The Recording
The Panelists
- Kevin Feasel
- Mike Chrestensen
Notes: Questions and Topics
SQL Saturday Richmond Recap
Our first topic was a quick recap of SQL Saturday Richmond. It was good to see the RTP area turnout, as well as some people we don’t get to see very often, like Anders. I also talked about how the SQL Saturday Richmond people gave me 2 hours and 15 minutes to talk about normalization and I still went long. It’s a mad world.
GPT-4o Released and Azure Regions
Our next topic was OpenAI’s release of GPT-4o, a cheaper, faster, multi-modal model. It’s also available in Azure OpenAI, though only two regions as of right now (East US and West US 3). That got us on a winding discussion of Azure regions, including a discussion of what Azure OpenAI resources are available in which region, how Sweden Central gets all the nice stuff, and then a dive into Azure regions as a whole. I brought up several references, including an article on Azure regions.
From there, I had to show the Nuke map, which gives you an idea of the effective zone of a nuclear explosion. Marshall brought up the Mars Bluff atomic weapon blast that affected his grandparents.
Back on Azure regions, I showed one of my favorite sites for pricing; CloudPrice.NET. This started as a discussion of relative region prices and then went into discussion of specific VM costs. Searching across regions is a great way to save money, assuming you have isolated resources and aren’t sending a whole lot of data cross-region.
LLMs and Data-Control Path Insecurity
Bruce Schneier named a security issue I’ve always had some challenge describing: data and control path admixture. This is a real challenge with LLMs today, though it is a solvable problem. It may just take some time to solve.
We also dug into a linked article on prompt injection and had a bit of fun with other topics tangentially related, as happens from time to time (by which I mean “every time”) on Shop Talk.