, call it "economic leverage", a very inflated stock market is no good measure for either.
It's true the US economy has grown faster than the European in the last two decades, for sure, I agree with you. It's just that the apparent magnitude of the difference depends on what metric you choose, and I just mean that the value of the stock market seems like a poor metric.
> the EU stock market was bigger than the US one in 2004, now it's half
I feel this is mostly to do with the EU having more companies that stay private for longer and partly to do with the USA's currency manipulation which maintains the dollar value artificially high.
You spend too much time online. The EU isn't bogged down with issues, it has uplifted an enormous part of itself out of abject post-communist poverty and yes growth isn't as fast, but it also isn't foisting as much debt on its citizens or working everyone to death. The problems you hear about on the news make the news because they are newsworthy, not because they are normal occurrences.
Most of the issues you mentioned are more likely to be specific to you own country. The EU is pretty limited in what it can do due to Europe being so afraid to federate
Why would they be afraid? Yugoslavia, USSR and any other time in history where you force similar but not really cultures under one central leadership, it ended up great in the end, they didn't fight or break up at all. So what's to be afraid of?
Yeah, why bother with that pesky democracy, freedom of speech and what each country wants when we can have a German like Ursula v.d Leyen be the supreme chancellor over the European Federal Reich and all of EU's problems will be gone, we'll have our own SV, our own SpaceX, it will be amazing, right? It will be uncle Adolf's dream come true.
Ok so you won’t engage with the fact that you misattributed to the EU issues you have with your local government…
The EU is both weak, powerless, and also that powerful tyrannical entity according to your various comments. You really might want to check your sources of information
>Ok so you won’t engage with the fact that you misattributed to the EU issues you have with your local government…
You have it backwards. I trust my local government because I can vote for it, and if they fail to deliver they can have rioters in from of their house, I don't trust EU leadership because I can't vote for it and we can't all travel to Brussels to riot while still making it to work after.
>The EU is both weak, powerless, and also that powerful tyrannical entity according to your various comments.
Why argue in bad faith pretending you can't distinguish what I meant? Eu IS powerless versus China and the US, but it can also act tyrannical over its members who don't play ball on unpopular topics like open borders illegal mass migration with illegal migrants and fake refugees. So it's both weak versus stronger actors and a bully versus weaker actors.
>You really might want to check your sources of information
Please give us your 100% truthful and unbiased sources of information. Or you might want to invest in a brain if you don't see the things I'm talking about happen in real life. Maybe you work in Brussels and your lifestyle depends on getting people to parrot the party line and silence the dissidents.
Its not to late, thats the defeatism that gives us fascism in the form of US politicians influencing us. Please dont think that we are soooo behind that there is no choice but to give in to their BS. There is, and right now is the perfect to to fight back.
lol. I hate presentations. I like to run a tight ship. But that does not shine, so they made me do presentations every quarter. If you do some work, you must "take" credit. It is kinda a need when you manage people since you need to build their careers.
I finally moved on to be an IC. Same story, same pressure :) You need to present to directors not because they need to know, but because your managers have a quota of N presentations per quarter, and if you back out, someone else needs to step up.
Needless to say my productivity reduces by half and sometimes to almost zero during the week or fortnight of presentations every quarter.
The business defines it as "meetings, presentations, support, coding, whatever".
Your productivity remains at 100% when you are doing what they want.
I get that you thought you were hired as a coder, and thus measure your productivity by that. That's what I thought too. I ended up doing a lot of support (which is good, but that's another thread). Until I recalibrated my definition of productivity that frustrated me. When I realized that support was productivity I got much less frustrated.
I have been on the industry for 35 years. I have seen my share of technology evolutions and o have seen the work from a dozen different dimensions. If after all that time, I find the process painful, just trust me -- they can't change me, and I can't change them. You take the warts with the wins and move on. 2-3 bad weeks, 10 good weeks. Life moves on to next quarter. Complete CEO mindset :)
You heavily implied presentation preparation implies zero productivity. He tried to say this prep is also productive even if you personally don't or can't appreciate it.
I meant my other productivity drops because I am not a natural presenter so even though I am rehearsing / editing for 2 hours a day, the presentation consumes me / overwhelms me that I can't even focus for the remaining 4 hours or 2 hours. Just do the bare minimum email processing, just survive. Everyone knows it. But by being in that zone of paralysis, I can still deliver a presentation. Sometimes good sometimes ok.
I have this need for the presentation content to reside in my memory cache and other work disrupts the cache quite badly.
But that's not a way to live. The other work stalled for 3 weeks.
I do this so many times. Type in a large amount of text and the only thing final in my mind is para breaks and the idea per paragraph. And then give it to AI saying "sending to director", "sending to friends on WhatsApp group", "sending to colleagues" and it does an awesome job of bringing the "AI polish" and then you edit or negotiate line by line or para by para on what you want to keep.
Yes, this is certainly common, and opinions and tastes differ about the outcomes—as they should, because we are all still in the early stage of sorting through the best way to use these tools. I think it's also already clear that "best way" means something different in different contexts.
Where some people are getting into trouble, at least in the HN context, is underestimating the impact that this has on their text. There's a big perception gap between the author's view ("fixed up the grammar a bit") and the reader's view ("this sounds entirely like an AI wrote it") in many cases. So many, in fact, that I feel I can say something about it. I'm no authority on any of this and don't want to sound like one, but this is such a common pattern at the moment that I feel confident reporting it. How it will change over time, I have no idea.
(I also don't want to sound anti-LLM - we rely on these tools heavily, they're amazing, they've already improved HN, and they show every sign of high potential to improve it further. The bottleneck isn't the LLMs, it's how quickly we can figure out how to use (and test) them. We just don't use them to process any text that we put on HN itself.)
And that is sad. I had speech impediment while growing up, but somehow I was able to focus on writing and used to write real well, first technical (sciency) stuff and then general thoughts too. Despite having never spoken english for conversation till the age of 16 or 17, someone decades later speculated that I was an english major because I could communicate really well (and I did use some heavy but very very context appropriate english words). Nowadays ... while I do use AI now and then to clean up my text, I have been accused of being an AI more than I can count :) You put in the effort and get accused of being chatGPT.
Especially if you are not asking siri to code stuff. If your use case is still "personal context" with "conversation", even if there is a 9/10 difference, the users may see their abilities going from 3/10 presently to 6/10 or 7/10, and still a massive upgrade for most of them. I think therapy and scientific research may remain in the domain of frontier chat interfaces for another year.
Can we just say it was basically vibe coded, but with real humans in the loop?
Version 5 was when the source material dried up, and the hallucinations became more frequent and obvious.
As far as I remember there was a basic outline of major plot points and where all the major characters ended up (a prompt) and were left to fill in all the blanks.
I mean he references a "murder of ravens" several times. It's an unkindness of ravens and a murder of crows. Classic LLM mistake right up there with the emdash.
What has worked though is
1. Recordings. Go into zoom, and give a talk with recording on. Listen to yourself, just once per recording but more if you can tolerate your voice :) It shows you your common failure points in black and white so that you can work on them.
2. Presenter notes. During my final talk, I have succeeded when speaking without notes, but to get there I need notes. I write my script as presenter notes (in Mac Keynote). Because of ADHD or whatever, as I am speaking, new ideas pop up. Every single time. In early rehearsals, I pause immediately, update the notes first and then go back and rehearse. After a dozen iterations, sometimes 30 iterations, the edits disappear, you learn to live with what you finalized already. Also once you narrate it 30 times, you have all kinds of memory maps sorted out in your brain, so even if you derail, you mind does have the information. I have seen some people have presenter notes in bullet forms, does not work for me. In the beginning I need my speech written out.
3. Rehearsals. The 30 rehearsals I mentioned. Figure out what you need. 5 or 50? You will know when you are ready. Once you have your magic number, stick to it. Maybe 25 becomes 20, but do not short change yourself by saying ... no I can wing it.
4. The morning of. I have tried 2 approaches. One is just open the deck and speak through the notes in your head. No recording. No zoom. No notes. Your mind should have it. OR not even deck. Just close your eyes, I am usually on a recliner (do not nod off) and run the narration in your head. Mistakes ... happen
5. Seating. Most of our presentations are in conference room settings but with remote viewers. Sometimes they are purely on video. Figure out the setup and rehearse 1-2 rounds in live mode. If you will be in a conference room, find one similar and rehearse once in that setting. If you will be seated and speaking to local + remote audience, try to visualize that as you present. It never feels the same with live audience, but it does give you some muscle memory.
6. Timing and Clickability. Transitions sometimes take more (or less clicks) than you envisioned. Practice them. If you are given 3 minutes, or 30, time yourself so that you know how far are you. Sometimes you need to be pitch perfect, but sometimes you can tolerate 10%. If I am at 10% variance, I stop fine tuning. As people ask questions, small variations can be tackled.
If someone else is sharing the screen and you are just speaking, rehearse that with them, because "next slide" handoff gets tiring very soon. To help them, add a line [ Click ] in the notes so that they know the click is coming when you get to a specific speech.
7. Screen setup. Over time, I am learning to speak from my mind (or heart). But the notes are there. I work on Mac Keynote, so there is a presentation mode where I can see what is on screen now, and what will be on screen next as soon as I click. The notes are there but they are only a last resort. If you are familiar with what is on screen, and what is coming next, you do not need to look at the conference room screen, OR any other window. These are usually enough to tell what you need. I make them the maximum size possible - do note that I have 2 screens side by side (current and next) so their sizes are still small on a laptop window, but having the biggest size I can get allows me to interpret fine variations - sometimes the next click makes only a small change, so having them visible helps.
8. Notifications off. Do not look at notifications. Ignore them. It is hard, but do it. 2 presentations back, one notification disrupted me so bad, I choked. I read the notification, it was at the beginning of session and someone just saying "sorry for joining late" and by the time I read it, my mind had disconnected. I started reading from the notes and never recovered from there. Maybe part of it was that I was not prepared - I did not have the 30 rehearsals. We did the work in 3 days, and 3 days was not enough for me to iterate on the slides, rehearse, have notes ... so when the chokepoint happened, my brain could not take it. But notifications is what triggered the disruption (of a bad kind).
Hopefully it helps
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