Read my musings about technology, managing people, as well as about life and work.https://clarencecai.com/https://clarencecai.com/posts/stop-channeling-start-thinking-again/https://clarencecai.com/?p=752A new kind of practitioner has emerged in the age of generative AI. They prompt, copy, paste, and publish. No verification. No critical thinking. No human layer added anywhere in the process. They function almost like conduits, not contributors, not value-adders.Sat, 11 Apr 2026 09:58:02 GMTClarence CaiHuman-to-human interactionaiai-ethicscritical-thinkinghuman-thinkingmediumssingaporeverificationhttps://clarencecai.com/posts/how-to-setup-an-openclaw-instance-on-proxmox-securely/https://clarencecai.com/?p=736If you have been following the AI agent space, you have probably come across OpenClaw. It’s an open-source, self-hosted AI assistant that connects to your messaging platforms and runs as a persistent daemon on your machine. It can execute shell commands, manage files, and automate tasks.Sat, 21 Mar 2026 09:10:17 GMTClarence CaiHowtoshow setup openclawproxmoxtailscalehttps://clarencecai.com/posts/even-if-you-are-physical-and-low-cost-you-will-be-automated/https://clarencecai.com/?p=732Recently, there was a news article about a Singaporean firm using robots to do painting. This shatters two commonly made assumptions. One is that many people assume that remote work would make their jobs easy to replace, easy to outsource.Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:25:27 GMTClarence CaiWork and Lifehttps://clarencecai.com/posts/amortization-mindset/https://clarencecai.com/?p=730How much do you spend on subscriptions every month? Do you even know it offhand or do you have to check it? I know I can only recall 60-70% of them. But if you think about how much you spent on your last laptop, your last mobile phone, you typically can remember if it cost almost $2,000.Sat, 07 Jun 2025 00:21:07 GMTClarence CaiMusingshttps://clarencecai.com/posts/rsu-epp-options-or-cash-which-is-better/https://clarencecai.com/?p=702Many companies are very creative and do great work, bringing value to that of their customers, their employees, and of course, their shareholders.Sat, 03 May 2025 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiWork and Lifehttps://clarencecai.com/posts/the-inconvenient-truth-why-we-crave-more-with-convenience/https://clarencecai.com/?p=684In 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).Sat, 05 Apr 2025 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiHuman-to-human interactionConvenienceCraving morehttps://clarencecai.com/posts/remote-oddities/https://clarencecai.com/?p=623It 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.Sat, 01 Mar 2025 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiMusingsWork and Lifepeople managementRemote workhttps://clarencecai.com/posts/the-explore-exploit-dilemma-lambda-in-ml-and-in-life/https://clarencecai.com/?p=602In 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.Sat, 01 Feb 2025 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiDecisionsWork and Lifedilemmaexplore-exploitlambdalifemlhttps://clarencecai.com/posts/you-live-through-the-95-of-your-life-for-the-other-5/https://clarencecai.com/?p=608In 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.Sat, 04 Jan 2025 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiWork and Life5%95%lifenormalcystrivinghttps://clarencecai.com/posts/why-you-should-pay-for-online-services/https://clarencecai.com/?p=516On 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.Sat, 07 Dec 2024 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiDecisionsfreemiumonline servicepaid vs freepaypremiumsocial mediahttps://clarencecai.com/posts/buy-vs-build-the-perpetual-debate/https://clarencecai.com/?p=604I 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.Sat, 02 Nov 2024 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiDecisionsbuy v buildbuy vs builddebatesoftware decisionshttps://clarencecai.com/posts/ai-insulation/https://clarencecai.com/?p=606Imagine 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.Sat, 05 Oct 2024 02:00:00 GMTClarence CaiHuman-to-human interactionaihuman touchhumanityinsulationlost humanityhttps://clarencecai.com/posts/d3-step-by-step-guide-part-4-of-4-singapore-hdb-resale-price-on-planning-map-github-pages/https://clarencecai.com/?p=578This is part 4 of the 4-part guide. In this final part, we upload what we have created onto GitHub Pages to publish it.Sun, 22 Mar 2020 01:03:00 GMTClarence CaiCourseworkTechnology Museumd3githubguidehdbmapnodejsplanningresale pricesingaporesingapore hdbstep by stephttps://clarencecai.com/posts/d3-step-by-step-guide-part-3-of-4-singapore-hdb-resale-price-on-planning-map-d3-visualization-dev/https://clarencecai.com/?p=558This is part 3 of the 4-part guide. In this part, we look at how we can create the d3 map visualization.Sun, 22 Mar 2020 01:02:00 GMTClarence CaiCourseworkTechnology Museumd3githubguidehdbmapnodejsplanningresale pricesingaporesingapore hdbstep by stephttps://clarencecai.com/posts/d3-step-by-step-guide-part-2-of-4-singapore-hdb-resale-price-on-planning-map-data-processing-with-nodejs/https://clarencecai.com/?p=548This is part 2 of the 4-part guide. In this part, we process the data that we have collected in part 1.Sun, 22 Mar 2020 01:01:00 GMTClarence CaiCourseworkTechnology Museumd3githubguidehdbmapnodejsplanningresale pricesingaporesingapore hdbstep by stephttps://clarencecai.com/posts/d3-step-by-step-guide-part-1-of-4-singapore-hdb-resale-price-on-planning-map-ideation/https://clarencecai.com/?p=542This 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.Sun, 22 Mar 2020 01:00:00 GMTClarence CaiCourseworkTechnology Museumd3githubguidehdbmapnodejsplanningresale pricesingaporesingapore hdbstep by stephttps://clarencecai.com/posts/what-is-a-stacking-plan/https://clarencecai.com/?p=527In this post, I want to share about the Stacking Plan visualization commonly used in the real estate domain.Thu, 30 Jan 2020 01:37:00 GMTClarence CaiCourseworkTechnology Museumcourseworkdata visualizationreal estatestacking plan