Posts

The Passion and the Roadblock I’ve always had a passion for education. Grappling with hard concepts, breaking them down, learning to make use of them, these were always really satisfying for me. And I’ve always wanted to share this experience and feeling with others! How can I make people realize that math or coding is really not that scary, that it just needs to be something that’s taught better or scaffolded? How can I make people see that research and theory and so on can actually be quite simple and elegant, as long as you take the time to establish the context and read and connect what you read to your life? ...

I recently completed an instructional design activity using the ADDIE model, and it left me with a realization that felt both obvious and surprising at the same time. On one hand, I’ve always understood that instructional designers need to solve learning problems—that’s the whole point, right? But what this activity really revealed was how much we need systematic frameworks to do this effectively. Without them, we fall into these traps of assumption-driven design, where we think we know what learners need without actually checking. The ADDIE framework showed me that effective solutions require iteration, collaboration, and continuous evaluation—things that don’t always come naturally, even when you care deeply about education. ...

Throughout this course, the group sessions were really interesting—seeing everyone’s works and outputs. I think it’s great that we’re getting the experience needed to actually just create something. There’s something deeply valuable about that, that at the end of the day, we’re doing things, not just learning. For our presentation, I found it deeply satisfying to try and reason through how exactly we could teach instructional design frameworks without it being formal, or something that people will just remember as a “list of facts”. Perhaps the biggest struggle was how late we had finished and started on the presentation. I think that’s something I want to improve on in the future. I’m also really proud of how we integrated the creative aspect and theme directly into the lesson. ...

This essay examines vote-buying and patronage politics in Philippine democracy, challenging the dominant middle-class view that treats electoral patronage primarily as voter ignorance or moral failure. Drawing on research from Manila’s informal settlements, the analysis reveals how vote-buying functions as a rational survival strategy for impoverished communities facing precarious living conditions and absent state services. However, the essay argues that both the civic sphere’s moralistic condemnation and a purely sympathetic structural analysis fail to address the circular trap at the heart of patronage politics: politicians who win through patronage networks have no incentive to build universal public services, while poor voters remain dependent on individual patrons rather than demanding systemic change. Moving beyond this impasse requires strategic intervention that addresses material inequality, builds universal service provision, and creates cross-class coalitions for structural transformation rather than continuing the ineffective cycle of voter education campaigns and moral appeals.

If you have no idea what “The Seminar” is, you should read it first here. This article was definitely a great read, and since tthere’s no need for it to be an essay or anything of the sort, I’ll mostly just dump my thoughts here in no particular order. First, I really like the idea of being in class as a “discussion”. I think with the rise of the internet, it really exaggerated for me the idea that the classroom is a place for learning, not knowing. Of course it takes work to know the facts, to memorize every single thing thrown to us in class. But it’s important to know that this is becoming less and less the “norm” when it comes to living in this 21st century world. Like you mentioned in our previous lesson, we are now in a VUCA world— where what we know now might be outdated in just a few years. ...

Preface I am approaching the AI debate from a different perspective than is typical in current discussions: that of systems thinking. I believe this model, which focuses on stocks, flows, and feedback loops, offers a valuable complementary lens for understanding AI’s integration into our world. I want to be clear that this analysis does not dismiss the core technical alignment problem. A common and powerful argument is that a sufficiently advanced superintelligence could solve for political and social friction as easily as it solves for protein folding. In that view, the ‘systemic’ barriers I discuss are not fundamental. This essay explores an alternative hypothesis: that these human-system barriers are of a different kind and represent a more immediate and persistent bottleneck than pure intelligence scaling. My aim is to analyze the current trajectory of AI within our existing socio-technical systems and to identify leverage points for intervention that are available to us now. ...

Preface I am approaching the AI debate from a different perspective than is typical in current discussions: that of systems thinking. I believe this model, which focuses on stocks, flows, and feedback loops, offers a valuable complementary lens for understanding AI’s integration into our world. I want to be clear that this analysis does not dismiss the core technical alignment problem. A common and powerful argument is that a sufficiently advanced superintelligence could solve for political and social friction as easily as it solves for protein folding. In that view, the ‘systemic’ barriers I discuss are not fundamental. This essay explores an alternative hypothesis: that these human-system barriers are of a different kind and represent a more immediate and persistent bottleneck than pure intelligence scaling. My aim is to analyze the current trajectory of AI within our existing socio-technical systems and to identify leverage points for intervention that are available to us now. ...

Artist exploitation is timeless; blaming the latest algorithm misses the real enemy.

A long ramble about my childhood, technology, and artificial intelligence.