Recommended resources
You won't find affiliate links here. Books lack links so as not to direct you to any specific store. I have no vested interest in driving traffic or readers to these resources other than to popularise ideas that I'd argue bear repeating.
Podcasts
Deep Questions with Cal Newport
Hosted by computer-science professor Cal Newport, the podcast presents — in my opinion — one of the most balanced and nuanced takes on AI and digital ethics that I've seen.
Cal's non-absolutist takes on AI are especially refreshing — the episodes usually approach the subject from a purely utilitarian or financial perspective. You won't find hype (or anti-hype) here, only objective and evidence-based discussions of the tech. One of the most important ideas that Cal is popularising at the moment is that the deep negative psychological impact of AI doomerism hype far outweighs the merits of the technology.
Favourite episodes: Has AI conquered coding?, Are we about to lose control of AI?, Do I need a brain gym?
Books
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
The backend engineer's bible. I'd argue that, nowadays, falling back on well-established system design principles is more important than ever. There's no replacement for understanding database internals, event-based systems and monolith vs. microservice architectures in the types of decisions that LLMs often get wrong.
"You're absolutely right and I apologise profusely. Of course I should have used a Kafka topic here instead of writing it to the local filesystem." Don't do this to yourself. Don't delegate critical architectural decisions to a probabilistic language model.
Websites
404 Media
At a time when major media outlets follow the general hype cycle and place too much unearned trust in tech companies and CEOs, independent and critical tech journalism is essential. 404 Media, as of writing this, is one of the good ones.