W10 - Iteration Weekly and Manus

Iterating on the weekly report. This iteration is based on two sources: Rong Jun's "The Logic of Weekly Reports" and Orwell's six principles of writing. The former prompted me to review why I write weekly reports and what I aim to achieve. The latter serves as a stylistic guideline: clarity of language is inseparable from clarity of thought. Orwell advocates concise, clear expression and avoiding unnecessary complexity and vague phrasing. With AI-style language becoming pervasive, this also answers the question of how to convey a human touch.

After a week of fermenting, Manus has split into clearly defined pro- and anti-camps. AI advances so rapidly that a single day can feel like a year, which is dizzying. Last week I reread "Learning to Ask" and was reminded that training critical thinking is an essential basic skill; it helps us analyze deeply, avoid superficial interpretations, and make wiser decisions.

Perhaps Manus's greatest value is igniting awareness of agents among the general public. Once AI acquires planning and agent capabilities, the productivity gains are unimaginably large. Using OpenAI for deep research makes it effortless to gather, organize, verify, and analyze large amounts of information, quickly helping humans dive deeply into a topic—apart from being a bit pricey and making one reluctant to use it. We need to do something with agents as well: beyond AI coding, non-coding tasks consume more time, so connecting agents to various internal platforms could yield significant efficiency improvements.