How This Handbook Works
This Handbook is the current best-understood picture of everything processed into Duke's Tech Knowledge Database. It is organized by TOPIC, not by the date material was received, so you can always find the up-to-date picture on a subject in one place.
It is rebuilt — not just appended to — each time new source material is merged in. That means sections may be reworded, reorganized, or strengthened over time as more evidence accumulates, even if no single new fact was added.
Structure
- General Operating Principles — standing rules that apply regardless of topic. This section starts empty and fills in only as genuine cross-topic lessons emerge.
- Topic Sections — each with three parts: Core Principles (the underlying facts/patterns), Key Facts & Examples (concrete extracted detail — numbers, comparisons, named tools), and Source Articles (traceability back to Notion IDs).
- Change Log — at the very end. Every merge gets a row: Source ID, date, what was added, which section. This is what makes the Handbook auditable rather than a black box.
Traceability
Every claim in this Handbook can be traced back to a specific Notion database row via its DK-### ID. If you want the full original summary behind any point made here, look up that ID in the Duke's Tech Knowledge Database Notion database — the full transcript is attached to that row.
What's new in v11
This rebuild merges nine entries (DK-82 through DK-90) and is the first assembled from the videos' own spoken transcripts rather than from second-hand summaries — every earlier entry was written from a third-party summary of the source, whereas from DK-82 the full transcript is attached to the Notion row and was read directly. The batch is unusually argumentative, which is its value. Bill Gates says the obstacle to AI policy is public silence; Fei-Fei Li says it is extinction rhetoric crowding out real work (DK-87, DK-85) — both describing the same vacuum and disagreeing about what fills it. Gates and Elon Musk, from opposite temperaments, independently arrive at the same mechanism: review before release by people competent to judge, and neither asks for slower deployment (DK-87, DK-83). Ed Zitron argues the money underneath all of it does not work (DK-86). Two interviews with the same Figure AI founder ten months apart let a set of specific claims be checked against their own restatement (DK-90, DK-88). Two things were deliberately kept out. A produced explainer on AI energy demand states on air that two of its headline figures came from asking Grok; both are excluded entirely rather than hedged, and the numeric-claims principle was strengthened to cover figures that have no human source at all (DK-89). Two unsourced statistics in a business interview are recorded only as things not to repeat (DK-84). One new General Operating Principle: electrical power, not compute, is now named as the binding constraint by independent sources across four topics, which is what earns it a place there rather than inside any one of them.
Version 13, compiled 15 September 2026. 112 source entries (DK-2 – DK-113). Claims are recorded as their sources framed them; figures described as claimed or reported are not independently verified.