The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it's important, and what we can do about it (Part II)

This is Part II of a guest post from Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, an assistant professor at James Madison University. In this post, Jeremy transitions from describing the reasons for the gap between academics and practitioners (explained in Part I) to solutions. Some solutions involve increasing the conversations between academics and industry professionals, collaborating more with workplace research, having industry professionals guest speak in academic programs, teaching academics what research methodology is acceptable in the workplace, and more. Read more »

The gap between academic and industry technical writing: What it is, why it exists, why it's important, and what we can do about it (Part I)

This is a guest post from Jeremy Rosselot-Merritt, an assistant professor in the School of Writing, Rhetoric, and Technical Communication at James Madison University. In this post, Jeremy explains why there's such a gap between tech comm practitioners and industry professionals, laying out the case with everything from language, cadence, pressures, motivations, job cycles, promotions, and more, in as clear and straightforward way as possible. This is part I of II. Read more »

Tom's opinionated guide to skill building 101

The thing I'm most excited about with AI lately is SKILLs. (I have to capitalize the word at first so you know I'm talking about agent skills rather than just general capabilities; however, I'll subsequently just refer to agent skills as skills.) I've now built about 10 skills for various purposes, and I'd like to write a post that shares some of my thoughts around skill building in a more opinionated way. Read more »

AI Book Club discussion of The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby

This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Sebastian Mallaby's The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind, and the Quest for Superintelligence. In the discussion, we talk about the complex character of Demis Hassabis (and comparisons to Ender's game), the idea of founders' personal morality acting as a final safeguard, and the relentless acceleration of AI development. We also talk about the historical rivalries between deep learning and reinforcement learning, the growing urgency around AI-driven job displacement, and what it means to train AI to automate our own work. Read more »

Judging beautiful docs, AI fatigue, and tool slop -- podcast with Fabrizio

In this podcast, I chat with Fabrizio Ferri-Benedetti about a variety of topics related to AI and docs, such as applying Italo Calvino's literary principles of lightness and quickness to evaluate docs, the reality of AI review fatigue versus creator fatigue, whether vibe-coded tools are tools slop, developing internal skills for repeatable doc processes, and the utility of running local AI models. Read more »

Review of Max Tegmark's 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence'

This post is my review of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0, a book we read in the AI Book Club. Tegmark, an MIT physicist and founder of the Future of Life Institute, says Life 1.0 relies entirely on biological evolution to change its hardware and software, Life 2.0 (humanity) can design its own software (through learning and culture) but is stuck with its evolved hardware, and Life 3.0 is a technological stage where life can design both its software and its physical hardware. Although Tegmark's book was published in 2017 (before ChatGPT), the book's core questions about recursive self-improvement, AI alignment, steering beneficial AI, etc., are still highly relevant today. Read more »

AI Book Club discussion recording of 'Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence', by Max Tegmark

This is a recording of the AI Book Club discussion of Max Tegmark's Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence. Our discussion explores Tegmark's visions of superintelligence, the unpredictability of AI goals and subgoals, and how the Asilomar principles fare against the relentless market pressures of today's AI arms race. We also contrast the book's theoretical focus on cosmic energy (and how superintelligence might more efficiently extract energy from matter) with the immediate, tangible threats AI poses to cybersecurity and global financial systems. Read more »

Developing internal skills for recurring documentation processes like release notes

My hypothesis this year around AI was that if I develop some agent skills to speed up repeatable processes, it might clear up my bandwidth and free up time for me to work on non-repeatable doc tasks. It appears to be working. Read more »