This week's notable links - June 3, 2024
This is my regular digest of links and media I found notable over the last week. Did I miss something? Let me know!
The 21 best science fiction books of all time – according to New Scientist writers
This list of the New Scientist's favorite science fiction books is brilliant. The books I've read that are included here are some of my favorites of all time; the others are on my to-read list. What's your favorite?
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How Black Lives Became The Hidden Cost of Clean Energy
"The nation, fractured by war, disease, and famine, has seen more than 6 million people die since the mid-1990s, making the conflict the deadliest since World War II. But, in recent years, the death and destruction have been aided by the growing number of electric vehicles humming down American streets."
A good reminder that our desire for batteries and power has a human impact, no matter which path we take. Renewable energy is still a far better choice, but we run the risk of thinking that "clean" tech is truly clean without doing the work necessary to ensure that everyone in the supply chain is well taken care of.
Solidarity campaigns and activism to protect peoples' lives are good, but it's notable that we never really get to hear about them, and this issue is rarely, if ever, mentioned in the tech press.
As the piece points out:
"“We’re always on the menu, but we’re never at the table,” he said. “The space of transportation planning and climate change is mostly white people, or people of color that aren’t Black, so these discussions about exploitation aren’t happening in those spaces — it is almost like a second form of colonialism.”"
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“The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been”
"The way we raise the money at The Guardian is different than any place I’ve ever been. This is truly a jointly owned responsibility among the business side and editorial."
Every non-profit newsroom needs to move their center of gravity from large contributions to smaller, distributed support from its reader base. The Guardian is doing it incredibly well, and there's a lot to learn from how it's going about things.
I'm not sure about the idea of tracking revenue per article, but the idea of making the whole newsroom involved in its continued existence doesn't seem bad to me (even if it goes against accepted orthodoxy). The trick is not taking it too far, and being open to secondary or tertiary effects. There are some stories that are vitally important even if they aren't obvious moneymakers, and newsrooms must retain a strong argument for running them.
The Guardian's "epic" at the bottom of every article drives a ton of revenue for them, and I'd love to learn more about how they optimize it in practice.
Finally, this seems right to me, and something for all news (for-profit and non-profit alike) to emulate:
"Nine or 10 years ago, we did a lot of work to decide whether we should have a paywall or not. And we decided that we would both fulfill our mission better, but we would also generate more revenue, if there were no paywall. Now it’s part of our DNA and we talk about it every day."
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User Research Is Storytelling
I shared this with my team and one of them said they had to check that I didn't write it. This is exactly how I think about (and ask my team to think about) rooting software development in human needs.
"All the elements of a good story are there in the three-act structure of user research." And if I'd written a post about it, it might look a little bit like this one.
There's a reason for the closeness: both our processes were informed by Nancy Duarte, who is very clear about the role of the three act structure. The details of my approach are a little bit different to what’s laid out in this post - something I may write about in a future post. #Technology
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Unexpected Anti-Patterns for Engineering Leaders
"The key to effective engineering leadership lies in figuring out which scenarios are worth deliberately defying conventional logic, and when to simply follow the rules."
Lots of good food for thought here. I've definitely been guilty of some of the anti-patterns here - particularly trying to be an umbrella for my team, which can leave people out of the loop and let them feel like they're lacking needed transparency.
The key is being able to jump in and get into the weeds when it's helpful, get out when it's not, and give everybody the context, culture, information, and resources they need in order to do their best work in service of the mission, vision, and strategy.
Speaking of, I love this:
"There’s this pervasive belief that there’s no strategy anywhere, but that’s not true. There is strategy everywhere, it’s just rarely written."
That's been true of every organization I've joined, and - if I'm honest with myself - every organization I've started.
"Complicating things even further, Larson also has found that many companies do have a habit of writing things down, they just aren’t the right things. “It’s the small decisions that end up getting documented,” Larson says. “You’d think it would be the opposite, but in my experience, the answers to important questions like, ‘Why did we go into this business? Why are we shutting down this business line? Why are we doing this services migration that's going to take five years?’ literally aren't written down anywhere.”"
Encouraging people to write reflections, to capture the "why" of decisions that were made, and, essentially, to journal the journey of the team and the company is rarely done, but I think forms part of a solution to many problems. #Technology
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Who actually uses Instagram’s Threads app? Taiwanese protestors
"While young Taiwanese users discuss everything from relationships to celebrity gossip on Threads, the app has gradually become a gathering space for progressives, who favor independence from China to defend the island’s democracy."
Threads has an official stance of not promoting political use. This is an example, though, of how any social platform will be political whether you want it to be or not - and therefore how the challenges and responsibilities surrounding that speech will present themselves regardless of whether you want them to.
I think there's no alternative: every mass social platform must assume that it will host political content from vulnerable groups (as well as powerful ones) and staff up appropriately. #Technology
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Study Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are Wrong
On answering programming questions:
"We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers."
To be fair, I do expect AI answers to get better over time, but it's certainly premature to use it as a trusted toolkit for software development today. One might argue that its answers are more like suggestions for an engineer to check and adapt as appropriate, but will they really be used that way?
I think it's more likely that AI agents will be used to build software by people who want to avoid engaging with a real, human engineer, or people who want to cut corners for one reason or another. So I think the warnings are appropriate: LLMs are bad at coding and we shouldn't trust what they say. #AI
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