💭 in your head · nothing to type
Recall the last time you came across a promise to teach you AI — a post, an ad, someone's channel. Don't judge it, just bring it back to mind.
Now picture yourself at a shelf in a shop, holding a jar. You don't trust the picture on the front. You turn the jar around and look at the ingredients, the expiry date, and who made it. Three glances, five seconds, decision made.
AI materials have exactly the same back of the jar. Run it through your head: what would you want to read there before handing that source a week of your life?
💭 in your head · nothing to type
You've just felt the difference between the packaging and the ingredients.
Packaging can be honest: good material has a nice cover too. The point isn't to distrust everything — blanket suspicion costs you as much time as blind trust. The point is to have a five-second check you run every time.
Picture this skill as the habit of glancing at an expiry date: you don't think about it, it's simply there. Catch this in your head: how many of the sources sitting in your bookmarks right now would survive that check?
Everything worth checking about open material is on its page and takes seconds.
1. The licence — what you're allowed to do
These are the ingredients. Genuinely open material has a licence file, and that file grants you rights: MIT and Apache-2.0 let you read, copy, modify and use it in your own projects. Creative Commons lets you read and share, sometimes with strings attached. CC BY-NC means no commercial use. No licence at all doesn't mean "anything goes" — it means "nothing goes": by default the rights stay with the author.
If material is being sold and there's no licence anywhere, you aren't buying knowledge — you're buying access. That's legal, but it's a different product.
2. The date of the last change — the expiry date
On GitHub it's right there: when the last commit landed. In a field where tools shift every month, material from two years ago describes a world that no longer exists.
Look at the date of the last edit, not the date of publication. A course released in 2024 and maintained since is more alive than one released yesterday and abandoned right after launch.