Blog #164: Three Reading Lists (2023)

Summarising the best links in Machine Intelligence, Elixir, and Engineering Leadership Source: DALL-E

[ED: This is just a friendly reminder that some new content will be on the way. This post has very little technical detail, but fear not; some genuinely technical stuff is behind the links.]

Of the back of a couple of posts from early in the New Year (here, here, and here) which seemed to be relatively well-received, I decided to be a bit more rigorous and regular with my reading list posts this year.

Starting from the end of this month, I am going to try to publish a short “reading list” post for relevant links and references on the following topics:

• * Machine Intelligence: anything concerning intelligent machines
• * The Elixir Ecosystem: anything that I have found useful in my ongoing effort to become proficient with the wonderful Elixir language and its surrounding ecosystem
• * Engineering Leadership: anything that piques my interest with respect to engineering leadership
• * Update 20240220: I recently added a fourth reading list: Irresponsible AI. This one tackles all of the weird or failure cases of AI when we didn’t stop to think about the full ramifications of the use of AI at scale.

Within those three categories, I will collect links and references over the previous month that I have read or found useful in my ongoing quest to learn as much as possible about the things that I find most relevant to my career and the role emerging technologies will play in it.

Full disclosure: I cheat [ED: If “cheat” is the right word?] just a little bit with this workflow by using GPT to generate a short summary for each article and a couple of hashtags. As I was preparing for this new content, I noticed that GPT is quite good at creating a one- or two-sentence précis that can give you a feel for whether or not the article is worth visiting.

I hope this ends up being an interesting test of the “humans and machines working together” operating model for machine intelligence. A human (me) will filter content by applying my sensibilities as to what is relevant and meaningful. A machine (GPT) will be doing the grunt work of generating the summary and the hashtags.

I will publish the first reading lists (for January 2024) here on Medium, but I am setting up a dedicated blog for this content and will move it all over to that when it is ready.

I’ll try this out for Q1 and see how it goes. I’ll continue if I can get the workflow down to a few minutes a day over and above the article reading time. If not, I will re-assess.

Originally published by M@ on Medium.