I deleted all my technical blog posts and notes. This era no longer needs that kind of medium.
For the past six months I haven't written a single note or blog post, apart from the lab documents I wrote for students as a TA.
I also haven't read a technical blog in a long time. Before I ever built proper RTFM (Read the fxxking manual) and STFW (Search the fxxking web) habits, the way we get information had already changed.
These days I'm used to talking with ChatGPT about everything. I'm a CS major, but what I discuss with ChatGPT goes well beyond computing: papers, career plans, health, and more. Lately I ask GPT whether my work could get into some xxx paper, or whether my résumé fits some xxx job posting. Stop thinking, and await the arrangements of Lord GPT.
Back in my first year, while working through MIT's Missing Semester, I tried to set up tmux, nvim and a development environment in WSL. I hunted everywhere for tutorials and blog posts and fought every kind of error. It was painful. ChatGPT was still just a chatbot then; I had to copy and paste the configs and code it gave me by hand and iterate round after round myself. Students starting university in 2026 will find it hard to imagine the kind of "artisanal programming" people were doing in 2023.
Today every technical blog and article is pointless. After I switched computers this year, I gave Codex a single simple prompt:
"Set up kitty's keybindings to match my old tmux habits, then use NvChad to configure a modern, good-looking nvim for me, and install my development environment while you're at it."
The AI configured everything well on its own. It handles coding tasks well too. If you disagree, on the one hand I think you should stop using "Doubao"; on the other, you should be more patient, tell the AI more about what you're thinking, slow down, and move forward a little at a time. In the long run, the stability this gives you is far more efficient than setting a goal and letting the AI iterate. Of course, once Astra & Fable 5.1 come out, everything may change again. As long as you're willing to pay up, AI can grant you "every" wish.
Maybe learning was never hard in the first place; monopolies on resources and information bubbles just made us believe certain things were hard. Lord AI is always emotionally stable and always patient in guiding you. In the GPT-4o era you still had to worry about factual errors or gaps in its knowledge. Today even Doubao has astonishing stability and a sense of the big picture (provided you're willing to pay 68 yuan a month for its premium model), and at least as a teacher it is far better than every instructor I have met on campus. Switch to Fable/GPT-5.6 and it outclasses more than 99.99% of humanity. In 2026 you can take in ten or a hundred times as much information as before in the same time, while understanding it more deeply.
I think that even with AI this powerful, Missing Semester, which keeps up with the times, is still a computer-science course well worth watching. Even if you're not a CS major, if your work involves using Codex/Claude Code for programming and you're curious, Missing Semester is a really fun course. Highly recommended. Just watch the latest edition.
I feel I should describe what my education has actually been like. I'm a rising senior at the School of Information Science at Hangzhou Normal University. In early 2024 I happened upon JYY's (Jiang Yanyan's) operating systems course, which became my introduction to computing, and I started learning computer science. Because of that course, I haven't done any reward hacking in college; you could even say I haven't been "contaminated" by any on-campus course. I just aim to pass every class, and my GPA currently sits at 2.1/5.0. This isn't a complaint: I genuinely think Hangzhou Normal University should stop all teaching, stop wasting students' time, stop disgusting students. Attendance check-ins, lab reports, slide decks, memorizing answers, pretending university education means something.
Nobody cares whether you learned anything from the labs, and nobody cares what you actually got out of a semester. Attach yourself to a professor's project, do something that looks like "research", push your GPA up, and in the end the system hands you the reward. Everyone together keeps up the illusion that "education is happening here." Of course, part of why I say this is to make excuses for not studying.
The technological future has arrived, but the institutions still live in the past.
Although I'm no longer writing technical blogs, I still think recording what I think is worthwhile. Beyond technical blogs, many articles full of human thought are still worth reading. It's just that technology itself has become cheap. Dario Amodei, for example, is controversial, but his blog is still worth reading, to see thinking from another angle.