Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

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.