There's an old story about Ernest Hemingway. Faced with a bad case of writer's block he overcame it by telling himself, when faced with the dreaded blank page, to begin by writing something simple and true. I often remind myself of this, especially when faced with the difficulty of writing about a complicated subject. When complexity IS the block, start with something simple and true. Not long ago, for my monthly newsletter, the first issue of the new year 2026, I had given myself the challenge of writing a brief item about artificial intelligence. Then I froze. I'm not an expert on the field. I know of coding only what a late 1970s course on APL could teach me. [If you really ARE into computer science, you're giggling at that sentence.) So I started with this sort of intentional simplicity. "The year 2025 may go down in history with a lot of labels." It may indeed. Getting just a little braver having taken that step, I continued, "But I, for one, w...