The Firehose Feed
This is a chronological feed of everything I’ve published.
AI AIfictionwriting 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 Substack tech Technology television Travel writing
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Substack is convenient, but treat it as a distribution tool for your content. Your content should live on an independently owned website, which has a domain name you control and own. This way, you can secure long-term visibility and control over your digital presence on the Internet.
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My compendium of links to stuff that I found interesting on the web. This week the focus is about “Being on the Internet”.
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Deepseek is pretty amazing. I made 22 API calls yesterday and I have spent….$0.005. Granted my use case is extremely simple, just some simple data work, extracting and shuffling data from a csv file to create a directory page on a website. But what would’ve taken me 2x longer copy and pasting, with lots of…
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A reaction to a fascinating essay on Substack about the cultural pressure of “leaving the mother tongue” and adopting other languages for class mobility. I reflect on the dynamics of language use among Malaysian Chinese, where the shame is about not mastering more languages or being slow at learning languages.
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I’m often frustrated by the writing community’s misconceptions about AI in writing. I wish more writers were more open to AI’s potential in writing and stop crucifying those who dare to say they use AI.
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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.
Elizabeth Tai 