In February 1996, I came up with a way to measure and report website traffic remotely. I put an image on my ‘HTML Corner’ website, served from my own server, named it Nedstat (the directory needed a name), and built the first version. When the page loaded, a file was updated on the server. Clicking the image triggered a Perl script that reported: last 10 visitors (due to a bug it was 11, don’t ask) visitors per day, per hour, per country. Real time. Simple. But this idea didn’t exist yet. I thought immediately: this could be something big.

I emailed the ‘Surprising Site of the Day’, a Dutch cool-site-of-the-day equivalent, run by Hans Veldhuizen. We already knew each other; I built a lot of sites and had been featured before. He wrote back: HTML Corner is nice, tomorrow you’re SSotD, but what’s on it, that Nedstat, that beats everything. We need to talk.

How and why I built an alternative.

The problem

Nobody seems truly happy with social media. The algorithm feeds you content that makes you angry, your feed is full of people you barely know, and it feels more like a shopping street than a town square: glance at one ad for a few seconds and you’re immediately flooded with ads from ten competitors. Your data is merchandise. It feels gross.

The nostalgia for 2016 makes sense: just your friends’ updates, in order, no AI and all that other noise, back when the word ‘doomscrolling’ didn’t even exist yet.

But nobody uninstalls. Because you’d also lose the updates from your friends: the holidays, the hobbies, the parties, the personal stories. You’re trapped.

I’ve been spending the past few months coding with AI. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Design before you delegate

Your own job is to build a smart architecture and data model. Use your unique creative thinking, and your own experience. For example, I never want to deal with timezones, so everything is always UTC until it’s displayed. That’s a decision the AI won’t make for you.

But you can’t plan everything upfront. You will iterate. Sometimes your idea just doesn’t work. This means you need to refactor all the time. It’s ok. Make many small refactors. Don’t wait until big ones are needed.

Experts speak. A Robotics professor and a researcher in Applied Mathematics from Johns Hopkins University discuss how AI can aid in the fight against climate change

When you read the title, you might wonder: How can something as virtual and abstract as AI assist in combating something as vast and tangible as climate change? Fortunately, the speakers have developed a clever framework that makes this understandable and logical by breaking it down into three clear areas: understanding the problem, predicting the direction, and assisting in the required transformation.

1. Understand the Problem

What do we know for certain? CO2 levels are rising, and the greenhouse effect is real. However, data collection is not very detailed. In the ocean, AI aids in operating autonomous underwater robots equipped with sensors. Remote control is impractical because radio waves do not work underwater, making AI a useful tool for enabling independent navigation.

Africa is a continent with countless challenges, yet the energy question is, of course, a global one. Because ’necessity is the mother of invention’, this panel suggests that it is worthwhile to look at Africa to see what solutions are being found there for energy supply.

First, some facts. 600 million people in sub-Saharan Africa have no electricity. An average refrigerator in the West uses as much electricity as a family in Kenya or Nigeria. And while global energy supply is improving, it is also predicted that by 2030, 90% of people without electricity will be in sub-Saharan Africa.

What happens then: Leapfrogging the grid. Just as mobile telephony meant that the landline telephone network was more or less skipped over, people are now installing solar on their roofs themselves. Because you can’t necessarily count on the government. South Africa is highly dependent on coal, but the high-grade coal is shipped to China, and South Africa itself has to make do with low-grade. And that’s not going to change quickly: The government is closely intertwined with the coal industry.