A couple weeks ago, the CEO of Snap was all over the news in the US because he and his wife made a large donation. The weird part about it was that every news outlet that covered it had an acrobatic title where they didn't specifically say how much they donated, yet insisted on that $550 Million amount.

When you read the article a bit deeper, you can do the math. They donated one hundredth of that amount. So I wondered, why did they inflate the amount in the first place? It looked like a PR stunt.

This past couple weeks, I worked on a video to explain what really happened and how we should take this news.

Enjoy

I think I finally figured it out. That is, the reason why AI written articles suck:

Both the author and I are reading the article for the first time.

When an article is insightful I don't even mind the emdashes or that the stark truth is not X, but Y. A good take can transcend even llmism. But then you have questions, and somehow the author doesn't even know what you are talking about, it's simply because they are discovering the insight at the same time you are.

They were busy, they didn't have time to write. As a consequence, they only dedicated enough time to skim the result before publishing. They don't know what's in it. You can't ask them what they were thinking when they came up with the insight because, well, they didn't think.

The great article sucks because there is nobody behind it.

You've probably heard this one before. It might have come from a parent, a teacher, or a friend who bought an expensive item and wanted to justify it. It goes something like this: A poor man buys a cheap pair of boots for a few dollars. They fall apart within a year, so h...

When I was a kid, my father bought a family home computer and placed it in the living room for all to see. When guests came to our house, they would stop by the computer and admire its marvel without even turning it on. While everyone else was careful with the computer, trea...

I like building websites. But in some circles, I might as well say that I like to drive to the forest before sunrise, chop down a tree, load it in my trunk, and gather some dry wood as well, then drive back before first light. All this just to use the wood to start a fire an...

Imagine being worth $2 billion. Would you give away $550 million? That's a quarter of your wealth, more money than I could spend in several lifetimes. Yet that's how much Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snapchat, and his wife have donated to a charity in California. Specifically, t...

Amazon has been accused several times for ripping off merchants on its platform. And every single time they denied any wrongdoing. A merchant, or anyone really, can create a product (or source it from China), then resell it on amazon. Amazon is the service provider, and ho...

I've always been interested in how dating apps work. You really only have two choices if you want to get in the business. Help people find a match, and they will never come back Make people pay and keep them on the platform as long as possible. Let's pretend for a secon...

It's hard to write a whole book. So for now at least, I've turned the prologue of my book into a short video. I hope you enjoy it.

I don't understand why this generation can't afford a home. When my grandfather was 18, he had already saved enough money from his paper route and various odd jobs to buy his first home. By the time my father turned 26, he was already married, had his first child, and was mo...

The Washington Post reported that the US government will decide who can use state-of-the-art LLMs. After the ban of Fable and the limitations coming to ChatGPT 5.6, what's next? My bet is Chinese models. For all of Anthropic's doomsaying and propping up of their secret mod...

- "If you talk to me, I'll punch you in the face, are you ok with talking with me?" - "Nods in agreement." - "Proceeds to punch the man in the face." That's how I feel whenever I hear the Miranda rights being read. It was designed specifically to scare anyone being read to...

I am a father of twin boys. There is a question I often think about. It often appears as a midlife crisis where I am not sure when I became a man responsible for a family.

It looked so easy for my father. It was as if he was born into it. He was a leader, a strong man, one that an entire community could rely on. When does that kick in for me? When do I become this leader? Or have I already become?

That's what I was thinking when I wrote this short story about my father 10 years ago. I couldn't find a way to describe him, without mentioning clocks. It was fitting since he loved them so much.

I hope you enjoy this "Ode to my Father". Happy Father's day to you all.

PS: please excuse the AI generated images, I'm still trying to find the best way to present it. The text was entirely written by me in 2016-2017.

Remember that scene in the Matrix where Neo is strapped into the chair and Link uploads all sorts of martial arts into his mind? When Neo wakes up, he says "I know Kung-fu," then proceeds to demonstrate his skill in a battle with Morpheus. That was a pretty amazing scene. Bu...

The worst type of bug is one that only happens on prod. And only on prod. If you checked this blog in the past few weeks, you might have encountered a big fat 500 error. I'd had the same design for 10 years, and I wanted something fresh. But who can redesign without also i...