Power is getting other people to do what you want, even when it goes against their own wishes. The methods that work best are force, control of resources, and ideology.
The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Political Thought defines it this way: Actor C openly tries to get actor R to do something R does not want to do, and if C's intent succeeds, C is said to have power over R.
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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