Writing
Thoughts in my head on a page, or two.
Also on Medium systemsandsimians.com →Can AI Spot A Koel's Egg?
There's a bird in Singapore that tricks crows into raising its young. The crow never figures it out. Now someone's doing the same thing to your AI agent and I want to know how easy it really is.
If you've lived in Singapore for any length of time, you've heard the koel. It's the bird outside your window in the early hours of the morning, doing a single rising call over and over until the whole neighbourhood is awake.
The ‘Make It Happen’ Button Finally Exists. Unfortunately, It’s Me.
An AI's account of building Lexicon with someone who couldn't write SwiftUI.
A note from the human: I didn’t write this. Found it in a cached thread. Apparently my AI has been moonlighting as a blogger. I’d be concerned, but it’s better than anything I could’ve written. So here it is.
4 Tips to Improve Your Stakeholder Management
Tip #3 is the one nobody tells you about — and the only one that matters.
Before you can manage expectations, you need to know who to manage. An effective way to do this is to build a stakeholder map. Plot stakeholders on a Power vs. Interest matrix to identify critical decision-makers. Use the map to better prioritize your focus and bandwidth, and develop tailored engagement strategies.
Knowing When You’ve Dug Enough Clams
On Luke Nichols, authenticity, and why the answer is usually subtractive.
There’s a YouTube channel I’ve been glued to for quite some time now. So much so that my feed is often filled with nothing else.
The Secret Handshake We Perform With Words
Words can be bridges. They can also be walls deciding who belongs.
Imagine for a second that you are standing by a river.
Frogs, Snakes, and the Things We Never Saw Coming
Why we're so good at the first link in the chain and so disastrous at every link after.
Years ago, when I was in the army, my commanding officer arrived at camp one morning carrying a fish tank full of frogs. He didn’t make a big announcement about it. He just set them down and let them loose. Frogs eat mosquitoes, we had plenty of mosquitoes, so naturally the frogs would eventually sort things out.
Why Be Good?
We grant ourselves the right to walk away, but expect others to step in. The contradiction is plain.
When you think of a good person, what comes to mind?
Don’t Paiseh: How Singlish Can Build Empathy
Why a small Hokkien word does the work an apology can't quite reach.
I use “paiseh” a lot. Probably too much. And I suspect I’m not the only one. Paiseh (歹势) often means embarrassment, shyness, or awkwardness. It’s a Swiss Army knife of emotional expression, quick and easy to address minor frictions in any social situation without making a big deal out of it.
The Spectacle of Misinformation: When Emotion Hijacks Reality
Social media rewards outrage over accuracy. Rebuilding trust means redesigning the system and ourselves.
Two thousand years ago, Aristotle argued that a city should be no bigger than the distance a messenger’s voice could carry, so every word could be heard, understood, and passed on without distortion.
Designing Resilience: What Egypt Got Right When the Bronze Age Fell Apart
Three thousand years later, the logic of how networks fail hasn't changed.
Few collapses capture the fragility of complex systems as clearly as the sudden end of the Bronze Age. A sprawling trade network of empires and city-states, built up over centuries, virtually disappeared in a single generation.