Posted in 2023

A few random opportunities in AI for Social Good

Recently a few friends have reached out asking if I knew of any opportunities to work on AI-related things that also have some kind of pro-social tie-in. I think a lof people see AI as a technology with a lot of potential, but in an environment of companies that don’t seem to prioritize the benefit of human-kind over the never-ending hype machine and the promise of hyperscale growth.

So I asked around a few places to see if folks had recommendations for using skills in machine learning or artificial intelligence, but in a context that was explicitly for the benefit of humanity or otherwise pro-social. Here are a few that stood out (they are 100% not vetted, I’m just passing along information in case it’s useful so please tell me if there’s something wrong or problematic in here):

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A Sphinx directive for social media embeds

I often want to link to social and other types of web-based media in my Sphinx documentation and blog. Rather than embedding it all in custom HTML code, I decided to write a little wrapper to turn it into a directive.

It’s called {socialpost}, and it works with Twitter, Mastodon, and YouTube links.

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Report from FOSDEM23: beautiful chaos in a conference

I recently attended FOSDEM 2023, my first FOSDEM! I had heard of the conference before, but hadn’t really looked into it too much. Fortunately, after some urging from friends and social media, I took a deeper look and decided I should join to see what all the fuss was about.

Here are a few things that I noticed while I was there.

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Bundle extensions with your Sphinx theme

Sphinx is great because it has a ton of useful extensions that let you grow its functionality. However, a downside of this is that users have to actually learn about those extensions and activate them manually. It’s not hard, but it’s a non-trivial amount of discovery work.

One way to solve this is for themes to bundle extensions on their own. This way they can include functionality via an extension rather than writing custom code on their own.

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