The Firehose Feed
This is a chronological feed of everything I’ve published.
AI asia Being a Writer Being Chinese Birds blog blogging books cat CDrama ChatGPT China Chinese culture Chinese Drama COVID COVID19 culture Fediverse Fiction Fiction writing with AI geopolitics indieweb Internet Language Learning life Malaysia Mandarin mental health movie review Obsidian Penang PKM Politics productivity reading science fiction seedling socialmedia StayAtHome Substack tech Technology television Travel writing
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Claude is the “cool kid” of the retail AI services world. However, thanks to its snobbish attitude to some geographical locations, token limitations, and corporate ethos I ended up in the arms of Mistral. Why I use Mistral and why it honestly doesn’t matter how great the model is as long as it serves your…
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Pu Songling’s “Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio” are more than just ghost stories. They also serve as critiques of Qing Dynasty bureaucracy. With the help of an LLM “literature professor”, I explore the deeper insights of “The Haunted House”, one of the stories in the 300-year-old collection.
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Sometimes the challenge of UX writing is not what to write, but how we write our copy. Here I share how I streamlined the UX copy review process for my team based on Dr. Katharina Grimm’s methods, aiming to reduce cognitive friction in UX writing.
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Malaysian secondary history classes have changed so much, so I am not sure what is being studied now. But during my time, we studied the history of Malaysia (of course), world history, which includes Islamic civilisations, Asia, Europe, and the Americas. We didn’t go in depth with all of them; we just learned their big…
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In this issue I share Chinese culture, technology and how it impacts society.
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A New York Times article about Coral Hart, an indie romance author that generates 200 novels using AI has gotten most of the writing community clutching their pearls. Me? I’m just tired of this cycle of unproductive outrage.
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China’s attitudes towards AI, and how China, Chinese culture continues to fascinate.
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How can communities come together in an age where media is dying, and the one that exists is shifting away from local news? How do we get messages out community when platforms’ “pay to play” business models are making it harder to communicate? Matt Chung is someone that has inspired me with his determination to…
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Today, an object mysteriously reappears in my bag weeks after I lost it, far from the original place I lost it. I have zero explanation for this. Even more that this is the THIRD time I’ve experienced this.
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This may seem like a clickbait title, but I really wonder if this is a trend because I saw a book blogger ranting that she’s fed up with books being released today and she’s going back to read classic fiction and finding more satisfaction there. It’s kinda me too. 🤔 Currently, I am reading (extremely…
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On 26 November 2025, a deadly fire broke out at the Wang Fuk Court apartment complex in Tai Po, Hong Kong. My thoughts and links to various articles, social media posts from China, and videos about this tragedy.
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A simple, straightforward Users’ Guide to Obsidian community plug-in Notebook Navigator.
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Whether AI makes you more productive really depends on whether you know what the heck you’re doing.
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In Asia, the real conversations and developments around AI are focused on practical applications for industry. They are quiet, hardly talked about and are not trendy.
Elizabeth Tai 