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Last week, while drilling the AIoT Exam 2 question bank, I hit a security question. Of the four options, only one read “an audit log recording the operator, time, target, and action”; the other three were bare nouns: transport encryption, data compression, load balancing. The answer jumped out before I’d even understood the question. A few questions further on, I realized it wasn’t just that one. The whole series was like this. ...

I came across a post on Facebook summarising a recent talk by Kent Beck; it’s on YouTube too. He’s the creator of Extreme Programming (XP), a key champion of JUnit and Test-Driven Development (TDD), and one of the signatories of the Agile Manifesto. The summary of the transcript goes roughly like this: AI output doesn’t mean correct → build tests, acceptance checks, and independent verification Features consume the Future → check changeability after every round of feature delivery ...

Looking back over the past two weeks, there’s a surprising amount worth writing down. From 9/15 to 9/17, out of sheer interest, I went and earned a basic gelato certificate, and spent a good deal of time sorting through and learning the science behind ice cream, the production process, and all the jargon. Truth be told, I just love eating ice cream. Eat enough gelato, though, and you get picky… ...

Over the past few days, I kept seeing posts about Jev, so yesterday I spent some time reading up on it and discussing it with ChatGPT. Setting Jev itself aside, I was more interested in the idea behind it: if AI does not need to go through a full reasoning process for every task, but can quickly judge familiar situations, that feels a lot like System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow. System 2 is slower and handles deeper thinking; System 1 is faster and makes quick judgments. ...

After reading through and organising lateral thinking, Six Thinking Hats, 635 Brainwriting, SCAMPER, Brainstorming, and design thinking, the biggest thing I got out of it was not a few more management or creativity tools. It was that I started to understand “thinking” itself as something that can be deliberately designed. In the working environments I have been in, from the boss on down, the decision-making style I know best is direct and fast. When a problem shows up, a small number of decision makers quickly pick a direction. If something can be done, do it first, then use the actual results as feedback and keep correcting and iterating. The advantage of this approach is obvious: speed. In product, engineering, and software development environments especially, as long as the cost of a mistake is low, the decision is reversible, and market or user feedback comes back fast enough, acting directly beats spending a lot of time in discussion. Many questions only get answered by doing, and over-analysis can actually reduce efficiency. ...

One diagram, and the box at the bottom of it I spent a while putting this together. It answers a simple question: when I say “get this done for me,” which protocols does that sentence pass through before it becomes something that actually happens in the world? Six layers, top to bottom. It starts at human intent and lands on robot arms, sensors, and PLCs. Every layer in between has a name, a responsibility, and a spec taking shape. ...

The exam is done. Last cycle ended with “next up is finishing the Intermediate subject content, plus the AIoT certification I registered for on a whim — after that, back to normal.” These two weeks were basically that list, worked through in order. The rhythm was nothing like last cycle. Then, 96 commits landed almost entirely in one repo; exam prep had squeezed everything else out. This time the commit count dropped by 40%, but spread across four projects: finishing the question banks, two new proposals, a format upgrade in the knowledge base, and the personal site. Going from “only one thing” back to “several things” is itself the signal that prep is over. ...

The first week back from Canada, I attended two conferences — though jet lag pretty much had its way with me for nearly the whole week. Things only started improving this week, and right on its heels came prep for the iPAS AI Application Planner (Associate) exam. I’d signed up around the tail end of AIA’s AIPM course. I happened to see information about the certification on Facebook, and while the iron was hot I registered for both the Associate and Intermediate levels at once — and roped in some AIPM classmates too. So before leaving the country, on top of wrapping up the client project I already had, I also stood up a quiz and drill site using RAG and shared it with the group. Then came a full 7-week cooldown, and it wasn’t until this Monday that I actually started drilling for myself. ...

Over the past two weeks (June 1 to June 14), several product lines have progressed on GitHub. Looking back, the theme is very clear: I’m not just writing features, but organizing the messy information and workflows of real life into systems people can use with peace of mind. MatrixTradingSystem (MTS) Trading Operating System A lot of time these past two weeks was dedicated to the final sprint of MTS, focusing primarily on “preventing real users from stubbing their toes.” Aside from a few last-minute client features, we also added support for the emerging stock market (興櫃). This turned out to be quite interesting — I hadn’t realized that broker support for emerging stocks varied so wildly, which led to some rather peculiar issues. Most of these have now been resolved, with only Yuanta Securities remaining to clarify final details via email (to the point of having to reverse engineer the broker’s App to locate the root cause). ...

When you run a company alone, with an army of AI Agents at your side, the biggest risk isn’t actually “moving too slowly.” The biggest risk is turning yourself into a faster task machine. Over the past half year I’ve been pushing the trading system, Lectio, AI Email, the Mira assistant, several small tools, and knowledge bases all at once — and AI really has exploded my output. But one thing keeps getting clearer: speed itself is not the goal. So I wrote myself an operating directive to remember what AI is actually for. This post is its essence. ...