Stuff I've Been Reading - March 1, 2024

This is a collection of some of the articles, blog posts, podcasts, etc, that I've read in the past couple of weeks. I'm hoping to make this more of a weekly post on Fridays. We'll see!

I'm immediately going to break the premise of this list and share an article that I wrote for LeadDev: How to plan for and mitigate different types of tech debt. Different sources of what we call "tech debt" is something I've written about before. The LeadDev article is a more focused—and better edited!—look at how to proactively plan for "debt" coming from different places.

Here lies the internet, murdered by generative AI, by Erik Hoel. Hoel paints a bleak picture, not of an AI-dominated future, but of a present where AI-generated content dominates the web. Cheap dross stuffed with SEO keywords and designed to game recommendation algorithms to make just enough money to be profitable. And he's not the only one experiencing this rapid descent into bot-driven nonsense.

Molly White, the genius behind Web3IsGoingGreat, put together a 30-minute follow-along intro to becoming a Wikipedia editor. It's a great tour that steers away from some of the deeper—and more daunting—aspects of the editor community and quickly gets into concrete ways to chip in and help out.

It’s The Impunity, Stupid, by E.W. Niedermeyer, dives deep into nearly a decade of Tesla's pattern of flouting environmental laws and the (lack of) regulatory apparatus that enables it.

And speaking of Musk and his disdain for regulators, apparently the only thing keeping Twitter in compliance with its FTC consent decree is staff actively disobeying his instructions.

Otherwise, this week has been a mix of job searching, getting some writing thoughts down, D&D session prep, and painting minis.

And I learned about jubensha, which—as a TTRPG player that loves the "RP" part—sounds unbelievably fun.