Category: Essays
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The Writing Community’s AI Panic
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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Is it me, or is it just more difficult to find good fiction these days?
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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Does AI help you work faster or is it just hype?
Whether AI makes you more productive really depends on whether you know what the heck you’re doing.
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Conversations about AI are different in Asia
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.
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After Charlie Kirk: Reflections from Malaysia
We Malaysians have learned over the last few painful decades: you need to be united as a people to effect any effective change in your country.
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Should we bring up China’s Nanjing Massacre today?
As the movie Dead to Rights (Nanjing Photo Studio)《南京照相馆》gains attention in China and globally, some critics wonder: Why bring it up now?
Elizabeth Tai 