Someone suggested that maybe I’ve got ADHD because of how I tend to (over)do things in big phases and then move on to something else. Case in point, this week I focused on reading, and somehow got through about six and a half books. It was Speaker for the Dead that unclogged the system, it was so engrossing that I didn’t feel the usual distractions: the urge to scroll a feed, or switch to a TV show, or check the chat apps. The ability to focus on long-form writing is like a muscle that loses its strength really fast if you’re not constantly training it.
Here are this week’s books.
- Transcription (Ben Lerner) — This was a recommendation from Lorde on one of her IG Stories. I really wanted to like it, but felt too little to pass it on. 3 stars.
- On the Calculation of Volume I – (Solvej Balle) — This 7-part time loop series has been on my radar and I thought I’d start. I’ll put it this way: as fun as Groundhog Day this is not. 3 stars.
- On the Calculation of Volume II (Solvej Balle) — I’m still undecided if I should continue. The author drops a cliffhanger right at the end to help persuade you, though. 3 stars again.
- It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over (Anne de Marcken) — This was a recommendation from Rob, a zombie novel you’ll like even if you’re not into zombies, and it contains some absolutely brilliant bits of writing. 4 stars.
- Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami) — I think you either like Murakami or you don’t. 4 stars.
- Lanny (Max Porter) — The second recommendation from Rob, even better than the last. Magical, abstract, raw. 5 stars.
- The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (David Frayne) — In progress.
This last book is a fairly academic sort of essay + research project on how modern life is unhealthily tilted towards work — has been colonized by it, even. How work dominates our worldviews, is seen as a source of virtue, and supposedly gives life meaning. It references some incredible antiwork bangers from Bertrand Russell and others, and made a good case way back in 2015 for how we as a (presumably Marxist-leaning) society could make life better for everyone if we just stopped centering work and thought about what else we could do. And that was before generative AI.
Viewed through the lens of today’s technologies, it’s hard not to see the chance that AI offers for us to rethink society: we could sustain current economic outputs while letting everyone spend less time earning, giving more people the freedom to pursue other things. It’s a Charlie Brown football that’s been offered and yanked away by capitalism many times before, but we can still hope. You may think you have a life today, he writes, but aren’t you really spending that time recovering from work? Are you really able to do the things you want, or have you already been limited to the options that fit neatly into evenings and weekends?
I plugged this into Claude and it pointed out that I’ve been on sabbatical for months and made a dozen apps, which might be the echoes of work ringing through my bones, a ritual I can’t unremember. I disagree. Work may have been the first to put the tools in my hands, but what I do with them now is self-expression, possible because work isn’t at the center of my thoughts and time.
It was with this in mind that I attended a talk on Thursday organized by my friend QQ, featuring my former boss, Olof, and a guy named Phil who heads up an innovation office in the government.
The event’s topic was “Human-Centered AI” — broad enough to go in many directions. Olof gave a preview of the book he’s working on, which argues that play is the future of work: something humans do naturally and joyfully, and therefore a genuine creative advantage over AI. But he remained firmly focused on work as an indispensable part of life, which made Phil’s contribution useful as a counterweight — he suggested to the audience that AI could let them pursue more creative things outside of work entirely.
I ran into a lot of people that I knew at the event. Many were ex-colleagues from the last couple of companies I was at. It’s times like these that Singapore makes you feel how small (or perhaps how tightly knit) its communities are. Quite a few of them have gone on to work with each other elsewhere, and a significant number have now landed in roles at the Government Technology Agency of Singapore (GovTech). As if to underline the point, one of the people I met at the post-event drinks was someone that YJ told me — just three days prior! — that he wanted me to meet. He was right; I enjoyed our chat and there might be an opportunity to do some fun stuff in AI together.
If you thought that all that reading meant less vibe coding, you’d be partly right. The bigger constraint was self-imposed: I’m currently not paying for any AI subscriptions, and have made it my mission to see how much I can do with free models. It’s like completing Doom with just the basic pistol, or Jason Bourne beating a guy to death with a book (I tell myself). Any idiot can ship an app with Claude Opus — but can they do it with DeepSeek V4 Flash?!?
(I’ll probably last another week before caving and resubscribing.)
Using only free access to Qwen 3.6 Plus, I managed to update Window Box with a slew of upgrades: transition animations between locations, better caching of assets for performance, accurate daylight timings, realistic sunlight movements from dawn to dusk (correctly oriented to the camera angles in each city!), and better handling of wind effects and sounds.
I also updated a maze, a maze, a maze to address a request I’ve gotten several times: the ability to see your path and the calculated optimal route after solving the puzzle.
During this time, Google released their new Gemini Flash 3.5 model and made some outrageous claims, such as how it rivals their own 3.1 Pro model in coding ability. After putting it through its paces and wasting quite a bit of time, I can say it’s currently nowhere as smart or reliable (at least when working in chat).
I wanted to add a page to this site containing a curated “bookshelf” of the best books I’ve read recently. I first made the page using a basic WordPress template, just a gallery of book covers that linked to Goodreads, but found it depressingly old-fashioned. Then I tried to use Gemini Flash 3.5 and DeepSeek V4 Flash to build a modern web app, with a stack of 3D books you could pull out to inspect, and ended up losing an entire afternoon’s work due to hallucinations and corruption.
The next day, I restarted the project from scratch and got something I was happy with. Only to test it with Cien, who gave me the feedback I knew in my heart but didn’t want to admit — all this faffing around with a fake 3D bookshelf wasn’t any better than simply seeing a grid of book covers. It was actually more annoying. So I redesigned it again, and you can see the results through the Bookshelf link in the site’s navigation.
Or at bookshelf.sangsara.net.
And because I didn’t want to wade into code or ask an AI agent each time I need to update the list of books, I built in a visual tool to generate the very code it needs! I’ve named this project Shelf Expression, and will open-source the code on GitHub once it’s sufficiently kink-free. Other people should then be able to just point their AI agents at it and repurpose this to add bookshelves to their own sites.
It’s becoming hard to remain satisfied with traditional, restrictive CMS systems like WordPress.com when you can vibe code custom pages like this, but I’ll stick with them for now on the basis of boring = stable. I’ve got too much history here to risk a migration at this point, but the day will come, so this really is an existential risk for many companies unless they update their services.
sangsara.net 
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