Hà Phan

Reading this article made me remember all the terrible idea initiatives that felt like a big “So What” to real users. But the age of AI, you can’t be the only lemming unwilling to jump off the cliff. ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mani...

AI Mania Is Eviscerating Global Decision-Making — Ludicity ludic.mataroa.blog

Hopefully the tide is turning …

OpenAI IPO will not happen in 2026 amid AI safety fears, Sam Altman says theguardian.com

I’ve seen people who leave the industry then try to sell their expertise through coaching. Personally I’ve always felt that it is hard to coach anyone bc context is everything. You have to understand the problem, the business and the politics. In addition in the age of AI, the old rules don’t apply.

An engineering friend of mine was complaining about AI. While he agreed that it expedited some things, he says no one knows which problem they should be solving first and why. There’s a saying in software that sometimes you gotta slow down to speed up.

I’ve always written with em dashes. You can find essays of mine written 10, 20 years ago with em dashes. I recalled being irritated when an editor from a magazine removed my sentence with an em dash and restructure it. Writing w/em dashes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s written by AI.

In my years of working, I’ve always been able to reconcile that software overall was a net positive to society. But after AI, I couldn’t see the integrity in that vision. What kind of future are we creating for our children? What kinds of trade offs are we making and for what?

You will never find your voice writing with AI. When I’m focused on writing there is a voice in my head and at times I’m writing down what it’s dictating or visually see in my head. It’s the stream of consciousness that you tune over time. Writing is an exercise of an examined life.

We’re approaching Oct and that means AOP and performance evals. First year where I don’t have to worry about that. Even if we offload it to AI, it’s still a pain in the ass. They were my most hated tasks.

I saw this video where AOC visits farms that are next to a data center, and the data center is literally taking away all the water of these farm lands. It’s killing people’s way of life. It’s truly depressing. When I saw that, it makes me not want to use AI ever again.

It seems like when it comes to AI, companies throw the ROI, data management, and customer service best practices out the window. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.

The best thing for me about using AI for writing and research is that AI can understand and leverage both Vietnamese and English sources. I can interview someone about an event and AI can provide the related cultural and historical context. It can also help me weigh the nuance of translations.

Saw that there was a layoff at Zillow. Feel bad for all affected. When I left 2 months ago I suspected it may be coming. I think a lot of companies are figuring out their AI strategy and it ripples through talent, ops, business model and the flywheel of how you create value.