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Showing posts from February, 2026

What Did You Build This Week? Rethinking Education for the AI Age

My sixteen-year-old son spent a weekend fine-tuning an mBERT language model with labeled hate speech data, then benchmarked it against MuRIL, a publicly available model for Indian languages. No assignment. No tutorial. Just Google AI Studio, Google Colab, and curiosity. He'd essentially skipped to the end of a university summer school curriculum. Using mBERT and MuRIL is advanced deep learning. Most students start with if/else logic and work their way up to Transformers over years. He started with Transformers. When he got interested in AI/ML summer programs like NUS, we looked at the syllabi. He was already beyond where the program would end. That's when it crystallized for me: we're teaching kids to write code in an era when AI writes code. We're drilling them in syntax when they need judgment. We're preparing them for an education system that's already obsolete. The Assessment Crisis The real issue isn't learning. It's testing. We test memorisation be...

Email Didn't Die. It may become the Plumbing for AI

"The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated." Mark Twain said that in 1897 after a newspaper mistakenly published his obituary. Email could say the same thing. The death of email has been predicted for decades. In 1989, John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp) declared fax would supplant it. In 2010, Mark Zuckerberg announced that email was dead and launched Facebook Messages. In 2015, Inc. magazine confidently predicted email would be gone by 2020. Every prediction was wrong. Email volume keeps growing. In 2020, 300 billion emails were sent daily. By 2025, that number hit 375 billion. But here's what changed: humans stopped reading most of it. Marketing emails go unopened. Newsletters get archived unread. The inbox became a dumping ground. And that's fine. Because humans may not need to read them anymore. The User-Side Revolution Every AI solution right now is aimed at enterprises. Microsoft Copilot. Google or even things like Claude Code or Cursor. The pitch is a...