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Starting the day early with barely six hours of sleep. A long work day filled with what felt like endless meetings. Not getting a point through to a colleague regarding some urgent work. Someone finishing my entire bowl of nuts on my desk while I stepped away for a meeting. The worst part? I had to file a security incident report and my work laptop got locked down because I was in a hurry working while eating lunch and accidentally entered a malicious curl command from a fake homebrew website. ...

Introduction Two days ago I co-moderated a roundtable on ISO 42001. Multiple questions were asking what is AI Governance: is it going to look like the worst parts of compliance - a checklist bolted on at the end, slowing things down, adding cost, and not really making anything safer? Good AI governance is not a compliance tax. It’s good design. And once you frame it that way, a lot of the apparent tension between “moving fast” and “being responsible” disappears. ...

Introduction In my 2025 in Review, I noted that 2025 was the year I switched to AI-assisted coding, and that organizations which embrace it will push far ahead of those which don’t. That was written in late December, with the ink still wet on the experience. Four months later, with a few more projects under the belt, it’s time to revisit that claim. Three projects form the evidence base: Bridge Ratings - (May 2025 - presented at Data Science SG in Jun 2025) Admissions Prediction - straightforward binary classification, but with shifting requirements Vaultshift - started January 2026, a bridge results platform that has grown from a single-session MVP into a full multi-session system integrated with automated masterpointing and ratings from above It’s interesting to see how things have changed really fast over the past year. ...

What a year! Let’s break it down month-by-month. Timeline January: Finger fracture, ARC Retreat in Da Nang, finger surgery, CNY February: Recovery March: Prep work, Mr T’s swimming lessons April: Assentor duty May: Directing at APBF Youth Championships, started joining Tech Leadership Circle meetup, Bridge Ratings website launched June: Data Science SG Talk, Mr T’s 1st birthday July: More prep work, catching up with Choo Tatt and Keith August: CS6101 (till Nov), facilitating coding workshops ...

Introduction The Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) often teaches about the The Five Hazardrous Attitudes which are psychological tendencies leading to unsafe decisions if left unchecked. It is perhaps not surprising that these five attitudes can be applied to the usage of AI as well, given the common theme of engineering and complex systems in both aviation and AI. What are the five hazardrous attitudes identified by the FAA? Anti-authority: “Don’t tell me” Impulsivity: “Do it quickly” Invulnerability: “It won’t happen to me” Macho: “I can do it” Resignation: “What’s the use?” Let’s look at how these five attitudes can manifest in the usage of AI by organizations. ...

This is a pretty interesting video about The JetBlue Flight 1748 incident which happened a few years back by Mentour Pilot The biggest takeaway is the “P.I.O.S.E.E” decision making model mentioned about 37 minutes in, as what the pilots could have done: Problem Information Options Select Execute Evaluate Aviation incidents usually have pretty good learning points, as a lot of high-stakes decisions have to made under high stress, and hence a lot of useful frameworks and concepts come from the industry. (Maybe also partially my bias from serving in RSAF!) In this case, the pilots failed to appreciate early enough that the tailstrike might have caused structural issues and accepted instructions to climb higher and higher. Thankfully their company maintenance advised them to abort the flight instead of flying for hours across the US back to Florida! ...

The SCBA Ratings page is live! Thus far, only matchpoint pairs games are rated, from 2023 onwards. Most of the development was done in a week with the help of ChatGPT and Claude. Why 2023? Given that SCBA re-opened in May 2022 after COVID-19 restrictions were eased, 2023 seems like a good starting point when most people returned to weekly games. How is this done? Ratings are implemented using OpenSkill, using Plackett-Luce based on rankings. ...

Teams of Varying Sizes TrueSkill was first developed by Microsoft Research for use in multiplayer team games, like Halo. It is a Bayesian ranking system which is suited for: Teams of varying sizes Multiplayer games Dynamic updating after each match Mathematics of TrueSkill Each player $i$ is modeled with a skill represented by a normal distribution: $$ \theta_i \sim \mathcal{N}(\mu_i, \sigma_i^2) $$ $\mu_i$ = current estimate of player skill (mean) $\sigma_i = uncertainty about that skill (standard deviation) At the start, players are typically initialized with: ...

The Death of the American Dream I recall watching the movie adaptation of The Great Gatsby back in 2013. Baz Luhrmann created a visual spectacle, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular character who has become part of multiple memes. And who can forget Lana Del Rey’s haunting vocals for the theme “Young and Beautiful”? I read the original novel soon after, and was pretty struck by how deep the underlying themes run. Fast forward to 2025, and it has been exactly a century since F. Scott Fitzgerald published The Great Gatsby. One hundred years later, its themes feel eerily familiar. The excessive wealth, the disillusionment, the relentless pursuit of a dream—all of it maps almost perfectly onto today’s tech-fueled, crypto-charged, influencer-driven landscape. This struck me on a commute home last week and as I thought about it, the main characters do reflect segments of modern day society. ...

Yep, just one week into the new year of 2025 I fractured my right last finger during football, during the seemingly innocuous act of catching a ball. Having been told for years the stereotype of “you’ll know if it is a fracture by the intense pain”, I thought it was just a bad sprain, because the pain was aching rather than sharp. There was no swelling, no bruising, so I just went for dinner as usual, and then back home, and that was when the swelling really started. ...