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Nov 9, 2025/Be back1

Alright, I’m gonna try to write this M-log2 as one long uninterrupted dictation into Wispr Flow.

Actually, just tried to do that and got through about a minute or so of it when my phone screen turned off and the dictation session ended with3 it without pasting what I had just said.

And honestly, it was kind of interesting stuff, so I’m a little bit disappointed. Obviously, this technology, or at least its integration into our phones as they exist now, has some ways to go.

To make sure I avoid that, I’m going to go paragraph by paragraph to make sure I don’t lose my progress.4

What I was saying earlier is that it’s really cool to be able to dictate and trust that it’s going to work accurately without having to enunciate my words a certain way.

But despite how cool it is, I think it’s also fascinating to explore the shortcomings compared to typing on a keyboard. For example, I think when I’m speaking, I end up taking really long pauses. You don’t see those here on the page since they all get squashed away by the time it pastes my monologue into the written word.

But I take these long pauses because with speaking, I need to be sure that the words I’m about to say are exactly what I mean to say because there isn’t really any going back. I can’t edit my thoughts the way I might if I was using a keyboard.

For example, in my previous attempt at one-shotting this M-log, I realized in one sentence that I wasn’t phrasing something quite how I wanted to, and my body yearned to press Alt+Shift+Backspace5 so that I can add a few additional clauses to articulate what I was trying to say more clearly.

The interesting thing is I don’t even know what those clauses might have been. But I knew I craved them. They weren’t words yet, they didn’t get to form, but they were vibes in my mind that would have led to real words if given the chance for my cursor to blink at the right spot in the paragraph.6

Maybe this is pseudo-profound or actually profound. But I think it’s a really good and visceral example of how the tools we have available to us really meaningfully shape the way we think. For example, if the keyboard was never invented and we just started with dictation, what would the art of writing look like? Would we be better at one-shotting things? Would we start off taking lots of pauses but eventually become much more natural speakers? Would we be less perfectionist because we would have so much friction in our path to edit things? Or perhaps we’ve been7 built some sort of mechanism into dictation itself that would allow us to edit previous sentences and thoughts. Maybe there would be another language for doing so altogether. Maybe we’ll invent such a language anyways because dictation will be so prolific a8 input method in the future that we need it to be more powerful than it is today.

I suppose another interesting artifact of being able to dictate is that you end up producing a lot more content a lot more quickly. This M-Log has already gotten longer than anything I might have produced in the same amount of time if I was typing on a keyboard.9

So, to spare you the time in reading too much, I’ll end it here.

In the months following its launch, BeReal rode the hype train pretty hard, even making an appearance in an SNL sketch. I think at its peak, roughly half of the 40 or so friends I had on there would post each day.

Although the premise sounded simple—and perhaps even a bit boring—it started to resonate with me more and more with each “⚠️ It’s time to BeReal!” notification. In contrast with all the ways that traditional social media was hijacking my focus and filling my consciousness with the happenings of hundreds of people I hadn’t talked to in years, BeReal seemed to strike an infinitely better balance.

Realness. The need (or at least encouragement) to post right away at a random time disincentivizes (or makes impossible) excessive curation, editing, or filters. I’ve seen BeReals of friends doing everything from making food to brushing their teeth to sitting on the toilet. It’s very raw, a little silly, and incredibly humanizing. The flip side of this is that you probably don’t want to see content that real from all the people you have on the friends list on other apps like Instagram. In my view that’s the point though (which, sadly, I think a lot of people missed–or at least didn’t appreciate as much). The app’s core premise reminds you that you’re a human with limited social capacity.

Doubles as a photo journal. Another popular app category has been “one photo a day” journaling apps, e.g. 1SE. I love the concept and have tried them, but I always fell off because it lacked the social motivation and excitement. Although it felt like it paid off when I got to make monthly recaps, the time in between started to feel like work. With BeReal’s “Memories” feature that shows you all your past BeReals in a scrollable calendar, you mostly get that for free. In fact, scrolling through my “Memories” tab is exactly how I convinced Mat to get back on BeReal after being off it for so long (unfortunately, it didn’t last… Mat sadly doesn’t share my love for BeReal, at least at the same level).

Stay connected, but not too connected. I’m sure almost everyone in my generation (and even plus or minus a few generations) has gone through the experience of enjoying Instagram, getting a little hooked for their own good, deleting it for a while, then repeating. Given that apps like Instagram are designed to sap every last ounce of our attention so it can be converted to ad revenue, this isn’t surprising. BeReal somehow managed to escape that problem. Using it, I felt more connected to my close friends than ever (at least until people started falling off) without ever feeling hooked.

For the longest time, it didn’t even have ads. I still don’t really understand how they’ve managed to not go under, especially considering how expensive it must be to host so many images and serve such spiky traffic daily.

BeReal has evolved a lot of its original constraints over the years. For example, you can now post up to five times a day if you post on time and, alas, there is now a stream of content from strangers (although I find it not as addictively designed as Instagram). Despite that, I think the original spirit of the platform persists. To me, BeReal still represents a unique vision of social media that provides meaningful connection while respecting our natural social and psychological limits as humans. In a landscape of apps that are designed like slot machines and users that are used to playing them, it faces an uphill battle for survival. Perhaps as AI takes over the internet as we know it, we’ll see a resurgence of this kind of social media platform centered around human limitations—as well as entirely new ones like these.

If it wasn’t already clear, the fact that BeReal has fallen so far from its glory days makes me a bit sad. I don’t wish all 400 or so of my Instagram followers were on there, but I do miss seeing the raw, everyday snapshots of my closest friends’ lives. These days, I only see five or so others in my BeReal feed, though I’ve managed to convince a few folks to come back recently. Maybe this blog post will convince a few more. Either way, I’ll be there, posting daily, even if just for my own “Memories” log.

I give BeReal a 5/5.

I had my 2nd driving lesson today. Originally scheduled for 5:00pm but rescheduled to 10:45am. It went pretty well. My turns were much better.

I was a rising sophomore at a suburban high school, I’d just turned 15 ½ (the minimum age to get a learner’s permit), and I was itching to start driving myself to school instead of taking the bus.

As is custom in most immigrant households, we had a single car about as old as I was, a trusty 2001 Honda Accord. After getting my driver’s license in early December of that same year, I became the de-facto family chauffeur for grocery hauls and family-friend parties but since we only had the one car, I didn’t get to regularly drive myself to school consistently until much later.

Fun fact: one of my earliest memories in life is getting buckled into the carseat in this car by my dad when my mom and I arrived in the US in 2001.

As luck would have it, however, that “trusty” old Accord crapped out just a few months later. I still remember slowly driving it to the Nissan dealership in Tracy. We took the backroads because–and I quote my 2013 journal entry–”the transmission leaps like a frog and it can’t go faster than 40mph without sounding like it’ll explode soon”. That same day, we bought a brand-new top-of-the-line 2014 Nissan Rogue. The upgrade from the Accord that still ran a cassette player was night-and-day.

Within a few weeks, we’d also decided it was worth the $3K investment to replace the Accord’s transmission and keep it around a while longer. As a result, it became mine to take to school.

Driving to school on my own and parking in that high school parking lot was perhaps my earliest true taste of adulthood. Sure, I was mostly only using it to do the same 15-minute commute back-and-forth (plus the occasional boba trip after school at Quickly) but I felt a very real sense of independence every morning when I clipped the carabiner of my car keys onto my belt loop (as pictured below).

Although both of those family cars carry a lot of nostalgic value for me, so too do those of my close friends in high school. One of my first friends to start driving was Alice. A year older than the rest of us and much more independent than most our age, she’d put thousands of miles on her beautiful light-green Toyota Rav4 before I’d ever gotten behind a wheel.

As an aspiring photographer, she wasted no time in using the freedom that car gave her in pursuit of the perfect shots. The rest of us in our friend group tagged along for many of the ensuing trips that took us all over California: from the foggy hills of Mt. Tam to the snow-capped peaks of Yosemite. The origins of my own affinity for outdoor adventure are inextricably entwined with Alice, that car, and the memories we made on those countless trips.

Before I knew it though, high school was over. I packed my life into the back of our spacious new Rogue and drove myself and my parents down to UCLA for what would be one of my last drives for quite a while.

After my parents dropped me off and drove back to NorCal, I spent the next year and a half relying on a Penny board as my primary mode of transport.

Then, on February 5, 2017, I got a call that changed everything—my dad had been in an accident and was in the hospital. I flew home immediately. Four days later, he passed away.

In the aftermath, I faced a major decision: stay at UCLA or transfer closer to home. Ultimately, we decided I should continue at UCLA but visit frequently. Weighed against flights and trains, driving proved to be the most practical option for regular trips. But with both family cars already in use[1], I needed my own.

So on a gloomy March evening, I became the unexpected owner of a lightly used 2015 Honda Civic. Ever the family documentarian, I insisted–despite my mom’s reluctance given the circumstances–on capturing a picture of the moment.

Over the next 2 ½ years of my time at UCLA, I made that 5-hour drive up and down I-5 dozens of times. It enabled me to show up for my mom in ways I couldn’t otherwise. Although I know those drives were exhausting in the moment and that they led me to miss many weekends on campus, the exhaustion and FOMO have faded from memory now. In its place lies a quiet confidence that I did the right thing even when it was really hard.

Despite not making much other use of it in my sophomore year, I made more of an attempt in my 3rd and 4th years to tap back into the sense of adventure I’d felt on those trips with Alice in high school. I used it to go on weekend hikes, took friends to explore parts of LA that we might not have otherwise, and even went on a spontaneous 5-day car camping road trip through Utah with a couple friends. To this day, it’s the coolest road trip I’ve been on.

Some of my roommates also had cars at various times so we all shared our apartment’s 3-car tandem parking spot. It was mildly inconvenient at times but overall, car ownership living in the apartments in Westwood wasn’t too bad.

After graduating from UCLA and moving back up to NorCal, I started a summer internship in San Francisco. I’d put up with the awful commute between Mountain House and San Francisco for an internship in the past (~2 hours one way) so I decided that wasn’t happening this time. I ended up staying at a long-term Airbnb with 4 others just under Twin Peaks. And just like in college, I used my car to ferry myself back and forth between San Francisco during the weekdays and Mountain House on (most of) the weekends.

During that summer, I began to learn just how hostile San Francisco is to car ownership. I’d figured street parking near my place would be fine but the rules around it were so complex that I had to download an app called SpotAngels just to make sense of it. Most of the spots around our place (the red pin) had some mix of street cleaning (either weekly or monthly) and stay maximums (usually 72 hours). As someone who only used their car on the weekends to shuttle myself in and out of the city, this added “Move my car for street cleaning” as a stressful new task to worry about on a regular basis.

As a cherry on top, towards the end of the summer, I got back from work one day to see that the front-left side of my car had been wrecked. There was no note on my windshield or any other indication of how it happened. My working theory based on the slight red-ness of the discoloration—though never validated—was that an SF Muni bus scraped it while making a right turn at the intersection just ahead and the driver never even noticed my pipsqueak car grazing it.

For my next internship in the fall at Stripe in SF, I decided to pocket the housing stipend, live with my mom in Pleasanton, and commute in by bike[2] and BART instead. At that point, the only biking I’d really done was casual rides with friends in high school. Using it to commute opened my eyes to a whole new way of getting around that felt really exciting. Looking back, I think this was the earliest point at which a car-free lifestyle started to feel like a realistic goal.

Not long after that internship, the COVID-19 pandemic began and what little driving I was doing came to a screeching halt. As both my mom’s and my car sat around collecting dust (and smoke from the crazy wildfires), I started getting really into cycling, racking up 60-80 miles per week with post-ride jaunts all over the East Bay.

Eventually, as the vaccines rolled out and the pandemic faded into the background, I moved to the Mission in San Francisco to be closer to work. Unfortunately, work moved to be farther away from San Francisco. Stripe, which used to be located in a near-perfect location by the SF Caltrain station, decided it was time to move to its forever home 10 miles south in Oyster Point[3].

I, along with so many other Stripes, was devastated by the loss of what would have been a delightful bike commute. Getting to Stripe by bike is still possible (and I’ve done it many times), but it’s just time-consuming enough to be difficult to justify as a regular option–just ask my friend and fellow Stripe, Lawrence.

With both work and family demanding more from me in terms of commuting, I decided to put my car-free aspirations to rest for the time being and instead lean into the other direction by upgrading to a Tesla Model 3. I figured that if I have to drive, I might as well try and decrease my carbon footprint (and in the long term, fuel costs).

Throughout the next several years, I felt an ever-present tension between embracing car ownership and living car-free. On the one hand, having a car made day-to-day life so much easier. I could carpool to work with my roommates in 15 minutes or less, visit my mom whenever I wanted (though I’d have to time it right to avoid heinous Bay Area traffic), and charge my car for free at work which saved me hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars over two years.

On the other hand, remember how I said San Francisco was hostile to owning a car? Well, that wasn’t an isolated experience. Once I moved to the Mission, I felt the full force of the city’s anti-car infrastructure. Shortly after signing the lease at my new apartment, I started backing into the ridiculously narrow garage only to learn that my car is too low to the ground to clear the 15º change in incline where the sidewalk ends.

So over the next six months, I spent dozens of hours hunting down street parking after work as my roommate Mat and I schemed a mathematically accurate model of the problem in Desmos so we could ask the property management company to install a ramp. It was a pretty glorious day when Morgan finally came and drilled those wooden planks into the concrete and I could rest easy knowing I had a predictable parking spot. On the bright side, it makes for a great memory and story.

In addition to the awkwardness of parking spots in SF, the sheer dearth of their availability makes apartment hunting much more challenging. I just tried adding “On-Site Parking” as a filter in Zillow and it dropped the list of available 1-bed rentals under $3.5K from 1,875 to 601 (68% fewer options). As you start adding other filters like in-unit laundry and pet-friendliness, those options dwindle as quickly as the average rent rises.

I air these car owner grievances not in the hopes that San Francisco might alleviate them by once again building monstrosities like the Embarcadero freeway. In fact, more often than not, I feel immensely grateful that this city makes it so difficult for cars to exist. I often compare my experience here with that in Dublin where I visit my mom so frequently. In place of gigantic intersections that could fit entire single-family homes and parking lots the size of parks, SF has actual homes (at 4x the population density) and parks within a 10-minute walk for everyone.

The way this city is built—as well as its downstream effects like car traffic congestion–forces me to make small sacrifices like defaulting to biking places, struggling to find parking if I have to drive somewhere in the city, and paying a bit more for my privilege of having a car. These sacrifices may grate on me from time to time but the benefits–incredible walkability, a delightful biking culture, and the relative safety—are undeniably worth it.

As much as possible, I’ve tried to lean into the grooves that this anti-car city pushes its residents into. For this past season, I’ve been challenging myself to bike more miles than I drive. The round-trip commute to my office is around 20 miles and to my mom’s is 80 so it hasn’t been easy; so far, I’ve logged around 350 miles by bike and 450 by car, and that’s after heavily shifting my defaults towards biking.

Despite the 100-mile deficit, the shifting of defaults it’s forced me to make has been really welcome (even if ostensibly inconvenient). Rather than timing and fighting the US-101 traffic to get to work, I’ve fallen into a new groove of biking to and taking Caltrain to work and biking the full 12-mile ride home (and falling back to using the work shuttles when I’m too tired or my day is too busy). It’s definitely a bit of a hassle some days with timing and logistics but I’ve loved that it embeds exercise into my daily commute and exposes me to the fresh air and the goings-on of my city in a more intimate way than sitting in an air-conditioned metal box on a 6-lane highway ever could.

Similarly, rather than driving to my mom’s, I’ve been biking and take BART, giving me the entire BART ride to read (I wrote a bit about this long ago here if you’re curious), work on creative endeavors like playpinpoint.app, or even just catch up on messaging friends.

There have been a few cases necessitating exceptions to this new set of defaults, however. 80 of the miles I racked up on my car this season came from visiting my mom as I was recovering from a bout of the flu and another 80 came from needing to lug big stuff between mine and my mom’s. I really appreciated being able to eject from my defaults in these cases.

My motivation for this seasonal goal was also tested and refined when Mat came to town and spontaneously suggested a day trip to a destination 100 miles away. We ultimately decided against it but I realized that I didn’t want this goal to affect my decision to say yes or no to the idea. Cars enable spontaneous adventure and amazing memories and that’s something I want more of in my life.

All that being said, with how little I’ve been driving these past few months, I’ve been starting to wonder… does it still make sense for me to own a car? Perhaps it’s time to sell it and just start using alternatives like rideshare, ZipCar, Lugg, and rentals to fill in the gaps that biking and public transit can’t. I think most months, that’d end up being cheaper anyways.

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My relationship with car ownership has gone through many phases that interweave with the broader chapters of my life. It started out by providing me a sense of independence in the suburbs of Mountain House, then enabled me to show up as a better son, and now—thanks to recently recalibrated routines—only occupies the fringes of my life’s needs in a way that makes me question whether it’s finally time to live car-free. As someone who’s lived a car-centric lifestyle for virtually my entire life thus far, it’s a scary leap to make…

For now, I give car ownership a 3.5/5.

[1] My cousin, who lived with my parents at the time, had started using my old Accord–which I taught him to drive in–for work.

[2] Actually I started out with a Boosted board but switched to a bike after its battery randomly just stopped working on me one day only a few weeks after I had gotten it.

[3] It was deeply frustrating to watch a company whose sense of climate morality and culture I appreciated so much during my internship transition to a world where an employee’s most rational option was to own a car and drive it every day. But that’s not entirely their fault, SF was threatening pretty steep taxes plus the Bay Area’s public transit options leave a lot to be desired outside of the main city.

I never really thought about it like that as someone born into just owning a washing machine. If anything, I thought it was annoying how my parents' home had it in the garage and how I had to bundle up to do laundry. When I moved out and became a freshman at the University of Pittsburgh, I started paying to do laundry in the communal laundry machine section on the top floor of Holland Hall. It was fine. Halfway through freshman year, my friends Eion, James, Jason, and I decided to rent an apartment off-campus in a sketchy alleyway called St James Place for $1500 a month (total). I remember touring the place with our landlord and at the end asking him what about laundry? "Laundromat is your best bet." Unfortunately, that is how most apartments in South Oakland were. St James Place became our home. It had its quirks and challenges as most college apartments that cost you less than $400 a month do, but we learned to love that through the beauty of nostalgia, alcohol, and friendship.

The laundromat we went to down the street, Dana's Dunkin Duds, did not receive this romanticization. I look back on college days with so much nostalgia and great memories. But fuck that laundromat. Lugging your laundry down the trash ridden alley in the freezing Pittsburgh cold only to realize the machines were all taken was a terrible activity while you were busy studying all week and partying all weekend. Not to mention, to even do laundry you have to obtain quarters from PNC Bank a 15 minute walk away. And you have to get extra, because James would rarely have his own so he "borrowed" some (a few dollars of laundry for a lifetime of friendship was a good trade though).

I wish I could say that the weekly trips to Dana's Dunkin Duds were a meditative ritual that allowed us to reset for the week as we enjoyed the economy-transformative laundry machines for a mere $2. Nope. It just sucked (sorry Ha-Joon Chang). When I moved to San Francisco, I had the joy of having in-unit laundry next to my bedroom door. Although the dryer was so loud it sounded like it was going to destroy the apartment, I still was so appreciative of the convenience. When I moved to New York, I was back to not having in-unit laundry. I was ready to suck it up and go to the laundromat like I once did, but our broker mentioned there is a new wash and fold that opened up literally right next door before we signed. That felt like a scam and that I was going to be too frugal to fall for. But, I tried it and I was amazed by how surprisingly delightful the experience was. College me would be aghast that I spend ~$10-15/load to do my laundry. But, picking up my laundry is for some reason one of my favorite parts of the week. The clothes are not only folded, but they are sorted. My socks are rolled up and next to my undershirts and underwear, the pants are all together, and so on. It is a great experience and to top it all off, the lady that owns it, Tina, is one of the nicest people I have met in New York. I love walking to the gym in the mornings and getting to wave to each other through the window.

So yes, Dana's Dunkin Duds does suck. But, without my distaste and all those bad past memories of walking to that laundromat, would I appreciate the laundry machines and wash and fold moments that I have now? They say comparison is the thief of joy, but it depends on what you compare. Maybe comparison can be a merchant of gratitude.

Of course. laundry machines are great innovations, graduating to in-unit is great, and gratitude is great . That doesn't change the fact that at the end of the day it's a chore and laundromats suck. Dana's Dunkin Duds gets one star.

Building great products is similar to building great games1. There is an element of progressive discovery that happens as you learn more about a game. For example, in Zelda, the game "teaches you without words," by giving you dungeon levels that would be easier if you had an item, like a rope to clear ledges. Players develop a longing for an item before they have it, and when they get it, they already know why it exists and how it is used. Clever game mechanics like this makes me appreciate well crafted games more than any amount of fancy graphics could ever. I still think game design is the peak of product development. The best games are some of technology's most magical and addicting offerings. It is probably why when I hear the word "games", my mind immediately goes to video games and the different consoles like Super Nintendo, PS5s, X-Boxs. It is amazing how these different platforms enable one system to play an infinite number of games.

Somehow, something equally magic to me than the complicated engineering and circuitry behind consoles like a Playstation and the insanely complex games built on those platforms is a simple deck of 52 playing cards. Maybe cards can be considered one of the first "consoles"ever. One deck of cards is also a system that is able to play an infinite set of games. Go Fish, Pinccole, Ride the Bus. Games for kids, games for adults, games while drinking. Decks of cards are even used for magic tricks. It is a beautiful example of how much complexity can arise from simplicity. What a relationship the two ideas have.

My special attachment to playing cards probably have roots in the card game "28." My dad does not have a lot of hobbies (not sure if a lot of immigrant parents do), but he is definitely a fan of the card game 28 (and its more advanced version, 56). It was always a some of esoteric game I thought took years to master based on the way my dad would talk about it. It even took me a few years for me to understand what the name of the game is, because Malayalee uncles would always call it cheetukali, (cheet is card, kali is play). When I was probably around ~17 and my family was playing during Christmas, I finally had an opportunity to sit down and learn the rules. It is a 2v2 game that uses a 32-card deck (8 through Ace). Players bid to set a "trump suit" and the goal is for the bidding team to win at least the number of points they bid, based on the card values they capture. It sounds quite confusing, but if you watch a couple of rounds it is honestly pretty easy to understand the basics of the game. I love that the "point" cards are randomly Jack (3 points), 9 (2 points), Ace (1 point), and 10 (1 point). (28=4 * (3+2+1+1) which is why it is called that). When you learn how to play the game, "Jack Nine Ace Ten" is a helpful phrase that gets drilled into your head. And it is more than just a game to uncles. If you make a mistake, you will get screamed at. It is pretty funny.

Every Friday when I was in elementary school my dad would drive an hour to drop my mom off at work at Temple Hospital in Philadelphia where she worked the night shift and then we would stop at my cousin Treno's house. While Treno and Appu and I hung out all night, my dad and Treno's dad would go drive to MAP (Malayalee Association of Philadelphia) together to play 28. They would fly out to different cities to play in card tournaments. Even fifteen years later, they still occasionally fly to different tournaments all around to play this game. A few weeks ago an 81 year old grandfather came to my parents house, just so he could play 28 with my dad and other friends. You start playing for the fun of simple card game, but you continue playing for the strong lasting sense of community. The game involves a healthy balance of memorization and strategy, like most good games do. I have personally probably played less than ten 28 games in my life, but I will alway have an appreciation of the game and sentimental fuzzy feeling I have surrounding it. And of course, it started a love of card games in me.

Playing cards are a great example of how a simple set of constraints (52 cards, 4 suits, 13 ranks) can still allow nearly infinite possibilities of rules and gameplay. The way that simplicity can breed complexity is often beautiful.

I give them a 5/5.