Life After the Watchtower

Our next meet-up is scheduled for March 18th....and we promise it will be a blast! ​Join us for a no-fluff, practitioner-led deep dive into two critical LLM challenges with focus on quantization and cheat-proof evaluations . ​This time we will handle a pannel discussion with two experts in the area - David Kоchoanov and Yordan Darakchiev. ​Pannel 1: Smarter AI at lower cost: How quantization makes LLMs more efficient? ​What can you expect? ​LLMs guzzle RAM and GPU like crazy. Quick rundown: inference modes, bottlenecks, the math behind it. ​Hands-on: when to use each and how to benchmark properly. ​The talk will provide a quick review of LLM inference modes, current bottlenecks, and numerics. The main goal is to explain post-training quantization methods that are most commonly supported by modern software and hardware, and give practical recommendations for their use and model benchmarking. We'll also provide a brief summary of the academic literature and discuss quantization-aware training and distillation. ​Who will present? ​David Kochanov has over 10 years of experience in computer vision research and development. In his current role at CARIAD (Volkswagen Group), he works on autonomous driving and driver assistance systems, with a focus on model deployment for real-time inference, including quantization and architectural optimizations. ​Pannel 2: Everybody Lies: How Language Models (and People) Cheat ​What can you expect? ​Teaching computers and people have the same temptations - students game grades, LLMs game benchmarks. We grade LLMs like exams: bad criteria reward test-taking tricks, not truth. The talk will present specially built for the pannel small BI-style benchmark (SQL, data summaries, and insight generation) with multiple LLM "judges" grade multiple models. With only couple of stress tests on the judges with small changes to the grading scheme all were broken - creating pure chaos! ​Rankings flip depending on who grades, response length beats correctness, and judges favour familiar model "accents". ​We'll end with an "academic integrity" toolkit for LLM evaluation: ensembles, invariance checks, length controls, and lightweight human calibration to make our LLM metrics harder to cheat on, and easier to trust. ​Who will present? ​Yordan Darakchiev is a data scientst and technical trainer. He has helped various teams turn data and ML into modern, measureable, production systems. His specialty are vision and language models, with a sharp focus on evaluation - fairness, privacy, trustworthiness, and robustness. He also teaches math and machine learning and has helped kickstart the career of more than 1000 data and ML professionals. ​Our next meet-up is scheduled for March 18th....and we promise it will be a blast! ​Join us for a no-fluff, practitioner-led deep dive into two critical LLM challenges with focus on quantization and cheat-proof evaluations . ​This time we will handle a pannel discussion with two experts in the area - David Kоchoanov and Yordan Darakchiev. ​Pannel 1: Smarter AI at lower cost: How quantization makes LLMs more efficient? ​What can you expect? ​LLMs guzzle RAM and GPU like crazy. Quick rundown: inference modes, bottlenecks, the math behind it. ​Hands-on: when to use each and how to benchmark properly. ​The talk will provide a quick review of LLM inference modes, current bottlenecks, and numerics. The main goal is to explain post-training quantization methods that are most commonly supported by modern software and hardware, and give practical recommendations for their use and model benchmarking. We'll also provide a brief summary of the academic literature and discuss quantization-aware training and distillation. ​Who will present? ​David Kochanov has over 10 years of experience in computer vision research and development. In his current role at CARIAD (Volkswagen Group), he works on autonomous driving and driver assistance systems, with a focus on model deployment for real-time inference, including quantization and architectural optimizations. ​Pannel 2: Everybody Lies: How Language Models (and People) Cheat ​What can you expect? ​Teaching computers and people have the same temptations - students game grades, LLMs game benchmarks. We grade LLMs like exams: bad criteria reward test-taking tricks, not truth. The talk will present specially built for the pannel small BI-style benchmark (SQL, data summaries, and insight generation) with multiple LLM "judges" grade multiple models. With only couple of stress tests on the judges with small changes to the grading scheme all were broken - creating pure chaos! ​Rankings flip depending on who grades, response length beats correctness, and judges favour familiar model "accents". ​We'll end with an "academic integrity" toolkit for LLM evaluation: ensembles, invariance checks, length controls, and lightweight human calibration to make our LLM metrics harder to cheat on, and easier to trust. ​Who will present? ​Yordan Darakchiev is a data scientst and technical trainer. He has helped various teams turn data and ML into modern, measureable, production systems. His specialty are vision and language models, with a sharp focus on evaluation - fairness, privacy, trustworthiness, and robustness. He also teaches math and machine learning and has helped kickstart the career of more than 1000 data and ML professionals. Agenda: 18:30-19:00 - Welcome drinks 19:00-20:00 - Pannel 1 & Pannel 2 20:00-20:30 - Q&A 20:30-21:30 - Networking ​Note: Event will be handled in English. ​Event is free but registration is mandatory: https://luma.com/8bbbxx1t

We are hosting our next meetup in Sofia! **Address:** Barter Community Hub \| Puzl\, 47 Cherni Vrah BLVD\, Sofia\, Bulgaria https://www.barter-hub.com **Agenda:** 17.45: Doors open, join us for snacks and drinks 18:15: Building Data Products with Logstash 19.00: How Elastic Streams Simplifies Log Data Management 19.45: Networking 20.00: Close **Talks:** **Building Data Products with Logstash** This talk will demonstrate how Logstash can be used to pull data, perform cleanup and enrichment, and create a data product (e.g., asset tracking) visualized in Kibana. *Speaker: Tsvetan Paskov, Full-stack Developer, DevOps, Founder @Move2Chat* **How Elastic Streams Simplifies Log Data Management** Learn how to manage log data more efficiently using Elastic Streams. This talk covers the challenges of unstructured logs, the benefits of schema-on-ingest, and new stream processing capabilities for transforming and structuring log messages. You’ll see how to use AI-assisted Grok pattern suggestions, conditional processing, and the schema editor to map fields accurately. We also explore how to monitor data quality through degraded and failed document tracking, and how to set custom retention policies. Finally, you’ll get an overview of Wired Streams, Elastic’s unified log ingestion model that simplifies routing and stream partitioning post-ingestion. *Speakers: Boris Kirov (Observability - Senior Product Designer) and Giorgos Bamparopoulos (Senior Manager Software Engineering) @Elastic*

**Founders Running Club** (FRC) brings founders, investors, tech, creative people and startup enthusiasts together for weekly easy runs and networking. We like to be comfortable when we run and finish with coffee and conversations. Choose your pace or follow a pacer—pets, friends, family, are welcome. 🗓️ Launched in San Francisco, July 16, 2022 🌍 Now in 35+ cities 📅 Running + Networking events + Community **Join the community** [http://foundersrc.com/chats](http://foundersrc.com/chats) **Stay updated**: Instagram [http://instagram.com/foundersrc/](http://instagram.com/foundersrc/) Podcast [http://podcast.foundersrc.com/](http://podcast.foundersrc.com/) LinkedIn [http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/](http://linkedin.com/company/foundersrc/) Strava [http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC](http://strava.com/clubs/foundersRC) Website [http://foundersrc.com/](http://foundersrc.com/)

📌 Let's meet in **Sofia** on **March 19th 2026** for an interactive conference and an enriching networking session! Come and discover Odoo, the all-in-one integrated software that will simplify your day-to-day business. Say goodbye to double coding, lost invoices and budgets; create your website in a few clicks... Odoo offers you a wide range of tools built for IT.🧐 🔎 **AGENDA** 🔍 18h00: Welcome! 18h15: Conference - Interactive demo & tips to digitize your company. 20h00: Networking - Snacks and drinks. ➡️ Are you convinced? You can subscribe at the following link: https://www.odoo.com/r/RfP The event is free, but registration is mandatory.❗ **Important:** 📍 Where? Sofia Grand Hotel - 1, General Gurko St str, 1000 Sofia, Bulgaria 📅 Date? Thursday, March 19th , 2026 📝 Registration? https://www.odoo.com/r/RfP 💰 Price? FREE! Hope to see you soon!

Our next meet-up is scheduled for March 18th....and we promise it will be a blast! ​Join us for a no-fluff, practitioner-led deep dive into two critical LLM challenges with focus on quantization and cheat-proof evaluations . ​This time we will handle a pannel discussion with two experts in the area - David Kоchoanov and Yordan Darakchiev. ​Pannel 1: Smarter AI at lower cost: How quantization makes LLMs more efficient? ​What can you expect? ​LLMs guzzle RAM and GPU like crazy. Quick rundown: inference modes, bottlenecks, the math behind it. ​Hands-on: when to use each and how to benchmark properly. ​The talk will provide a quick review of LLM inference modes, current bottlenecks, and numerics. The main goal is to explain post-training quantization methods that are most commonly supported by modern software and hardware, and give practical recommendations for their use and model benchmarking. We'll also provide a brief summary of the academic literature and discuss quantization-aware training and distillation. ​Who will present? ​David Kochanov has over 10 years of experience in computer vision research and development. In his current role at CARIAD (Volkswagen Group), he works on autonomous driving and driver assistance systems, with a focus on model deployment for real-time inference, including quantization and architectural optimizations. ​Pannel 2: Everybody Lies: How Language Models (and People) Cheat ​What can you expect? ​Teaching computers and people have the same temptations - students game grades, LLMs game benchmarks. We grade LLMs like exams: bad criteria reward test-taking tricks, not truth. The talk will present specially built for the pannel small BI-style benchmark (SQL, data summaries, and insight generation) with multiple LLM "judges" grade multiple models. With only couple of stress tests on the judges with small changes to the grading scheme all were broken - creating pure chaos! ​Rankings flip depending on who grades, response length beats correctness, and judges favour familiar model "accents". ​We'll end with an "academic integrity" toolkit for LLM evaluation: ensembles, invariance checks, length controls, and lightweight human calibration to make our LLM metrics harder to cheat on, and easier to trust. ​Who will present? ​Yordan Darakchiev is a data scientst and technical trainer. He has helped various teams turn data and ML into modern, measureable, production systems. His specialty are vision and language models, with a sharp focus on evaluation - fairness, privacy, trustworthiness, and robustness. He also teaches math and machine learning and has helped kickstart the career of more than 1000 data and ML professionals. ​Our next meet-up is scheduled for March 18th....and we promise it will be a blast! ​Join us for a no-fluff, practitioner-led deep dive into two critical LLM challenges with focus on quantization and cheat-proof evaluations . ​This time we will handle a pannel discussion with two experts in the area - David Kоchoanov and Yordan Darakchiev. ​Pannel 1: Smarter AI at lower cost: How quantization makes LLMs more efficient? ​What can you expect? ​LLMs guzzle RAM and GPU like crazy. Quick rundown: inference modes, bottlenecks, the math behind it. ​Hands-on: when to use each and how to benchmark properly. ​The talk will provide a quick review of LLM inference modes, current bottlenecks, and numerics. The main goal is to explain post-training quantization methods that are most commonly supported by modern software and hardware, and give practical recommendations for their use and model benchmarking. We'll also provide a brief summary of the academic literature and discuss quantization-aware training and distillation. ​Who will present? ​David Kochanov has over 10 years of experience in computer vision research and development. In his current role at CARIAD (Volkswagen Group), he works on autonomous driving and driver assistance systems, with a focus on model deployment for real-time inference, including quantization and architectural optimizations. ​Pannel 2: Everybody Lies: How Language Models (and People) Cheat ​What can you expect? ​Teaching computers and people have the same temptations - students game grades, LLMs game benchmarks. We grade LLMs like exams: bad criteria reward test-taking tricks, not truth. The talk will present specially built for the pannel small BI-style benchmark (SQL, data summaries, and insight generation) with multiple LLM "judges" grade multiple models. With only couple of stress tests on the judges with small changes to the grading scheme all were broken - creating pure chaos! ​Rankings flip depending on who grades, response length beats correctness, and judges favour familiar model "accents". ​We'll end with an "academic integrity" toolkit for LLM evaluation: ensembles, invariance checks, length controls, and lightweight human calibration to make our LLM metrics harder to cheat on, and easier to trust. ​Who will present? ​Yordan Darakchiev is a data scientst and technical trainer. He has helped various teams turn data and ML into modern, measureable, production systems. His specialty are vision and language models, with a sharp focus on evaluation - fairness, privacy, trustworthiness, and robustness. He also teaches math and machine learning and has helped kickstart the career of more than 1000 data and ML professionals. Agenda: 18:30-19:00 - Welcome drinks 19:00-20:00 - Pannel 1 & Pannel 2 20:00-20:30 - Q&A 20:30-21:30 - Networking ​Note: Event will be handled in English. ​Event is free but registration is mandatory: https://luma.com/8bbbxx1t

Rev. Steven Clevenger is an ordained spiritualist minister with over 40 years experience as a Spiritual Healer, Clairvoyant and Spiritual Teacher, educated and trained at the White Lily Chapel. Rev. Siobhan Wolf Shaffer is an ordained spiritualist minister and certified medium and healer with over 20 years experience. She began her development in 1988 in Pennsylvania and continued when she moved to Ohio in 1998 where she studied at Rays of Lights Church with Rev. Steven Clevenger. Our full worship services consist of an inspirational lecture, healing meditation, and messages from the spirit world that serve to demonstrate evidence of eternal life. Please visit our Official Church Website (http://raysoflightchurch.com) for more information.

Do you sometimes feel like you do well in life then something happens and you slide back, never quite getting ahead. At this Meetup you'll find out how to identify what actually causes the lows, the highs and everything in between. More importantly you’ll get the secret of how to gain control over your life so the highs are higher and the lows go away. Wouldn’t it be nice to stop the wild roller coaster ride for good? Or at least make it a fun roller coaster ride, with more ups and downs. There is a hidden factor that will be going over and you’re going to be quite surprised what it is and how much it affects your life. Be sure to click on the red "Attend" button below to come to the event. We look forward to seeing you there. This group is hosted at the Dianetics and Scientology Life Improvement Center.

Do you want more Self Confidence, less Self Doubt, more Happiness, less Anxiety, and more Love? This event is an introduction to how to handle irrational emotion. How often are yours or another's emotions out of control? What is that about??? I have asked these questions and after much search have found answers and am sharing. Maybe you have suffered a traumatic experience, a deep loss or been through a painful breakup? After that, you try to move on but you just can't. Possibly you have a thought or emotion that hangs around for days and you just can't shake it. What is all this stress, anxiety, depression, and self doubt? It's just crazy! It's not the real you. You can find out what is at the root of all this. This is a local event. Areas you can change with the right information: * Control of unwanted emotions * Lack of confidence * Grief * Anxiety * Anger management * Creating ideal relationships * Memory * and more... This is a local meeting that can start you on the way to a better life, more confidence and less negativity. All the happiness you have lies within you. Let's find it! Be sure to click on the red "Attend" button below to come to this local event. We look forward to seeing you there. This group is created by the Dianetics and Scientology life improvement center.

Interested? Contact Preston Moore k.preston.moore@gmail.com 614-300-5989 ———————————— Engaging in men’s work is the new way to forge friendships while being open-minded to personal growth. Many men experience healthier relationships, personally and professionally, by engaging in this work. Open Men’s Group is a container for men to share vulnerably without receiving judgment or feedback. We believe that emotionally mature, powerful, compassionate, and purpose-driven men will help heal some of society’s deepest wounds. We support the powerful brilliance of men and we are willing to look at, and take full responsibility for, the pain we are also capable of creating – and suffering. We care deeply about men, our families, communities, and the planet. Visit ManKind Project USA to discover more. https://mkpusa.org/

Wouldn’t it be nice to find a way to overcome your feelings of anger so that you not only control them, but you no longer have the urge to lose your temper in the first place? And how about being able to shake off resentments, persistent annoyance, or even feelings of vengeance? We’d like to invite you to an event on how to overcome anger and resentment. We will show you why people have trouble controlling their temper and where resentment comes from. Flaring anger can ruin a meeting, a relationship, an opportunity, or just about any aspect of life. Worst of all, outbursts towards our family can create hurt that lingers throughout a lifetime. You want to have a civil conversation, and you’ve vowed that you wouldn’t lose your temper, but a few minutes later, the anger flares up. Maybe you’ve realized that being angry doesn’t get you what you want so you internalize it. Or maybe you avoid the knockdown, drag-out fights, but stewing in resentment is exhausting and takes an emotional toll. In this event we show you how to get to the root of your anger so that it stops being an issue to you. You’ll also learn why people harbor resentments and how to move on. Don't continue to struggle, make a difference in your life, and join us for this local event. Be sure to click on the red "Attend" button below to come to the event. We look forward to seeing you there. This Meetup is sponsored by your local Dianetics and Scientology Life Improvement Center.

**Our March pick is *God of the Woods* by Liz Moore.** **This month’s novel is an award-winning literary mystery that blends family drama with psychological suspense. It explores women’s voices and relationships while delivering an exciting, eerie, and deeply suspenseful story. The book is 576 pages in print or 14 hours and 35 minutes on audiobook.** Early morning, August 1975: a camp counselor discovers an empty bunk. Its occupant, Barbara Van Laar, has gone missing. Barbara isn’t just any thirteen-year-old: she’s the daughter of the family that owns the summer camp and employs most of the region’s residents. And this isn’t the first time a Van Laar child has disappeared. Barbara’s older brother similarly vanished fourteen years ago, never to be found. As a panicked search begins, a thrilling drama unfolds. Chasing down the layered secrets of the Van Laar family and the blue-collar community working in its shadow, Moore’s multi-threaded story invites readers into a rich and gripping dynasty of secrets and second chances. It is Liz Moore’s most ambitious and wide-reaching novel yet.