The text discusses how Fly, an AI platform, enables developers to deploy globally distributed applications with replicated databases for both reads and writes using standard tools and features. It explains that while it's easy to scale out a database only used for reading, handling updates across multiple instances is challenging. The article then introduces a hack that simplifies this process by allowing the application to handle read/write operations based on exceptions generated when attempting to write to a read replica. This approach involves minimal code and is easy to understand.