a scramble of thoughts (feb 13, 2026)

Since I can't seem to write a full blog post for the life of me, here are some thoughts in bullet point form.

• Why do we even write if no one reads anymore? I've been wondering a lot lately about the impact of writing in this particular moment. It feels so futile given all the things happening, and I've seen far too many think pieces that don't lead to any action. I'm upset at my own defeatist mindset, but I guess I'm feeling a bit hopeless over the purported impact that all these essays have, when nothing really seems to be changing.
• J.D. Vance is a product of Asian America. The first time I said this out loud, it was mostly just a joke, but there's some truth to it. A lot of folks don't know that Amy Chua, the "tiger mom" or at least the one who popularized the term and the particular model minority immigrant parent mindset, was a personal mentor of J.D. Vance. It's not to say that this means he's actually a product of Asian America, but rather that the various cultural beliefs of Asian Americans has helped shape Vance. We could talk more about Usha Vance, Asian conservatism, the role Asian Americans have played in shaping policies such as affirmative action, and what powerful Asian Americans have put their money towards (hint: it's not aligned with some sort of class or anti-racist consciousness), but that's not really something I feel like I'm knowledgeable enough in to write more on.
• AI doesn't replace jobs, it invisibilizes them. I started writing a post in the form of a sample lesson plan with some suggested readings for a single lecture on AI and labor. It's centered on a few related terms such as "ghost work," "invisible labor," "patch work," and "heteromation" with the main takeaway that actually, it takes a lot of labor to actually incorporate AI into the workforce, and one feature of AI is that we often don't see that labor. It's like a ghost kitchen, where the customer — and often even the employees themselves — are kept from seeing or interacting with each other, making it harder to organize. We need to remember that hiring/firing decisions are made by people in power, and not up to AI — so we should stop refering to AI as if it's the thing causing people to lose their jobs (which isn't even true). An additional aspect of this is that automated systems (like "self-driving cars" or content moderation) are actually outsourced to people across the world, and we continue to see more reports of this revealed in the news.
• Like speaking, driving has regional accents, and "self-driving cars" fail to replicate that. For the past few years, I've been playing around with the idea that self-driving cars fundamentally lack a key characteristic of driving in the form of regional accents. This idea came about when I was driving down a particular street in Oakland one day, and noticing that just about everyone was breaking the standard driving rules and driving outside the lines, passing each other up, and blasting through red lights, but there was a certain type of coordination to it. It was like watching a conversation happen with our cars, where micro-behaviors would help us signal to each other what we were going to do next. It reminded me that not everyone in the Bay Area could communicate while driving like that — it was a very specific flavor to the East Bay — and in different parts of the country and world where I've driven, the sorts of implicit behaviors we have are executed and interpreted differently. It's like we have regional accents that guide our driving styles, localized to where we're driving, and self-driving cars that try to pretend driving is uniform and universal across the world simply fails to capture that.