Dear XYZ,

I’ve always been interested in what it means to be free. If I were to continue writing this blog for long enough, I won’t be surprised if I revisit this topic occasionally.

I would sometimes hear people saying that they choose not to have kids because that would mean giving up their freedom. A similar logic can be applied to marriage or being in a long-term romantic relationship; some people (probably less so compared to having children) would say that they prefer the freedom of being single.

For the most part, this makes intuitive sense. When you have relationships, they take up your time and energy. But I think that there’re other ways to see this. I’m particularly interested in how freedom can be conceptualized in a different manner to invert this intuition. If we were to imagine our experience of life as if it were architecture, relationships would be like doors to a separate space. Different life spaces allow you to have different sets of experiences and possibly express different versions of yourself. Without having these relationships, one will not be able to access these spaces and therefore not be free to roam and wander in such spaces. Seen from this perspective, having relationships gives you the freedom and ability to experience things that you wouldn’t have otherwise.

This is similar to Isaiah Berlin’s coinage of positive freedom, which can be understood as the freedom to do something (as opposed to negative freedom, which is the freedom from external restriction). In this sense, the ability to act in a particular way is a form of freedom, because it would otherwise be unavailable to the person.

Perhaps it could be thought as a trade between temporal freedom and spatial (or relational) freedom. We may get less time to do things for our personal self, but gain the opportunity to build relationships and community, as well as bear witness to the life of another individual.

I am somewhat bothered, as I’m writing this, that we often associate the lone ranger out in the frontier as synonymous with freedom. There’s something to be said about the lonely freedom of striking it out on your own, but I think what’s often left unsaid is the courage and freedom to connect, to befriend, to love and be loved. In my case specifically, to have the space to explore what it means to be a dad.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Y was born on 8 August 2026. That makes me a dad, which is something pretty incredible to wrap my head around. In some ways, having a kid is one of the most typical things about life — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this and you wouldn’t be reading it — but yet every individual birth feels like such a miracle in itself. How is it that a sperm and an egg can come together to create a brand new human being with combined traits from mom and dad?

Y’s birth was relatively successful. There was a short moment where there was a possibility that we may have to do an emergency C-section but fortunately we didn’t have to resort to that. C did an amazing job, she’s a trooper as usual. What’s kind of funny is that we found that Y probably had his hand on his face when mommy was trying to push him out, so the pushing took a bit longer than we thought it would, though again, relatively short.

I brought my mom to visit Y at the hospital on the second day. I managed to muster my courage and broached the religion topic which I wrote about previously. While she would’ve preferred a different outcome, she was accepting of our decision. Mom said that she hopes that I don’t have to go through some kind of catastrophic experience to rediscover faith. She mentioned that the testimonies that she hears for rebound Catholics often involve them going through some kind of traumatic event. I think there’s some survival bias here, that many of these returning Catholics have experienced such painful life-changing incidents found solace in faith. The people who led otherwise ordinary lives likely stayed the course. This could explain why those testimonies aren’t heard, or even if they are, they are likely much less salient than the painful ones. This experience has also led me to think about the relationship between life and writing (or perhaps more broadly, art). I’m not sure if I would have the same conversation with my mom had I not put it into writing. In that sense, I have already gained from writing by living more truthfully. Perhaps writing can act as a sort of rehearsal by staging the situation with words first.

Y is absolutely adorable. He makes really epic funny faces and poses. It’s super fun to observe him grow.

As of this writing, Y is on his thirteenth day. In the first two weeks, I think the main concern is getting the baby to regain their birth weight. For those who don’t know (I only found out during pre-natal courses), babies will usually lose some weight after birth and regain it by the second week or so. One of my personal challenges during this phase, as someone who loves to plan, is that Y’s hunger doesn’t really follow a fixed schedule. So things change on a daily basis. Having medical consultative help has been a great source of confidence and reassurance, and so has the occasional questions to Claude for consolidating normative benchmarks and guidelines. Prescriptive science, when applied to medicine and biology, is normative in nature. This means that parents are often trying to fit a shape that is defined by normative distribution. I have some thoughts about this, I think it’s probably the best approach that we know of, but it immediately forces parents to be in a comparative state of mind and to worry about “standards” right after the baby is born — I’m not sure if that’s a good starting mental space for new parents. I might discuss this more in a separate post. Fortunately, we just came back from the medical appointment and Y is now heavier than his birth weight. So in that regard, we’re probably done with this first “quest”.

So far most things have been within the range of expectations — disrupted sleep, less structured time, changing diapers, getting pooped, peed, and puked on. Things have been a lot easier with mom holding the fort in the kitchen, cooking delicious meals for us everyday. It has been immensely helpful to not have to worry about it and know that C’s diet is properly taken care of. I can’t imagine doing this without at least some parental leave. I don’t understand how some working parents are able to survive with little to none of it. Caring for a baby is something that requires time and takes some getting used to. I find myself feeling somewhat tired and thus frustrated at times even when I’m on paternity leave. I can’t imagine people who have to juggle everything all at once in the first few weeks of their baby’s life. I feel like it would be a lot harder to enjoy this time if there are so many other things that require your attention. I’m really lucky to have this time to be with my family.

The last thing I wanted to mention today is that there is a lot of well-meaning advice and pointers that come your way as a parent. I don’t think I know how to properly deal with those yet; I mostly find them somewhat annoying. What I find especially annoying are people telling me all the work that needs to be done and pointing out all of the tasks. I find that kind of… boring and off-putting? Maybe it’s just me being weird haha, but I don’t think it’s super helpful to give such information nowadays in such an information-dense world? I think if the roles are reversed, what I would say instead is to assure the parent(s) that they’ll do a great job and tell them the cool things to look forward to, for instance, the funny little noises that they make and their cute facial expressions.

All in all, glad that things are going well in general. Definitely more to come!

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

As we count down to Y’s birth, I sometimes wonder, how should I respond if he ever asks me, “Why did mommy and you bring me into this world?”

I feel like I should have some kind of an answer to that, perhaps this could also serve as a reminder to myself about the kind of dad I want to be, especially when things get challenging.

Dear Y, you may wonder why you were brought onto this planet amidst upheaval. We have a looming climate crisis, the global world order established after Second World War is unraveling, AI is changing how work is conducted. There is a lot of uncertainty and risk. I think it’s important to remember what the point of all of this is. And I think, the point is to have a good life, one that you define and cultivate. I think all these ongoing changes do not preclude making a good life, one filled with meaning and purpose. I hope that you will grow to be a good person, the kind that leaves the world better than you found it. I hope that you take joy in all things big and small. I hope that you’ll chart a path you can call your own and make decisions based on beliefs and positions that you refine over time. I hope that you’ll open yourself to what the world has to offer, especially its awesome natural beauty — the depth of the ocean, the breath of the sky, the warmth of the sun. I hope that you’ll love the people that you meet, make many friends of different stripes, experience heartbreak, and believe in the goodness of people. I hope that you’ll make your own mistakes, learn from them, and do better the next time. I hope you’ll enjoy the life that you’re given, not by mom and I, but by the infinite string of contingent miracles that manifested your consciousness into your body in this time and place.

My job as a dad is to help guide Y to be and become himself. I’ll try to be sensitive to his inclinations and interests, and help him channel his energies to his ends. I’ll be honest when I need to be, but also be kind and open because he is born in a different episteme, and there’s so much that I’ll learn from him and the way he looks at things. I look forward to sharing time with him.

I’ll probably not be doing a second one of this if I have another child. Or perhaps it’ll be a good chance to revisit and revise this then.

Mommy and I are excited that you’re coming Y!

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.

Recently, one of my favorite YouTubers, the Green brothers, made videos about Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. Thought it’ll be nice for me to revisit it.

I first got to know about the story through a philosophy course in college by one of the most important teachers in my life. That was also the time when I was looking for another philosophical (or perhaps some would say spiritual) footing as I was progressively becoming detached from the Catholic faith that I was brought up in.

I am inclined to say that a huge part of my worldview today is shaped by Existentialist philosophy, especially that of Camus. I think that we are thrust into this existence not by our choice. And it’s odd and beautiful how we try to find meaning in what seems like an ultimately meaningless universe. Except that it is meaningful because we create that meaning by being. We are the color in what is otherwise a grayscale void. And that’s a part of why this is so absurd, we didn’t have any choice in being; it almost seems like humans are built to seek meaning, but there’s no meaning to be found, at least in the metaphysical sense where most people tend to look.

I think struggling to find or make that meaning is central to the human experience. Trying to figure out who we are and what we want to do in our limited time here prompts much of how we feel. But I think that’s the whole point. The way that Camus’ melodramatic frenemy Sartre would put it is that “man is condemned to be free.” The agency that we have over our lives is a blessing and a curse — we are responsible for how we live our lives. For many of us, we’re so lucky to be given the breath of life and to experience what it has to offer. We’re fortunate to live, learn, and iterate.

The act of putting one foot forward, falling, picking oneself up, taking another step, and repeating that again and again until our time here ceases — I find that a beautiful thing to do.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

Through our classes and preparation for welcoming Y, I have a better understanding of what child-bearing, birthing, and nursing does to a person.

There’re also studies indicating that marriage satisfaction tends to drop after a couple becomes parents.

The process of having a child is a miracle, it gives life to a new being. That process requires the transformation of the mother. Her body expands and changes to grow a child in her belly. Her hormones change as a precursor to alter the chemistry of her body to perform animare, the highest form of biological alchemy. To bring something into existence, from seemingly nothing.

At the same time, these processes changes a person — their body, mind, and soul. And in the process, they take on a new identity, that of the mother.

I recall from the studies of researchers like Kahneman and Tversky about how humans are loss-averse; we tend to respond more emotionally to the possibility of loss as opposed to gain. Perhaps to some degree, we’re wired to see the glass half empty.

I’m so excited and joyful that I’ll be welcoming a child and a mother. I am, in my heart of hearts, also fearful of losing my wife; I worry that my closest relationship to the most significant person in my life will change.

(I’ll typically end something like this with some kind of soothing self-helpy type of response, but for today I wanted to hold space for this feeling, and leave it at that.)

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

As Y’s delivery date draws closer, it means that my mom is about to come stay with us. She has kindly agreed to coming to live with us for two months to help tide us through the challenges of having a new child. We’re very grateful, at the same time I think there are some nerves about her coming.

It has been a while since we lived altogether, so there’s probably some getting used to that. Beyond that, I think something that I’m slightly concerned about is that my mom is Catholic, very Catholic. Over time, I’ve found myself drifting away from the faith that I was raised in. That is a story that probably deserves an entry of its own, so I won’t go into detail here.

So yes… what should I do now that I no longer believe and practice the faith that my mother holds so dear to her heart? And more specifically, how do I navigate conversations on faith, belief and religion now that Y is coming into the picture? It makes complete sense, if you’re in a proselytizing religion like Catholicism, that you’ll want your grandson to be baptized into your faith, so that he can have salvation, and that hopefully someday, can join you in the eternity of afterlife. I would think that, if you truly believed in that, you’d do whatever you can to ensure the redemption of those whom you love.

There many ways to deal with this, but I want to come from a place of love and understanding, wherever possible. So here’s how I’ll approach it, if my mom asks me whether we’ll be baptizing Y and the reasons for our choice.

Mom, I thank you for bringing me up in this faith, it has helped me a lot in my times of need, especially during my teenage years. It gave me a lot of comfort and guidance. However, the truth is that I no longer believe in God, and especially in the Christian sense that there is a Heavenly Father who is listening to your prayers. It would be disingenuous for me to baptize Y and pretend that I’m a Catholic. Not lying is one of the commandments and pretending to be someone I’m not amounts to lying to my child about what I believe. I will bring Y up to be a good person, to care for their fellow person, to be centered in their own beliefs, but I don’t think that requires being in an organized religion. I respect your devotion to your faith and I know how much it means to you, but I hope you understand where I’m coming from. If, one day, Y decides that he wants to be a Catholic, I’m not going to stop him from doing so, but that’s his choice to make, not mine. I want him to find his own way; I don’t want to decide what he should believe in for him.

It’s likely that things won’t go exactly in the manner I’ve described, so this is more of a rough guide. I do look forward to spending time together with my mom and cherishing the moments together with her. I know that she’s excited about the little one coming. I’m hoping that I can help foster an atmosphere of joy, celebration, and ease.

Happy birthday mom, thank you for bringing me onto this planet, even though there were many difficulties then. Thank you for everything that you’ve done for me. I will do my best to raise Y with the same care and attention that you nurtured me with. I’ll try to do it in a way that’s true to me, in a similar manner that you did. I love you, mom ❤️

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

the administration would investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence companies had improperly distilled American models to power their own, saying that the U.S. can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft. Politico

I find it quite absurd whenever frontier model companies (or in this case the US administration) talk about distillation being some kind of assault on the work done by the frontier labs.

If they were to posit that they deserve some kind of IP protection over their model, or outputs of their model, wouldn’t that be incongruent with how they believe that training their model on copyrighted material amounts to fair use?

I think that this is the original sin of AI. I don’t think model trainers, even though their burning through their cash stockpiles on training these models, have any kind of moral authority to claim that they have been stolen from.

They are the ones who stole first.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

It’s often very easy to forget how lucky I am to be able to live this life; to be able to experience all that I experience.

Even things that may not be the most comfortable or even painful. How fortunate am I to be alive to experience that.

Of course, it’s somewhat understandable for us to avoid unpleasant feelings. Or we may get frustrated when things don’t go our way. Some of these things may be truly terrible, but some really aren’t when I zoom out a bit.

Perhaps it’s a disagreement with C – where things go in the house, how we want to raise our kid, how we should spend our money. But when I zoom out – how lucky I am to be on this adventure with such a wonderful person.

I’m sure there’ll be moments where I feel overwhelmed being a dad in the near future. But again, how fortunate I am to have a child, to be someone’s father, to be able to journey through life with someone in this manner.

I think it’s so easy in our culture to want the next thing, to want more than what we have. And — I know this is a cliche but perhaps it’s because it’s true — it is so important for us to recognize what we have, see the bigger picture, and be so so thankful. Things could’ve turned out very differently.

I think being happy requires some mental effort, because sometimes the grain direction of our society points towards misery. Advertising is designed to make us feel like we are missing out on something or that without that brand new thing we are incomplete. Social pressure makes us doubt if our choices were right, especially if they aren’t conventional. Understanding what is truly important to us and cultivating that inner perspective to see things in that light requires practice.

Because we’re so lucky to live this life, why should we aspire to live another? The best way to be grateful to this life that we’re given is to live it in a way that is true to us: our value, beliefs, and desires. At the same time, to also live a life of love instead of resentment, by letting other people live their best lives, even if their choices may be different from ours. In that way, we can become someone else’s luck, by either helping them to live and enjoy their time here on this planet, or leaving them alone to do so.

Of course, there are things around being good neighbors and making sure that we organize society such that more people can be lucky. But at least on an individual level, I think this holds true — to cherish, to live, and to love.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

I messed up yesterday. Got a bit impatient at C for asking me the same question multiple times over the course of several days. Really wasn’t being very considerate or kind, especially to a pregnant person with all sorts of biological changes that she’s going through. I apologized, but I wanted to reflect further on it because I think any type of real change requires a sort of mental or behavioral circuit breaking.

Habit breaking is difficult because it requires us to change our norm. It’s easy to stick with the status quo because there’s already some kind of grain direction that is our natural state. A simple example of this, especially when I was in my grade-school years, is having to write the date on paper assignments. The new year would come around, but it’ll take me a few weeks, maybe even a month, to correct my muscle memory of writing the previous year.

And so breaking out of a habit, or for that matter, going against the grain for anything, for instance cultural or social norms, require some discomfort or additional energy or attention.

Over the next week or so, I’m going to slow down and turn on a “monitor mode” whenever I have any interactions with X. She deserves better, and our son, who will be born in about a month, deserves that too.

I’ve developed a mantra when I find myself getting into a frustrated state — “slow, chill, center”. To remind myself that I am apart from the immediate emotions I’m feeling, so that I can take a quasi-third-person perspective and consider how I actually want to respond. I think this can also be turned into a breathing exercise, the first two words on the breath in, and the last word on the breath out.

Habits take a while to fix. In my poor memory I recall some fact about 7 weeks for habit forming. I expect to report back on how I’m doing here to you, just so that there’s some account there to keep track of.

This also made me think about the Confucian saying, “修身，齐家，治国，平天下。” The way that I interpret this is that change needs to start within us, and emanate outward. We have to cultivate ourselves to make our families and the wider world better.

Unrelatedly, I also thought about how, ultimately, the people that we impact the most are the ones that are closest to us: family, friends. It’s ironic that, it’s often these people that we end up hurting the most. For all that public success brings you, I’m not sure if any of it can ever equate to the private satisfactions of good relationships that are built over decades. At least for me personally, I think that’s one of the real measures of how someone lives their life.

I’ll do better.

xoxo,
K

Dear XYZ,

in this piece “AI” refers to LLMs and the “agents” built on top of such language models

I feel like opinions around AI usage is polarizing into two encampments. On one end, you have the AI maximalists who believe that AI is the inevitable future and are trying to use it in any way that they can. On the opposite end, some would oppose any use of it.

I think both sides each have their own rationale for justifying their positions, but that’s not what I’m interested in writing about today.

As someone who makes things, I’m interested in the tools that we use and how it shapes the things that we make. I often recall the quote misattributed to Marshall McLuhan that goes something along the lines of “we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us”.

I’ve observed that for myself, my comfort around using AI differs quite a lot depending on the task. For instance, I actively use AI for programming and making software, but I can never imagine using AI to write articles like these.

Then again, even for writing software, there are times when I’d rather read and review every line of code even when it’s generated by an AI tool. There’re so many different ways to use the tool that also impacts one’s experience with it.

I think much of it boils down to how much you care about the thing that you’re doing or making, and how that artifact relates to you. btsv is made using AI assistance, but I will go pretty far to say that it wasn’t vibe-coded. I know the code base well, and had a strong hand in shaping all the major design decisions. I’m willing to own both the merits and mistakes in the project, instead of shrugging my shoulders. Because it is a project that I care about, I will make sure that I “paint the back of the fence”. I also want to understand how it works so that I can imagine how to grow it over time.

In physical tools, the tool itself provides a lot of constraints over how something is made. For instance, a Japanese hand saw is going to cut a lot slower than a bandsaw, but in a way it forces you to be a lot more deliberate and careful. The hand saw also offers a lot more control compared to a band saw.

But I’m not sure if using this analogy is applicable for AI. AI is such an amorphous tool, I really wonder if its effects as production tooling will be obvious. It can simultaneously help you learn a lot or nothing at all, depending on your choice. (I’m assuming that you have the volition, but that’s not always true in organizational settings – but that’s a different conversation.)

AI tools can do a lot nowadays, but they can’t desire. And even if they someday were to desire, that doesn’t in any way change how we should desire. Just like how my cat’s desires are parallel to mine and can coexist simultaneously.

I guess our relationship with this powerful tool really boils down to the intentions that we bring to it. It’s like a genie; it reveals the character of its master. If you want to use it to do difficult things, you can. Conversely, you can also use it to avoid doing anything.

Individually, you should be aware of what using AI is doing to you as a person. Is it making you better than you were before? And perhaps more profoundly, is it congruent with how you want to live?

2026-07-10: Primeagen just made a video on a similar topic

xoxo,
K