I've been in technology since I was in elementary school. That's luck, not talent. It just means I happened to be standing there for the whole arc. I've watched data move from magnetic tape to floppies to hard drives to a cloud nobody can point at, and I've watched computers go from a machine one family shared to a thing in your pocket that answers back. Not as history I read about later. As it showed up, one strange new thing at a time.
I may also have gotten into a small amount of trouble around the age of twelve. This was the dial up era, when a sysop was very probably watching every keystroke you typed, and almost none of us understood that yet. It was a new frontier. Nobody had put fences around the pastures, mostly because nobody was sure yet what the pastures were.
The part I remember most fondly is staying up all night with a friend, typing code into a machine that had all the patience in the world. Nothing clever. Things like this:
20 GOTO 10
And then watching it happily fill the screen forever, because that is precisely what we told it to do.
I'm not a programmer today and I don't pretend to be, though I've been bitten by the vibe coding bug about as hard as any other would be coder. What actually hooked me was never the syntax. It was the logic. Line 10 says print. Line 20 says go back to line 10. It makes sense, and it keeps making sense, forever, without argument or ego.
That same logic is exactly what scammers and attackers count on. A machine doesn't get confused the way a person does. It doesn't get suspicious, it doesn't get a funny feeling, it never stops to wonder whether a request is reasonable. Give it bad instructions and it will carry them out perfectly and without complaint. Most of what you'll read about in the scams section here comes down to somebody slipping a bad line 10 into a system that was only ever going to do what it was told.
I remember searching the early internet with a tool called Archie, back when searching meant something far smaller than it does now. When Netscape arrived, I described it to people as reading a magazine on your computer screen, because honestly that's all it was. You could look at the articles. That was the entire experience. Today you can run your whole financial life through a browser on a phone in your pocket.
Growing up on science fiction, the characters always talked to their computers, and we thought that was the most fascinating idea imaginable. Now we talk to machines constantly, and I don't think we are ever going to stop.
So where does all of this end up? Nobody knows. It's exciting and frightening and genuinely amazing, usually in the same week. Do I think we go the way of the movies, with the machines taking over? No. Not really. I think we're better than that. But every tool ever invented could be used well or badly, and this one is no different. That part was never really about the technology. It's about us.
Which brings me to why this site exists. Somewhere in the middle of all those years, I noticed something that still bothers me. A lot of people in this field make things complicated on purpose. Not because the idea is genuinely hard, but because sounding complicated feels like sounding smart. Jargon gets used as a velvet rope. Proof you belong, or proof you don't.
"Most people aren't confused by technology. They're confused by the people explaining it."
Now to be fair, every real profession has its own language, and there are good reasons for it. Medicine and law lean on Latin that has been doing precise work for centuries, and that precision genuinely matters. You want your surgeon and your attorney using exact words, not approximate ones. Technology has earned some of its vocabulary honestly, in the same way.
But here's the difference. You can go most of your life without needing to read a contract or interpret a chart. You cannot go a single day without technology. It's in your bank, your doctor's office, your car, your kid's classroom, your front door, your television. When the language keeps people out of something they never got the option to opt out of, that stopped being precision. That's just a wall.
Like I'm 9 is the door in that wall. Ask anything. Nobody is watching, nobody is grading you, and there is no such thing as a question that's too basic here. You will never be made to feel stupid for not knowing something that nobody ever bothered to explain to you properly.
It should also be fun. Things stick better when you're actually enjoying yourself, and most of this is genuinely interesting once someone takes the mystery out of it. If a bad joke sneaks in along the way, that's a feature, not a bug.
Where you go with any of it is up to you. All I want is for you to understand where we actually are, in terms that don't require a decoder ring, so that the decisions you make are yours and they're good ones.
Behind the apple
Meeke is a pen name, and the apple is my stand-in. Behind both of them is one real person: me.
The voice you hear in the videos is made with AI. That's on purpose. I'd rather you remember the explanation than my face or my name, so I keep my real identity out of it. (Also, an apple with a speaking part is just more fun.)
This is not a sponsored site. Nobody pays for what I say here, and no company gets a say in a review. When I review something, it's something I actually own and use. If a link ever earns me money, I'll tell you right next to it. And some things I review came free through Amazon Vine, Amazon's program for reviewers. When that happens, I'll always say so.
So why do this at all? Partly because I love teaching. There's nothing better than watching something click for someone. And partly because of my friends. When one of them asks me what something is, or whether a text message is a scam, that question usually turns into an article. If it's confusing them, it's confusing a lot of people.