If I had to do it again I don’t think I’d work in tech. A lot of enshittification now on bullshit problems. You can say, “Well we’ve made it easier for people to buy a thing.” But at the end of the day as a society we trust each other less, we have no social contract. It’s a lot of so what.

Reading this article made me remember all the terrible idea initiatives that felt like a big “So What” to real users. But the age of AI, you can’t be the only lemming unwilling to jump off the cliff. ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mani...

Just saw The Odyssey. Amazing! But the gods are assholes.

Saw that there was a layoff at Zillow. Feel bad for all affected. When I left 2 months ago I suspected it may be coming. I think a lot of companies are figuring out their AI strategy and it ripples through talent, ops, business model and the flywheel of how you create value.

I think I going to stop this account soon. There’s nothing left for me here. I might start a TikTok account about what I’m pondering and working on. But I don’t want to care about followers or whatever. Just a video diary of sorts.

There’s a thing that happens when you’re in writing mode. There’s a voice in your head that is talking throughout the day. It never stops. It’s like loose threads you unravel. When I can hear those voices again, I get excited bc I know my creativity is flowing.

Something I realized upon retirement was that I was operating in survival mode. Urgency was the only gear. I recalled about 15 years ago, a manager had given me the feedback that I didn’t always need to floor the pedal. But the industry ratchets you up.

You will never find your voice writing with AI. When I’m focused on writing there is a voice in my head and at times I’m writing down what it’s dictating or visually see in my head. It’s the stream of consciousness that you tune over time. Writing is an exercise of an examined life.

I woke up the day before at 4am & I had a sentence in my head that wouldn’t quit. So I got up and wrote 5 hours straight. I thought it was something I could share on SubStack but then I realized it is a chapter where context builds ahead of it. It’s like figuring out an ontology of memory and time.

If you had told the 22 year old me then what I would achieve now, I would be incredulous and I might even feel disappointed. The conventional life felt like a debt I had to repay, and tech was a hat that I wore hesitantly and glad to hang up. While art and writing felt like liquid oozing out of me.

Things that serve me well while working that doesn’t help my brain now: - Expecting myself to shift gears overnight - Being the sole decision maker when everything is in limbo - Anticipating A,B,C future scenarios and planning for them all - Stop making "Feeling Good" dependent on large completions

Was telling someone that when you’re an Asian living in CA, you’re just another person. But in less diverse states, you sometimes get treated like you’re a foreigner or an other, regardless of whether you are born here and speak perfect English. That’s really the main reason I stay in CA.

It’s funny how I’m focused totally on other things now but as soon as someone ask me about product or UX, my brain doesn’t miss a beat. I will share what I know but I do feel like it’s not my place to try to mentor anyone anymore because I’m no longer in the game.

Novices think of interaction but systems thinkers think of flywheels. How to think of every element as distribution, the trigger and response whether deterministic or non-deterministic.

I was giving someone advice today about his product idea. It’s funny how people jump directly to solution when hypotheses about motivation triggers aren’t even defined. I articulated hypotheses for him to disprove, and in that process he’ll discover the unknowns he never thought about.

Someone from my old team reached out yesterday about design decisions and I provided some guidance with insights from research history, and how the interaction maps across various device inputs. History enable you to see the product as scaffolds of hypotheses and to triangulate across all research.

I’ve seen people who leave the industry then try to sell their expertise through coaching. Personally I’ve always felt that it is hard to coach anyone bc context is everything. You have to understand the problem, the business and the politics. In addition in the age of AI, the old rules don’t apply.

I have encountered designers who remove features bc they think it doesn’t look good. If there is strategy to focus on a thing due to enshittification, that’s a different convo. But you don’t just kill things without clear whys. You just relegated yourself to arbitrarily putting lipstick on a pig.

Someone called me today about my work in a 3D experience. Honestly, a designer who works on UI without an innate understanding of orientation in driving, walking, speed and utilizing motion is like making decisions about making the dashboard look good vs UX’ing driving.

Caught BTS’s half time show at my uncle’s house. That was my extent of watching the World Cup. The boys were on point as usual.

Spoke with Rosenfeld media. They invited me to a session of “Exit Interview.” I explained that perhaps my reasons for exiting the tech might not be as relatable. But a loss of religion did contribute to it. But after some discussion, I agreed to do it. I’ll need to schedule around my travel.

Went to the doctor yesterday and my blood pressure is lowest it’s ever been. I come from a family w/genetic disposition to heart disease. When I was working I didn’t feel particularly stressed. Sometimes I enjoy the adrenaline. But the stress was slowly killing me.

I was watching this podcast w/Andrew Stanton, a film maker at Pixar. He said that Steve Jobs saw Pixar as a way of creating something that would last through the decades, like how people still watches Snow White whereas people only held on to a phone for 3-5 years. I always saw tech as disposable.

“The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.” Henry David Thoreau

They say that you’ll reach a certain age where you don’t care anymore. For me, I’ve always known that the career is just a vehicle and once you get somewhere, you can stop driving. It’s an instantaneous detachment.

Nothing burns me out faster than politics and leaders I don’t respect but must tolerate.

Usually in the face of a massive ambiguity, when no one knows what to do, as soon as I start to have an inkling where I can find the reasoning from several angles, that usually gives me the energy for the chase. But this last time, even though I could see it, I couldn’t find the energy.

After a long stint as a consultant, I landed a full time job, and I brought no personal objects to adorn my workspace. So much so that when I went on PTO people thought I had quit. My boss brought this up and I said, “I have to feel as if I can walk out anytime.”

Cleaning out my office and wondering if I should get rid of my company swag and trinkets. It’s not if, it’s when. It feels like erasing an identity. I’m a minimalist and I go through the Marie Kondo’s exercise of “Does it bring me joy?” more often than others.

No matter what company you work for, one of the exhausting thing about work was the social performance like feigned enthusiasm about consensus theater — unfocused experimentation coupled with uncritical enthusiasm; or when you see the poor outcome coming but no one is stopping it.