Thanks for your Qs Joe.

1) Medium is a content mill. You have to start from scratch for every article. You can have 100k followers and write a piece that gets <1k views. The algorithm decides and you don't own it. Just for that, Substack is better. You own your audience and can adapt your life as you grow. That kind of uncertainty from Medium makes it impossible to treat it as a job for me.

2) The internet is magical. In 2017 I read an article by Tim Urban of Wait But Why that made me want to study AI. I did it by myself using Coursera and other platforms. Then got a job here in Spain at a small startup. Three years later I started to write (never liked to code). I explored different topics at first and eventually stuck with AI because I knew about it, I liked it, and the world was starting to show interest. It was a matter of time before it exploded.

3) This question is rather broad. If I go down to the very basics, I'll just repeat what you read everywhere because it's true: a consistent habit (write a lot) and an iterative method (write better over time).