On one side, a handful of people are raking in cash like crazy. On the other, more people are stressing about paying the bills. This is the parallel world of the AI era. Two Stories on the Same Day: Fire and Prosperity On June 1, 2026, two things happened in South Korea. At 10:32 AM, a gas room suddenly caught fire at SK Hynix’s Cheongju Campus 4. Hydrogen fluoride leaked, and 3,600 people were evacuated in a panic. ...
How Close Are You to the Chip? You think hard work leads to success? In the AI era, your income might not depend on your ability—it depends on how close you are to the chip production line. King Workers vs. Thunderstruck Poor In 2026 South Korea, on one side are the “kingsanjik” (king workers)—frontline semiconductor technical workers getting average bonuses of 600 million to 700 million won (~$270,000 to $320,000). Blue-collar workers in clean suits are more popular in the dating market than suited white-collar workers, and T-shirts with the SK Hynix logo are hot items at online auctions. ...
You think hard work can change your destiny? Wrong. What awaits you is a world where even giving everything you have may not be enough to see a glimmer of hope. This isn’t some motivational platitude. This is the honest reckoning of a man who has lived forty years. The Woman Pushing Bricks in the Winter of 2008 In 2008, I was 25, fresh out of college, working as a computer technician at a research institute. ...
Have You Met People Like This? You think the most awesome people in a company are the most technically skilled? Wrong. It’s the people who don’t need to write code or make plans—but get promoted and get raises every time. What do they rely on? The three-piece set of a rushed operation: gilding turds, passing the buck, and emergency tasks. The First Piece: Gilding Turds—Making Simple Things Complicated What’s “gilding turds”? Taking a clearly simple requirement and packaging it to be incredibly complex and high-end. ...
DeepSeek V4 Pro Is the Cheapest Nuclear-Powered Donkey At first, the way I used AI was: Ask AI to write code I manually run the program, encounter problems Ask AI to write local logs and check the logs AI writes fix code again I run again AI checks logs again Repeat… Then I told DeepSeek V4 Pro: you must continuously fix and solve problems, automatically run the program after each fix, do automated testing, then check the run logs after closing the program, find problems in them, then fix again, run again, check logs again—until no more problems appear in the logs. ...