“But I already have a website on Substack,” you argue. No, no, Substack is just a distribution tool to amplify your website. It should not be your digital home. In the last few years, I’ve noticed a pattern of writers leaving their websites to make Substack their digital home. Now, it’s kinda okay if they have...

Welcome to my Linkblog where I share interesting articles and blog posts I found about social media, Indieweb, geopolitics, Chinese and Malaysian stuff, cute cat videos or anything funny and interesting I find online. FYI: I also share links in the “Weekend Tales” of my Substack newsletter, Tai Tales. The newsletter...

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 context...

Now, a caveat before I go on. There’s a common narrative on left-leaning US-dominated social media that there’s a concerted effort by Beijing to stamp out native languages. This interpretation is false and propaganda, and this writer is not in the mood to educate or argue with these believers right now, and as I...

Sometimes, I get frustrated with the writing community. I’ll casually post something about using AI for writing, and almost immediately, someone would drop a rude comment without finding out how I use AI to write! They immediately jump to conclusions and think I generate novels with a click of a few buttons. Yes,...

My choice of paid AI is probably strange to most … besides Gemini, which is assigned to me at work (meaning, work pays for it), I’m personally paying for … Mistral. Mistral is seen as Europe’s leading AI service alternative to US services. You’d think I’d go for Claude, and it IS tempting, as I do admire their...

I created an LLM ‘literature professor’ who discusses stories with me after I finish a tale from Pu Songling’s Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (or Tales of the Liaozhai), using the 2006 Penguin translation by John Minford. As I read through the book, one of the most important things I learned about Tales was...

Realised I’ve not updated my “now” status in a long, long while. Right now, geographically, I’m in Penang, the island where I was born. My ancestors have been here for more than a century. Sometimes I feel that the island calls to my blood – at the risk of sounding dramatic. At this exact moment, I’m typing this at...

Welcome to my Linkblog where I share interesting articles and blog posts I found about social media, Indieweb, geopolitics, Chinese and Malaysian stuff, cute cat videos or anything funny and interesting I find online. FYI: I also share links in the “Weekend Tales” of my Substack newsletter, Tai Tales. The newsletter...

Efficiency and clarity are the bread and butter of UX writing, but often our own internal processes are the messiest part of the job. I’d like to share a UX copy review process that I’ve adapted from Dr Katharina Grimm, a UX writer who shared a brilliant video about performing UX copy audits. My system is slightly...

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...

Welcome to my Linkblog where I share interesting articles and blog posts I found about social media, Indieweb, geopolitics, Chinese and Malaysian stuff, cute cat videos or anything funny and interesting I find online. FYI: I also share links in the “Weekend Tales” of my Substack newsletter, Tai Tales. The newsletter...