What we’re about
Greetings, fellow tech sorcerers!
Techalicious is back after a long hiatus. This is a casual meetup for people who enjoy technology and want to connect with other tech enthusiasts in the GTA.
💡 What We Do
We explore whatever's interesting: AI tools, web development, programming, Linux, privacy tech, self-hosting, or any cool project someone wants to share. Think of it as a gathering of digital sorcerers swapping spells and tricks of the trade. Topics change based on what the group's into at the moment.
👥 Who Should Come
Anyone curious about tech. Doesn't matter if you're just starting out or you've been practicing your craft for years. Beginners, professionals, hobbyists, students, apprentice wizards and seasoned mages alike are all welcome.
✨ The Vibe
Small groups, real conversations. No corporate stuff, no sales pitches. Just people who like technology getting together to share ideas, learn from each other, and have fun.
Join us and see what's brewing!
Upcoming events
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•Online👁️ The AI Watchman: Vision Models & Content Moderation
Online👁️ The Problem
Remember our Stable Diffusion session? We had a blast generating AI art, but here's the thing - sometimes these models produce... unexpected results. Extra fingers, weird artifacts, or content that makes you go "whoa, that's not what I asked for."
What if AI could watch AI? Enter local vision models.
👁️ What We're Doing
This Thursday we're taking a whirlwind tour of self-hosted content moderation. We'll take images fresh out of an AI image generator and run them through a local vision model that can actually see what's in the picture and decide if it passes muster.
The whole pipeline runs on your own machine. No cloud. No Big Tech looking at your cat portraits.
👁️ The Tour
- Vision Models 101 - What they are and how they "see" images
- Teaching AI What to Look For - Crafting prompts that get consistent answers
- Parsing AI Output - Getting structured data out of fuzzy responses (yes, regex makes an appearance)
- Batch Processing - Scanning hundreds of images automatically
- The Reject Pile - Quarantining the questionable stuff with proper logging
👁️ Who's This For?
Anyone curious about running vision AI locally. If you were at the Stable Diffusion event, this is the natural next step. If you're new, no worries - we're keeping it high-level and concept-focused.
Bring your questions and your curiosity!8 attendees
•Online💆 Regex Therapy REDUX: CLI Fun for Everyone! #AIRelevant
OnlineRegular expressions. Those cryptic strings of symbols that look like your cat walked across your keyboard. Maybe you've copy-pasted them from Stack Overflow and prayed they worked. Maybe you've avoided them entirely.
💆 Time to fix that!!!
This week we're making regex (REG-ex, short for regular expressions) actually make sense. No theory dumps, no computer science lectures. Just practical patterns you can use right away.
💆 What we'll cover:
We're using three command-line tools that all speak the same regex dialect, so you learn one syntax and use it everywhere:
- ack - Find stuff in files, fast. Like grep but smarter.
- rename - Bulk rename files without losing your mind.
- perl one-liners - Quick text transformations from the terminal.
All three are Perl-powered under the hood, which means consistent regex syntax across the board. Learn it once, use it three ways.
💆 You'll walk away knowing how to:
- Search your codebase without wading through junk
- Rename 500 files in one command
- Do find-and-replace operations that would take forever by hand
💆 Who's this for?
Anyone curious about the command line. Total beginners welcome. If you've ever thought "there has to be a faster way to do this," this session is for you.
💆 The AI Connection
Here's something we don't talk about enough: local AI pipelines generate a lot of messy output. Vision models give you fuzzy text that needs parsing. Image generators spit out files that need organizing. Batch processing needs smart pattern matching.
Regex is the glue that holds it all together.
We'll be using these exact techniques in upcoming AI sessions, so consider this your foundation work. Get comfortable with regex now, and you'll have superpowers when we start wiring up local models.5 attendees
