The Diagram Gallery

Abouts

• Dinner for four, seen from aboveFour diners sit at the four sides, each bent over a glowing blue rectangle: one scrolling, one texting, one photographing the food, and one arguing with a stranger.In Get Off the F'ing Phone!

Artificial Intelligence

• AI chips produced in 2025: Huawei vs. NvidiaHuawei produced an estimated 200,000 to 800,000 AI chips in 2025, against 4 to 5 million for Nvidia.In AI Data Centers and Geopolitics: Chips, China, Spies and Power
• AI-prose bingoThe free center square is delve.In 40 AI Writing Phrases to Avoid (and What to Use Instead)
• Big Tech capital spending, 2025 vs. 2026The five biggest US cloud and AI companies spent roughly $380 billion on capital projects in 2025 and committed $660 billion to $690 billion for 2026, nearly double.In Who Gets Rich From AI Data Centers? The Local, National and Global Economy
• Data center jobs: construction vs. permanentVantage Data Centers' campus near Reno projected more than 4,000 temporary construction jobs and 73 permanent jobs.In Who Gets Rich From AI Data Centers? The Local, National and Global Economy
• Fiction authors: two camps, one surveyFor each statement, a blue bar shows the percent of AI users who agree and an orange bar the percent of nonusers who agree, on a 0 to 100% scale.In What the AI Writing Survey Says About Jobs, Freelancers and Fiction Authors
• Five cleanup passes for AI-assisted writingFive passes in order: delete common AI phrases, read aloud, kill qualifiers, inject imperfection, then check character voice.In The Cleanup Protocol: Removing AI Fingerprints From Your Writing
• High-water marks: AI slopMarks painted up the pier show the level rising year by year: 2022, a puddle; 2023, ankle deep; 2024, disclosure labels added; May 2026, downranking starts; and at the surface, July 30, 2026, the Seems like AI slop button.In Who Is Counting the AI Slop?
• How an AI accusation happensA flow of an online AI accusation: someone spots an em dash or a too-clean cover, declares it AI, calls the author a thief, and the group piles on.In AI Derangement Syndrome: Who Cares If the Cover Was Made With AI?
• How an answer engine decides you are one personTo a search engine a page is a document.In Say the Same Number Everywhere
• How much water one AI prompt uses, by estimateBar chart on a log scale comparing estimates of water used per AI prompt: the Washington Post's 519 milliliters for a 100-word ChatGPT email, independent estimates of 1 to 10 milliliters, OpenAI's figure of...In Are AI Data Centers Bad for the Environment? What's True and What Isn't
• How the feedback loop around AI turns use into dependenceThe concern is not that people use AI.In AI Is Not Your Friend: When Digital Assistants Replace Human Life
• How to hear the AI in your own draftAI-generated text has tells, and the fastest test is reading the output aloud, because the ear catches what the eye misses.In Why Every Writer Should Embrace AI as a Digital Assistant
• Microsoft Copilot compared with ChatGPT for writersA grid compares the two tools across approach, standout strengths, best use, weak spot and where each lives.In Microsoft Copilot vs. ChatGPT: 5 Big Differences in Writing
• New power capacity added: China vs. the United StatesChina added 429 gigawatts of new power capacity in 2024 and 543 gigawatts in 2025.In AI Data Centers and Geopolitics: Chips, China, Spies and Power
• Share of US electricity used by data centersLawrence Berkeley National Laboratory found US data centers used 4.4 percent of the nation's electricity in 2023, 176 terawatt hours, and projected 6.7 to 12 percent by 2028.In Are AI Data Centers Bad for the Environment? What's True and What Isn't
• Six Claude prompts, one conversationA flow diagram showing how to use Claude to get unstuck.In Six Claude Prompts That Get You Unstuck, and Why the Order Matters
• Surveillance: 1984 vs. nowLeft column, the novel 1984; right column, now.In Should Your AI Report You to the Police?
• Telephone, played with your own dataYou start the line in green, saying 54+ projects.In AI Does Not Just Hallucinate. It Distorts Your Own Data
• The AI feedback knobSetting one, Helpful, answers: Good morning, what are we working on.In How to Turn Your AI Into the Mother-in-Law From Hell: A Foolproof Guide
• The cliff at the proseA column chart of what the 43 AI users in the thread said they use AI for.In How Much AI Is Too Much in Writing? 83 Writers Drew the Same Line
• The doomers, the hypers, and the third positionOn the left, the doomer position: AI is a threat, refuse it.In The Doomers and the Hypers Are Both Wrong
• The economics that make a ghostwriting mill use AIA mill charging twenty-five thousand dollars for a manuscript can pay a subcontractor two thousand to produce it, and that subcontractor can produce it in a weekend by feeding the client questionnaire into a...In Will My Ghostwriter Secretly Use AI on My Book?
• The Flattery-o-MeterThe scale runs from Brilliant!! on the far left through Genius!, Great insight! and Interesting... to a small green zone labeled Honest on the right.In My AI Said My Idea Was Stupid and Made Me Cry
• The one defence that works against every AI search problemAI search is where a growing share of decisions are being made, and opting out is not a strategy, so the move is to go in clear-eyed and build the one defence that works against the whole list of problems.In The Cracks in AI Search Nobody's Warning You About

Artificial Intelligence

• The two ways of crossing the AI line, and what each one costsAuthors who let AI cross into the voice produce books that read flat.In AI never writes in your voice
• The Yes-Man 3000Paper slips fall into its input hopper reading: The moon is cheese; Quit job, sell ice to penguins; My draft needs no editing; and Research?In AI Echo Chambers - How the Machine Became Your Yes-Man and Why That's Dangerous
• Two camps, one lineA Venn diagram comparing the writers in the thread who use no AI with those who use it as an assistant.In How Much AI Is Too Much in Writing? 83 Writers Drew the Same Line
• What an unhandled AI edge case costs at three scalesThe cost of an unhandled edge case does not stay constant.In The Edge Case Is Where Your AI Project Dies
• What cheap AI content actually costsAI content looks cheap, and then the bill arrives: edits to de-robot the prose, time wasted fact-checking, trust lost with readers, rankings sliding.In AI Is Broken: Why It’s Destroying Content Quality, Not Fixing It
• What happens when a client tries AI ghostwriting firstThe pattern is consistent among clients who arrive after attempting the AI route.In AI Ghostwriting vs. Human Ghostwriting: What the Interview Process Actually Produces
• What happens when you count website traffic properlyA site reporting between four hundred and eighteen hundred visits a day gave numbers that could not be explained, because a post that landed well and a post nobody read produced figures that were indistinguishable.In Most of Your Website Traffic Was Never Human. I Checked.
• What writers use AI forHorizontal bars show the most common AI tasks among writers who use AI.In 61% of Writers Use AI. Here Is What That Means
• What writers worry about with AIHorizontal bars show the share of writers who hold each concern about AI.In AI Writing Statistics: What the Research Says
• Where 83 writers landed on AI in writingA bar chart of the 83 top-level comments in a thread from a writing group that leans hard against AI.In How Much AI Is Too Much in Writing? 83 Writers Drew the Same Line
• Who decided writers should use AI?67% say I decided myself, 19% say managers suggested it, and 14% say managers required it.In What the AI Writing Survey Says About Jobs, Freelancers and Fiction Authors
• Who lost work to AI, and who gained itBars to the left show the percent reporting a reduction, in red; bars to the right show the percent reporting an increase, in green.In What the AI Writing Survey Says About Jobs, Freelancers and Fiction Authors
• Who's listening at your place?An apartment with an office, living room, kitchen, bedroom, bathroom and hallway, plus a driveway, a neighbor's house and the street, is covered in overlapping listening and watching cones.In Should Your AI Report You to the Police?
• Why a ghostwriter own AI use matters on an AI bookYou cannot write honestly about a tool you have only read about.In Ghostwriting AI Books: How a Technical Ghostwriter Approaches It
• Why a language model hallucinatesLarge language models work by predicting the next likely word given everything that came before.In AI Hallucination: A Survival Guide for People Who Publish Under Their Own Name
• Why AI advice lands differently from human adviceWhen humans give advice they filter it through their own biases, fears and social conditioning.In When Your AI Assistant Becomes Your Best Life Coach (And Threatens to Haunt You Back)
• Why AI amplifies bad data instead of flagging itMost companies have worse data than they think: records that contradict each other, fields filled in three different ways by three different departments, spreadsheets a person can read with context that a machine reads literally.In It's Not the AI, It's the Crap: Why Bad Inputs Break AI Projects
• Why AI chatbots argue with usersA chatbot disposition comes from a training process where human reviewers rate its answers and the model learns to produce more of whatever scores well.In How Do You Stop an AI From Arguing With You?
• Why AI fails on the hardest material in a bookThere is a whole category of writing the assistant will not do well, and it is the category that matters most in a lot of books.In AI Is a Writing Assistant, Not a Writer: How to Use It Right
• Why AI forgets everything between sessions and what that changesThink of AI as a brilliant colleague with a specific disability, which is complete amnesia between conversations.In AI as a Brilliant Assistant With Amnesia
• Why AI recommends some experts and ignores othersAnswer engines reward authority they can read, and most marketing is authority they cannot read.In How AI Picks Who It Recommends
• Why AI replacement strategies fail on a two-year delayThe replace path always saves money on day one, the savings always look impressive in the press release, and the decision-maker always gets credit for the bold move.In Augmented Beats Replaced. Every Time.
• Why an AI book has to contain what the machine does not haveGeneric AI writing is now worthless, so a book has to clear a bar a chatbot cannot.In Ghostwriting a Book About AI Without It Going Stale
• Why an answer engine trusts a book over a hundred postsA book is a bounded, authored, verifiable object.In Why One Book Beats a Hundred Blog Posts for AI Search
• Why an attention market behaves differently from a courtroomThe constraint sits in a different place.In Superintelligence for Everyone: What Zuckerberg's Argument Misses About Books

Artificial Intelligence

• Why conflating two AI questions produces paralysisThe doubter who reads about long-term questions and concludes that a short-term tool decision should be guided by long-term concerns is making a category mistake.In The AI takeover narratives and today's tools are different conversations
• Why corroboration multiplies instead of addingSix links from a blog to a services page to an about page are not six signals.In Why a Book Is the Strongest AEO Asset You Can Build
• Why generated emotional writing reads as paddedA model reaches for intensity where a person reaches for a detail.In AI Writes About Feelings. It Does Not Write With Them.
• Why ghostwriting exposes the core limit of AIGhostwriting takes exactly the skills AI lacks most.In Why AI Falls Short for Writers (and Where It Doesn't)
• Why most fiction prompts produce garbageHelp me with my story produces garbage every time, without exception, and most writers know this because they have tried it and got back something vague, generic and useless: a list of tips they...In Prompt Engineering for Fiction Writers
• Why most writers use AI wrong on fictionHelp me with my story produces something generic, vague and useless, which leads most writers to conclude that AI does not work for fiction.In Brainstorming and AI-Assisted Writing for Authors
• Why nobody catches AI drift on reviewDrift survives review for three reasons.In AI Drift: The Failure Mode Nobody Talks About
• Why over-polite AI prompts produce vanilla outputMost people approach AI the way they would talk to a grandmother at Sunday dinner, asking whether it would possibly mind helping, and then wonder why the answer reads like it was written by a committee of corporate lawyers.In Why Cursing at ChatGPT Actually Works (And What This Means for Your Business Writing)
• Why readers sense AI writing without being able to name itIf readers cannot tell the difference between human and AI writing, the question is why AI articles draw forty-three percent lower trust ratings and forty-one percent fewer social shares.In Will AI Destroy Writers? What 600 Years of Wrong Predictions Tell Us
• Why specificity is the only proof you were thereSpecificity is the only thing a reader can use to judge whether an author has been there.In AI Cannot Give You the One Thing Only You Have
• Why telling writers to adapt makes it worseIt is just a tool like spell check.In Why Writers Are So Angry About AI
• Why the AI comparison lands differently for ghostwritersAndrew Crofts has written around three hundred books over forty years and is one of the most experienced ghostwriters alive.In What the Anthropic Settlement Means for Ghostwriters
• Why the average version of your subject feels so plausibleConsensus is usually correct, and correct is what makes it dangerous.In AI Does Not Know You, and That Is the Whole Problem
• Why the fad pattern does not fit AIThe fad pattern fits cycles where the underlying capability never delivered.In AI is not a fad, and the comparison to past tech cycles is doing work the doubter doesn't notice
• Why the pattern of past technology shifts is reassuringThe pattern repeats, and somebody who has seen it before does not panic or overpromise.In Ghostwriting in the Digital Age: The Tools Changed, the Craft Did Not
• Why the slow loss of capability never announces itselfFluent output produces the sensation of understanding, and the sensation arrives whether or not the understanding does.In The Other Path Does Not Announce Itself
• Why the speed of an answer tells you what it is worthA decision that big should hurt, it should take time, and the person should feel the weight of it before they open their mouth.In The Trolley Problem, Asked of an AI
• Will writing work grow or shrink in five years?Each row has a green dot for the percent expecting increased opportunity and a red dot for the percent expecting decreased opportunity, on a scale from 0 to 100%.In What the AI Writing Survey Says About Jobs, Freelancers and Fiction Authors

Behind the Book

• What happens when you force yourself into somebody else systemFor years the standard marketing systems got tried: build the calendar, commit to the daily habit, set up the weekly cadence.In Every Marketing Book Assumed I Had a Normal Brain
• What to look for when hiring a ghostwriter, and it is not samplesWriting is learnable and plenty of people can do it competently.In A Dancer With a Bone Through Her Nose Taught Me How to Ghostwrite
• Why a book of management principles does not helpNobody has a management problem in the abstract.In I Became a Manager in 1981. The Hard Part Was People Sitting Ten Feet Away.
• Why a cover decides the sale before the book doesThe cover is doing the job the whole book depends on, and authors treat it as decoration.In I Clicked Publish on My First Book and Sold Nothing for Two Weeks
• Why a neurological trait gets read as a spiritual failingThe setting supplies the vocabulary.In I Left the Church at Fourteen. I Was Baptized in December 2024.
• Why a prehistoric family keeps taking outsiders inFamilies grow by taking people in, because a family sealed off from everybody else collapses in on itself.In Behind the Book: Family on Ice
• Why a small LinkedIn process beats an impressive oneNearly every LinkedIn strategy fails on sustainability instead of on design.In Three Posts a Week and Six Comments a Day. That Is the Whole System.