2026-03-16 04:46:00
Some days I get in bed after a tortuous 4-5 hour session working with Claude or Codex wondering what the heck happened. It's easy to blame the model - there's so many options to choose from:
It's not uncommon for me to come back to the problem the next day, my own context window cleared from rest, and find a fast and fulfilling path forward with the help of the LLM. What's going on?
This one seems pretty obvious. If I am becoming mentally fatigued, I will write worse prompts, and because of that, the AI will do a worse job. Here's an example of what happens when I'm really tired: Kick off a somewhat meaty prompt (after 30% of context was used to align with the AI on the problem), realize right after submitting that I missed some key context, interrupt the LLM, provide the context, and then have it proceed. Without a doubt, interrupting Claude Code or "steering" in Codex leads to worse outcomes.
Some of the work I'm doing right now requires parsing some large files. There's bugs in that parsing logic that I'm trying to work through with the LLM. The problem is, every tweak requires re-parsing and it's a slow process. I liken it to a slot machine that takes 10 minutes to spin. To add insult to injury, some of these tasks take quite a bit of context to get rolling on a new experiment, and by the end of the parsing job, the LLM is 2% away from compaction. That then leads to either a very dumb AI or an AI that is pretending to know what's going on with the recent experiment once it's complete.
If I reach the point where I am not getting joy out of writing a great prompt, then it's time to throw in the towel. That has to be the first signal. If I'm half-assing it, being short, interrupting, and getting frustrated, then time to take a break.
There's some metacognition that needs to take place here. Am I being less descriptive because I haven't actually thought through this problem and I'm hoping the AI will just fill the gaps? That can be a very seductive trap to fall into. AIs are getting quite good at filling in undefined requirements, something that I remember having to do as a software engineer myself, but they're not good enough yet.
There's times I write a prompt with so much clarity in my desired end-state that I'm already celebrating the end-result when I submit the prompt because I know the AI is going to CRUSH IT. That's the feeling I need to look for in every prompt. If it's more the feeling of unsureness or impatience, it's just not going to pan out.
In the case of my parsing problem I mentioned above, it was too slow and the feedback loop was painful. I want my slot machine to take seconds/minutes to spin, not 15/20/30 minutes. In these cases, I've started to spin up a new session with the LLM, lay out my problem with feedback loop speed, express my desire to get to a sub 5-minute loop, give it an example of a failure case, and ask it to reproduce that failure case as quickly as possible. This is starting to sound familiar ... TDD anyone?
I was always the scrappy engineer. Sure I wrote tests, but I was never one to stop and create elaborate test cases or integration tests for bespoke problems. That was too time consuming, and also, I was getting paid even if my feedback loop wasn't perfect.
It's been quite the journey to fight that feeling that writing elaborate tests is time-consuming when working with AI. If you give an LLM clear success criteria: "Reproduce this specific failure case and make sure the clock time is less than 5 minutes to do it. Feel free to experiment with ways to optimize the code path or omit certain pieces that are unnecessary to reproduce" - the AI will not only reproduce the problem (maybe slowly the first time), but it will create levers for a faster feedback cycle. With that fast feedback cycle, it will consume less context and be SMARTER. This can seriously save hours of debugging time.
When I am exhausted from working with an LLM - it might actually be a "skill issue". I need to recognize when I'm tired and entering the doom-loop psychosis. Cognitive outsourcing of requirements is seductive, but it's a trap. If I'm not enjoying the act of writing the perfect prompt and absolutely confident I will return to a result I'm 95% happy with, I need to either take a break or ponder if I've really thought through the problem. If things are moving slow and it feels as though context is filling up too quickly - I need to make that the problem to solve. Find a path, with the help of the LLM, to iterate faster and use up less context.
2026-03-16 01:10:00
I read the People and Blogs interview with Patrick Rhone. I love how he describes personal blogging:
...that’s exactly what a blog should be - a reflection of one’s interests and attention over time. A reflection of who one is right now and where they’ve been. Blogs are living things that should grow at the same rate we do.
I totally agree, and at the same time, I’m terrible at living up to it myself. Or at least I have been in the past.
I’ve deleted both posts and entire blogs that “don’t feel like me” anymore. I've acted on some deluded idea of having found a permanent me, a person who will remain the same from now on and forever.
It’s an illusion, of course. The only thing permanent is change. The person writing this text is gone the moment I hit “Publish”.
That’s the beauty of life. We experience, we evolve, and we become a new person again and again and again. If not, we might as well be dead and gone.
Given my somewhat messy blogging history, I’m a bit afraid of saying this out loud. On the other hand, maybe that’s exactly why I should do it:
I have a good feeling about this blog sticking around.
2026-03-16 00:28:00
It's the night before Chinese New Year. After the reunion dinner, we bike home in the dark and cool, but this time, my mind is elsewhere. I feel unsettled. I can't shake the images I saw on the TV screen from my mind—the scores of robots dancing/doing martial arts moves in unison, the AI-generated video graphics that puzzled me for a moment as I tried to discern if what I saw was actually real, or not.
I remember once reading an article that explained the gap between the development of robotics and large language models and how I felt a sense of relief to know that this was still a long way off. So the sight of robots moving so fluidly in an almost human way came as quite a rude awakening, especially since I don't keep abreast of all these tech developments.
Now it's my first time knowing of and watching (snippets of) this annual Chinese New Year show, and honestly, I felt disturbed by the little that I saw. Now I'm obviously not the main target audience here, but besides what feels to me like blatant nationalistic propaganda, I feel that what was meant to elicit a response of amazement only left me with a slow and sinking feeling of dismay—at the realisation that the world as I know it has changed.
How do I reconcile how robots are appearing more and more human? How do I deal with the way society seems to herald the rise of the machines? And how do I make sense of my world if I have to question the reality that I see, that I hear, that I read? Why does it feel like we are being crowded out and now have less and less room to be human?
What kind of world will my son inherit?
It's no secret here that I dislike AI, and it blows my mind to find myself quite alone in my sentiments. People around me generally seem open to it. I've had friends and family put up their Ghibli-fied pictures as display pics, had colleagues who are older and (I assume) less tech-savvy than me consult it for questions and ideas, been handed a piece of LLM-generated text to read in a group setting (as there was supposedly something of value to be gleaned from it—meh!), and also heard “You can use ChatGPT to (do this and that)” casually suggested one too many times.
My brother when I told him about my disdain for AI said (regarding our children) something along the lines of, “They will not need to learn how to write, but they will need to learn how to prompt AI to write for them,” and “AI is their future reality. They will need to learn how to use it to keep up with and function in society.” Needless to say, I felt a little depressed after that conversation, both about the reality he was not quite wrong about and the fact that he did not seem perturbed about writing becoming “less relevant”.
I can't understand why AI doesn't grate on others the way it does me, but I was never taken by it. I remember coming across an image generator for the first time (before I knew anything about “AI”1 or its ethical implications) and trying to create a wallpaper that I envisioned for my new Mac. I had abandoned my attempts soon after as I realised that there was no way the tool could actually generate the image that I had in mind. In the end, I found the perfect illustration by an actual (human) artist that still graces my screen today.
The next and last time I used a generative AI tool was during a training session at my previous workplace, when we were tasked to use Gemini to generate lesson materials. The trainer opened by telling us that this was a fun tool to explore, but as I churned out image after image—each seemingly legitimate at first look yet revealing uncanny oddities under scrutiny—there was a layer of artifice I simply could not ignore, and all I could feel was a growing sense of horror.
It feels like we are losing our humanity—somewhere between the tide of AI slop, the flood of performative social media and the rise of convenience—and everything has become that much more fake, shallow and impersonal.
Nowadays, I can't do a work-related search without coming across multiple surreal-looking images of activity ideas or thumbnails of Disney-like animated characters, their eyes widened in perpetual shock—an image that is, frankly, quite terrifying. I've also become increasingly turned off by K-pop (I keep up casually out of habit and curiosity more than actual interest—something I'm trying to wean off) and how artificial everything feels—the flashy music videos; the plastic faces, unnatural veneers and doll-like eyes; and the disturbing nature of fan service.
And just the other day, I was reminded as well of how impersonal the experience of going to a restaurant had become, when we were actually waited on at a cafe. I genuinely appreciated that rare and brief moment of speaking to our server instead of the usual scanning of a QR code. And it suddenly dawns on me that this was the norm in W, to have actual human interaction when you placed an order at an eatery, and I miss that. I'm also reminded of my first part-time job at sixteen, when I had a brief stint waitressing at a Japanese curry restaurant, taking orders and confirming them politely, ticking off items on an order chit, sending them off to the kitchen.
It was in W that the convenience we enjoyed back home became apparent—we could simply walk into a clinic anytime to take a queue number to see the doctor, could easily make cashless payments almost everywhere and get all that we need in a single trip to the supermarket (produce, toiletries, even medication), all without even bagging the groceries ourselves.
We thought that by reducing friction, we would add to our lives, that efficiency would give us back the time that we so desperately needed for our hectic city living. But what if friction adds more to our lives than it takes away?
I remember how ChatGPT was once suggested to me as a solution to my complaint of trip planning being time-consuming and effortful—an idea that I had looked on with utter disdain. As much as I disliked the process of planning for a holiday, I had absolutely no interest in making it any easier.
Why would I even want to go on a trip planned by a robot? Why would I follow its itinerary or travel to the random places it suggests? Why would I entrust my holiday plans to a chatbot which knows nothing about me?
Because it matters to me that I trawl through multiple websites to pull out information that is of interest and relevance to me. It matters to me that I decide which are the places suitable for our family and which are the places worth going. And it matters to me that the holiday I go for is a holiday that I actually decide to go on. Why would I ever want to give up thinking and let someone—or something, to be accurate—think for me?
Maybe I'm a snob, but I'm positive that my ideas are better than any ChatGPT and am absolutely certain that my writing is even more so. As for AI-generated images, not only am I not enamoured with them, I find them grotesque. AI simply offends me. It feels like an insult to my intelligence, an insult to humanity and an insult to life itself.
(And I feel like my design school lecturer, a photographer—who stitched together surrealistic photos on an enlarger in the darkroom—would agree with me completely.)
Because you can take my laundry—give me a robot that will do my chores—but don't take my ability to think, to make, to be.
Lately, I've been in my element at my new workplace—I have zero regrets quitting my old job—and much of it has to do with the time/space/freedom that I have to create here. I'm literally writing a whole curriculum from scratch, weaving two subject matters thematically into a narrative spanning an entire school year. And I've been writing my own lesson plans, conducting them and refining them after. The process has been interesting and engaging, but it helps, of course, that I'm teaching the fun subjects. Now I'm even conceptualising and scripting for our big year-end event—something that I eagerly volunteered to do.
What is life without that spark that you can only find in the act of creating? And what is life without the grind—the grind that shapes us, the friction that humbles us, that keeps us human?
I think of my teenage years playing MapleStory on the PC, grinding—first killing snails, then slimes, mushrooms, octopuses, pigs, and so on—so that I could level up. At that time, racking up sufficient experience points to finally get to the next level was a painfully long process. Yet as we set our sights on that far-off goal and pursued that Herculean task, life was lived in the grind—training alone, training alongside online friends, going on party quests (even with my siblings), buying/selling/making trades, selling fame daily at the hangout spots (and always pushing my ads up with the maximum number of @ symbols).
Then I think of how I was left sorely disappointed after trying the mobile version of the game when it came out ten years later. The game had “no feels” without the tactile experience of hammering at the keyboard to control my character—hotkeys that my fingers had memorised by heart. Worse still, there was an auto-battle and auto-quest function, making the game saturated with highly-decorated characters that had reached insanely high levels that were unheard of back in the day. I could not understand the motivations of all those players I saw because I quickly tired of the game and deleted it soon after. Because what exactly was the point of playing a game that played itself?
What is left of us if we outsource our thinking to a machine and our words and art to a robot?
And where would I be if not for my words, if not for the act of writing?
I think of what writing has done for me—how it has changed me—since I started journalling again, almost two years ago now. Writing has been a bit like putting on a pair of spectacles over my short-sighted eyes. It has cleared my vision, clarified my thoughts and given me an awareness of who I am and where I want to be heading. And though it is not everything, it is to me a bare necessity.
Writing is sacred. The drifting thoughts in the day. The nights in front of the screen—wrestling, grappling—for just the right words that can connect the thoughts that have accumulated over weeks, even months, in my head (my essays have only grown lengthier). And the life that I live in between.
Writing feels like life. Writing makes me feel alive. And sometimes, these words even take a life of their own, birthing new thoughts that would otherwise never come to mind.
In the weeks since beginning this essay, my starting thought of the slow and sinking dismay at how we have less and less room to be human has gained newfound meaning for me as I consider what it means to live a slow and sinking life.
On the last day of Chinese New Year, after the afternoon's thunderstorm gave way to cloudy skies, we changed our plans to head to the observatory and biked to the beach instead in the hopes of catching the lunar eclipse. It was a fairly long ride to beach, but the crisp air made our journey a pleasant one. And though we never did catch sight of that once-in-a-red-moon rare celestial event—no thanks to the thick blanket of clouds that lingered after the rain—it hardly even mattered.
That day, we walked on a sandbar, watched the sun set, picnicked in the dark, lay down gazing at stars, and on our way back, finally saw the full moon in all its glory. That day, we disrupted our usual after-work/school weeknight routine and experienced something new together for the first time. That day, I felt a little more alive.
Some days later, I found myself sitting on a bench, eating an ice cream sandwich in the dark as a Hokkien song blared from the ice cream uncle's not-so-sanitary ice cream cart, and I sensed within me a moment so precious.
And maybe this is the slow and sinking life we are all meant to live—thinking, doing, being—physically present in the world and in the bodies we inhabit. Thinking our own thoughts, doing and making with our own hands, being human, at the heart of it all.
So let life be slow and sinking. Let it not hurry, and let it carry weight—the weight of our ordinary days. Then perhaps we will in this artificial and superficial world still be able to find, with both gladness and relief, room left for us—the room for us to be human.
I had been “living under a rock” until a conversation with my intelligent uncle this CNY. (At our first meeting and when I was all of nine, he challenged me with a hare-and-tortoise version of Zeno's paradox, to which I eagerly and valiantly fought on the side of logic.) Intelligent Uncle opened my eyes to the realisation that the AI we refer to today, contrary to its name, is not at all intelligent—something I had never given a second thought to before. I should probably switch to using the term LLMs, except that it doesn't flow as well in writing and no one I know actually uses that term, for now at least.↩
2026-03-15 11:18:00
>> Beautiful community driven maps
I've begun moving to add more privacy, or at least some more anonymity, but something that has been a pain point has been navigation.
I don't want to use google, I don't want to use Apple.
After some searching I found out about OpenStreetMaps and fell in love with the concept. It's a massive project that is made by the community and hobby map developers. It even allows multiple entities and apps to pull data from it, to build systems, where the map data is more robust.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem like my city is very well developed on OpenStreetMap. Luckily, I found some awesome tools for iOS and Android that create little "missions" or "quests" for you to complete and help make your local map more accurate and better. It's fun, because even if you're just picking up coffee, there's likely a quest a few feet from you that you can complete. If you prefer desktop, you can even start editing straight from their website.
For iOS - Go Map!!
For Android - StreetComplete
For Desktop - OpenStreetMap
If everyone started contributing a little to the open org, we could have a real community driven and run alternative to big tech. I've already added several building, labels, addresses, and I plan to add much more so that my local community can have a real fighting chance to leave the multitude of privacy breaches by big tech.
by untitled_operator
2026-03-15 04:23:00
I've been musing lately about the way the internet feels different with AI eating the world. I think my opening an account here is, at least partially, a reaction to that change in feeling that I have been experiencing. I think the problem is that it used to be impossible to produce a large volume of content without expending a similarly large volume of time, effort, and, to some extent, money. AI changes this fundamentally.
Now, we are awash in content and mostly content with very little actual thought behind it. Content for content's sake. Since the most vacuous content requires the least effort to fake, the race to the bottom accelerates. It feels impossible to find a foothold and tell what is worth reading. There used to be, for lack of a better term, markers of quality. Today all those markers can be simulated cheaply and easily.
Thus, the return to a simpler smaller internet. Internet of real people. A rigorous rejection of the algorithmic intermediary and a demand for sincerity. I hope that places like this continue to grow. In the same vein, I have switched all of my content consumption to an RSS feed delivered via email. No filtering that I don't explicitly create. No ordering other than publish date. I find I can actually think sometimes.
2026-03-15 02:35:00
I am an expat. My parents are expats. My grandparents are expats. War and opportunity, the classics. Mine was education but it was also bigger than that. I wanted a new home. And I found one, for a while. But as much as I tried, I never felt fully settled. I moved house every year for the last nine years. It was not always intentional but it was always time to leave.
When people ask me where I'm from, I tend to pause and assess what they’re actually wondering. Oftentimes they can’t figure out my ethnicity. I look racially ambiguous and my accent is hard to place. Other times, they want to know if I’m local to the area.
I guess what they want to know and then I indulge them with the history of my entire lineage anyway because anything shorter feels incomplete.
My last move was intercontinental. To fit my life into four suitcases, I gave away many of my belongings to friends, charity shops, the local library and the trash. For the last decade, whenever I’ve gone to buy anything of a considerable size, I’ve thought about how easily it could fit into a box, a suitcase or an Uber. Even then, there were still too many clothes, books, board games, irons, utensils, foldable Ikea boxes, backpacks.
My minimalism was not an aesthetic choice. It was born out of a jadedness that grew over time from failed attempts to settle. I would buy things like a TV and a shoe rack and they would weigh heavily on my shoulders as I helped an Uber driver with a bad back load them into the trunk of his car. It started to feel cruel and silly.
I let go of the need to want. The one and done became a lifestyle. One pan for my meals, one bag for the everyday, one e-reader for my books. I only restocked products when I fully ran out and I only accepted gifts in the forms of vouchers or experiences. I developed a real dislike for gifts just for the sake of gifting, collections for the sake of collecting.
I don’t want to be a minimalist anymore.
I want to buy something comically big and heavy, like a grandfather clock.
I want to own things just because they’d be fun to own. A big globe, an electric incense burner, bulbs that come with a remote control.
I want to paint my walls and collect books again.
I want a radio and a guest bedroom.
I want to pick up my neighbor’s mail when they’re out of town and trust them with my plants when I’m out of town.
I want to be able to say where I'm from without any hesitation.
I don’t want to be a minimalist anymore.