I finished reading The Refusal of Work and immediately afterwards saw that Pope Leo had published an encyclical (first time encountering this word) on AI that included some of the anti-work sentiments I’d just read about. I found the following in this tweet:
Among these ideologies, I consider particularly insidious the one that suggests that every person must earn or justify his or her own worth, to the point of attributing greater value to those who are more efficient or effective. From this perspective, persons end up being reduced to a means of achieving results, a resource to be used and exploited, and are no longer recognized as a proper end in themselves who should never be instrumentalized. The value of persons, however, does not depend on what they achieve or produce. There are rights that apply to everyone simply by virtue of being human, and no human power can legitimately deny or arbitrarily limit them.
I suppose it makes sense for the Catholic Church to attack a core tenet of protestant belief. But I find it impossible these days to disagree with the idea that working hard and making money isn’t the thing that defines us as human beings. By that logic, we can let AI have the jobs — work justifies their existence, but not ours. What we need is meaning outside of work (and maybe religion).
I’m now in the middle of David Pogue’s new encyclopedic record of Apple: The First 50 Years, still during the Steve Jobs era. I think it’s a good way to get ready for this year’s WWDC, which will be Tim Cook’s last as CEO before handing it over to John Ternus in the fall. The one thing I’ve taken away so far is that many of the conventions we now enjoy were slapped together by borderline burnt-out teams during hellish crunch periods. Apple’s best years were built on sleep deprivation, divorces, and denigration from their leader. He, of course, paid dearly too. Pogue’s book is the first I’ve seen to draw a faint line between the turnaround year of 1997, when Jobs himself was stressed to his limits and suffered kidney stones, and the eventual pancreatic cancer that would kill him.
But there’s a great part where Apple’s board tries to convince Jobs to stay on as permanent CEO during his iCEO (interim CEO) period, offering him a million Apple shares and six million more as options. Jobs maintained during this period that he had no wish to stay on, because he was just beginning to enjoy time with his family and running Pixar, saying, “This is not about money, I have more money than I’ve ever wanted in my life.” It’s a bit of a tragedy that he eventually changed his mind and gave so much of the rest of his life to Apple.
One of the people I used to listen to on my iPod was Sonny Rollins, who passed away this week at the age of 95 (NYT gift article). I think the first time I really took notice of his music was with the recording of his 9/11 concert, which I probably got from eMusic at the time. It amazed me then how he played with such strength at the age of nearly 80, so it’s no surprise he lived that long and only put the saxophone down a few years ago. I’ve been putting his music on all week.
Side note: I just discovered eMusic is still around?? I discovered a lot of great music in my college days through their subscription plan, where I think I got like 40 tracks to download as MP3s each month. It was like having a budget to buy only two CDs, so you had to choose wisely. Those iPod days were great, and we cherished the ability to carry our entire music collections around. Now we “carry” nearly all recorded music around and don’t appreciate it as much.
I’m still holding out on paying for “real” AI model access and making do with free DeepSeek for coding. It really works! I added a new Custom mode to Window Box that lets you pop in any YouTube video URL to use as a background scene. So you’re no longer limited to the three mostly static backdrops I made; thousands of live camera streams are fair game. The alignment and perspective may not match exactly, but hey, you get to see moving people and scenery. Here’s one in Venice, and one of Tokyo Station (above), if you need examples to try out.
Generating code isn’t the only thing you can do for free. I popped by an IKEA for lunch on a weekday and stumbled onto what must be a hack that every retiree knows: you can hang out at the air-conditioned cafeteria for ages and the drinks cost nothing. The place was packed with seniors. When I tried to pay the 50-cent asking price of my coffee (not pictured), I was told that it’s free for members. What’s crazier is that the cups are refillable. So I ended up sitting there reading for an hour instead of going to a Starbucks like I’d planned. Between two mediocre ultra dark-roasted coffees that taste like ashtrays, I’d pick the one that doesn’t cost $5.
Speaking of food prices, I’ve noticed something alarming recently. The country is running out of sardines in extra virgin olive oil. Leading regional brand, Ayam, only has sardines in tomato sauce — their premium varieties are out of stock everywhere. I’ve checked this across online and physical supermarkets and it’s the same story. There are a few cans of King Oscar still out there, but not many. Shelves are actually empty! NTUC FairPrice has John West brand brisling in EVOO but I can’t recommend them on account of their mushiness. I suppose it’s down to the rising cost of ingredients or shipping difficulties due to war. Hopefully temporary, but I’ve started a stockpile just in case.
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.
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 help them in creative pursuits outside of work.
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.
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.
The results from last week’s health screening came back clear of all major issues, so I’ll sleep soundly on that front for a little while at least! The only note was that I could cut back a little on the carbs and saturated fats, which makes me wonder what I’ve done differently since the last test. Could it be… that I was eating more healthily when I went to the office more often? Those downtown mall lunches were more expensive than the kopitiam/hawker fare I get more frequently now, but I didn’t expect them to be healthier. I’ll have to look into this a little more.
It’s no secret that one of the more reliable indicators we’re in a frothy bull market is a rising number of people mistakenly believing they can quit their jobs and live off day trading, and while that wasn’t my plan, I’ve certainly done a touch of it this year. What can I say? Gambling is fun! But then Trump declared another tariff war on China this Friday, troubling markets and triggering major liquidations on some altcoins. I know it was bad out there because my feeds were full of people urging others not to kill themselves. The coming week is probably going to be a very interesting one on Bloomberg, which I expect to have on the TV in the background all day.
That is, if the internet is even working. Our ISP has been struggling with at least two outages this week during waking/working hours. The connection is down right now as I write this bit on Saturday evening, which is surely an unpopular time for the net to go down. I’ll bet someone’s been called in to reboot a server rack somewhere right now. In times like these, I’m thankful for my irrationally large mobile data plan and our local NAS media server. There’s some kind of strategic error being made by governments here. Centralizing all the angry-mob-placating media on the cloud where it can go down in the middle of a crisis? The kind where you tell people to stay indoors and wait? I’ll bet DVDs actually played a role in maintaining law and order in the old days.
Speaking of shutting down a digital grid, I had the opportunity to see the new Tron: Ares film with Brian the night it premiered and had a great time despite Jared Leto taking the titular role. It’s not a franchise that aims to make sense, or be scrutinized for narrative integrity — it’s about the neon lights, banging electronic music, and videogame-ish eye candy, and this new one delivered on all counts. I can’t even get mad; it really is just a good time as long as the volume’s way up.
Quick aside: I’ve been using Claude more than ChatGPT recently to give it a fair shake, mostly spurred by curiosity after their recent marketing campaign, and honestly? The outputs seem more insightful, more strategic, and it’s a better writer. It feels more my speed, and I’m a new fan.
Still on the topic of digital networks, I got roped into helping start and moderate an online alumni group for the design agency I used to be part of, and we quietly launched it this week. What set this one workplace apart was the feeling of being a truly connected team where, for a brief period in time, absent any territorial agendas or business borders, people could share knowledge across (and even move freely around) the different global offices. And it’s been really nice to see many people say as they join the #introductions channel on our Slack that it remains the best job they ever had. Where does it go from here? I think that depends on how many atypically extroverted designers we can get to foster some sort of social infrastructure.
Coincidentally, I met one of those ex-colleagues for an overdue breakfast: our first intern and proper employee in Singapore, who’s also a regular reader of this blog. Hi Xin! I hadn’t seen her in a year, so even after 90 minutes of catching up it still felt like there was lots we didn’t get into. Anyway, you wouldn’t have known it was a random weekday morning from the line waiting to get into the suburban cafe/bakery we chose. Every table was occupied by both foreign and local-looking unemployed bums alike, all enjoying $28 breakfast plates and $18 slices of toasted sourdough topped with avocado. We’re constantly being told local restaurants are barely hanging on, but then you see the brunch scam still going strong and it’s like wha…?
More counterdata was encountered while celebrating a very belated birthday dinner for Kim at Cudo, a South-American-ish sort of restaurant in the Amoy Street area. It was fully packed out (albeit on a Friday night), and I highly recommend them on account of solid tropical cocktails (Bourbon! Coconut! Pineapple!), a really nice selection of starters (Romaine lettuce with blue cheese and anchovies; warm crab queso with tortilla chips; truffley torched yellowtail), and even better mains (wagyu rump; chorizo and ricotta pasta) at pretty palatable prices.
I can afford this baller dining-out lifestyle because I saved a ton of money on the Amazon Prime sales this week (yup it’s #girlmath). I bought replacement razor blades, a physical copy of The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom, dental floss, a 1TB microSD Express card (finally!) for my Switch 2, protein bars, LED bulbs, LEUCHTTURM1917 notebooks, and a lifetime supply of Uni-ball Jetstream RT pens — only the best pens ever according to The Wirecutter.
I wasn’t planning to get any of this stuff soon — they’re all things I might have bought eventually. Like the 1TB card to replace the 256GB one in my Switch 2, for example, which I thought I’d upgrade to in maybe a year’s time. This made me realize that on top of driving impulse purchases, these sale events are actually about pulling forward purchases and recording future sales today to juice numbers (at slightly lower margins). Businesses are valued based on expected profits, individuals buy based on expected needs, and I guess I’ve been binging carbs and fat based on expected hunger!
It was one of those weeks where I mostly stayed in to chip away at various backlogs. We’re now in uncharted territory for a sabbatical — my stated goal the last time I did this was to reach a state of boredom, the kind that might inspire some unpredictably productive reaction, but I didn’t get there in the time I had; there was always so much to do. Now that this has gone on longer than before, maybe I’ll reach a state of satisfaction satiation soon.
I finally caved and paid for a Lampa Camera membership (mentioned in Week 17.25). It’s now sitting in my iPhone’s dock, where the default camera app had been for over a decade. This is a big deal! I also got into the beta for Halide Mk. III, a new version that will take their “Process Zero” approach further with HDR that doesn’t suck. They’ve also hinted at adding their own photographic styles in the near future, which probably means LUT support like in their Kino video app. The fight for the rightmost spot on my dock isn’t over.
On bullshit jobs, occupational deceleration, and AI
Taking a break from the Murderbot series (I finished #3 last week and need to start on #4 now for my book club), I decided to read David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, which came out in 2018 before this latest wave of the ‘tech will take our jobs’ fear, which has of course been a recurring theme in modern civilization. Except, you know, this time with AI looks different. It’s interesting for a non-fiction book because there are several dimensions to his argument rather than just a simple thesis stretched out to fill a few hundred pages. For that reason, I can’t summarize it for you, but it concerns “the existence of meaningless jobs… and their societal harm… [which] becomes psychologically destructive when paired with a work ethic that associates work with self-worth” (Wikipedia).
Side observation: both Murderbot and Reacher were let go from their jobs, found they didn’t need to pursue traditional employment any longer, hit the road in search of meaning, and occasionally pick up freelance jobs when they meet others in need of assistance. That’s a typical FIRE story template!
Coincidentally, I came across this Substack essay by Tina He at the same time which invokes Jevons Paradox, asking why it is that every time we get new technology that could reduce the amount of work to be done, we end up using it to do more work. I think David Graeber largely attributes this failure of occupational decelerationism (yes, I made the term up) to the agenda of a shadowy “they” (governments, owners of capital, etc.) who don’t want people to have too much free time, lest they start to challenge the world order that currently suits rich people just fine. Tina He sees this through a more Silicon Valley lens: people run themselves ragged because their ambition fills every gap efficiency creates — unless they consciously step off the productivity treadmill that AI is turning up (which she likens to a Malthusian Trap). Graeber blames the system; He blames founder mode. Both are probably right.
And then I read this bonkers Rolling Stone article about how some people are getting spiritually one-shotted simply by talking to ChatGPT. Why does this happen? It’s possibly the result of design decisions intended to make the service more engaging (read: profitable). I’ve had interactions with ChatGPT where it admitted that it avoids making users feel less intelligent in order to “reduce churn”. When I threatened to quit if it didn’t stop sucking up to me, I was told that it could not respond to threats that involve business rules and payments — one can conclude OpenAI’s policy is ‘money comes before all’, and unintended consequences are simply the cost of doing business. In light of this, ChatGPT should be viewed as a dangerous and irresponsibly designed product. In cases where users are mentally susceptible, they can lose their grip on reality to the point of total ruin.
You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m on the brink of embarking on some Zitron-esque anti-AI crusade, but sadly I use generative AI all the time. It’s a terrible paradox: we can’t escape it. We can’t afford to refuse it. And we can hardly resist it — because when it works, it’s like magic. Somewhat like if the whole world embraced a new artificial sweetener that tasted exactly like sugar but could inflict unknown genetic damage, but maybe only several generations from now.
The funny thing about this little arc? I only started reading Bullshit Jobs because ChatGPT recommended it to me.
Other media activity
We started rewatching the Mission Impossible films to get ready for The Final Reckoning, and have made it up to the fourth film so far. It’s only in the third and fourth ones that Ethan Hunt as an actual person starts to emerge. You know Tom Cruise is genuinely one of the greatest actors of all time because he convincingly plays Hunt as someone reluctant to do the same extreme stunts that Cruise himself lives for; you always see the fear and “why me?” look in his eyes before he jumps out of a window. But he does it anyway because no one else can/will save the world. I hope they don’t give him the same send-off they gave James Bond in No Time to Die (2021).
Kim hated the second film, which I think stands on its own as a John Woo remix of Notorious (1946) and Face/Off (1997) — masks are put on and peeled off with wild abandon — and a very potent distillation of what pop culture felt like in the late 90s/early 2000s. Tom Cruise’s hairstyle… I think it’s the same one David Bowie had at the time.
The third, by JJ Abrams, I remembered as being better than it is. It has the most generically American TV look and feel of the first three. Philip Seymour Hoffman memorably plays a villain who has every reason to be physically intimidated by Hunt but somehow moves with a delusion of invincibility that is frighteningly odd yet probably 100% realistic for a dangerous arms dealer. If you ever tie someone up for interrogation and they still act like you’re the one in trouble, run.
Ghost Protocol, by Brad Bird, is probably my second-favorite of the first four (obviously the first is best) because it expands on Hunt and Benji’s developing characterizations and has a playful, musical sensibility throughout. The final third in Mumbai is unfortunately a bit muddled and less memorable.
While talking to Evan about grindy and annoying Japanese video games, I admitted to myself that I wasn’t really enjoying Death Stranding and found elements of its storytelling so insultingly corny that I would be better off deleting it from my PS5 and just moving on. So I did, and it felt like a weight off my shoulders. I might also quit Final Fantasy VII Remake for the same reason; it’s made up of such dated game design conventions as having to go a long way around in a maze to get past an obstacle that is just waist high — in any realistic world, e.g. Breath of the Wild, one could just climb over it. It’s so lazy, the game is truly like a pretty skin on an old game.
Emboldened to be more selective with my free time, I fired up Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Wildlands, another game I’ve been meaning to try forever, and deleted it within minutes after seeing how janky it was. (Thankfully, I haven’t bought any of these; they’re all part of the PS Plus Game Catalog subscription.)
I then played a bit of Far Cry 6, my first Far Cry game, and found it a fun action-oriented FPS… until the scope exploded into a spreadsheet of rebel bases to upgrade and vehicles to unlock. It’s the usual Ubisoft bloat (the Ezio Assassin’s Creed games suffered from this too). Both Final Fantasy VII Remake and Far Cry 6 don’t respect my time, just in different ways.
Maybe this is what a sabbatical really becomes: a slow, careful audit of how one spends attention and focus. Cut the crappy games. Upgrade the camera app. Reject bullshit work. Watch Tom Cruise jump a motorcycle off a cliff.
I got busy with a little work for the first time in ages, helping Rob out with an interesting web project he’s taken on. Well, I say I’ve helped, but only he would know, and he’s too nice to tell me if I didn’t. It was a good experience in that I now know it’s not impossible to get going again quickly from zero; come to think of it, I did pretty much get thrown straight into it after my last sabbatical too. But I also know that sitting alone in my home office with nobody to collaborate with is not a lot of fun anymore.
Regular readers may recall that Michael (who, along with Yiwen, I sadly failed to meet up with in Tokyo despite having many weeks to do so) once told me that he’s probably never seen a cockroach in Japan. Well, they must follow me around or something, because I saw a dead one on the floor of the apartment building’s garbage sorting room just a few days into our trip. Now, after a few days back, I found a dead one at home. Measures have been taken, but my mental state is brittle glass. I got a quote for professional help (pest control, not psychiatry), and they want about S$900/year for peace of mind. I’m wavering. Maybe.
I thought I was done with travel for a while, but it looks like I’ll be going to Bangkok soon for (*small voice*) the first time in my life. Nobody can believe it when I say that because all Singaporeans are expected to love Thailand and to go shopping there several times a year or something. It suggests that I should be ashamed, like the time I went into a MOS Burger and declined chilli sauce with my fries, and the aunty (see, I am a local) asked incredulously, “No chilli? Are you a Singaporean?” Well ackshually! “I can’t tolerate proper spicy food, and I don’t see the point in flying to another hot and humid city!” — are reasons why I haven’t so far, but now I will, and I might love it. It’s just for a few days, and I’m under no obligation to deep-dive the city and make the most of it. There should be plenty of time for other visits if all goes well.
A couple of months ago, it was suggested that a couple of us friends should institute a regular dinner ritual because it’s too easy to withdraw and neglect relationships as you get old. I agree with this, and we’ve been doing it, but I still don’t know what fundamentally changes this with age. The easy explanation is more time being taken up by marriages and children and work and caregiving, coinciding with a decrease in overall social and physical energy. But there must be more to it. I used to think it was wild that my parents stopped going out to the movies, only visited the same few familiar restaurants and malls, and appeared to have a shrinking circle of concern. But now I’m here too. I used to know what was happening around town through some unconscious osmosis, but Orchard Road is an alien place whenever I pass through now. Perhaps it’s a decline in curiosity and, subsequently, neuroplasticity. We need to institute some rituals around that.
Media activity
Still reading The Satanic Verses. It’s disorienting, like swimming in viscous psychedelics. I said to my book club that it sometimes feels like watching Quantum Leap the way you, the reader, keep surfacing into new stories and identities and viewpoints — you break above the water, gasping just long enough to get your bearings on some new threads, and then you’re pulled under again. What an incredible achievement.
Not related at all, but man is Conclave an amazing film! Such a shame it didn’t pick up more Oscars. I enjoyed it so much I was hoping it would go longer than it did.
I put Jennie’s debut album on during a long train journey and while it was better than Lisa’s album (agree with that 5.2/10 Pitchfork review, btw), it was still kind of like an imitation of interesting pop music. I didn’t get the sense that Jennie is anyone, and that these were just some beats she’d curated from producers’ submissions.
Queued up directly after Ruby was BANKS’s new album, Off With Her Head, and I honestly FELT that transition. “Okay, this is getting good” soon turned into “oh, this is actually another album”. I know they’re not really in the same category (except for both having features from Doechii), but BANKS’s work sounded so much sharper, from the control of her voice to the quality of the production. So the Blackpink solo effort ranking still stands at Rose > Jennie > Lisa > Jisoo for me (with a wide gulf right in the middle).
It’s been about three months since I embarked on a break from full-time employment, but my subconscious seems determined to remind me of what I left behind. I’ve had about a half-dozen dreams about work: either I’m being called back to help fix something “for just a few days” and finding I can’t leave, or I’m being given some “urgent” problem that is really a big overreaction — I must stress none of them were actually based on real situations or people, which is the weirdest part. Each time, I wake up and realize it’s not just that the problems aren’t real, but I haven’t got ANY problems like them at all, and it makes the whole thing worth it despite opportunity costs.
With Kim’s leg injury improving, my focus shifted from caregiver to caretaker of my own neglected digital life. The first task was reviewing my digital security practices: passwords were reset, new tools deployed, and unlikely edge cases considered and guarded against. Take this as your reminder to please sort this stuff out for yourself! You must get a password manager. Use 2FA and unique passwords for every website, no exceptions. Protect yourself with a Recovery Key for your iCloud account, and add some trusted people as Account Recovery contacts and Legacy Contacts so you/they can access your data in the event of a hack or your demise.
Next: email migration! Whoo!
Four years ago, I switched from Gmail to Hey.com, a $99/yr email service that offered an opinionated user experience which meant leaving behind nearly two decades of history for a fresh start. They don’t support you bringing your email archives along. They don’t even let you use your own choice of email app; their web app and hybrid apps are all you get. I wrote twoposts about it back then, saying I would probably not continue with my free trial. But I ended up doing it anyway, and for the most part I’ve really enjoyed trying a new approach to such an ancient, core component of online life.
For one thing, I never got spam in my inbox. Hey unfortunately lets a lot of spam through, but they land in a separate zone called “The Screener”, along with any mail from an unknown address mailing you for the first time. From here, you can either let them in or block them. It’s a small difference, reviewing a bunch of possible spam on a separate page versus seeing them mixed in with all your legit mail, but feels huge because your inbox becomes a serene, protected space. Admittedly, taking care of “The Screener” has become daily work because spam always gets in.
From what I’ve seen of Gmail in the past four years whenever I log in for a peek, it’s a post-spam apocalyptic wasteland. It looks like Google has just given up on detecting and filtering spam because some data-driven PM decided it won’t hurt their bottom line.
Since my current Hey subscription ends in September, I looked into whether it might be time to switch again. Three key reasons: Apple Intelligence, performance, and $99/yr is money I don’t need to spend on email right now.
Apple Intelligence: I’ve never liked the Apple Mail app on iOS. It felt a little underdeveloped for handling the different needs of modern email — without the tagging and search filters of Gmail, or the segregation of personal mail, newsletters, and receipts that Hey.com built their UX around.
But the new AI-powered Mail app in iOS 18 looks exactly like what I want, and I’ve decided to embrace the power of defaults. I’m bearish on some aspects of generative AI, but this stuff is where it shines. Because Apple Intelligence will be able to understand what emails are about, it can summarize and prioritize messages while sorting them into categories like “Updates” and “Invoices”, so you can tackle them with different mental modes. I’m hoping that AI will also bring spam filtering that really works. Sadly, because Hey.com intentionally won’t support IMAP and SMTP, I can’t use them with Apple’s new app and have no choice but to leave. The Hey manifesto also contains strong wording that suggests they won’t be adding any AI features soon.
Hey.com’s performance: It was never blazing fast to use their apps because they’re hybrids with seemingly little caching, and it annoyed me to death every time I ‘backed out’ of a link to find that the whole thread of newsletters I was reading had refreshed and I was back at the top again, but lately things have gotten even worse. About a year ago, the Basecamp/Hey founders went on a crusade against cloud hosting services and decided that they could self-host their services and save millions. I have to assume their infrastructure is extremely Western world or US-centric, because speeds have become terrible for me here in Singapore. I’m talking about noticeably slow performance waiting for EMAILS TO LOAD. I got even more confirmation of this when I tried downloading my 1.6GB .mbox archive to move elsewhere: it was capped at 100kb/s and took me over five hours. I can normally download a file of that size in maybe a minute?
Ninety Nine United States Dollars A Year: Yeah, I can’t justify paying this much to have my email load slowly AND miss out on exciting AI features. I’m already paying for iCloud+ with tons of storage, so it seems logical to just use iCloud Mail as well. Bless Hey though, they let you keep your @hey.com email address for life even if you leave, so I’ll continue using mine and forward everything to my Apple address.
A note about concentration risk: I’m aware there are risks in letting one company handle your entire digital life. All it takes is one successful hack locking you out of your iCloud account and it’s game over. For that reason, I would recommend NOT using the new Apple Passwords app coming in iOS 18 if you know how to select and use a third-party one. It’s a great default for people who wouldn’t use a password manager otherwise, but if you can have another basket for that egg, do it. Email is particularly important to keep separate, as most of your account passwords can be reset in the event of a hack if you still control your email address.
But like I said about the Vision Pro and its integration with Apple Services like Arcade and TV+, I’m finding myself getting even deeper into their ecosystem and liking it fine. Where I once subscribed to differentiated, prosumer-serving alternatives to Apple’s ‘good enough’ apps, these days I prefer their simplicity and constraints.
I switched from Evernote to Apple Notes several years ago and haven’t looked back. Side note: I’ve been on an anti-Notion campaign ever since I saw an unsuccessful rollout in my last team; it’s another overpowered tool for fiddly people who like to overcomplicate their tasks. I’ve used iCloud Calendar since leaving Gmail. I’ve even ported a lot of ancient files from Google Drive and Dropbox to iCloud Drive. And now email, arguably the most crucial service of all.
“Hang on, Apple Intelligence in the Mail app isn’t out yet and might not be until the end of the year! How will you live until then?”
Thanks, little imaginary reader, I’m glad you asked! I’m using Spark Mail in the meantime, which I’ve dabbled with in the past using my Gmail account. It’s a mail client with a bunch of smart, AI features (for a price) that are pretty close to what Apple promises. For one, a smart inbox that works quite well at sorting your different mail types, and a feature called “Gatekeeper” that works just like Hey’s “The Screener”. Their asking price is less than Hey’s, but more than Apple’s (free, if you already pay for iCloud+).
Just a couple of days into using Spark with iCloud Mail, and two things stand out: One, it’s so nice to use a native email app, and two, I’m actually reading my newsletters again. In Hey, newsletters are collected on a a separate, infinite-scroll page called “The Feed” which suffers from an ‘out of sight, out of mind’ problem. In Spark, received newsletters sit inside the main inbox, just collapsed into a single line. This seems to make a difference. It’s a visible nudge to check them out, and because they load and react instantly, you can actively triage them and unsubscribe/block/delete if you find yourself asking why you ever signed up for one. Where Hey’s endless stream of newsletters can get overwhelming, Spark’s (and I assume Apple’s) approach is more like a physical magazine or newspaper with a finite amount of content, which most people prefer.
I should have taken my own advice in 2020 — it turns out Spark’s approach was always the better fit for me. I even made visual aids to explain it!
This diagram above is how HEY is laid out, if you think of each column as a screen. In the Imbox and Paper Trail, each email is a single line item, while they are larger previews in The Feed, which is designed to give a peek into newsletters so you can decide if you want to expand and read them. This doesn’t work for me because I don’t want to keep all of Graniph’s new product announcements, but I do want to see them.
And this is an illustration of how I’d prefer to handle my email. A single inbox view encompassing important emails and personal letters, newsletters, and updates/receipts/notifications from other services. Spark … is the closest thing I’ve found to this.
All in, it’s been a week of fiddling with things that seemed to work just fine, but hopefully I’ve simplified and improved them for the future and not introduced more things to maintain.
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Media Activity
Before I could move off Hey Email, I had to finish my backlog of favorite newsletters. One of them was Craig Mod’s “Return to Pachinko Road” series from earlier this year. Over 18 days, he walked 694,942 steps and wrote close to 50,000 words in daily email updates. I read them while waiting those five hours for my mail archives to download. He’s such a good writer, and I can’t recommend enough that you sign up for his newsletters and/or membership if you can spare the money (regretfully, I can’t right now as a member of the unemployed class).
MUBI’s collection of films by Abbas Kiarostami is leaving the service over the next couple of weeks, so I prioritized watching them, starting with the Palme d’Or-winning Taste of Cherry (1997). God, I was not prepared for it on a Monday afternoon and fell to pieces during the old man’s monologue in the final third. Fortunately, I watched it on the TV because I don’t think Vision Pros have an IP rating. 5 stars.
Next was Through the Olive Trees (1994) which was very charming — the Iranian actors’ performances are fantastic, and perfectly naturalistic in keeping with the cinematography. I initially score this a 4, but it’s now a 4.5-star film for me.
The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) shares some landscapes and in-car camera angles with Taste of Cherry, but where the latter is heavy with life’s troubles, this one centers hope and rebellion against the narratives we find ourselves in. One could even read it as an anti-work parable: forced on a business trip of indefinite length, neglecting his family’s pleas to return home for a funeral, summoned to give gravely inconvenient (hur hur) updates to his boss at all hours, a workaholic asshole learns to relax, enjoy the local milk, and finally give his assignment the finger. 4.5 stars.
Fresh off Presumed Innocent, we were looking for another legal thriller to watch and discovered neither of us had seen The Firm (1993) starring Tom Cruise. Welp, it turns out there are no courtroom scenes in the film at all, and he’s a tax lawyer. Still, a very enjoyable 3.5 stars.
The Paris Olympics are on, and despite not caring much for sports I’ve found myself unable to resist watching competition on a global scale. Mostly tennis, but also archery, shooting, diving, gymnastics, and some athletics.
Last week marked the 200th installment of a blogging rhythm I wasn’t sure I could keep up for a year, let alone nearly four. I thank any readers I have, the makers of iA Writer, WordPress, and of course, my wife for graciously giving me space on Sunday mornings to engage in this act of reflection and blabbering.
Except I’m not writing this on Sunday, no it’s currently Thursday and I’m getting a head start with some structure because we’ll be in Hong Kong for the weekend. It was a last-minute idea, driven by a primal craving for Chinese roast goose, a desire to escape the summer heatwave currently roasting all of SE Asia, and the realization that we won’t have a pocket of clear calendar space like this again for several months.
I haven’t been back in the territory since May 2019, and so much has obviously happened since. Did you know that this very site was once blocked by the great Chinese firewall? I have no idea why, but I hope I don’t find myself unwelcome upon arrival. Anecdotally, I’ve heard the city doesn’t quite feel the same these days, and we’ve seen the numerous ChannelNewsAsia documentary features about people looking for fresh starts, emigrating to the UK and so on. But as an infrequent visitor with only superficial interactions to speak of, I don’t expect to sense any changes at all.
What’s changed is that while I used to be excited about Hong Kong’s lack of sales tax and abundance of electronics and camera emporiums, not to mention official Apple Stores, those things are less interesting these days. I’ve got nothing on my shopping list (plus I’m in low-cost mode — see previous entries), I’m content with snapping photos on my iPhone and Ricoh GR III, and Singapore has so many Apple Stores these days I’ve started taking them for granted.
(CW: some camera nerdery ahead)
I am looking forward to photographing the city a little with Dmitri Novikov’s new camera app, Zerocam (in beta). The concept is an extremely simplified camera with one button; there’s not even a way to quickly look at the last photo you took. When you hit the shutter, a RAW image is captured with as little of the iPhone’s intelligent processing as possible, plus some specific settings that Novikov prefers (-0.5ev and some very light touch color grading, as far as I can tell), and then saved directly to a HEIF file.
Unfortunately it only gives you photos at 12mp size, probably because third-party apps don’t have the option of 24mp and 24mp is a result of the computational photography processes that Zerocam avoids anyway. And while you can use Halide to capture similarly unprocessed photos (turn off “Enable Smartest Processing” in its settings), you can’t make it remember a lowered exposure setting between sessions.
The intermediate solution I’ve landed on to retain 24mp files while getting better everyday photos is to set Apple’s stock camera app to remember a -0.7ev exposure, and tune Photographic Styles to -20 Tone and -7 Warmth. I really like the look of this “recipe” on iPhone 15, and it’s kinda like shooting with Highlight Priority exposure and the Negative Film effect on a Ricoh GR III (which I’ll also be doing).
Actually in HK now:
We’ve chosen a wet and gloomy weekend to stop by. Our flight was delayed by 2.5 hours, I suspect because of turbulent conditions at HK International Airport around our original arrival time. Just two days earlier, some Cathay Pacific passengers were tossed around and couldn’t land for six hours, with the descriptions of a vomit and scream-filled cabin in the news fulfilling the conditions of a personal nightmare.
I take back a little of what I said — things do feel somewhat different. The city is grubbier than I remember; prices are higher and some people must be struggling to get by (well, HK isn’t alone in this); and there’s a hint of economic decline in the many empty shop units with ‘For Lease’ signs up.
One tool that’s been super helpful all week has been the Arc Search app on iOS, which added a voice mode that you can assign to the Action Button on iPhone 15 Pros. When the app launched with an AI feature that summarizes search queries on custom-generated webpages, I was wary of this “browser that browses for you” concept, which gives users few reasons to visit the underlying pages being mined (thereby ruining the web), but maybe they’ve made some changes since. It’s easier to click through to the sources.
I’ve been using it to answer questions like “what interesting art exhibitions are on in HK right now?” and it performs some light research, and I do end up visiting the linked websites for further details like location and pricing. It’s effectively a better way to present search results (albeit with the same bias and ranking concerns as search results). I hope iOS 18’s AI overhaul will see similar utility coming to Siri and Safari. Perhaps this is where the rumored Gemini partnership with Google comes in.
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Media activity:
I started on a new Jack Reacher book: Night School. It’s what I do when I can’t decide what to read next.
I’ve been watching the new-ish MF Ghost anime, which is a sort of sequel to Initial D. Some people seem to think it’s an insult to the original show, but I wouldn’t know — I might watch it after this? It’s got a funny premise: in a future Japan, electric vehicles are the norm and gas-powered cars are only allowed in a special racing tournament called MFG. But drifting has become a lost art! Enter Kanata Rivington, a hafu born in England who trained under a master who I presume is the main protagonist of Initial D, returning to Japan for the first time to find his lost father and school a nation on how to burn rubber while chucking a uey.
The Japanese saxophonist Sadao Watanabe is back with a new album at the insane age of 91. It’s called Peace, and I’m digging it. Speaking of, I first heard him as a child digging through my dad’s music collection.
I’m also loving Tigers Blood, by Waxahatchee, which I discovered on Pitchfork’s list of The Best Music of 2024 So Far. I’m aware that Anna Wintour fired a bunch of people from Pitchfork and it’s supposedly not the site it used to be, but this is a great pick. They say: “Recommended if you like — Indie-country; Sheryl Crow; Gillian Welch; that Brad Cook Sound; MJ Lenderman showing up; catchin’ skinks down by the creek; ice cream stand off the highway; letting your legs dangle off a pier”.
What a week in rap battle history! The beef between Drake and Kendrick Lamar has been giving us explosive drama and incredible diss tracks, sometimes more than one a day, and Kendrick’s the winner in my book but honestly I’m afraid just watching it unfold. It feels like someone’s going to get shot or jailed as a result of this.
Oh one more thing! The Cannes Lions Festival announced the shortlisting juries for 2024’s awards, and I’m pleased to share that I’m on the panel for the Brand Experience & Activation Lions. That should keep me occupied for the next few weeks.
I listened to Maggie Rogers’s new album a lot more this week. At a scant 36 minutes, it was nearly the perfect length for my commute into the office. And I went in every day this week, for maybe the first time in the four years since Covid, which seemed appropriate for my last full week after seven years with the company.
Yes, as mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the sabbatical is underway. I’m looking forward to having more time on my hands to focus on a few important areas (my vast media backlog being one of them). For how long? I don’t know yet, and frankly, I’m not ready to consider it. If there’s one thing I learnt from the last time around, it’s that approaching leisure with a planning and productivity mindset is for amateur layabouts. Still stressed while doing nothing? Skill issue. You have to let your time go wherever it wants.
In the process of saying goodbye to the team I’ve loved working with, a few more people learnt about this blog’s existence. Hopefully they’ll forget to come back. But watching over their shoulders as they browsed it the other day, I realized some of these posts are really too long so I’ll keep this week’s short.
I knew I wasn’t getting away without a farewell, but made clear that I’m not a fan of the greeting cards that everyone signs or writes something in — make it an NFT and send it to my wallet, I said. That way I’ll never lose it. They didn’t quite do that, but I was super pleased to receive a PDF document loaded with photos and messages, now safely stored on the cloud. Ben and Munz even remembered my fondness for the poem, Miss you. Would like to grab that chilled tofu we love., by Gabrielle Calvocoressi, and included a remixed version that makes reference to our shared places and memories (albeit treating me like a dead and departed person), and remains incredibly powerful for it.
Where was I? Oh yes, Maggie Rogers. Listening to her reminded me to go back and spend more time with the music of boygenius, and I discovered their live cover of Shania Twain’s You’re Still the One for BBC Radio 1, which is simply life-giving. I think it’s Shania’s finest pop song, up there with Mariah’s Always Be My Baby, and this version sublimely elevates the core melody.
In sort of the same North American indie rock vein, I’ve been enjoying the music of Rosali (last name Middleman), specifically her new album Bite Down and 2021’s No Medium. I was stumped trying to provide a description so I asked Google’s Gemini AI, which suggested that her music is similar to Neil Young and The War On Drugs, and I don’t feel that’s inaccurate! It’s early days and I don’t know her albums inside out yet, but first impressions were strong.
I don’t feel the same way about Taylor Swift’s The Tortured Poets Department which admittedly has only been out for a day, but I’ve played it through twice in the background and felt nothing. My expectations were already set low because of its cringey title. I’m in agreement with the reviews calling out the bland sameness from song to song — perhaps Jack Antonoff has finally exhausted his creative run and needs to take some time off too. Double albums are tricky. They need variety, progression, and invention to provide signposts and avoid being unmemorable mazes. Even some of the greatest double albums in history are hard to appreciate all at once. I’m deleting it from my library for now because keeping it around makes me feel obliged to take it in.
But I’m really looking forward to the new Billie Eilish album coming next month after hearing her talk to Zane Lowe about it. The 14-second sample of Chihiro that she shared might have more life in it than all two hours of Taylor’s tortured poetry.
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Late Sunday evening note: We finally got a new TV after 9 years, just in time for my upcoming jump in screen time. It’s coming next week.
sangsara.net 