Your Second Brain Won't Scale Without QMD

Most Obsidian-as-second-brain tutorials skip the part where it breaks: once the vault gets big, Claude Code’s index-based search starts to fall apart. QMD, a local RAG tool by Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke, fixes exactly that gap — hybrid retrieval (BM25 + vector), fully local, free, and a 96% drop in token use. This post covers when to install it and the one prompt that gets it running.

May 20, 2026 · 11 min · David Zhang

Five AI Businesses That Actually Print Money in Shenzhen — A Full Teardown

Local merchant operations, cross-border AI product-image factories, AI export lead gen, AI avatar short videos, and AI resume rewrites plus job-search coaching. No tech background, no capital, no team needed — just use AI to amplify a single person’s output and sell to the anxious small-business owners and white-collar workers packed into Shenzhen. Each business broken down by how you make money, where the profit sits, what the barrier is, and how to start.

May 19, 2026 · 27 min · David Zhang

How Authors Are Making Money Writing Novels with AI

Rie Kudan won the Akutagawa Prize, Joe Vasicek cut his book cycle from 2 years to 14 days, Leanne Leeds ships 12-15 books a year at a 4.5-star Amazon average, and Hachette pulled a novel after Pangram clocked it at 78.4% AI-generated. The Sudowrite / NovelCrafter / Claude + Scrivener stack is now the Western mainstream, and the Chinese-language world has nothing equivalent.

May 18, 2026 · 17 min · David Zhang

X Open-Sourced Its Latest Recommendation Algorithm Today. Here Are 10 Things Every Creator Needs to Know

After X open-sourced the For You recommendation algorithm, creators should stop obsessing over likes and focus on replies, reposts, retention, account profile, reply leverage, and search long tail.

May 15, 2026 · 18 min · David Zhang

Harness Engineering Explained: How to Make Your AI 10x More Effective

Raw models are no longer enough for serious engineering work. What actually separates mediocre results from great ones is the Harness built around the model: context management, tool execution, task orchestration, feedback loops, and architectural guardrails.

May 15, 2026 · 23 min · David Zhang

Inside the Multimillion-Dollar Supply Chain Behind Porn Livestreams

Porn livestreaming is not just a sleazy transaction between one streamer and one tipping viewer. It is a gray-and-black-market pipeline involving platforms, agents, streamers, payment providers, technology vendors, and traffic brokers. The real danger is how it turns impulse spending, virtual coins, memberships, and private-domain harvesting into repeatable cash flow.

May 14, 2026 · 32 min · David Zhang

Why Enterprise AI Transformation Starts With Layoffs

Buying AI tools and rolling out company-wide training does not equal AI transformation. Real change means replacing human-to-human collaboration with human-plus-agent workflows. That shift hits headcount first, then rewrites the survival rules for employees.

May 10, 2026 · 9 min · David Zhang

If You Know Nothing About Startups: A Startup Guide for Technical People

If you have a technical background, you will find that 70% of real startup problems have nothing to do with code. The product is only step one. After that come sales, communication, cash flow, debt, cofounders, and timing.

May 9, 2026 · 16 min · David Zhang

Five Principles for Writing Industrial-Grade Skills

A Skill isn’t a longer prompt — it’s a triggerable, executable, testable, maintainable workflow. Five angles to get it right: on-demand loading, tool boundaries, model selection, progressive disclosure, and evaluation.

May 3, 2026 · 12 min · David Zhang

Why We Need World Models to Replace Chatbots

Three years in, models are 100x more capable. Why is AI still just a chat box? The chat box is the Nokia of the AI era. From chatbots to agents to wearables plus world models — here’s the next decade of AI product evolution.

April 25, 2026 · 16 min · David Zhang

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