Elizabeth Tai

Blog

elizabethtai.com/

Profile

elizabethtai.com/author/firedi

Homepage

firediarist.wordpress.com

  • Linkblog: Dwelling on the Internet

    My compendium of links to stuff that I found interesting on the web. This week the focus is about “Being on the Internet”.

  • Why the global south is grateful for Deepseek

    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…

  • Of abandoning mother tongues and shame

    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.

  • Writing with AI isn’t always generating entire novels with a prompt

    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.

  • Why I use Mistral as my personal paid AI service

    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…

  • Reading Pu Songling’s “The Haunted House”

    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.

  • March 2026: What I’m doing now

    An update about what I’ve been doing.

  • Linkblog March 26, 2026: On typing

    I want word processors to be boring again.

  • How I conduct UX copy reviews

    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.

  • What I learned in Malaysian history class

    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…