May 2019

Last updated 6 years ago

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Podcast:

On the topic of AI and ML being "scary", Throughline goes over some other historical trends
Coffee used to be "scary" by 1500 Ottomans
- "Innovation and it's Enemies" - a book on innovations that were initially unwanted
- Coffee and caffeine driving away from traditional structures, like coffee houses instead of mosques. Lack of knowledge on potential side effects caused fear as well.
- All it took was a head official loving coffee to stop bans
- Coffee was demonized by the Christians until Pope Clement tried it and decided to baptize it (lol)
- I suppose a structure of the story is going here: all it takes is one influential person to change everyone's minds immediately.
- Coffee as a new innovative substance is demonized sometimes.
Also talks about how tractors and telephones displaced jobs, but of course are now 100% accepted.
- Women telephone operators did not have too much issue finding new jobs as the 1970s comes around and opens up.
  - Have we reached at a point where tech changes too fast? Displacing jobs too quickly?

Podcast:

Today's crisis is not the first time the United States has been addicted to pain relievers.
Older: Phoebus Cartel - Lightbulbs can potentially last much longer, but planned obsolescence is a thing.

Podcat:

Talks with Nelly Cheboi, who is running an organization who wants to provide laptops, computers, and low-latency availability of computer science study resources to students across Africa.
Fascinating to hear how she approached some of the challenges of bringing tech to African markets:
- Africa is emerging as a tech market, availability of web and development tools is a great equalizer. You don't need a high-powered expensive computer to code out the next Airbnb or Facebook.
- Near-unlimited latency and network availability that Americans take for granted is not as available in African markets. It presents an interesting choice architect challenge: why would I use up all 50MB of my allotted 3G data for the month on one youtube coding tutorial when I could use it for thousands of WhatsApp chats with my friends?
- Nelly is tackling this in interesting ways, with a kind of edge-caching approach for resources that are likely going to require more access.
  - Downloading popular coding tutorial videos and website to local caches and serving them using her own web servers.
  - Even downloading popular public resources like and hosting it locally behind NGINX

Last updated 6 years ago

Was this helpful?

Podcast:

On the topic of AI and ML being "scary", Throughline goes over some other historical trends
Coffee used to be "scary" by 1500 Ottomans
- "Innovation and it's Enemies" - a book on innovations that were initially unwanted
- Coffee and caffeine driving away from traditional structures, like coffee houses instead of mosques. Lack of knowledge on potential side effects caused fear as well.
- All it took was a head official loving coffee to stop bans
- Coffee was demonized by the Christians until Pope Clement tried it and decided to baptize it (lol)
- I suppose a structure of the story is going here: all it takes is one influential person to change everyone's minds immediately.
- Coffee as a new innovative substance is demonized sometimes.
Also talks about how tractors and telephones displaced jobs, but of course are now 100% accepted.
- Women telephone operators did not have too much issue finding new jobs as the 1970s comes around and opens up.
  - Have we reached at a point where tech changes too fast? Displacing jobs too quickly?

Podcast:

Today's crisis is not the first time the United States has been addicted to pain relievers.
Older: Phoebus Cartel - Lightbulbs can potentially last much longer, but planned obsolescence is a thing.

Podcat:

Talks with Nelly Cheboi, who is running an organization who wants to provide laptops, computers, and low-latency availability of computer science study resources to students across Africa.
Fascinating to hear how she approached some of the challenges of bringing tech to African markets:
- Africa is emerging as a tech market, availability of web and development tools is a great equalizer. You don't need a high-powered expensive computer to code out the next Airbnb or Facebook.
- Near-unlimited latency and network availability that Americans take for granted is not as available in African markets. It presents an interesting choice architect challenge: why would I use up all 50MB of my allotted 3G data for the month on one youtube coding tutorial when I could use it for thousands of WhatsApp chats with my friends?
- Nelly is tackling this in interesting ways, with a kind of edge-caching approach for resources that are likely going to require more access.
  - Downloading popular coding tutorial videos and website to local caches and serving them using her own web servers.
  - Even downloading popular public resources like and hosting it locally behind NGINX