Links and listens #5

Got out of Taipei today for a short trip to Hsinchu. We don't get to do that as much as we'd hope, so it was nice to spend a bit of time wandering around one of the smaller cities on the island.

Found myself nodding along to this short post about the uneven distribution of AI's benefits and "value creation". It's timely, especially with the AI Summit happening in Paris this week, and the release of a Joint Statement on Limiting AI’s Environmental Impact which we (Green Web Foundation) and 100+ other organisations are signatories to.

The two groups of actors that truly benefit from generative AI so far are 1) a dozen or so of big tech companies and 2) to a smaller degree, employers who might get some small efficiency gain out of their employees.

It’s the opposite of the (long debunked) Trickle Down Economics of yesteryear: The financial value bubbles to the very top, and only trace amounts of the value capture happens anywhere below.

Tangentially related to the above, Om Malik writes about the growth of fixed connection broadband availability around the globe, which now reaches 1.5 billion people. He also looks at what lies ahead with caution as the next billion people connect with fast fixed broadband connections.

Looking ahead, the challenge isn’t simply about reaching the next billion connections. The world faces a more complex problem: preventing a new form of digital bifurcation where advanced markets pull even further ahead. If artificial intelligence (AI) becomes a core part of all digital experiences, the lack of connectivity will leave a large swath of humanity behind, simply because they lack access to better digital tools.

Not a long read, but rather a handy tool shared by Chris over on the Frontend Masters blog.

A really enjoyable interview pod from The Changelog, where Jerod and Adam chatted with Bert Hubert about building software that lasts. This is super important in todays age of "npm installing away our problems". Bert covers the expected stuff, like keeping projects simple and reducing complication in code. But he also mentions other things, like walking a mile in the shoes of your support team so you can feel the pain of the things you might put out into the world.

... we all know that we should not write software that is as complicated as we can make it because that's not going to end well. But everyone said, look, we had very bad experience. Like we need to figure out seven years ago why this clever code, what it actually does and then often you find that this clever code there was no need to make it clever. ... even if you have 25 [political parties], there is no need to set up a complicated data structure to hold 25 political affiliation names. But one day you might sit there and say, hey, wouldn't it be useful? Wouldn't it be fun if we had a complicated red-black tree so that we could make really rapid searches of our 25 political parties. And, and then you sit there and maybe in 2032 trying to debug why it doesn't work. And, and that's because you try to be clever.

Bert Hubert

More a watch than a listen but hey, Honeypot make damn good developer documentaries. This one about Angular is no exception.