Many companies are very creative and do great work, bringing value to that of their customers, their employees, and of course, their shareholders. Some companies are even creative with their compensation, opting to not just pay with money (the fiat legal tender kind) but with other machinations that ultimately are less useful than money, understanding them is what you can do to ensure that you...
The Inconvenient Truth: Why We Crave More With Convenience
In today’s streaming world, we can actually access millions of TV shows, movies, and even music albums and songs at the touch of a button (and sometimes not even a button). For example, right now, you can just easily ask your favorite voice assistant to load whatever song you want, whether you’re driving, at home, or at work. I think this form of convenience extends itself to a point...
Remote Oddities – Experiences Only Remote Workers Have
It used to be that when we caught TV shows, we would all watch them at the same time, some prime time soap episode that would become the talk of the week if it was awesome. Then came demand TV and streaming and now we all watch whatever whenever but have nothing in common to chat about anymore as everyone’s watching something different. In my years of managing multi-country teams, one oddity of...
The Explore-Exploit Dilemma — Lambda in ML and in Life
In machine learning, there is a concept of explore vs exploit. How often do you explore versus exploit? For example, when the algorithm is doing its supervised learning, you need to know how often to actually utilize the data that you have to get the right result. Let’s say you are trying to classify animals. You collect data, like how many legs they have, whether they produce milk, or whether...
You live through the 95% of your life for the other 5%
In life and at work, 95% of the time, even if you are working on research, or operations, or software engineering, are common things you do to keep at your work. Build this widget, solve that business requirement, make this odd unclear and uncertain idea a reality. Whether it is an innovative solution, or just thinking differently to solve a day-to-day problem, these are but your 95%. Then once...
Why You Should Pay for Online Services
On the internet, or more specifically, the world wide web, Yahoo search used to be the de facto search engine for many people. Launched in 1994, I personally started to use it on a 56kbps modem connection in 1998. Then, Google became popular in the early 2000s in Singapore and I switched to it sometime in 2000/2001 and never left. In 2003, before the world even heard of Facebook, and around the...
Buy vs Build, the Perpetual Debate
I used to work with a colleague who constantly lamented how overwhelmed he was by the sheer number of platforms and tools he had to support. It didn’t make sense to me at first, none of these tools were custom-built, yet they were all self-hosted on virtual machines, requiring constant maintenance. With so many modern SaaS solutions available, why were we still managing everything in-house? It...
AI Insulation – How AI Keeps You Apart From Loved Ones
Imagine that you’re at a social event and you walk up to shake someone’s hand. Instead of receiving an outstretched hand, you get a hand in multiple layers of gloves and the person is inside what seems like a plastic hamster ball. That’s what it’s like to be represented by layers of generative AI. This is an analogy of what I call “AI Insulation”. When layers of AI wrap around our interactions...
D3 Guide — Resale Price on Map — GitHub Pages
This is part 4 of the 4-part guide. In this final part, we upload what we have created onto GitHub Pages to publish it. This is a practical step-by-step guide to creating a map visualization in d3. In this 4-part guide, we set off to create a visualization to display whether the area where the resale prices of HDB flats have changed throughout the years. Check out Part 1 here. Here’s a...
D3 Guide — Resale Price on Map — d3 Visualization Dev
This is part 3 of the 4-part guide. In this part, we look at how we can create the d3 map visualization. This is a practical step-by-step guide to creating a map visualization in d3. In this 4-part guide, we set off to create a visualization to display whether the area where the resale prices of HDB flats have changed throughout the years. Check out Part 1 here. Here’s a demo of what...
