creating space for reflection
If you scroll to the bottom of each post on the site, you may notice a curious badge: It's a badge from the Not By AI group, a project that looks to explicitly tag creative content—writing, visual art, music—as created by humans, not machines.
There are rumors that the entire Amazon Kindle lineup will be refreshed this year: more memory for AI, plus removable batteries to comply with EU regulation. Hey—more Kindle hardware is good news. Yet, the reading experience on Kindles has felt stagnant for years , and after they discontinued the
Back in 2017, the sci-fi author Ted Chiang wrote a prescient article surfacing the fears of AI. This was before the technology had reached its current, supercharged LLM form, before even GPT-1 was trained . He was reflecting on the problem of misaligned AI, the same concern that would
Etched in my core memory, from my teenage gaming years, is The Offspring's All I Want : It's the intro loop from the arcade game Crazy Taxi . The core game and its sequels haven't seen any updates since the 2000s [1] , but they epitomized the
What are the rules to the game? What game are we even playing? A couple years ago, we caught the Super Bowl on TV, with the 49ers playing in the biggest sporting event of the year. As my son was asking why things were happening, I found myself having to
It seems like FIRE survived after all. The acronym stands for Financial Independence, Retire Early. It's a movement I've been following since the late 2010s, with the emphasis on financial calculations and statistical analysis tickling my mathematical brain. At the same time, its core tenet of
I think it was the semester's first career fair, during my sophomore year in college. A Microsoft recruiter, screening for computer science majors, pulled me aside and asked me what my "favorite language" was. I panicked, and told them that, uh, I sorta liked English. I
"The world is moving faster than ever…", and all of its paraphrased clichés, have become a personal pet peeve. It shows up in business articles, podcasts, and plenty of advertising, to trigger a sense of anxiety and uncertainty about change. Just before they try to
I've been sneaking vacation photos into my Year in Review posts, as we've had the opportunity to go farther away in recent years. The travel switch flipped when the kids got old enough to remember their adventures, so that during these trips, we can emphasize differences
A couple months ago, I went on the CTO Confessions podcast . In one of the segments, we talked about the impending—or already developing—problem of the shrinking talent pipeline. With agentic AI, senior engineers are now expected to manage multiple coding agents to augment their output, and
I called it two years ago: E-ink was stuck . It was a niche display technology, without the same R&D or manufacturing volume as conventional LCDs, and therefore lagged in both price and quality. If the increasingly slow and iterative releases of the Amazon Kindle line are any
The success of one generation should change the lives of the next. This is the fundamental immigrant story. My parents made the decision in their late 30s, dragging along three kids from Hong Kong across the Pacific Ocean to settle in the cold Canadian landscape. They sacrificed their stable careers,
This blog's namesake drives my writing process. I first come across a noteworthy book or article, something that triggers a thought or reaction. Then I create a new doc, jot down a few thoughts, and let it sit for some time before fleshing out the idea more holistically.
Recently, the YouTube algorithm started surfacing well-produced videos to my feed, from realtors laying out information on attractive neighborhoods. Here's one on the towns in San Mateo county, and here's another talking about what's new in Sacramento county. The content is genuinely insightful,
How do casual blogs like mine retain their interested readers when every distribution channel is degrading? Well, if you scroll to the bottom of this post—or any other post here—you should find a simple email address and a subscribe button. Giving me your email signs you