Hi everyone. I have a confession to make. I'm a recovering Olympian. Are there any other Olympians in the room? Doesn't come as too much of a surprise. But I'm 25 years after I'm still recovering after having spent most of my life in professional sports. What I do today is entirely different but also not because I'm an agile coach and I design and I create teams for the high performing and I believe that I'm qualified to do this because I have been part of high performance teams. I represented Austria in a 1992 Olympics and I played handball. Anyone have any idea at all what handball is? Wow amazing. It won't spare you from watching a little video later on anyway. But good that you know. I played handball in the Olympics and then at some point I realized I had to grow up and when I did I started working with companies like these. Most of those are in the Southern Hemisphere because I live in New Zealand but some of them you might have heard of such as Sony Ericsson or Weta Digital. This is not cricket. This is handball and while it's widely unknown probably in India but also in the UK the US basically in a country that speak English don't play handball. It's the second largest sport in Europe right after football and people have professional leagues. We have professional players and you can make quite a good living playing handball. For those who don't know yet what handball is I want to play you a video which is about a minute and 30 seconds. Enjoy. If you do want to do professional sports it's really important to start at an early age. This is me doing sprint resistance training when I was really young. Also my parents realized that it's really important to stretch and to be tall when you want to play handball. It kind of worked out. Yep. It could be like when that's me and my dad and my grandparents.  It was what I did. It's what I love doing and what I did every single day when I get home from school and I think having been a sports geek makes it easier for me to relate to software development geeks and I found a community where I thought people are actually quite similar. They're like tightly into one thing and they love what they're doing and it's their lives and we all lack social skills. That's another thing. My idea of a perfect holiday at the time was touring Europe and playing at youth tournaments. It was really really cool and one of the things that has done to me was very early on it instilled a sense of joy of achievement. I love being good at something. I love the element of mastery and I love let's face it winning. It's pretty cool and that's something I've kept all my life. What I haven't kept is the pink jersey but it was the 80s. It's my excuse. And everything I have achieved at any age I have achieved as part of a team. There's no such thing as a single athlete achieving things on their own. And there's achieving things as a team. You're part of a team but you still have to achieve mastery in your own right. And what you need to do in order to achieve mastery is like in software development you need to become a professional. And that's exactly what I did when I turned 17. This is what they do to you when they ask you to pose for a photo for this little signature card. You're definitely not allowed to smile. But when I turned 17, handball really became my life. When you play handball you train twice a day. You don't do this as a side job. This is your job. This is my first team in 1986. We're a three-time European champion. We played in the European Champions League. And one of the things I learned from early on is that professional sports is an exercise in pain management. As I said, you practice twice a day. And I don't know if any of you have done this but you do uphill sprints until you vomit and you do and then you do five more. It's all doable by the way. But what it has taught me is that whatever pain I felt in companies I work with today, it's not that different. Sometimes I'm facing the pain of a startup where we really don't know are we going to have jobs tomorrow. This is all going to end in month because we run out of money. And sometimes I face the pain of bureaucracy, of going at a speed that I perceive as being really, really slow. And playing handball has taught me how to manage that pain.  What for us in software development is phase two. In professional sports is active relaxation. There is no such thing. It's what they tell you when you're supposed to take a day off.  And really it's nothing to do with that relaxation. Very much like phase two in software development that actually never happens. So all of this pain got me ultimately lost to the Olympic Games, to Barcelona in 1992. And sticking with the pain, we had the saying of no pain, no Spain. We came in fifth. And I got to say thank God, because the worst thing to possibly happen would have been coming in number four. I'm also the only person ever who regretted not getting a tattoo. Unfortunately, this is not my shoulder and this is not my tattoo. Everyone else seemed to have got a tattoo, but I didn't and I still regret it. What I got instead was a number of life lessons, a number of things that I learned and can apply now. And it's also a number of things where I needed to have 20, 25 years to pass before I could put them into perspective, because before I could manage to make things and understand how things related to each other. And I want to share with you the six key learnings that I got out of being a professional athlete. I also forgot to ask, so anyone here, even though they haven't been to the Olympics, has been a professional athlete before? Amateur level? What do you guys play? That one? Cool. Anyone else? Oh, finally. And I think the most important thing that I have learned and maybe all of you who have done team sports before can recognise this. The most important thing I have learned is how to pick my team. How you pick your team is incredibly important. And the one thing that I want to recommend is to choose a team where you are the worst player on the best team that will still take you. Why? You learn a lot. Yes, exactly. That's the way you learn. You learn from other people who are better than you. Really good teams, have the best coaches. And also you learn how to normalise high performance.   Because all of your friends, all your mates are doing the same thing. They're going to the Olympics too. And they're all really, really good at doing sports. So what you learn is to completely normalise high performance.  For me, definitely was not fun. Because I had picked the best team that would still take me. I was 16. And I was playing with people who I absolutely couldn't relate to. I wasn't even sure what I was supposed to use the formal or informal with people who were as ancient as 25.  And I can only recommend doing the same thing in professional life. I believe it is really, really important to pick the right company, to pick on a high level the team of a company where you can learn as much as possible. And even within your workplace, to pick a team where you can learn as much as you possibly can. If you're lucky enough to be allowed to choose your own team, there are three questions I usually ask people when they can. It's what can I learn? What can I teach? And also, is this fair to my company? And if you get to a point where you can't find a place where you can learn, I believe it's time to find a different team or a different company. If you're not lucky enough to choose your own team, I've written a how-to instruction guide for how to introduce self-selection into organizations. Any of you been at my talk on Tuesday? Cool. I hope you're going to self-select very soon. And I still do this today, picking my team. And even though I'm a self-employed consultant, I still need a team. I still need a group of people to learn from. And that's what I've learned to do in an informal way. I pick a team of people, an international group of people, who I bounce off ideas with. I go to conferences and I make those connections so I can discuss ideas and concepts with people. Just a quick question. How do you guys pick your teams or companies? What criteria do you use? So is the person willing to learn or are they and are they an optimist? Is that for when you choose your own team or is that when you choose other people to be on your team? When you choose your own team, like which team you want your company, what do you choose it by? Challenges, yes. Which is pretty much the picking the best team that will still accept you. And speaking of, sorry, do you have more than one company in Bangalore? So I think if you apply it to a higher level of abstraction you probably do have a choice. I think we all have an influence in making this happen by using criteria for how to choose the companies we work for and helping the companies we work for getting to a stage where people can choose their own teams. Another thing I've learned is that it's actually really important to know when to go. There seems to be this thing that people feel bad about leaving a team or leaving a company. We all feel that we're letting other people down when we do this or we feel we don't have a choice. I believe the moment we have outgrown a team we need to decide that we're going to leave. It's nothing, we should not ditch a team from one minute to the next but it's a price is when you realise that you can't learn on this team or in this company anymore to look for a different place. And I believe that's actually okay because we're responsible to keep learning throughout our professional lives and we do this by picking the right teams with the right coaches. I also believe that collaboration is key which is absolutely nothing new that I'm telling you there.  What I find interesting though is that in professional sports you have a meritocracy. People are chosen 100% because of the talent and their skill because of their performance and when you've got this you get a collection of people with very different backgrounds. You get people here from different classes of society people with kind of different cultures people who have different backgrounds and different levels of education different levels of intelligence. Lots of athletes are actually quite dumb but you need to work with all of those and you need to make sure that you can establish a relationship with people so you can work together. In professional life this is the same by the way this is what you do when you can't find a good picture always use cats. In professional life that's the same and I'm not sure what your diversity stats are but I used to work in Amsterdam 45% of the population in Amsterdam are not born in the Netherlands. In Auckland where I live at the moment I think it's 41%. Any stats for here 90% warning? Yeah and maybe and there's different kinds of diversity but I do think that in a tech industry if I compare this to professional sports and see how a goal and high performance results in people being really really diverse on the team and then the tech industry well we're actually not particularly diverse it tells me that most likely we're missing out on a large group of talent and we need to be better at looking for that and there's one thing that usually people talk about how great it is at startups how great it is at work because people are friends. I don't think there's anything bad about being friends at work but I do believe it's absolutely not necessary to be friends. I've played handball with people who I didn't like I've played with people who had very different values from people I thought were boring people who were homophobe people I would not have grabbed a coffee with normally but all I needed was being sure that that person is the best left wing in the world I don't care would I like them or not I want to play with them because together we want to win and there's research to back this up you guys heard of Project Oestotla done by Kulul some of you it's a four or five year old analysis or it's the analysis of data over four or five years where they look at what makes teams high performing and is there any way to predict high performance turns out there isn't the only thing where you how you cannot the only thing that's a prerequisite for high performance is safety it's making sure that you have a shared goal and that you can achieve success together that when you make a mistake you're covering each other's backs that's the one and only thing and I think that goes very well for sports teams sports teams in a way have it easier because if you've got a very diverse group of people who don't necessarily like each other but are the best want to be the best you need to make sure they have a reason to actually collaborate and that reason is a really really compelling goal in sports those are dreams you want to go to the olympics you want to be that person with the olympic torch and that helps you overcome any problems caused by diversity by the way i did this the right smoke it kills you almost but and also in professional lives we need to find compelling goals that makes people want to live to live to work together and when we do have that a diverse group of people who are highly talented a group of people with a goal that is really compelling we also need to have working agreements to make sure that we have an agreement how we can work together and achieve success together and there's a book by Bob Sutton that's called the no arse of all and i like it because basically what it states is that if you got one person who's not a team player on your team the cost is enormous and it's actually so big that he makes a really good case that you should get rid of that person we see this in sports in sports that's the player who doesn't pass the ball who's going for his or her own goal at work that's the person who hides information it's the person it's a developer who refuses to test it's the BA who refuses to learn something new and when we see this kind of behavior we need to get people to change it and ultimately if we can't we need to get rid of them because the cost or the entire group of having one person not pulling in the same direction is enormous i also believe we need to get really really good at feedback because you get this group of people and they're really diverse they need to find a way to talk to each other and by getting good at feedback i mean both giving and receiving feedback both are hugely important on a professional sports field there are two types of feedback there's instant feedback it's feedback on the field if you're on the field you need to have feedback right here and right now if i'm in full spread in this direction the third time the ball comes here behind me i need to shout at my colleague that i need the ball over there there's nothing personal in it but it's something they need to know right here right now there's no point waiting until halftime there's no point waiting until after the game and also it can't matter whether this person is junior or senior this is something that just needs to happen but then there's also the other kind of feedback and that's the delayed feedback that's the feedback off the field because sometimes you can actually wait because it's not an emergency you can wait until you give feedback in private i call it on a team having no undiscussables where you can really talk about problems and over time solve them personally i was i remember being about 18 or 19 and i thought it was a really good idea to slack off a bit and go out about town town and get pretty drunk and have fun and i thought this was just my problem until an older player took me aside and said hey you might think this is your problem but really this affects all of us when you go out and drink and you're not ready for practice in the morning this is not just your problem this is our problem and that's what i want to get to with any type of team that we can have those discussions around what's okay and what's not okay is said no undiscussables within a team and i found this really cool framework for giving feedback who of you are familiar with radical candor it's a framework that's made by maryl scott she has been and she has received feedback and out of that she has come up with a framework based on her personal experiences and basically there are two axes on feedback one is behavior where something needs feedback and you can either challenge directly or you can back off and not challenge at all then there's the other dimension which is how much do you care personally you can care a lot or you can actually not give a damn about that person and i really really like that framework because there's so many techniques around giving feedback but i think what it comes down to is what's the place that feedback is coming from and the place it should come from is radical candor where you care deeply about that person and you also bring things up directly be careful to question yourself or i always question myself before i give feedback am i just annoyed and actually don't care that much about the person that would put me into the obnoxious aggression category and sometimes i find that people care but they don't really dare to give feedback and i had a really interesting experience a couple of months ago when i asked some friends to come and give us feedback because we're a couple of people in my company we want to be better at public speaking i'd love to get keynotes and i asked myself what do i need to do and they told me well it's a little thing here and a little thing there but that's all they said but i also got the feedback that if i want to do keynotes i need to change my accent because that person really didn't understand what i was saying and i thought that's an amazing data point this is really cool to know and it is like a professional athlete getting to know that actually you need to play more of a topspin and the problem with that feedback was i didn't get it they sent this in an email to my business partner and i think there's so much damage done by having this ruinous empathy trying to protect my feelings which is actually really unfair because i can't improve and i'm not sure about your culture but in a new zealand culture in a southern hemisphere culture we're very often in the we're too polite corner where we don't say what we really think because we're trying to protect other people's feelings and while i'm at feedback receiving feedback it's equally important to consider the source because some people in professional sports we pay professional coaches and we listen to them we also listen to our teammates but also there are people we don't listen to i don't necessarily listen to a sponsor or the audience in a handball game i know also if you had any advice for me on how to throw the ball better i really like you but actually i would just go yeah whatever you probably are not qualified handball coaches and i think it's really important to actually always consider the source of feedback is this something i want to take on board is that something that's coming from someone someone who's either not qualified or where it's not coming from a place of radical candor i also believe i was going to ask you questions about this but every time i ask about feedback it's going to take an hour and a half so i'm going to tightly move that through after the presentation and i also believe that it's hugely important to never ever stop learning do you guys like learning seriously you're different from me i hate it i hate learning new things because that's when i'm back at the stupid phase that's when i have the beginner phase that's when i don't feel competent and when i'm like totally out of my comfort zone it's really hard i like when i get at the end but learning per se don't like it that much yes yes unlearning is even harder still no one really to admit that they actually don't like learning that much if i put it that way yeah i think it's important but it is really hard and one thing that i learned in professional sports is that if you learn you go 100 in you are out of your comfort zone you're trying to learn something new and there's absolutely no room when you do this when you're 100 focused to think about what you look like what other people think of you what things you should hide and how you come across so i think in order to speed up learning and to be good at learning we need to not even try to look good and put all vanity aside and stop caring what other people think so my suggestion is just to take off take your mind off the outcome and be totally in the moment and have the courage to be ugly and a beginner and not very good at what you're doing and when you do that at some point you're going to outgrow your idols in sports you get to a place where you need to take those posters off the wall where you realize that the people you were looking up to they are actually not better than you anymore they're on your team there's not that much you can learn from them anymore and that's when you realize that actually you're on your own you need to stop doing what other people have done before you need to stop looking for people or for one single person you can learn from you need to broaden your spectrum and learn from everyone but follow absolutely no one and I think in an agile world in agile companies we have an advantage because we say fail early fail often so we are all trying to get better at the mindset to put ourselves out there and fail something that annoys me very often though is that people seem to go no failed didn't work out not a big deal I think we need to fail often and early but give a shit in professional sports you try something and it doesn't work out you actually feel quite devastated you have an emotional connection the number of times I just wanted to dig a hole or a tunnel to get out of the court without being seen is huge and that emotional connection to making mistakes has helped me improve even more because then it was even more important and I worked harder on fixing those mistakes and companies there is I think we're actually getting quite good at this this is a company where currently work we have a concept called trial balloons it means everything goes and you can try something and when you try something you put something you put the sticking out in a trial balloon and some of those ideas are going to fly and some of them are going to die and they go on a fail wall so what I'd like to say is to just keep evolving there's never a point where you can actually have a stand still because as soon as you do you will almost regress compared to everyone else and if you keep doing this if you do all those things if you pick a good team if you learn from the right people and if you push yourself then what's going to happen is that you have a chance to be really deliberate about your career and in order to be deliberate about your career to try something and to fail you need to be able to do this safely and I've always had a safety net since I was a junior PLSQL developer 15 years ago I've had two months worth of salary on a bank account that I didn't touch ever it's my runaway money it's when I'm in a company doing a job that I don't like or realize I'm not learning anymore I've outgrown this company I need to leave I know that I don't need to worry about quitting my job I can do this and safely assume within two months I can find another job is that something that also holds true here or what's the market like here yep content yep yes yeah I call it my bugger off money contentions in money is probably more proper too I should have thought of that and what that does is that I know whenever there's something that feels risky and exciting and I feel I can learn I know I'm totally in the right place and I can make a good judgment call because I don't have to worry about endangering my life or not having any food on the table so I believe doing all this will get you to a really really good place people will want to work with you and that's how you get the really good gigs and you will have the emotional agility to be really good at what you're doing and to get a really good career that's satisfying sports has certainly made me who I am today I have absolutely no regrets and I'm happy that I have learned a lot and at least it has also prevented me from becoming an Austrian fashion model and leaderhosen which I think is good for the world just to sum up here are my tips to be world-class pick your team wisely no one to go collaboration is hard but it's key be good at feedback never stop learning and be deliberate about your career what about to say thank you no one has made this sign yet so I believe we have some time for questions so my questions my questions two parts one is do you find yourself longing to kind of try and recreate that or in a bit of a withdrawal and knowing that like it's very difficult to get there again and two is that yeah because I'm really good when people ask two questions okay that I forget the second one okay now is the first one you ask cool uh yes totally it's what I miss all the time once you have been on that level you miss it because it's amazing but I also know how much work there's involved in doing this and it's one of the reasons why I do public speaking it's very similar it's the closest I can get because it's real time nobody cares if I can deliver this talk tomorrow or the day before and it's something where you're a bit there doing something right now right here in front of people which is cool and there's some elements of mastery that you can achieve and I know I'm nowhere near an Olympic level of doing speaking but it's the fun being kind of a beginner intermediate person again thank you this the second part to that was working with people who haven't experienced who don't know what that feels like does that make it difficult to relate sometimes to that you're you're striving for this and they have no idea of that this this feeling exists or with that with that's like is that kind of strange relationships at times yes yes I think like any experience this has been this is my story this has been normal to me so empathizing with people who have never ever done this is hard and I'm trying hard to do this and I'm trying to find ways to relate to them what real really good teamwork could be like what mastery could be like and what it could feel like and sometimes I managed to move them a bit in conversations and through working with them in a team sometimes we're just so on different planets that I don't manage to do that okay how did I make the transition from Olympian to software developer first of all what happens is old age at some point you get a stop and I've seen many athletes who turn 35 and they have to stop and they work in a pizza shop and there's nothing wrong with working in a pizza shop if that's what you love doing but they didn't so I knew I needed to do something to make sure that I wouldn't end up like this so I just decided to stop age 26 and I went to uni and I did a master's degree in computational linguistics and got out in the year 2000 didn't know what I didn't know so told everyone I was amazing they should give me a job and then I learned on the job awesome another question that I had was so you know even I have when I worked in that team they use a lot of sports analogies to you know motivate the team and you know try to draw parallels but ultimately you've actually been you know on the ground how how similar or different do you really think that you know we draw some sports analogies but ultimately do you really think that they're software development and playing professional sports are they really that similar that we try to you know sometimes tell our teams I think in some aspects they are in others they're not and the things that I was just talking about they were the ones I experienced are the same and have been the same for me in software development teams as in handball and there is a gazillion things that are totally different but those are the things that I think are a commonality and where to me it's not an analogy but actually the same thing just applied in different contexts okay all right thanks any other questions so it's a kind of continuing the earlier question while we draw you know analogies between professional sports and software development I mean there's one one slide in your presentation where you said about fail early and fail fast but I mean I was all thinking that in professional sports is failing an option because you lose one match you're out of the entire thing right I mean it's always right the first time in every game has to be your A game I mean I don't think we I mean at least that was my understanding that we don't have that option of failing in in professional sports so I believe we do and I think it's how you define failure and I don't particularly like how we use the word failure because to me it sounds catastrophic if you replace it with making mistakes you make a gazillion mistakes on a handball field I made a gazillion mistakes that I know about doing this presentation we all do that all the time but none of those are endangering the whole thing so I can make mistakes and I will make mistakes on the field and we can still win the game and sometimes you make mistakes that are so big that you actually lose the game but life doesn't end there are more games you might still make the next round in a tournament and even if it's the Olympics okay it's a really bad failure four years later there'll be another Olympic Games yeah so it's a kind of extension of what you just said so what do you do to recover from that like logically you know there are more games but when you have a really bad day you're completely down and you feel you don't want to ever do this again so what do you tell yourself in that situation and how do you get back to normal and play the next game that's a really good question because it is quite horrible when that happens and what worked for me is the going away going all then feeling I am the worst player in the world I should not play handball I'm never going to amount to anything at all go through that and that might last max a day and then having a role myself then I really need to get myself together and just look forward is there anything I can learn about this from what I've done yes cool apply it if not just move on but after a day just move on and look forward sorry I had a question not question actually just a confirmation so as to speak so be it this professional sport or be it a software development or any aspect of any professional life are we talking about the underlying human interactions and human principles and the behaviors and then we are trying to tune that up to a certain level so that regardless of the profession that you choose those underlying factors are always present in you is my understanding or correct in that way I don't know if it's correct or not but I would agree take a last question there is always a coach even though the excuse me the players are already pros so can you draw an analogy I mean a parallel between yeah it's a role of the coach in software development versus professional sports I think there's a huge difference there that's one of the huge differences in professional sports you always have a coach and you practice and I think that's one of the places where any analogy probably falls down in software development we need to learn from other people and that can be well it can be a coach it can be any other people you work with it can be books it can be more informal and very often you don't just have a coach but many people you learn from is and I think sometimes like I'm an agile coach as I call it but basically it's being around and helping people learn something some of it is coaching some of it is just having conversations and I think being a professional on a team it can be useful to have a coach but I think they're also really good teams software development teams who don't have a coach that makes sense thanks


One of the features of deep learning that I find fascinating is that they use continuous approximations, differentiable equations you can do gradient descent on to approximate a world which is discrete, which has separate objects and separate facts in it. In some sense they are magic. It's amazing that they actually work. You can take a neural net and it can approximate a piece of C code or natural language, processed natural language where you have sets of sentences, you have words which are discrete, you have relationships between them and note that they're doing something that is slightly implausible. Discrete optimization is NP hard. If you're trying to do something which you say this and this but not that then solving the optimum for most of these discrete problems really hard. However neural nets magically do gradient descent. They just go smoothly down, down, down and very efficiently find approximations to these really hard discrete problems. Learn to invert a list. Learn to recognize that this is here and that is not there only if this is there. Logic sort of pieces. And it's important to note that because you're approximating a hard problem within its approximation, the approximation will guarantee be imperfect and this is going to drive a lot of future research because you can get 90% 95% good approximations with this continuous approximation, this nice differentiable smooth function, but it is not going to be able to solve everything. There are problems that are provably too hard to be solved by these sorts of methods in at least the sort of time we do. So the big research question, can we somehow glue in discrete representations, symbolic representation of the world? Now maybe this is not necessary. Inside your head, everything is continuous. Well actually underneath the continuous representation is a discrete representation of neurons firing boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But we think of neurons as being a continuous. We don't actually have objects like houses and screwdrivers stored in our head in a place you can latch on to. But somehow we have this behavior as if we could recognize things like screwdrivers. So how does that work? How could we do that? Let's look at one attempt to try and do this, the cleverer system. It's a system that generates synthetic movies.  You then show the movie to the computer. So it gets a sequence of images and ask it questions like how many spheres are moving or which one of these things is responsible for the gray object being knocked or prediction, which is what most of neural nets will ask, where will the blue square go or things that are hard for current neural nets to answer like counterfactuals? What will happen if the gray sphere is plucked out and removed? And to answer questions like this, it's hard to work purely with a standard sort of CNN or LSTM sort of model. The idea that these researchers are proposing is to use neuro symbolic reasoning. This is one of many pieces that do some version of this map from an image to a discrete representation of objects. In these pixels, there are red squares and green squares, objects that have attributes on them. They have shapes and sizes and colors. They also have relations, something very symbolic. How many objects are to the right of the red object? They have visual cues. Are they of the same material as this or that? So this idea is to merge together a deep learning model that maps from pixels to a discrete representation when it's not built in, right? That's learned of objects and attributes and relations between them and allow that then to answer questions, right? You can take the questions, use our standard transformer model, map those to facts and try and somehow go from the continuous world of videos to a hidden latent discrete objects with attributes to then answer questions. Quite cool. So how does it work? You watch a video, the computer does. It's got some sort of a mask convolutional neural net that parses the frames, recognizes objects. It has an LSTM encoder. The LSTM learns to recognize what are the objects? What are their colors? What are their shapes? It then pulls that into a little model that it uses, right? We're moving toward causality, a model of the world. They're discrete things that have dynamics. They move at certain speeds. They keep moving. They bump that then takes the simulation here, run simulations that predicts what will happen for these pieces. Given the prediction, you can then take a question and a prediction, run that to a question answering machine. We've seen versions of these in this course and then answer what is the shape of the second object to collide with the gray object and it says it's a Q. So note this piece of parsing the text into objects and attributes, parsing the image into objects and attributes, modeling them. This is what is happening going on under the hood in a structural causal sort of sense and then answering questions. One example, very much a toy system, but it captures the spirit of trying to recognize that the world is composed of objects, attributes and relations between them, but not being purely symbolic. There's LSTMs in the text analysis. There's LSTMs or CNNs in the image analysis.


Welcome to another OptoPlanet example. This time we'll be looking at the meeting scheduling example. So in this example, we have to assign meetings to a room and to a time, a starting time. So for example, we have this meeting about engaging sustainable user experience in the new economy. This green meeting, right? And that meeting we've decided it will be in room 1 and it will start at 8 o'clock. At the same time, we have another meeting about cross-selling, compelling multitasking in action, as you can see here, and that will be held in room 4. Now, the interesting thing about this example is that not all meetings have the same duration. So for example, this particular meeting lasts one hour and actually two hours, as you can see, right? From 8 o'clock until 10 o'clock. But other meetings like this brown one, it is only 15 minutes. Or for example, this yellow one is actually 45 minutes, right? So they are in a different, they all take a different duration. You can see some are actually quite long. They go up to four hours, some of the meetings, while others are much less. Now, so this is a little bit different from the other examples in OptoPlanet because it uses something called the time grain pattern to deal with this. What we basically do is we split the time up into a granularity of 15 minutes. So we have 8 o'clock, 8.15, 8.30. And the meeting can start at any of those grains. So it can start at 8 o'clock at 8.15. Because I will allow a meeting to start at, let's say, 8.012. Then that's not really interesting because humans cannot deal with such a fine accuracy. We can only start meetings at a accuracy of 15 minutes in this case. Maybe for your use case, of course, that might be every 5 minutes. Or if you're dealing actually with machines, you might actually use a much smaller granularity than even minutes. But in this particular use case, 15 minutes is the ideal granularity. So in this case, we do have a number of constraints, of course. Now, the first constraint is quite obvious. You can only hold one meeting in one room at the same time. So you see, for example, that while one degree meeting is held in this room, there's no other meeting being held at the same time. So that means that another meeting cannot just be in the same room at the same time starting at the same time. It actually should not overlap at any point during the same time. So we cannot start a meeting, let's say, this orange meeting. We cannot start it at 8.30 in room 1 because then it will partially overlap with the green meeting. So that's the first thing, room conflicts. Now, the second rule is that we don't want to go in overtime, of course. We have a certain time window, which is a number of days. We're now scheduling up to the 5th of January, but we cannot actually go use more time than that. That's quite obvious. And the next thing is, of course, attendance, right? So we have a number of persons. Let's take a look at the persons here, number of persons. You can see them on the left here, which are want to go to some of these meetings. Now, a person doesn't want to go to all the meetings. Each person wants to go to a number of meetings he considered as required. And he or she also has a number of preferred meetings often. So for example, you can see that this first person here wants to go to the green meeting, right? So that's required, and he can do that. He can go from 8 till 10. There's no problem. He has no other commitments at that time. We can see that this other person, Andre and Lukas, also want to go to that meeting. Now, you can see for Andre, it's a preferred meeting, but he can go. So that's fine. But for Lukas, it's a required meeting. So he can go. So that's not just fine. That's actually required, right? So that is a difference between hard and soft constraints, right? Actually, hard and medium constraints in this case. So all the people who are required to go to a meeting, if they have to attend two required meetings at the same time, then we break a hard constraint. Now, you can see that's not the case because we have zero hard constraints broken. And also, if you actually look through this, you will see that at no time, one person has to go to two meetings that he is required to go to at the same time. Also, of course, we want to make sure that people can go to their preferred meetings too. It's a little bit more difficult because it's actually not possible to go to all preferred meetings in this data set, I believe. But most of the case, this is true. So for example, if you look at that first person, we can see if you look at the required and preferred one, you can see that you can actually visit most meetings up to this particular meeting, actually, where he has to go to two meetings at the same time. Net has to go, wants to go. It's a preferred two preferred meetings. So we lose actually lose some points for that. You can see that we actually have this case 18 times. So in 18 times, we will somebody will have to drop out of their preferred meetings of one of their two preferred meetings, right? Now, so that's the attendance constraint. Then of course, we have something called room capacity. All of the rooms have a certain capacity. And we need to make sure there's enough room for all the people attending that particular meeting, which is scheduled in that room. So we take that into account too. Of course, that's of course hard constraint again, the room capacity. And beyond that, we have one other constraint, which is a soft constraint, which has we want to do all the meetings as soon as possible. So we want to move all the meetings to the front of the schedule. And this is just a number which counts a number of grains that people are beating start later than January 8 o'clock. So this will never be zero, of course, but it does push all the meetings to the front of the schedule, which is nice to have. So when new meetings that we didn't account for actually would be scheduled, it would be added to the end. So let me just show how this works when we start from an empty thing. So we have an empty schedule, no January, no rooms filled in. And we have our meetings over here. So as you can see, cross-selling, privatize, transform, engage, downsize, synergies and all that kind of stuff. Do you want to schedule these meetings? So let's start solving this. Now, if you can see that it's here, we can see the score that we found. It's actually not showing the results in the screen. Why? Because constantly refreshing the screen is actually slows down the application, actually hangs the application. So I've not enabled this here, as you can see in the bottom right. But I'll give it a little bit of time. Now we're getting quite a good schedule after a few seconds. So let's stop this and you can see this is the schedule. And as you can see in this case, there are no hard constraints broken because everybody can go to all the meetings that they are required to go to. And here you can see sometimes they do have to go to two meetings at the same time. They want to go to this is a preferred meeting again. So again, we have some medium constraints broken. If you give it some more time, then we can actually lower this to 18Fs as we've seen. But it works and it's a good, it's a feasible schedule and it's much better than one which would actually figure out by hand. So a little bit more about the time grain pattern before this session. So there are different ways, different design patterns on how to deal with assigning to time in Optoplanar. And the best design, so the interesting design patterns we've documented those. And so what we see in many cases is where the duration of something that needs to be scheduled is fixed. And then you can use time slot pattern which we use in the course scheduling example, right? So for example, the core chemistry lesson takes one hour, but the math all the lessons takes one hour. So we just schedule them to the time slot, right? Well, in this particular case, we're using the time grain pattern where we say, okay, we use a granularity of 15 minutes and we assign the starting time. So the sales meeting starts at zero. The architects meeting started at time grain one, which 15 minutes later if you see on the bottom on the top, right? So that's a different way of designing the domain model. And this allows you to have a much lower, you know, have meetings in different durations. And there's actually a third pattern too, which is a chain through time pattern, which is used in vehicle routing or usually in when tasks need to be assigned. And the nice thing about those is that it works very well when there are no gaps or when the gaps are very deterministic. Like if you work two hours, you want a 15 minutes break. The interesting thing about this is that we're not going to use some sort of granularity. We're just going to start a task when the previous one is done. So when, in this case, the taxes of the Netherlands have been calculated, that's Beth will start her next task doing the Belgium taxes, for example, right? Now, it depends, of course, on your use case. What's the best one to use if you're dealing with time? But it is interesting to know that you have these options available and each of them has their advantages. They're, you know, use the right tool for the right job, use the right design pattern for the right use case. And each of one has, of course, some limitations in design. Now, you probably think, why not just simply say, okay, use a very small time grain like a time grain of one second or even one millisecond or one nanosecond? Now, you can do that and support that, of course. But the problem with that is that you, if you don't need one minute or one millisecond or one nanosecond granularity, you actually need a 15 minute case, for example, when you're scheduling humans, this is usually the case. Then you're going to increase the search space a lot and it's going to be much, much harder to find something. You will need far more CPU power to do that. So, actually, you apply and you will get results that you don't want because there is no point in starting a meeting at 15 nanoseconds after five minutes after nine o'clock, right? Because humans don't show up on a nanosecond accuracy, of course, right? Okay. So, thanks for listening to this example and I hope you enjoyed it. Bye.


Okay, here we are. First Thessalonians 4. We'll look at verses 1 through 8 today, but I'll introduce our passage by looking at verses 1 and 2 and introducing, giving you some background to remind you of some things. I'm developing a foundation, but to be honest with you, the direction we're going is really found in verses 3 through 8. And this is speaking about the believer's walk. What does it mean to walk worthy of the Lord Jesus Christ? And so we'll be looking at that. He especially is going to spend some time in this passage speaking concerning purity. And so that is going to be really the heart of my message as we look at a believer's walk, a walk that is worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. In order for us to get to verses 3 through 8 and to allow me to develop that with you and try to become very practical with that, I need to remind you of some of the things that we've already been looking at, a way of introducing this by reminder. There are some who've never, haven't been in any of our studies through this. So this will help you a bit to come up to speed with where we're at here in chapter 4. And so what I'll do is I'll read verses 1 and 2 first, give you some background. It'll take a few minutes to do that, develop the context, give you some reminders, and then move into the practical teaching that we're going to find in verses 3 through 8. So hold on as we go through verses 1 and 2, then we move into practical teaching verses 3 through 8. So I'll read beginning at verse 1, read verse 2, 1 Thessalonians chapter 4. Paul writes, Finally then, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more, just as you receive from us how you ought to walk and to please God, for you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus. And so it's interesting as we begin how Paul begins this portion of his letter. Notice how he begins with the word finally. It's interesting in that he really has much more to say because he's got a lot to say as we go through from verse 1 of chapter 4 into chapter 5. He's got a lot of things that he wants to speak about. One of the things that we'll be looking at soon is a portion of Scripture that I've been looking for to spending time teaching. And it's a portion of Scripture that refers to something that we the church call the rapture. And we're going to see that Paul is going to be developing that with this church soon in chapter 4. And Paul is going to encourage and comfort the church by sharing about this particular event that we call the rapture. And the rapture is a promise that the Lord will suddenly remove his church in order that the church will be with him. He's going to make it clear that those who are alive will be caught up in the air and will join those who have preceded them by dying. And so this is going to be a word of encouragement. It's a word of encouragement because the church is afflicted. The church is persecuted. And so this word that the Lord is returning to take us would encourage and comfort them because they're facing afflictions. Now we saw in chapter 3 verses 12 and 13 how that Paul had prayed that they would increase in love for one another. And he also had prayed that their love would abound to all. In other words, may the church not only love one another because we're commanded to do that. And by this all men shall know that we're disciples of Christ if we have love for one another. And so we know that love is the birthmark of a believer. And so anybody who calls upon the name of Christ, well, the evidence of his reality of relationship is going to include the love of the Spirit. But it's not only going to be just for brothers and sisters. It's going to also include love for others in a general sense. The Bible in Romans 13 8 says, Oh, no man anything but to love one another. For he who loves another has fulfilled the law. So loving one another is a great testimony first to those who don't know the Lord. Somebody wrote at no other time in the history of Christianity did love so characterize the entire church as it did in the first three centuries. And Roman society took note. Tertullian reported that the Romans would exclaim, behold, how they love one another. And so loving one another is a demonstration that God dwells in us. But loving people in general is also a visible expression of the fruit of the Spirit. Again, the love of the early Christians wasn't limited simply to their fellow believers. Christians also lovingly help nonbelievers, the poor, the orphans, the elderly, the sick, the shipwrecked, even their persecutors. Jesus had said love your enemies and pray for those who spirefully use you and persecute you in Matthew 544. The early Christians accepted this statement as a command from the Lord rather than as an ideal that couldn't be actually practiced in real life. And the love of Christ was demonstrated in so many things that sometimes we forget about the love of Christ was demonstrated in the creation of orphanages. The love of Christ was demonstrated in the creation of hospitals. The love of Christ was those demonstrated in the establishing of universities. It was expressed to society in general. And so loving one another and loving others is a birthmark. It's an earmark of a Christian. And so Paul is speaking concerning that, how that were to abound in love for one another and for all people. We look to Jesus as our example. But Paul said his own example before them. He said, love one another just as we do to you. Not only have we loved you with word, but we have imparted the gospel to you and we have also imparted our very lives to you. So you can use us as an example. And though he was absent from them, he longed to be with them because he wanted to bless them. In verse 13 of chapter 3, he had also prayed that their hearts would be, notice, blameless in holiness. In other words, if God's love filled their hearts, their lives would reveal His love. The fruit of God's Spirit would be evident in them. Galatians 5, 22 and 23, which speaks of the fruit of the Spirit. The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long suffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such, there is no law. The fruit of the Spirit is evident in them. And he said, it's my great desire that you will demonstrate that in your love and in your walk, that you'll be blameless in holiness. And all of this is going to be based on the fact that you are anticipating the return of the Lord at any moment. You see, if you're waiting for the Lord to return, your life will evidence that. In Calvary Chapel, we're well known in the church world as those who are anticipating the return of Christ. The rapture is the next prophecy on the prophetic calendar that is awaiting fulfillment. And there's no other prophecy that needs to be fulfilled before that one is. This is the next event. So from the beginning in our heritage, we as believers and we who are Calvary Chapel pastors, we have known and anticipated the return of the Lord. And we've spoken concerning that for many years. And so this hope of the return of Christ, this hope of the rapture is something that is going to be evidenced by the way that we live. This knowledge that Jesus is returning at any moment is encouraging us to live in a certain way. Titus chapter two, verses 11 through 13 says it like this. The grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all men. Teaching us that denying ungodliness and worldly lust, we should live soberly, righteously and godly in the present age, looking for the blessed hope and glorious appearing of our great God and Savior, Jesus Christ. When the apostle Peter was writing in 2 Peter 312, he said, since everything will be destroyed in this way, what kind of people ought you to be? Then he answered his own question. He said, you want to live holy and godly lives. So the promise of the return of Christ is intended to provoke response in the heart of a believer and the behavior of a believer. Because if we truly believe he's returning, our lives will evidence that. And that's what John was saying in 1 John 3, 2 and 3 when he said, beloved, now we are children of God and it has not yet been revealed what we shall be, but we know that when he's revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. And everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself just as he is pure. So that's what Paul is leading to. He desires to give them more attention to prepare them for the return of Christ. He knows that there are false teachers that are coming in. He knows that they are moved by Satan and undermining the faith of the believers. And he knew that because they were suffering, false teachers could capitalize on this because a false teacher could undermine their faith by claiming believers shouldn't suffer. So that was something Paul had to address. And he's been doing that throughout the letter. And he pointed out that afflictions are part of what it means to be a believer. Instead of destroying faith, affliction is part of our life. Affliction is deep in our faith. It refines, it gets refined, it's strengthened, it makes our faith more focused. And that's the point he's been making. And now he continues his letter by picking up in verse one here in chapter four and saying, finally then, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus that you should abound more and more just as you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God. For you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus. So he's continuing and urging them. Notice how he says, finally, brethren, we urge and exhort in the Lord Jesus. I urge you as a brother, but I exhort, I plead with you as an apostle. And what am I urging you to do? What am I exhorting you to do? I'm encouraging you to walk and please God.  You're to walk worthy of the gospel of Jesus Christ. This isn't his conclusion, by the way, but it is leading to an important section of his letter. And it's so important that he uses his authority to urge and exhort them. His plea is that they will abound more and more in the things that they've received. His plea is that they continue maturing in their walks with the Lord and steadily grow in him. Notice in verse one how he says, you received from us how you ought to walk and please God. So when he had first taught them, when he had first taught them, he clearly taught them that they were to live to please the Lord. And the teaching that he had given to them had been received. He says it in verse one. He says, just as you received from us how you ought to walk and please the Lord. The word received means to welcome. You welcomed this. You accepted this. You received these orders in order that you might live in such a way as to please the Lord. You wanted to be instructed on how to be saved, but you also need to know as a saved person how you're supposed to live. You've already been taught. You already know you're supposed to please the Lord. And you need to remember that your faith is going to inform the way that you live. There's a lot of people to date that you might encounter that I do. I'll see them either personally or I'll see them on television sometimes or whatever I run into them in one way or another. And they'll be saying how much they love the Lord, but in fact, they're not obedient to him. They're not showing in any way through their life that they have a relationship with the Lord. And there are quite a number of people today who are doing that or living like that. But he says you need to abound more and more in the things you've received. You need to continue to grow. You need to walk properly. You need to learn to please the Lord. You see the teaching you accepted and the teaching you welcomed instructed you, but it also is instructing you not only how to be saved, but how to live. You know you're supposed to please the Lord. You know to live in that way. It's like what he says to the Colossians in chapter one, verse 10, that you may walk worthy of the Lord, fully pleasing him, being fruitful in every good work and increasing in the knowledge of God. So when he speaks concerning the walk, how you're to walk, the word walk there is a word that speaks concerning your way of life. It's how you conduct yourself. The way that you walk in Scripture is another way of speaking the way you live. And the word please there simply means to accommodate yourself to the opinion, desire and interests of someone else. So he's saying a Christian's desire to yield to God's desire for him or her to be pleasing to him ought to inform the way that he lives. And so he's speaking about a walk that pleases God. When you read the Bible, you'll see that there are a lot of Scriptures that speak about how to please God, how to walk and please the Lord. The Bible tells us that we can please the Lord with a walk of faith. Hebrews 116 says without faith it's impossible to please him, for he who comes to God must believe that he is and that he's a rewarder of those who diligently seek him. If we're going to live a life that pleases the Lord, we need to have a walk that is sensitive to the leading of the spirit. In Galatians 516 Paul said walk in the spirit, you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. If we're going to walk and please the Lord, we need a walk that is producing good works. Ephesians 2-10 says we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them. If we're going to please the Lord, we need a walk that is earmarked by his love. Ephesians 5-2, walk in love as Christ also has loved us and given himself for us and offering and sacrifice to God for a sweet smelling aroma. If we're going to walk in a way that pleases him, we need a walk earmarked by wisdom. Colossians 4 verse 5, walk in wisdom toward those who are outside redeeming the time. If we're going to walk in a way that pleases him, we need a walk that is morally pure, one that values Christian fellowship. 1 John 1-7, if we walk in the light as he is in the light, we have fellowship with one another, and the blood of Jesus Christ's Son cleanses us from all sin. If I'm going to have a walk that pleases him, I need a walk earmarked by obedience to his word. 2 John verse 6, this is love that we walk according to his commandments. And if I'm going to have a walk that pleases him, I need a walk that is consistently holy. Ephesians 5 verse 8, you were once darkness, but now you are a light in the Lord, walk as children of light. And so he's saying, you received from us how you ought to walk and to please God. You welcomed it as the word of God. You embraced it, receiving and acting upon it. Because when I gave you the message of salvation, I also intended to communicate you how to live. And he said in verse 2, for you know what commandments we gave you through the Lord Jesus. So I've previously instructed you and these instructions are binding because of the authority that Christ has given to me. So we have divine orders concerning our lifestyles. We are to be set apart for Jesus Christ. The Christian must live in the world, but he must not let the world live in him. Jesus said in John 17 15 through 17, I do not pray that you should take them out of the world, but that you should keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. Sanctify them by your truth. Your word is truth. So he's saying, I want to speak to you and command you how to walk and please God. Now we pick up the application of that walking and pleasing God, how to walk. The believers walk. Verse three, this is the will of God, your sanctification, that you should abstain from sexual immorality, that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel and sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust, like the Gentiles who do not know God, that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter, because the Lord is the Avenger of all such as we also forewarned you and testified for God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore, he who rejects this does not reject man, but God who has also given us his Holy Spirit. The believers walk. How to walk and please the Lord. Let's look at that. You know there are guys who speak, I've heard this before, some of you perhaps have heard it also, maybe even said it, where people have said, I just want to know the will of the Lord. Why doesn't God tell me what his will is? I really want to know the will of the Lord, as if the Lord is going to, you know, hire somebody in one of those airplanes to go right across the sky. This is my will for you. Well, God has given to us his will. It's determined, it's rather demonstrated here in verse three. Listen to what he says. This is the will of God, your sanctification. And you see that's great, but he goes on to say that you should abstain from sexual immorality. This is the will of God, that you might have a life that set apart to God. And a life that is set apart to God is sexually pure. That's what he's saying. Many years ago I was an assisting pastor in another Calvary ministry. And the secretary of the church received a phone call with a request from somebody who didn't go to the church, but had been told that she ought to call and see if she could sit down with me. This was back in like 1979, 1980. And so I did a lot of the ministry counseling there and all. And so the senior pastor said, well, see if David will meet with her. And so long story made short, she didn't go to the church. She had just received advice to give a call and speak to me. And so I made an appointment to meet with her after a Sunday morning. And I waited for her. And she was supposed to bring her boyfriend. And she and her boyfriend were having some problems. And so as they came, as he came, rather she came and sat down in the office, I remember opening the conversation by saying something like, I thought you were having problems with a boyfriend. She said, we are having problems. And I said, and I was told that you wanted to talk to me with him that he was supposed to be here. And she said, well, he was supposed to be here. And I said, may I ask where he is? And she said, well, I went to go pick him up to bring him. But he was playing, I think he was playing either a football or playing a softball game with some friends. She said, I went to pick him up to bring him so we could meet with you, but he didn't want to come. So I chose to come by myself. And I said, oh, you've got a relational problem, but the person that you're having the problem with didn't want to come to counsel. She said, no, he wanted to place whatever game he was playing. I said, okay. I said, so what can we speak about? So she starts speaking to me concerning the problems and all. And it's never going to really be that effective if he's not there to kind of give his side or whatever. And so finally, as she's sharing, I asked her a couple of questions. I said to her this, I said, listen, are you a Christian? She said, yes. I said, and how do you know that you're a Christian? And she shared with me and she obviously knew enough of the gospel to have claimed Christ as her savior. And I said, okay, now your boyfriend, is he a Christian? She says, no, he's not. I said, your boyfriend's not a believer. And she said, no, I said, what are you doing with him? She says, well, he's my boyfriend. I said, I know. But the Bible says, be not unequally yoked together with an unbeliever. I said, the scripture teaches that a believer is not to have relationship with the nonbeliever. I said, have you not heard that? And she says, no, I've never heard that. I said, do you go to church? And she says, I go every Sunday.  She said, I've never been taught that. I said, well, there's a root of your problem. So we continued conversing. And then I said, what is it in particular that you really want to talk about? And she says, well, we've been having sex. And I said, oh, no, wait a minute. Okay, so you're with an unbeliever.  And she said, yes. I said, okay, has anybody ever told you that that's called fornication? That's a sexual sin?  Yes, you go to church. Yes. Has your pastor ever taught a passage that relates to that? She says he never has. I said, well, let me show you what the scripture says. We had our conversation at that time.   I said, so you're expected to somehow heal this? I said, it's not going to heal. I said, he didn't care enough about you to even come and sit down and talk to me about the problem. He's telling you how he feels by his absence. He's speaking loudly in this room by the fact that he's not here. So if you want advice, my advice is simple, break up with the guy and get right with God. He's not a believer. You're in sexual sin and you need to repent and move on with Christ. And she says, well, thank you. You know, that's not the kind of advice you probably wanted. But she said, thank you. And she left. She didn't go to the church. She never phoned again. We planted this church. So it was in 81. So we planted this church. And I got a letter in the mail and I still remember. I have it somewhere. I remember reading that letter where she said, you probably won't remember me. I was the young lady in your office crying about the relationship I had with a guy.  I needed to repent, get right with God and that God would heal me. She said, I just wanted to do some follow up. And it had by that time been three or four years. She said, I just wanted to do some follow up. She said, I took your advice. I broke up with him. I went to school. I joined went to college. I was in the Christian club on the college campus. I became the president of the Christian club. When I became president of the Christian club, I met a young man. We began to date. He asked me to marry him. And I want you to know that I was that young girl crying in your office. But now I'm that young woman following Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ. And I met the right guy. And I just want you to know that the Bible, you know, it isn't that this young lady wanted to be in sin. This young lady was basically following the course of the age, the course of the world, the things that people did. Because after all, if you like somebody, don't you sleep with them? And that's the way the world was even back almost 40 years ago now. It was already moving in that direction. But the Bible is very clear. And when I spoke to her and said, has nobody taught you this? She was not in a church that went through the Bible. And so she'd never been taught that. See, Paul made it very clear. And we're going to look at that right now. He says in verse three, this is the will of God, your sanctification that you should abstain from sexual immorality. Sexual immorality is really a single Greek word. And it's the Greek word is pernaeus. The word pernaeus speaks of every form of sexual practice that lies outside the circle of God's revealed will, including adultery, premarital, and extramarital intercourse, homosexuality, bestiality, and other perversions. Pornia, that is where you get the word porn from pornography is speaking of sexual practices. Now fornication or sexual immorality was common amongst the pagans and it still is. It's possible that the Thessalonians had continued its practice after their conversion. That's not improbable because sexual restraint was almost unheard of in Greek culture. For pagan Greeks, it was unreasonable to encourage people to sexual restraint. Because at that time it was assumed that a man would find sexual pleasure outside of marriage. And because of this sexual activity was lightly regarded, widely accepted as natural.  It was simply an appetite. And they likened it to an appetite or a desire to drink or desire to eat. As a matter of fact, Paul addresses that in 1 Corinthians chapter six, verse 13, because there was a statement at that time. They're saying, if you're hungry, you eat. And in 1 Corinthians 6, 13, Paul said, food for the stomach and the stomach for food.  The body isn't meant for sexual immorality, but for the Lord and the Lord for the body. You see, many today don't believe that fornication is a sin. Even in the church, there's a tremendous lack of understanding about this subject. Sexual promiscuity is incomplete with the life of holiness. Sexual sin destroys the foundation of intimacy that's established in the covenant of marriage. You see, by virtue of creation, marriage is God's design for proper sexual relationships. It's intended to be enjoyed between a man and a woman who are married. In Genesis 224, a man shall leave his father and mother be joined to his wife. They shall become one flesh. So God's command for marriage is intended to produce a godly couple producing God-fearing children. And sexual sin's a sin against God. It's not only a sin against God, but in a way, very practically, it's even a sin against your own self. In 1 Corinthians 6, 15, and 16, Paul said it like this, do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ? Shall I then take the members of Christ and make them members of a harlot? Certainly not. Or do you not know that he who is joined to a harlot is one body with her? For the two, he says, shall become one flesh. Sexual purity recognizes our relationship to God.  It destroys the marriage covenant. It often leads to divorce, and it very often leaves behind broken children. In Scripture, sexual involvement outside of marriage is revealed as sin. In Hebrews 13 verse 4, marriage should be honored by all, the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral. You see, the believer is to live a life that is blameless and holy before God and man. And the difference of our lifestyles, the difference between the lifestyle of a believer and an unbeliever should provide contrast. In Philippians 2 15, Paul said that you may become blameless and harmless children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation among whom you shine as lights in the world. Fornication is a serious sin. Some people don't think it is, but it is. Fornication is a sin that eliminates you from entrance into heaven. Somebody argues that that's not true. Really, Ephesians 5, 5 and 6, this you know, that no fornicator, unclean person, nor covetous man who is an idolater, has any inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and God. Let no one deceive you with empty words, for because of these things the wrath of God comes upon the sons of disobedience. Let no one deceive you.  He says in verse 4 that each of you should know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in passion of lust like the Gentiles who do not know God. We are to devote our bodies as sacred vessels that are devoted to Christ. Romans 12 1 and 2 says it like this, I beseech you therefore brethren by the mercies of God that you present your bodies as the living sacrifice, holy, acceptable to God, which is your reasonable service. Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind that you may prove what is that good and acceptable and perfect will of God. So we are to abstain through voluntary self-discipline from sexual sin. Now somebody says, well that's nice to say, but sexual desire can be very great.  Let me ask you a question. Because there are those guys who will say, man, you know, pastor, that's where you're making a mistake.   You understand that, don't you pastor? You ever remember that? Okay, here's your hypothetical question. You're with a girl, you're moving into a moment of intimacy, all systems are go. Would it make any difference to you just before you enter into sex, if she said to you, oh by the way, I'm HIV positive? Would that make any difference to you?  I suspect they would. I suspect immediately all of that. That's what would happen to you. Why? Because the fear of AIDS is greater in you than the fear of God. That's why, because it isn't God you fear, it's disease. And that's why the church is so messed up today, because the church doesn't fear God, because the church doesn't listen to what God says, because we know better than God. That's why. And the bottom line is, your body is a sacred vessel into the Lord. You have been dedicated to him for his service. Yes, sexual desire can be very great, but you need to remember the consequences. There's no such thing as a harmless sexual activity, no such thing. Besides the fact of it being a sin, there are also consequences like diseases and pregnancies, and then some have moved into abortions. He says in verse 5, we're not to have our bodies, we're not to have them in passion of lust like Gentiles. Notice who do not know God. Pagans don't have an idea about God's commands, Christian purity. They don't really care. They don't know the Lord. They haven't responded to him, but when we're saved, we're not to use our bodies for sinful passion, but for service to him. And says, so he says in verse 5, not in passion of lust like the Gentiles who don't know God, but here's something very practical, verse 6, that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter because the Lord is the Avenger of all such as we also forewarned you and testified that no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother. The word advantage means to gain something from somebody else. It speaks of taking advantage of somebody. The word defraud means to corrupt or try to corrupt the wife of somebody else, to try to alienate her affection or fidelity from her husband. One of the things that isn't spoken about is what Paul is speaking about right here. I'll read it again and I'll give you some insight into this. No one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter because the Lord is the Avenger of all such as we also forewarned you and testified. You're in church. You're single. You meet somebody. We'll take again. I'll use the male perspective as a man. You meet a young lady. She's sitting. You see her. You walk up to her. Hi, how are you? Go to the church. Yeah, how long you've been here? You make small talk. Before you know it, you see her again. Then you see her again. And after a while, you start thinking she doesn't seem to be attached. You looked at her hand. There's no ring there. So you talk to her. She's unmarried. She's unattached. Before you know it, you ask her out. Why not?  And she says, why not?  You visit with her. She's nice. She likes you. You go to Bible studies together. You go to church together. As a matter of fact, at first, you even meet each other in church. I'll see you there on Sunday. I'll see you there once or whenever you go. I'll see you. And now you're connecting.  But you've gone out once or twice and all. And you kind of played it kind of cool with her and all. You don't know whether or not she finds you attractive. So you're wondering.  I was real shy. You know, I'm a shy kind of guy. And I thought, well, you know, I don't know if she wants to hold my hand. Maybe that's too forward. So Marie and I, the girl I ended up marrying, Marie and I, you know, we go out on a date. And I started thinking, I wonder if I wonder if she'd like me to hold her hand. And we'd been going out for several weeks and I'd never touched her, never held her hand or anything like that. So I'm thinking, I wonder if she wants me to hold her hand. So I noticed she would put her purse on her left shoulder with her right hand free when I was standing on her right side. I noticed that. So I thought, I wonder if that's a hint. So what I did, this is a truth. I'm not lying. This is the truth. What I did is I pretended there was something on the ground as she took a couple of steps in front of me. Then I picked up my, and I walked around the other side where her purse was. And she switched her purse to the other side. So I thought, ah, she wants the touch. You know, I, so I thought, so I thought, I wonder if she's leaving that free for a reason. So I stopped again and she keeps walking and then I just kind of moseyed onto the other side. And now she's switching her purse to that. I didn't hold her hand for several weeks, several weeks, never did. Then one day the guy touches her hand. It's like electricity.  Oh, she's holding my hand.   So now some of you guys make out in the first night. I didn't. So I ain't kissing her for five months. So I think, yeah, maybe you ought to try that.  Well, what I'm really talking about is the law of diminishing return. There's this anticipation that you have even the first time you call him up for a date and your heart begins to raise. I hope that they answer the phone. I hope that she doesn't mind me calling. And then you have this rush when she says, oh, hi. And then there's that, how she visits with me. But now she's going out. Now I've held her hand. Now I've kissed her. And what happens, guys, is the thrill doesn't last.  And before you know it, she's respecting you.   But now you're starting to make moves on her. After a while, you'll wear her down a little bit before you know it. You're into relationship. You're in sex. And you're saying, this is wrong. I know I'm wrong. You feel like you're trapped for a while. She's feeling trapped. And then one day you say to her, you know what, we're not good for each other. And I'm so sorry, God forgive me how I've sinned against you and I've sinned against God. Forgive me, but we got to break up. And she says, I hear you on that.  She goes the other. And then one day some guy meets her in the same way you did. And he likes her and he talks to her. He takes her out, but he treats her like a lady. He treats her the way she's supposed to be treated. He treats her with honor and respect. He opens her door. He pays for the meal. He shows the kind of respect a man should show for a woman. And she says to herself, now this is a real man. He reads the word. He prays with her. He serves next to her. And then one day he says to her after weeks, months, a year, whatever, he says, you know what, you are the girl that I prayed for. I know that God prepared you just for me. And I want you to marry me. Will you marry me? And she looks at him. And she's kept a secret. She hasn't said anything. And she finally says, well, you know what, man, we've been doing well together and I really have grown to love you. But we haven't really talked about some things that you probably ought to know.  And I was with him. And I gave my purity to him. And that man looks at her. You defrauded your brother. That's what Paul's talking about. You defrauded your brother. You took from him what belonged to him, which is her purity. You took it. You used it, got rid of it. Oh, God, thank you for your forgiveness. I knew. But her husband was defrauded of what belonged rightfully to him because of what you did. And that's what Paul is saying here. He says it. Listen, no one should take advantage of and defraud his brother in this matter because the Lord is the Avenger of all such as we also forewarned you and testified. Somebody said promiscuity before marriage represents the robbing of the other of that virginity, which ought to be brought to a marriage. The future partner of such a one has been defrauded. Paul says, live in purity. Don't take what doesn't belong to you.  Because that's what God has called men to do is to honor, respect, and cherish those women. And when a woman yields herself, she loses a part of herself. You're defrauded.  Sexual sin, yeah, it's a sin.  It's a testimony to people. There are people who talk about all the problems they have in marriage and this and that. It's not that we don't have problems. Marie and I have problems. She doesn't always agree with me. She eventually doesn't. That's why the problem is solved. No, we, but you know what? We've always known as a married couple, we've always known that God comes first. He's the one who brought us together. He's the one who keeps us together and we together serve him. And we haven't found any mountain or obstacle that we can overcome with him. We can do all things through Christ who strengthens us, but we've had to learn. We have to learn how to love one another, how to care for one another. And so Paul is simply saying that, that, that a man should not be defrauding, taking advantage of another man by taking from that man that which didn't belong to him. And so be careful in these issues of sexual immorality because it's destructive in so many ways. He says in verse seven, God did not call us to uncleanness, but in holiness. Therefore, he who rejects this doesn't reject man, but God who has also given us his Holy Spirit. If you ignore this, he's saying you will reap what you sow. And God is the Avenger. God administrates justice fairly and no sin goes ignored. There are repercussions that will follow. Remember, God didn't call us to uncleanness, but to live holy separated lives. You see, sexual purity reflects on the purity of the whole person. Your character is revealed through your obedience to God's Word because the Holy Spirit, coupled with the Holy Word, when obeyed, produces holy lives.  Therefore, he said in verse eight, he who rejects this doesn't reject man, but God. So somebody says, well, that's your opinion, Paul says, no, you're not rejecting me. You're rejecting God. You're rejecting what God says in his Word. And by rejecting the command, you in reality are rejecting the God who gave it. And so this is that serious sin, so serious that he took this much time to speak concerning it. Many have failed. I don't say this lightly because it could be taken lightly. Many have failed. But guess what? My God is forgiving God and a loving God. Our God forgives. And I believe in something called second virginity, which simply means that you can come to faith in Christ, you can be washed clean from your sin, and you can live as if you have never been touched. You can live in such a way that your life is as pure. And yes, there are physical things that cannot be denied, but you can start over in Christ and you can have a pure and beautiful life and you can and will be forgiven by God. And he changes you. Now, I don't want to go into many personal details about this. I have a friend whose wife and I'll leave him unnamed because it's too personal, but I will say this, a friend whose wife was a prostitute and the Lord saved her. And this friend of mine is a pastor and his wife serves Jesus with purity because God forgives and he heals and he cleanses anyone in Christ. It's a new creation. All things are passed away. Behold, all things become new. So if you failed, just lift it to God. God forgive me. I am a sinner. I need you. Wash me, cleanse me, make me new. I will follow you and the Lord will answer that prayer and you will be brand new in him. That's the God that we serve and he will wash and he will cleanse you. Keep that in mind. Keep that in mind.


Ubiquiti Edge Switch 10x. This is not a bad little switch right here. I like these and they have a specific use case. So I'm obviously a big fan of the Unify line because of the control plane being able to manage a bunch of switches, see them on a dashboard. And yes, these do support UNMS, but UNMS is not as full-featured as the full Unify dashboard. But there are times when people want just a basic switch to do some programming. It's not likely to change. It doesn't really need to be dynamic, so to speak. So, yeah, the Unibiquiti's Edge Switch line is really good for that. Plus, they actually support some more advanced features that you don't get with Unify with certain models of the Edge Switch because not all Edge Switches are equal. This is a more basic version, which I'm struggling to get apart after I snap to bed together. Just don't have the fingernails for it. There we go. Already took the screws out. It doesn't come apart this easy, but I figured, hey, let's start by looking at the hardware on it. So the first thing about the Edge Switch 10x is it can be a little bit difficult to slide apart. All right, but you're not usually taking switches apart. That's my job. Passively cooled, big heat sink, doesn't get warm. So short answer on that. Let's look at the overhead real quick. So taking a look at it here, pretty simple design. This is non-POE. We do have this kind of cool to where the LEDs come for the SFP ports on here and just one heat sink on it. But like I said, it doesn't really get hot. And then inside of it, if you kind of look, I thought this is neat. They have a, so the front lights come on right here. There's the LEDs for it. And it's actually two different separate LEDs that go into here. So this can change between the two different status colors on it. So not a lot to look at inside of them. They're pretty simple. So slide the lid back on. Oh, by the way, if you didn't notice, it does have these.  That's why when it goes together, it is really solid. So let me just slide this and slide this. It goes together easy. It just doesn't come apart as easy. There's only two screws here and a screw on each of the back sides. Got a ground 24 volt DC. Yes, it does come with the adapter. So pretty straightforward, pretty simple. Like I said, as far as ports go, two SFP, not SFP plus and eight one gig ports that are supported on this. So pretty basic when it comes in terms of features, like I said, but if you have a simple switch need and you don't need the whole unified control plane, which is what a few people have mentioned to me like, I don't feel like loading the whole unified software. I want just a basic switch, supports VLANs and doesn't need some separate software. So, you know, there's a web interface directly on this and that's what this is. So with that being said, let's start logging into it and dig in. Oh, we'll comment too on the back here. Easy wall mount, you know, the little offset slide in us crews for the wall mount. So it makes it easy enough when you're putting this in like a little tight space back wall or something like that. So I like that. All right, so we're logged into the Edge Switch and it's pretty simple. It is not like the more advanced full feature Edge Switch. It does not have layer three routing capabilities in this particular model. Like I said, the Edge Switch 10X is the little bit more basic one, but it does have VLAN support and support for a few other things. So we can go here and say, enable port one isolate flow control DHCP. Don't disable the port you're plugged into. You will have a bad time, but spanning tree is on there. We have the ability to reset port link, grab some info about it. If there's any port dropped and how many packets and get a little transfer notice here, you can set the mode. You can also take and bind a few of these together to a lag interface. Pretty simple just by clicking that. It doesn't have, if I'm not mistaken, yeah, it only supports if we do, let's lag together six and seven. So if we lag six and then seven, then we select the ports. The only option is aggregate that shows up in here. So you can edit, lag static lag, enable STP, blah, blah, blah. So pretty basic when it comes here, but it gets a job done. It does have some of those options on there to do that. Now, right now I do have another computer plugged into port three and let's talk about VLANs real quick. Now, I do like this switch, but I will admit, when you're on here, it is more difficult compared to the Unify line to set up VLANs. This is one of the reasons I don't push home users to the Edge Switch line. I think they're a great product or solid, but this causes a lot of confusion when they are trying to figure out how to do this. And what we have here is one is the trunk port and then we're bringing all the VLANs in and then this is a default VLAN, but we've excluded port three and that's what my computer's plugged into. And by excluding port three and then setting VLAN ID 50, calling it VLAN 50, setting it to tagged on this, excluded from these, it's automatically, it's gonna be excluded based on the lag and then untagged on port three. This now brings VLAN 50 to port three and gives my computer this IP address. So you see my computer now has <IP_ADDRESS>. And if I move this over to port two on the Switch, so it's plugged into three, just move it over to two here, make sure I wait, make sure my computer drops the connection. So, all right, now it's gonna DHCP and ask for another one. And now this one is all and then all again coming over here, which actually the native network was gonna provide on there. So, now that my computer has another IP address, I'll switch back over to here. Do the IF config, it's thinking right now. It's got an IP address, IF config. Now we have <IP_ADDRESS> by moving over versus we had the 50 address previously right here. Now, the reason I bring this up is this is like one of those things that people want is to know how to set up VLANs and take a lot of questions. And like I said, it's not difficult if you know what you're looking at. They have documentation on the website how to do this, but it is different versus we'll pull up the Unify, just when we have a direct comparison because this is what people ask about all the time. So, right here is the port in my studio Switch that the system's plugged into and move it over so you can see better. So, it's plugged into this port right here and this port's just empty right now. But if we wanted to change this from all and we are on port three right now, I would just change it to 50. There's no tagging, untagging. That's happening. It's just happening behind the scenes and made really intuitive here to then tag this VLAN to this port. So, if I wanted to make port two equal VLAN tag 50, I just hit the pull down in there and of course you then can do some test profile. This is a lot of our lab stuff. That's why you see it in like our YouTube demo video I have set up in here, the storage 10G. I can bring that right over to here if I wanted just with clicking it and not have to worry about trunking it between all the lines and choosing the trunk and choosing a tagged and untagged for all that fun stuff. All right, back over to the Edge Switch. Can you SSH into it? You sure can. Let's do that real quick. So, we'll go over here and do that in the menu. So, okay, do have it turned on already. Management IP, it does support putting the management ID in a different VLAN in case those are wondering. So, if I wanted to put the management to grab it but grab VLAN ID 50, I could do that and make that my management VLAN. It does support UNMS, SSH service turned on. Web server, port 80 and 443 secure, that's on there. IPv6 support, that's there. Switch settings, it does have jumbo frame support and a couple different options for the spanning support. One of the other things I thought was kind of neat over here on the tools, they do have the Mac table, a discovery so you can discover other things on the same link, the ability of paying some addresses. So, handy little utilities, they have them built into the interface and finally let's SSH into this. UBNT at <IP_ADDRESS> and we are in. And now, like I said, this is still not as full-featured so some of the extra features you may see in the more powerful line of edge switches aren't there but we do have quite a few different options and things we can do inside of here to configure the switch. It has a configuration mode, restore defaults, reboot, blah, blah, blah, a lot of the other things in here. Trace route to network hosts and a few others. And I'm not gonna dive deep into the command line in this particular video, it's just a review of the edge switch, like a quick review. It's been kicking around the lab for a little while and this is a lot of times what we use it for. One, so we can test configurations on it and not that there's a lot to configure but sometimes people have some questions on it or we just wanna build something out in the lab and there are kind of handy little switches that we have deployed for some one-off jobs like I said, we're not managing the infrastructure of it and we wanted something that's easiest to log into for example, to manage a couple cameras or that need to be separate in a couple of VLANs but they're solid, they're reliable, we've never had a problem with them, they're nice switches overall but they're less recommended really for home users due to the fact that unless you wanna learn some of that extra VLAN tagging by the way you can switch all that from the command line as well so it is a great tool to learn on but that being said, people who go I just want it to work and I need something easy, I still push them over to the unified line because well, it's just it's easier for a lot of people which is one of the reasons it's so popular as a system but it's not a bad switch at all, I do recommend it and I'll leave a link, a affiliate link below where you can get one, thanks and thank you for making it to the end of the video. 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