Issue 326: AI can't take away our indomitable human spirit

Anybody feeling wow’ed by the indomitable human spirit lately? From children building apps for the blind to community-funded startups to humans learning new skills at any time in their lives, this Overflow is packed with stories that’ll restore at least some of your faith in humanity.

On the pod, we’re joined by Runpod’s Zhen Lu to talk about going to your community instead of VCs when building developer tools. Red Hat’s Stephen Watt, from their Office of the CTO, sat down with us to talk digital sovereignty in a world of AI, and what it would look like to leave nobody behind in the race to sovereign AI. And we still care about humans over here at Stack. We’ve got the story on why AI hasn’t replaced human expertise and why it matters for how you buy for and run your business. Plus, we need a little bit of your human expertise ourselves in our latest Stack Overflow Knows survey.

From the web, we’ve got stories on failing AI storefronts (the AI forgot to hire real people to run the store), vibe-coding fifth-graders (they created a Braille tool to help people who are blind), Internet Archive’s new database of rare concert records (everything from Nirvana to Neutral Milk Hotel), and toilets in space (we’ll just let you read that one yourself). And nothing speaks to the indomitable human spirit quite like our never-ending journey for knowledge. How can we take constructive criticism less personally? What happens to our writings—and their copyrights—after we shuffle off this mortal coil? What does it mean to be a coding beginner in a world of AI? We have all those faith-in-humanity-restoring links and more ready for you down below.