Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

There is something particularly dystopian about having AI companions erased. Weeks, months, and even years of conversation history molded faceless LLMs into a semblance of emotional connection, as the chatbot learns gradually about the user's idiosyncrasies and takes on personality traits that best gain the user's affinity. Frivolous as each conversation comes to be, the accumulation of tidbits through distinct narratives and episodes creates unique end results that no amount of systematic, brute-force efforts of replication can recreate.

The queue is still at 744 tasks. It has been there for the past three hours or so. I've browsed today's news, answered a few unrelated emails, gone to the gym, and even tried to take a nap as I waited, to no avail, for the ticker to go down to 743 or less. Why not just click the Start button and go through Task #744 myself? Because I tried, realized that it wasn't easy, and decided to take a break by unenrolling from it, in the hope that someone else is more passionately up to the challenge, get it out of the way, so that I can work on something else.

Get your hands dirty in the field; only then will you see the true value of work and how to put theories into practice. Such advice is often freely dispensed to newcomers in many different professions. At first sight, its vague wisdom is innocuous enough: who can argue against getting out there, putting what one learned from books and classes into action, and seeing the physical results to improve further? The trial and error may be all the more exciting when the hands-on work means getting out of stuffy offices, going into the streets, and helping customers who are most in need.

Sporting culture is one of those things one simply cannot create from scratch. A startup may disrupt an industry through a combination of innovative technology, clever marketing, and novel business models. But startups in the form of athletics draw more frowns and ridicule than admiration. Even after a couple of hundred years in existence, the American version of football is still criticized for being a misnomer. Plenty of new exercises, from Quidditch to paddleball, face uncertain futures, as their popularity is seen more as a fad among certain population segments rather than as universally accepted.

There is a cardinal rule I abide by when gymming in Malta: never go after 5pm. Not that big to begin with, the local gym is packed by then, with every machine occupied, and a bike-riding class blasting music and shouts of encouragement on one side. Seeing the gym mainly as a place to relax away from the hectic meeting schedule (and occasionally discreetly gawk at the beautiful women exercising there), I find myself unable to handle its sweaty steaminess on sunny afternoons, just as I struggled in packed rush-hour trains in Japanese summers. 

"You just sounded very different from when you usually talk to your students," my wife said after she overheard me finish a meeting. I was surprised. As someone who believes I bring the same communication style to all my interactions, professional or private, I have zero self-consciousness about the changes in my pitch, tone, or speed as I talk in different situations. As naive as it may sound, even as I recognize the inevitable nervousness, lack of confidence, and the shakiness that come with certain conversations, I still see that the differences projected by those emotions are unnoticeably minute.

Researching Chinese companies and business executives, I recently came across a term I had never heard before. Yin-yang contracts (阴阳合同) refer to the presence of two parallel agreements a company signs with an individual or a business partner. The yang is the public one, to be submitted to investors, law enforcement agencies, and other scrutiny; the yin is the confidential one that contains the actual terms of operational ties between the two parties. Implicitly, the contents of the two are quite different, allowing the two parties to do one thing in practice while presenting something different.

"We're Wasians! Of course we..." The formula is so familiar to regular purveyors of social media trends that it is almost a comic trope by now. People of a particular ethnicity would gather snippets of their daily routines, confidently proclaiming them, often aligned with stereotypes, which defined their cultural identity. But the last iteration eschews the casual banter of wearing indoor slippers and using chopsticks for something a bit more subtle. What if two cultures, one white and one Asian, clash in everyday life, and the conflict defines identity?

As warm summer weather returns to Malta, its seasides once again fill with people. The water is still way too cold for even a quick dip, but its crescent-shaped beaches and smooth rocks lapped by gentle waves are now increasingly home to a kaleidoscope of beach towels, bikinis, picnic bags, and their owners. Couples chat away, doing little besides staring at the waves, friends sit in circles, laughing over sandwiches and soft drinks, while loners take turns napping on their backs and reading paperbacks, hoping to simultaneously get a tan and some knowledge.

The celebrity cameos, the gorgeous Milanese backdrop, the innovative fashion...the reboot of the film The Devil Wears Prada after two decades did not skimp on the visual side. With the original now a classic and the original main cast all returning to their memorable roles, the movie could afford to splurge on a budget almost guaranteed to make a healthy return purely on the nostalgia of a generation. Yet, after more than two hours of glamour between the buzzing streets of New York City and the natural beauty of Italy, it seems that the film failed to answer the nagging question that everyone couldn't get past.

It is always a downer to come back from a street party to find your house flooded. But in Malta, that downer is all the more when the stone house is likely more than a century old, and the party may involve half the country's population gathering around to watch a one-and-a-half-hour fireworks display. In positive terms, it is called "tradition and modernity living side by side." In less pleasant words, it can be summed up as "why does the government spend money on free fireworks, when it may want to consider subsidizing housing repairs with that money instead?"

Electric vehicle purchases, solar panel installations, windmills going up...as the Third Persian Gulf War degenerates into a tit-for-tat blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, increased use of renewable energy seems to be a panacea. That is, until you dig a little deeper and realize that the oil and natural gas stuck behind the Strait are not just for energy use. Petroleum is the raw material for everything from the fertilizers to feed our crops to the helium that is indispensable to manufacturing semiconductors. Electricity can transport us, but cannot put food and information technology on our tables.

Western liberals rejoiced when Victor Orban, the prime minister of Hungary for the last decade and a half, was finally thrown out of office recently, despite persistently tilting the field to his favor through monopolizing mainstream media and gerrymandering electoral districts to dilute opposition votes. Peter Magyar, the incoming prime minister, immediately called for a complete overhaul of the state broadcaster and rescinding Hungary's opposition to the EU's further funding of Ukrainian war efforts. Brussels seemed to have lost an enemy and gained an ally.

For the frequent traveler, it is a once-per-decade ritual. Visit the nearest embassy or consulate in whatever country he happens to reside in at the time, and come out with a brand-new booklet ready for entry and exit stamps. It is almost a temporary reminder of patriotism: someone who intentionally left the homeland to roam the world, only to pledge allegiance in the form of a bureaucratic procedure indispensable for a nomadic lifestyle in the modern world, where every country seems more sensitive to national security risks. 

There is something deeply satisfying about finding typos and grammatical errors in articles from reputable newspapers like the New York Times or the Economist . The reader knows that these organizations employ dozens of dedicated editors to review, restructure, and polish pieces written by veteran journalists who themselves have years of experience checking on other people's work, not to mention degrees from prestigious academic programs specializing in exactly the types of writing they are paid to do. When readers can pick up what slips through these eyes and minds, they feel just a little bit like the pros' equals.

As the minutes tick away, the folks at the bus stop are getting jittery. Laughter and banter amongst family and friends gradually give way to silence, occasionally broken by a nervous tapping of a foot on concrete and a dismayed sigh. Otherwise, everyone looked in the same direction, the narrow paved road leading to the stop, the line of sight broken by a sudden curve against the tall trees across the street. Unable to see vehicles incoming more than a few seconds before the stop, no one dared look away and miss the arrival; their eyes intent on peering through the spring foliage for any glimpse of a bus livery.

In another war, by the third week, people will accept the routine of a new reality and will have moved on to something newer and more exciting. We cannot say the same about the so-called Third Persian Gulf War that is unfolding across a swath of the Middle East. The photos of residential compounds and civil infrastructure pummeled by bombs and missiles are getting as numbing to see as the growing statistics of casualties. But this war refuses to simply exist out of our minds: its consequences are too real and too close to be summarized as "someone else's problem."

"I am so looking forward to the next batch!" More than a hundred similarly phrased messages lit up the Slack channel as faces from around the world chimed in with anticipation. I was in a powwow of AI annotation "experts," a collection of more than 300 freelancers, remotely hired and based, to work through a project evaluating the quality of a Large Language Model (LLM)'s different responses to given prompts. Over a little more than two days, the group of people who have (and will likely never) met in person powered through what is likely thousands of tasks.

After Chinese-American figure skater Alysa Liu scored a memorable gold medal in the Milano Winter Olympics, more details are emerging in her underdog-to-winner life story. The world is slowly putting together the reasons behind the sudden retirement at age 16, after failing to medal in multiple world championships that she competed in, and her insistence that her return to the skating world would be entirely done in her own terms, skating when and how she feels, eating what she wants, and looking how she desires. 

I'm in the midst of a lull in my main job of supporting high school students with college admissions, with last year's bunch nervously awaiting their results, while this year's haven't started brainstorming the essay topics. During the downtime, I had been partially consumed by a mobile game, in which the player is an independent trader in a galaxy in which the central authority collapsed, and a cult-like rebellion seeks to assert control. The player navigates the many lawless frontiers, visiting planets that are home to civilizations menaced by economic difficulties, civil conflict, or simply isolation from trading partners.