The Weekend Wind-Down #57 - April 6, 2025

Welcome to April, here's this week's list!

Play I watched this week

I went with some friends to see Supervision, a Singaporean play that features an older man stuck in a wheelchair, his daughter - a busy working mom, and the new helper that has been hired to help take care of him. The story, themes, and dialogue were all very local, if I hadn't lived here this long some of it would have been lost on me. Overall, the acting and direction was very good, I especially liked that video and media was integrated with the live action. One of the plot points was about security cameras, and real cameras were set up and displayed throughout the show after that, letting the audience see the action from different angles as well as the discomfort the characters were feeling. The story was a bit all over the place, I think it could have been more impactful if the writer had stuck to less ideas he wanted to convey. The story covered themes of getting older and not being able to take care of yourself, the pressures of dealing with aging parents, surveillance and whether it keeps us safer, the social and ethical concerns around employing helpers, sacrifices for your family, and more. I guess, just like in our real lives, people in stories can have a lot going on, but some depth was missed.

Fantastic sales person I met this week

Like many of you, I get contacted by people trying to sell me something almost every day, both personally and for work. But even when I'm trying to buy something it's rare to have an amazing sales experience. Recently I've been trying to find a venue for a work event I'm holding later this year. While some of the options I've found have been okay, I wasn't super excited about any of them. Then I went to see one last venue, and the first room she showed me was just okay, but she could tell I wasn't thrilled with it. She listened to my concerns and what I was looking for and realized she had another room that fit my needs much better. We went to see it and I instantly loved it. We are signing the contract soon, and if it wasn't for the sales person going the extra mile to show listen to my needs and show me another option, I probably would have chosen a different option. It doesn't sound that hard, but it's amazing how often there is a kind of take-it-or-leave it demeanor, when just a little extra effort could close the deal.

What I read this week

This week I read An Impossible City by Karen Cheung. I've mentioned before that I like to read books from local authors or about the places I visit, and this book hit both marks before my trip to Hong Kong next week. It was an interesting book, I felt it was more of a personal memoir than about the city itself. I liked that it didn't romantisize or exoticize Hong Kong like so many books about Asia do. It was interesting to hear about all of the events we read in the news from someone who was born and raised there, Hong Kong has been through a lot, and for someone who isn't rich or ultra-successful, it's easy to see how difficult those times were. This will only be my 3rd trip there, so I'm certainly not as familiar with the city as I am with Seattle, Singapore, or Shanghai. But I've always liked Hong Kong, it has many things in common with Singapore, limited land, financial hub, large immigrant population, bigger neighbor to the north and more. But it's more edgy, it feels less safe - it has more character. And that's just me romanticizing it, but if you want to see how someone from there feels about it, this is a good book to read.

What I'm thinking about AI this weekend

I've gotten to use a bunch of other AI tools besides ChatGPT recently, both from work and downloading some of the other popular clients. What's struck me the most is how different they all are, not only in the interfaces, but also in the way they respond and the output they give. We're not even two and a half years into the explosion of generative AI, and there's already so many tools being built for specialized uses. If I think back on my experience of the growth of the internet as a normal personal and business user, the trajectory is so different. In the 90's we chatted on AOL and MSN, now we chat on WhatsApp or Messenger - we used to Skype, now we Zoom - we used to wait 2 minutes for a blurry photo to load, now we can stream in 4k. Things have gotten faster, higher resolution, there's more stuff on the internet than there used to be, the physical and digital worlds have integrated with Amazon, Uber, and others, but looking back now, they all seem like incremental changes compared to AI. I still people say that this is just a fad, or we're close to reaching the limits of what it can do - but even with today's capabilities it can fundamentally change the way we live and work. If you haven't really thought about how you can integrate AI into your life, you better start now or you're going to end up like somebody's grandparents who couldn't work a VCR.

That's all for this week, enjoy the rest of your weekend!