Hey, it's Bernie!

I love building things, creating things, customizing things, ever since I was a little girl. If you looked at my books, shoes and school files, they will all be “marked” with all my scribbles and artwork. I was an avid gamer and would spend all my free time getting “999” on all the game and watch handhelds, first in Game A and then in Game B (hint: Game B is harder).

Then as I grew up I discovered computers and there I got to learn software, install programs, run them, and work with text on the screen, data, and graphics (remember Lotus 123, Wordperfect, dBase). Then the World Wide Web came along, and I was just hooked. I leave traces of my work all over the Internet, from building my a blog from scratch using an IIS server with .asp backend, to the coming of AJAX, javascript, CSS, then PHP, building forums like phpBB, those names sure bring back memories.

All of these things I did were self-taught, and done without any like-minded friends or family members. It was like my secret world where I thoroughly enjoyed, and yet, the world I had to leave behind every time the responsibilities of real life calls.

Then today, I just spent 4 solid hours just talking to Claude (the free version). I wanted to install a self-hosted blog using AWS Lightsail and WriteFreely. So I just started a chat with Claude and asked

"I'm looking to install my own blog using lightsail and write freely. Can you guide me through it?"

What followed was 4 hours of hyper-focused step-by-step guidance and troubleshooting between Claude and me, where we first signed up for AWS and me asking how I can get the free trial, and him giving me suggestions on which option to choose, and why, then when I had trouble installing the nginx packages, it told me to use the Singapore mirror instead. O.M.G. Honestly I wouldn't have done it without him. If Claude wasn't there I would be going through all the help files, YouTube videos, and I'm sure I would get stuck on what commands to run on the CLI.

I've never had time to just jam and install stuff, and even build stuff. I've always dreamed of building my own servers, my own mobile apps, but never ever got around to do it because development requires large chunks of focus time, the bulk of it involving troubleshooting and figuring out what went wrong.

But now. All has changed. With all these AI coding partners, I feel that I can let my creativity and builder-mind flow, and if I ever encounter any issue, I'm just one question away. And at lightning speed too! I just had to show him the error message and he knows what went wrong. Freaking amazing.

I will be sharing more of what I'm building in the coming months. I'm not sure if I will end up hitting the session limits (which I did hit today, but fortunately I managed to get everything configured and launched before that happened), but I'll hold out for just one more day on upgrading.

Have a great night.

As I dive deeper into the world of AI engineering, I'm beginning to discover the plethora of tools available, and that's not all – every single day there's a new name of a new tool to download, check out, etc. The pace is just slightly too fast.

Initially I was thinking of Claude Code as a coding agent, then I realized there were other options, like Codex, Cline, GitHub Copilot and Jules? Ok ok, hold the phone. I need a moment to think.

I don't need such a sophisticated agent right now, so I'm not going to put down any money for subscriptions until I get stronger in my CS foundations. Playing around with VS Code, Cursor, Antigravity, then hooking up to Frontier LLMs via APIs is enough for me right now.

You've seen them everywhere – Hello Kitty, Cinnamoroll, Kuromi and other Sanrio characters, Sumiko Gurashi, Sonny Angel, Fugglers, Labubu, Hirono, Space Molly ... the list goes on. There's an explosion of cute things in our post-pandemic years, I have some, you have some. Cute things make us happy, we look at them and we say “Awww, so cuuuute!”

But therein lies our weakness. What if one day, the very thing that's going to destroy all of humanity is a cute thing? I'm pretty sure we will all be dead meat.

This year I'm going all in to learning about AI, not just as a user, but to really build expertise and domain knowledge about how to implement AI in business. This could be a multi-year learning journey, but here's what I'm doing now:

1. Get a certificate from a credible university in Singapore
2. Enroll into as many online courses there are about AI, machine learning, and data science
3. Follow podcasts and YouTube channels to listen to experts in the field
4. Create a dev environment for practice and testing
5. Build 2 AI-related products from scratch

The models I'm working with right now to assist me in research are:– Claude, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini and Copilot.

I will be blogging my progress here so feel free to subscribe and follow along. My goal is to get hired as an AI engineer some time in the future.

Today I started my course in Data Science and AI at NTU, hoping to have a better understanding on how AI works behind the scenes so that I can move forward into this brave new world with open eyes.

The lecturer mentioned something interesting. He said that the technical elements of the course is easy, as we can always use AI to assist us in getting those answers. The real challenge is not “what we learn”, but “how we learn”.

Which got me thinking about how knowledge and our access to it has evolved through the past few decades. They say “Knowledge is Power”, and I still believe this. I was born in an era where TV, radio and textbooks were sources of knowledge. Then the Internet came along, and suddenly we had free access to knowledge from all over the world. When we don't know the answer, we “Google it”. If you were to absorb all of the world's knowledge on the Internet you would be unstoppable. But that was impossible.

So now we are on the journey as a human race to create the ultimate knowledge machine, not only to digest all of the world's knowledge, it will also help categorise, summarise, and explain. If we feed this machine enough knowledge, it can take over what we have spent our lifetimes doing – categorise, summarise and explain knowledge. If knowledge is power, then who eventually will have the power?

How will we fit into this brave new world of knowledge superiority? I believe we will become “knowledge switches”. This term is taken from various industries like networking, and trains, where a switch controls the flow of data, or control the direction of the tracks. As knowledge switches we will take the knowledge flowing from the source aka the oracle of AI, and channel it to the change we seek to make.

So this changes how we need to behave in the acquisition of knowledge, we will no longer be rewarded for the access of knowledge, but how well we can control the flow of knowledge into our industries. The ones who do that effectively will succeed.

I told my daughter the other day “you learn from your mistakes”.

And she asked “Do you always need to make a mistake before you learn something?”

That got me thinking ...

Recall the times when you don't make mistakes, what happens? You were either following instructions, processes, culture, societal norms. You don't learn during those times, you were FOLLOWING. Then one day you did something wrong. You made a mistake. Suddenly you realised that whatever you were doing was flawed. What do you do next? You changed your actions and fixed the mistake. You LEARNED.

So yes, you only learn when you make a mistake, because “learning” comes from within, “following”, on the other hand, originates from the outside. Which means that in order to learn more, you have to make more mistakes.

So, are you a follower or a learner?

I have a 2020 Intel MacBook Air. It is super slow, and super loud, with the fans blowing at max speed the minute I turn it on. I've not been using it much the past few years since I have an M1 Mac mini for working at home and an iPad for media consumption.

Then I went to apply for a 6-month Certificate in Data Science and AI, and lo and behold, their recommended RAM for a laptop is 16GB. I only have 8GB. So I went to check out the prices of the current line of MacBook Airs as well as some Windows Laptops. Seems like I'll have to drop above S$1,800 for any decently spec-ed device.

I got tempted when the prices of M4 MacBook Airs dropped the past few days. I almost bought it. It was only $1,757 for 24GB RAM and 512GB storage. Not bad. But I currently do not have this amount to spend.

So, I'm going to wait a few months later and maybe get a new laptop in March.

If you've read to this point, thank you for listening. :)

But I think it is essential for what I'm trying to promote. You see, as someone who's working on multiple projects simultaneously, I find it really challenging to edit videos after I film them. My upload rate is atrocious (as seen from my Food Delivery YouTube Channel).

My bottleneck is, you guessed it, video editing. So I've been trying to figure out how I can still post great informative content to my audience without constantly making empty promises to upload but failed.

Live streaming! That's what I've come up with, my solution to this upload problem is live streaming. So, which platform? It will be between TikTok and YouTube. I want to start by focusing on one channel, then maybe add another one later. After looking at different pros and cons I've decided to start with TikTok. Even though I'm earning money on YouTube I would like to test out a new platform and learn about its features as I go along.

In the words of Ryan Holiday “The Obstacle is the Way”. I've not done live before so I'm scared of it. But I'll give it a shot. Wish me luck!

It was either a meal a day, or every other day. The $5 deals were hard to miss, coupled with the ease of ordering and getting table service here in Singapore.

But this year I'm going to eat differently. My BFF discovered Shake Salad, which are different types of salads packed in cylindrical containers where you can just add the dressing, close the lid and shake. Each of those cost $5.90, which is not much of an increase from the McD Super Saver meal. Let's see if Shake Salad is going to save my diet.

I have 10kg to lose this year. Wish me luck!

The greatest enemy of life is INACTION. Many times in my life, I've been crippled with energy-draining inaction and those have been my worst days. But we can’t completely eliminate such occurrences. As humans we suffer from burnout, feeling overwhelmed, anxiety and depression. But I believe we can tweak our environment and our mindsets for the better.

Don’t overthink - learn to catch yourself in the act of overthinking and immediately focus your mind on something else. Mel Robbins has a very effective method called the 5 second rule. She says that the minute you have an instinct to act on a goal you need to count 5-4-3-2-1 and physically move or your brain will stop you. I’ve tried it myself and it works.

Have less material things - We moved to a small apartment, I sold my car, and I cleared out almost 60% of my possessions. I will continue to live light. Having less stuff to take care of has freed up time for the more important things in life, like relationship building.

Build structure and routines - I’m an ENFP and I can be messy and disorganised. But I can also create structure for myself so I set myself up for success. Ever since I started documenting  everything into my “Bernie Operating System”, I begin to reap the benefits of structure and as a result, all the small details get taken care of in the form of the routines I create. I don’t get stressed anymore and this creates the mind space for me to keep my mind focused on what’s important and hold myself accountable for that.

Forgive yourself - Deadlines are arbitrary. Remember, the goal is not to meet the deadline, but to stick to it till it’s done.