Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.

"Napoli is a bit rough around the edges, but beneath the hassle and bustle is a vibrant city of good food and good people," so the many travel vloggers say about southern Italy's largest city. The disclaimer is highly warranted. After all, the city is known for having produced several well-known mafia groups that, in the decades past, managed to turn the city into a den of street crime. While northern Italy turned its historical and cultural sights into a tourist boom and endearing image of fashionability, Napoli was largely avoided despite its equally illustrious offerings.

The government signaled displeasure with the reporting by revoking the journalistic privilege of several correspondents ...goes the typical back-and-forth between authoritarian regimes and critical (often Western ) media outlets. Those revocations are based on a perhaps deliberately bureaucratic method in controlling access: the existence of the journalism visa in most jurisdictions. Foreigners working for major news brands are expected to self-identify as seeking to publish information. This is so that they do not bring their employers problems, while enabling local authorities to better track their whereabouts.

Outside the imposing, vertical stone walls that enclose the hilltop fortress jutting into the sea is another Valletta. There, the few tourists battle crumbling passageways hugging the rugged coastline, cold sweat breaking out as they come face to face with narrow paths where their feet are inches away from a steep drop into the raging ocean below. But they also come out into a small seaside community, where small fishing boats lie next to wooden houses and storage units, unchanged in decades. Families gather, surely away from their main inland houses, to barbecue, feed stray cats, and greet intrepid travelers passing by.