Hi “weeders”, this week I wrote an essay about choices, decisions and human agency. And let’s start by recapping a week of me figuring out how to clean and filter data with AI, sharing post-retrenchment advice, swelling with pride about my NTU students’ FYP, wondering how the Xbox business is still alive, and giving up being a MacBook user.

Random photo that I took

17th June 2026, Bishan, Singapore

What I wrote this week

Vibe Coding Project – I created an app that can take a complex PDF and break it down into a properly structured markdown (text) file.

I also learned that Gemini can do pretty effective data cleaning of Excel files. Try my prompt.

Reid Hoffman writes great Substack posts, and this one raised a major question for me.
Retrenchment numbers in Singapore are creeping up, and the layoffs are hitting knowledge workers first. As a retrenchment club alumni, I have some thoughts to share.
Kai-fu Lee wrote this great system prompt for Claude (or any other LLM app) to minimise sycophancy. I turned it into a Claude skill file so that I can invoke it when doing research, rather than having the system prompt impact every result with many square brackets.

I’m very proud of my NTU final year project team “Phone Sleeps First”! They got featured in The Straits Times!

The Xbox business blew up in 2013 when I was running its Singapore business, and here’s a Bloomberg journo chronicling its slow and expensive decline.

I’m not ashamed to admit that I am returning to my Windows laptop after trying to be a MacBook Air user for two months. OK, I didn’t try that hard.

Another market share chart showing the ongoing battle between OpenAI and Google.
I find this cartoon funny.

Why I think everyone should use a continuous glucose monitor, even if they’re not diabetic.

Sunday Essay

I forget many things in my life. In fact, if I haven’t talked to you in the past six months, I will probably forget your name, so please forgive me in advance. What I do remember clearly are the big decisions I have made in my life, and why they happened.

For example, in the last months of my junior college life (1994, 18 years old), I got so bored and frustrated doing a drip-drip-drip titration experiment in the stuffy chemistry lab, I swore then never to be in a STEM career. It’s inexplicable and somewhat silly, but it happened, and that’s a major reason why I did not apply to medical school like the rest of my classmates. That random decision shaped my entire career, believe it or not.

In 2005, 29 years old, in the newsroom – I got angry with two news editors who wanted me to assign an intern to cover a non-story about 20 people getting retrenched from a local telco. This was a time when “retrenchment” was still a dirty word, but I told my bosses that the company had tens of thousands of employees, so what was the news value here?

They said, “Ian, when you are our age (40s and 50s), you will be worried about keeping your job.” I seethed, because I thought that they shouldn’t be letting their middle-aged insecurities burden me and my intern with a non-story. I decided then that I would never be like these two boomers, that I would never be dependent on any one job or skillset, that I would be “retrenchment-proof”. Well, I largely succeeded until I got retrenched in 2022. I’ve edited that decision to: “Be recession-proof”.

(Ian’s Rule 2345: Never be afraid to copy-edit your Life Principles.)

There are many more of such decisions that I have made throughout my life, and it was only in recent years that the word “agency” became more prominent. To me, agency starts with evaluating the choices that we have, making a decision, and living with that decision.

In the AI age, the word “agency” has become more important than ever, as people begin to outsource their thinking and decisions. You’ve heard enough about that, so I won’t remind you. However, know that agency happens at every second of the day with every tiny or big decision: what time to wake up, what to eat, whether to exercise, do I read the Bible, do I check in on my friends, shall I send a curt message, do I look at the clouds, have I kissed my wife, shall I walk without looking at my phone, do I take on this assignment, do I say yes to the boss, will I attend this meeting, and so on.

I remember during my youth, I argued passionately with a friend who said that some people had no choices in life, they were forced by their circumstances. I said that everyone has at least two choices, they just need to find the other one. We always have a choice! Then we need to decide which choice to make. That is our agency. Never let anyone tell you otherwise.

(This essay was inspired by this YouTube podcast featuring Fei-Fei Li, and my ongoing experiment with using a continuous glucose monitoring system as a non-diabetic.)