May 2019

Podcast: Throughline - Resistance is Futile

• 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: Throughline - Opioids In America

• 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: Software Engineering Daily - Emerging Markets: Kenya with Nelly Cheboi

• 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 Wikipedia and hosting it locally behind NGINX