Life’s unquiet dreams

I’ve noticed similarities between how our emotions propagate and how wildfires spread — we end up being consumed by a gush of emotional wildfire that started from a small thought, just like an entire mountain gets burned with a small ember or flicker of flame that started everything. I pushed this metaphor further to think…

It’s been a little more than a decade since I started my first real job. I’ve had a lot of managers along the way, some of them I’m thankful for to this day and still maintain relationships with (one of them I still hang out with him a lot of times), others I don’t want…

Form-giving. Bringing ideas to life. It’s a unique skill that professionals known for their creativity (designers, architects etc) bring to the table. There are various artifacts created as a result of this form-giving: napkin sketches, whiteboard drawings, diagrams, wireframes, blueprints and so on. Out of all these, I’ve been especially always fascinated by diagrams. The…

Recently I’ve seen quite a lot of people online raising questions about the usefulness of learning foreign languages, practicing writing or drawing. Their point: AI will be doing all of these for us, and will be far better and we’ll ever be. So why even try? When it comes to a pure utilitarian perspective, they…

Ever since ChatGPT and other AI tools came into existence, I’ve been fascinated by the AI’s ability to learn. Companies that created those AI tools trained the AI models with a vast amount of dataset from public web data (eg. Wikipedia, books and news articles) to various datasets from open-source or licensed partners. With such…

A few days ago, I watched a YouTube video that shared a story about a person who played Go (one of the most complex games one can ever play) for many decades since his 20s but still ended up getting dementia when he went into his senior years. It reminded me of a Quora post…

What is a writing sprint? It’s what I’m starting as of today. I’ll be spending 30 minutes on writing about a topic that I want to write about. I’ll be doing it in a “freewriting style” (ie. Focus on writing what comes to my mind rather than focusing on editing, not worrying about grammar or…

I’ve had my HBO Max subscription for about two years without watching any single show on it. Crazy that I forgot about it until a good friend of mine reminded me of it. I’ve unsubscribed from it right away and also found some other subscriptions that I’ve been paying without using them (smh). I’ve unsubscribed…

‘Tis the season. The performance review season. My company does its performance review in January. Starting mid-December till the first week of January, people scramble to write their self-review to reflect on what they did well for the past year. I always had doubts about the effectiveness of it and how the process can be…