Some articles are simply hard to read—not because we are not trying hard enough, but because they were never written to teach in the first place.
Sometimes, their purpose is merely to explain something briefly or to serve as a record. They skip the intermediate steps that would make the ideas easier to understand and digest.
There is nothing wrong with that. We can simply treat them as practical reference material: something to keep around and return to when we actually need it.
Once I started using AI to help me write, I noticed a few patterns.
It opens with something that sounds profound: "In this era of rapid change, X is redefining how we ..."
Or: "Most people think X. The real problem is Y."
Lately I read Andrew Ng's new post on X, AI Engineering Skills Map: Shaping the build, and it made me, an engineer of more than ten years, anxious about my career.
The core is one sentence: a strong software engineer in the AI era has to move past implementing requirements someon…
Read more — 14. When Code Gets Cheap, Where Does a Developer's Value Go
For more than twenty years the internet ran on a stable supply-and-demand relationship where everyone, or nearly everyone, won.
Sites like blogs gave search engines free content to crawl, and the search engines sent traffic back to those sites. Advertisers could then use that pul…
Read more — 10. When AI Takes the Content, Where Does the Traffic Go
I once watched a documentary where a business owner spent a week living as a poor person so he could explain why poor people stay poor.
After selling his labor for a life that was not so dignified, the owner reached this conclusion:
The main problem with working for a living is t…
Read more — 11. Work Crowds Out the Time to Think About the Future
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