#41 CYB: AI, Web Memoirs, and Wintery Things to Eat
This is the Tech Issue, so nerd out with me.
Northern California winter image, 2019.
Spring is actually about to happen in California (once we get through repeated bouts of an atmospheric river). This reality fills me with joy but also reminds me that our winter is only about 10 weeks long, nothing compared to much of the world.
Nevertheless, I relish the longer days and the better hiking weather when it’s not pouring. I’m also deep into improving my AI skills, cooking what we get in our farm box, and weightlifting. My new coach has helped improve my squat depth and form and build strength, Picking up heavy pieces of metal, putting them down, and carrying them around gives me so much pleasure. Who knew that barbells, dumbells, and kettlebells would help me to win the endorphin lottery? Not this girl.
My regular AI reads
Linked In, AI Threads, my Feedly reader, the OpenAI Developer Forum and newsletter subscriptions keep me aware of what’s happening with AI, but it’s overwhelming. These are the people writing about AI-related topics that I turn to on the regular:
Beth Kanter: Beth writes, facilitates, and talks about AI in the nonprofit workplace, both for Microsoft for Nonprofits and as part of her practice. Her book The Smart Nonprofit, Staying Human in an Automated World,(with Allison Fine), is a great read.
Ethan Mollick: A professor at Wharton School of Business. Mollick’s book, Co-Intelligence, Living and Working with AI, comes out from PenguinRandom House on April 1. Till then, check out One Useful Thing, his invaluable substack newsletter.
Jeremy Caplan: Wonder Tools. Caplan focuses on productivity tools, workflow, and processes. He highlights and tests new products and explains their use case. This recent post on an AI tool called Bloks, for example, explains how it summarizes meeting notes, describes the app, and shares information about alternative tools as well.
Web memoirs: Web 2.0 and the Early Oughts Come Back into Sight
So many great posts and series are now looking back at what feels like a more innocent time on the World Wide Web (aka the Internet). around 2004-2010. As an OG, I enjoy the remembrances, but for the 33-year-olds, who were 14 in 2006, these stories might be golden.
Building Slack: Stories of building Slack — the company, the product, the business, and the culture — told by two employees who were around for the entire journey from @johnnyrodgersvancity and alirayal.
Glenn Fleishman, Pipe Dreams, The Life and Times of Yahoo Pipes, is a look at an ahead-of-its-time product from Yahoo, at a time when Yahoo! engineers had the bandwidth to build innovative tools like Pipes.
Ben Smith, Traffic: Genius, Rivalry and Delusion in the Rush to Go Viral, Penguin Random House, 2023: Smith tells the story of Buzzfeed, Gawker, The Huffington Post, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, and other media entities and platforms that changed online advertising and then set the stage for the online hate wars to come.
Richard MacManus, Bubble Blog: From Outsider to Insider in Silicon Valley’s Web 2.0 Revolution : Richard MacManus’ memoir of his experiences running his tech blog, ReadWriteWeb, during the first decade of the 2000s, is a great read. Richard was smart and engaged back then–and still is–so this memoir offers both wonderful retellings about key moments and key people, and an honest look back and appraisal.
COOKING
Every week, I pick up the Full Bell Farm farm box from a porch in Berkeley, go home, and figure out what to prepare with the squashes, greens, rutabagas, turnips, and leeks in the winter farm boxes. Thank goodness for the recipes on the Full Belly farm site, which offer options.
My new discoveries are iron-skillet sauteed carrots with onion-chili crisp and maple syrup, rutabagas or turnips cut up and roasted, then mixed with maple syrup and black pepper, and a kale salad with quick watermelon pickle that my family gobbled up.
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All best,
Susan
PS If you would like to know more about the training, coaching, and workshops planned for nonprofit staff and leaders who want to improve their skills using AI (or just get started)--or would like a digital copy of our NEW AI Training Brochure, reach out to susan@collectiveagencyllc.com