Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

"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. 

The three-story house lit up like the entrance of a high-end mall. Yellow string lights run the vertical length from the rooftop balcony to the garden below. A velvet red bow tie runs the horizontal length across the second floor, while a balloon snowman and a Christmas tree bookend the whole spectacle on the top and bottom. The fact that the house is surrounded by the characteristic beige stone houses of Malta, with not a decorative light in sight, only serves to accentuate its visually prominent place in the quiet residential neighborhood on an average night.

After three years working in college admissions consulting and speaking to more than 100 high school students worldwide, this is my biggest learning. Skills are easy to pick up. For those who can afford it, professors are willing to mentor, NGOs can be set up, hardware prototypes can be built, and diverse cultures can be learned firsthand. Even those without money can pick up skills through free online courses, bugging adults to share their expertise out of the goodness of their hearts, and run small projects to help out in the community.

When one asks for the wealthiest countries in the world, perhaps the most commonly used (albeit deceptive) measurement is GDP per capita. The logic is that if each resident, on average, is more economically productive, they would justify higher wages and thus more spending power to improve their livelihoods. A corollary is that the wealthy ought to also be the most peaceful. After all, crime and conflict are not good for business. No one would both investing, scaling up, and paying people to produce if they worry about their assets and very lives.

For years, I struggled with fitting in at different organizations, whether it be school, workplace, or just groups of friends. It is not that I could not function within them. As needed, I could communicate with coworkers to get projects done, chit-chat with friends to share life updates, and adhere to rules that lead to concrete results, whether it be graduation or promotion. But more often than not, these actions felt less driven by intrinsic motivation to better belong through crafting more shared goals and tighter personal relationships, but just obligations to maintain memberships.

Let's see, six meetings today...five more tomorrow...I need to reschedule one to Saturday...maybe I can get up at 6am because that's the only time slot that works with his time zone. These are some of the monologues that are going through my mind as I scan my time schedule for my coming days. As an educational consultant, having meetings with students is my main job, but in the quest to make myself available for more students more frequently, I often quickly realize just how unscalable the work can be, no matter how much I try to be efficiently ubiquitous and responsive.

The schedule of an educational consultant unaffiliated with a regular school can be an odd one. With students occupied with their classes until late afternoon on weekdays, the consultant is not in a position to speak to the same kids until their evening hours and weekends. The result is that the consultant's work becomes not so different from a barman: busy from the dinner hours late into the night, with no possibility of a free weekend. For someone like me who has always worked in corporate jobs where weekends and holidays are almost sacred for otherwise busy employees, the service industry work schedule is new.

China and the United States negotiated a temporary truce in their ongoing trade war, slashing the tariffs they had imposed on one another for 90 days and lifting stock markets worldwide in its aftermath. However, analysts from various news outlets, and surely, investment banks, continue to see uncertainties as the two sides left largely unsaid what will happen after those 90 days expire. Will the tariffs go up and send business and markets downhill once again, or will the vaulted idea of "continued negotiation mechanism" established during these talks help dial down the temperature permanently?

"And here is your card, valid until December 2025," the nice lady at the Malta residency office explained as she handed over my new residency card. And just like that, I am welcome to another year of living the slice of the Mediterranean paradise. Also exactly one year after delivering my first post from this little island, I am here to summarize the year before in an always vain attempt to predict the upcoming year's trajectory. As is always the case with the first of the year, checking off what has been completed helps to focus the mind on some truly new experiences that can still be had.

The American college application is quite unique. Whereas one would expect that a "good" student is defined by good grades, both over years of classwork and one-off exams, the American system demands a student to be much more. So students spend years building up a list of activities outside the classroom. From excelling in the competitive world of music, sports, and academia to the more idiosyncratic leadership initiatives to show that one can change the world, one small impact at a time, high school students should be occupied even when they are not buried in books.

In some way, time in Malta almost stands still. More than 300 days of sunshine a year means the place's weather never varies across seasons. The centuries-old stone buildings, protected by centuries of renovations on the inside and regulations that guide what towns should look like, mean that the visual look of human settlement here also is unchanged since civilization set foot. Then there are the old men and women who pull up their chairs and sit for hours in front of the lapping Mediterranean coast. One could finish their oil paintings without asking them to stay still.

The simplest of addictions can crop up at any time. Whereas being hooked on drugs and gambling requires one to make an active effort to go to the nearby dealers or casinos, there are plenty of ways that one gets buried in an alternate reality for hours and days without having to spend a single dime. A vacant hour between meetings, a sudden urge to procrastinate from an inevitable task, a desire to kill off time without a concrete purpose...something more productive is definitely there, but it is not found.  A few game downloads, watching videos, or even a session of casual banter with  ChatGPT  could all do fine.

The non-Japanese portrayal of the Japanese salaryman is often an illustration of the unenviable foot soldier of Japanese economic success. Overworked and exhausted, they drag themselves into similar-looking office buildings in their equally similar corporate uniform of black suits with neckties. Admired for their individual sacrifice and hard work as a sign of devotion to help their companies and country grow and prosper, the non-Japanese observants would nonetheless loathe to emulate the way these salarymen worked and lived.

I often half-jokingly say that I am way past my peak at age 35. While it is a way to prevent others from setting too high of an expectation for how much further my career can go, it also reflects how I reflect how I see my career so far. As a mere 24-year-old, I was already a Vice President of Operations at Lazada , an e-commerce firm that became a major player in that industry in Southeast Asia. Overseeing more than 150 employees, some more than twice as old as I was at the time, made me realize that corporate management was frankly, not my cup of tea.

Every line of work ebbs and flows based on a calendar of deadlines. When no imminent projects are on the horizon, employees enjoy their downtime, taking vacations and going home early from the office. When clients call in with urgent requests, employees reluctantly do overtime, trying to get through all the tasks while their managers and customers breathe down their necks for constant updates. The deadlines vary greatly from industry to industry, with expectations being three months for management consultants to three minutes for the fry cook at McDonald's.

One thing that this blog does not particularly do well is "specificity." Often, posts start with a concrete event that triggers a line of thinking, but then dive deeper and deeper into the philosophy and values behind the thinking, until the reader is left thinking, at the end of the post, what do the abstract thoughts developed across multiple paragraphs have anything to do with the event that triggered the post in the first place. And too frequently, I am inclined to agree with the readers: as a space to freely jot down my thoughts, the thoughts are prioritized over structure or narrative.

It has been some days after the sudden ouster and return of Sam Altman as the leader of the world's current tech darling OpenAI. But even as the episode gets written into recent history, there are plenty of mysteries surrounding exactly what happened. Who are the folks who wanted Altman out so decisively, even though they, as the public, know that Altman is the face of the company and an influential voice on AI even beyond immediate company operations? And what exactly did they want to achieve through the ouster? Greater commercialization may be a culprit, but for casual observers, this is mere speculation.

The recent bankruptcy of the co-working space operator WeWork in the US spelled the end to a rather embarrassing saga in the world of tech. Under its flamboyant founder, the firm was once deemed a tech darling ready to disrupt the fossilized world of real estate management. For a while, it seems to have succeeded, offering up rental spaces to other tech startups hoping to bask in the glow of how tech can be utilized to solve legacy industries. Getting other tech firms to believe that it is an integral member of the tech world propelled WeWork to new heights in valuation.

The world is bracing for an AI revolution. Starting from the shock of ChatGPT's dexterity when it first emerged this month last year, both tech experts and the general public are now envisioning a world in which chatbots like it and its myriad competitors go from mere helpers to human work, to become central to daily operations of the global economy. With skills that range from crafting documents and conducting online research to brainstorming new ideas and putting together computer codes, it no longer seems unfathomable that chatbots replace millions of human workers around the world.