I grew up playing Scrabble -- my grandma was cuthroat. I've played occasionally through the years, and more recently I've been playing Scrabble Go, the official, licensed Scrabble app, with friends. It's fine, but it's full of ads (unless you pay them), it has annoying side games (gems? why am I earning gems?), and I …

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This is the last post in the IZE series. In the previous installment, I looked at two ways to generalize the IZE algorithm itself: preferring consistent facets and searching for trees with better goodness scores. Here I want to ask a different question: what does the AI revolution of the last few years actually change …

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Engineering leadership knows the standard playbook for product teams: the Product Trio, the Spotify model, outcome-based roadmaps, and so on. I've seen teams adopt these practices and still struggle when they add responsibility for advanced algorithms -- search, recommendations, predictive modeling, or generative AI -- …

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If AI helps me get ideas from my head to the readers' heads faster, that's good. Society thrives when ideas are shared, critiqued, and built on. But authors shouldn't take credit for other peoples' ideas -- they should synthesize others' ideas, including the "blurry JPG of the web" that is LLMs. The question …

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I keep seeing AI skeptic takes like "AI is useless" or "LLMs are only good at Natural Language Processing", usually because of hallucinations and AI slop. Both are real problems. But that conclusion still misses the point: it misidentifies what LLMs are actually good at. My take is: LLMs are great …

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The rise of AI-assisted coding tools has made it dramatically easier and faster to build small side projects than ever before. What used to take weeks of evenings and weekends can now be done in a few focused sessions, with an AI pair programmer handling much of the boilerplate, debugging, and implementation details. …

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