In this week’s newsletter, I wrote an essay about why I don’t automate the most time-consuming part of my teaching work. The weekly recap is pretty long: Crisis comms lessons from the Hyrox fiasco, how I build Excel tools with AI, choosing which free AI subscription (that the SG govt is offering citizens), using AI with agency, navigating careers, a ridiculously priced Pokemon tee-shirt and much more.
AI Stuff
Most popular post of the week: We cannot always control our bodily functions, but we can control our messaging. Timeless PR lessons from the recent Hyrox fiasco.
How I build Excel tools with AI and show others how to do the same.
But I don’t build slide decks with AI.
The SG Govt is giving out six-month AI subscriptions to citizens who take up selected AI upskilling courses. Which AI subscription should you choose? (Hint: Don’t choose the ones starting with “M”)
An NYT column by Thomas Friedman: “It’s Already Too Late To Stop The AI Threat” (gift article).
I always use AI with agency. I’m starting to suspect that many people who are upset with being asked to use AI don’t know what agency means or how they can exercise it.
A Stanford lecture by Andrew Ng and Laurence Moroney on how to navigate careers in the AI age. It was for a STEM audience but I think humanities people really need to watch it.
I’m cracking down on spelling and grammar mistakes in writing assignments, because it’s 2026 and we have so many free tools to fix them.
I don’t buy many things because I’ve been a product manager and I know all about the true cost of consumer products. But this Psyduck T-shirt goes overboard with its retail margin.
Psyduck is a Pokemon character who is always having a headache.
Human and Other Stuff
Patterns of unhappy people, by Shane Parrish.
If you wonder why I have so many things to write about, you can take a peek into my morning routine.
I’ve been playing games since the 1980s and I don’t think I’ll ever stop. Recently, I bought a retro gaming handheld – the Retroid Pocket Nova – and it’s been a blast. Here’s how it can play the ancient Nintendo Game and Watch titles like Parachute.
My transforming computer x gaming handheld.
It’s haze season in SE Asia, and I’m trying to be positive about it.
Sunday Essay
As I write this, I’m feeling quite pooped (ok, no more Hyrox jokes) after a Saturday of grading assignments for my NTU classes.
Until you become an educator, you’d probably never realise how time-consuming grading is. I have about 50 students in my media writing classes, and even for a low-stakes assignment, I have to spend at least 15 minutes per submission to read, write feedback, key the grades into a customised Excel spreadsheet, and then double-check my data to make sure I didn’t mess up. That’s 750 minutes, or 12.5 hours!
But I still don’t automate the grading for written assignments, despite having all the skills and experience to design the agentic AI solution for it. It’s simply wrong for a humanities course where it’s all about judgement, ethics, and balancing perspectives. Yes, I now ask students to fix their basic grammar and spelling errors (with or without AI) before submitting their work, but it’s only so that I can focus on evaluating their thinking process and the actual quality of their content.
Because I care about my skills and how I impart them, I am always clear about when I should or should not use AI in the teaching process. I also know the fundamentals of some of these things I have done in my life:
In sales – you must personally experience someone giving you money in exchange for the product that you sell; then you will understand why sales is not spreadsheet management.
In marketing – you must learn how to market a product with just a few dollars and see an actual monetary return to understand what ROI really means.
In art – we must learn how to see the world and draw things by hand before we use any software app.
In writing – you have to talk to people in order to write down their stories. Interviewing is the first skill to learn in writing. Alternatively, just writing about the real things that you’ve done is a good start.
LinkedIn newsletters – On average, this newsletter takes about two hours to produce every weekend (105 minutes of writing and 15 minutes to generate the key visual). But I do it because it doesn’t feel like two hours, and because you deserve to read the thoughts of a human, not a soulless machine.
Before I sign off, let me tell you about this new idea I am going to put into action right after I post this newsletter. I’ve been struggling to learn Python for several years because I keep forgetting the nitty-gritty stuff, and also because I haven’t had a real-world problem to apply coding to. Today, I will take the basic Python exercises and ask AI to design simple real-world challenges for each area of coding, so I can make useful stuff with basic skills. Perhaps, I can finally become a real coder.
Hello world!