Quantum Computing Is a Lie (Here’s What I Discovered)

How I’m Preparing My Family for a Changing World Order (WW3?)

Hello world, One strange side effect of unemployment is that it gives you something modern life rarely provides anymore. Time. For twenty five years I worked in tech. Like many engineers, I spent most of my adult life sprinting from deadline to deadline, project to project, quarter to quarter. There was always another problem to solve and another fire to put out. Then one day the treadmill stopped. Now that I am no longer spending every waking hour inside the machine, I suddenly have the ability to do something I had almost forgotten how to do. Observe. And what I am observing concerns me. For most of my life, I have lived inside something historians would call the American unipolar world order. Most of us rarely think about it because it simply became the background operating system of our lives. Like electricity, it was just there. After the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, the United States entered what many called Pax Americana. America became the world’s lone superpower. We had the largest economy, overwhelming military dominance, enormous industrial capacity, and perhaps most importantly, immense cultural influence. America was not just powerful. America felt inevitable. During the 1990s and early 2000s, I viewed America as some strange combination of Captain America and Guardians of the Galaxy. Maybe that sounds ridiculous, but that was genuinely how it felt. There was a broad expectation that tomorrow would be better than today. Economic growth seemed permanent. Globalization seemed unstoppable. Political stability felt normal. The future felt like a solved problem. But now I look around and increasingly feel like I am watching the operating system begin to fail. Some of this decline is relative. Other nations are becoming stronger. Some of it appears more fundamental. Our industrial capacity has weakened. Social cohesion feels increasingly fragmented. Political polarization has become part of everyday life. Our geopolitical influence appears less absolute than it once did. None of these changes by themselves mean catastrophe. But together they suggest something larger. The world order that shaped much of our lives may be changing. The question is what replaces it. Some believe we are heading toward a new Cold War where America and China emerge as two competing superpowers locked in a bipolar struggle. I am increasingly skeptical of this. Instead, I think we are drifting toward something messier. A multipolar world. This is a world where major powers still matter, but where middle powers also gain increasing influence. Countries such as Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, India, Turkey, and others may refuse to fully align themselves with either America or China. They may sit on the fence. They may switch sides. They may negotiate with everyone. They may exploit both camps for maximum advantage. Globalization also complicates everything. The old Cold War had relatively clean lines. Today’s world does not. A country may depend on America for security while depending on China for trade. The alliances become tangled. The incentives become blurry. The board becomes chaotic. There is also another reality that fascinates me. Modern technology has changed power itself. Drones, sensors, precision weapons, and digital infrastructure have made even weaker nations far more difficult to dominate. Large powers can still hit hard. But imposing control has become much more expensive and much more uncertain. Even the strongest players can walk away with a bloody nose. And this is where I become uneasy. Multipolar systems can be unstable. You have multiple ambitious actors, shifting alliances, power vacuums, and competing interests. Without a dominant power acting as an organizing force, the potential for mistakes increases. History often shows that wars do not begin because everyone wants war. Wars begin because enough people make enough bad calculations at the same time. So how do you prepare for uncertainty? I do not claim to have answers. I am not a financial advisor and these are simply my personal thoughts. But I have started thinking differently about resilience. I think about preserving financial flexibility. I think about diversification. I think about holding assets that are less dependent on a single institution or currency. I think about optionality. Most importantly, I think about family. Because ultimately, all of these discussions about geopolitics and world systems eventually become personal. At some point every grand historical event arrives at your front door. History stops being a chapter in a textbook and starts becoming your mortgage, your job, your neighborhood, your children’s future. Maybe I am wrong. I hope I am wrong. I hope decades from now we look back and laugh at all of these worries. But if the world really is changing, then perhaps the greatest mistake is assuming tomorrow will automatically look like yesterday. Because history has a habit of moving slowly. Right until it suddenly moves all at once. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe [https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Real Reason They're Racing To Build AI?

The Future That Quietly Keeps Me Up at Night Hello world, For the first time in more than two decades, I suddenly found myself with something I hadn’t had in years: Time. After spending 25 years as a software engineer in big tech, I entered what I jokingly call my “involuntary early retirement.” And when your daily rhythms disappear, your mind starts wandering into strange places. Mine wandered into the future. Not my future specifically, but humanity’s future. Like many engineers, I have always believed that technology is fundamentally a tool. A hammer can build a home or become a weapon; the hammer itself has no morality. Technology seemed no different. Artificial intelligence, robotics, biotechnology, these were simply instruments extending human capability. But the more time I spent reading, researching, and following emerging technological trends, the more a question began nagging at me: What if we are no longer merely building tools? What if we are building our successors? That question led me into the world of Transhumanism. For those unfamiliar with the idea, Transhumanism is a philosophical movement advocating the use of advanced technologies to fundamentally enhance humanity itself. The goal is not merely to cure disease or make life more comfortable. The goal is to overcome biological limits altogether. Disease. Aging. Cognitive limitations. Possibly even mortality itself. For decades, this sounded like science fiction, the sort of thing reserved for late-night conversations between futurists and authors. Today it feels different. Because the technologies that make this possible are no longer imaginary. Brain-computer interfaces now connect neurons to machines. Genetic technologies such as CRISPR allow us to edit the very code of life itself, precisely. Artificial intelligence increasingly performs tasks that once required human expertise. Robotics grows more capable every year. Individually, each technology seems understandable. Collectively, they begin to feel transformative. Potentially civilization-transforming. And here is where things become unsettling. Because if these enhancements become possible, they will almost certainly begin as expensive technologies available only to a small number of people. Perhaps the wealthiest. Perhaps the most powerful. Perhaps the descendants of today’s technological elite. What happens then? Imagine two groups emerging within humanity itself. Not nations. Not races. Not classes. Species. One group possesses enhanced intelligence, longer lifespans, superior biological capabilities, and direct integration with AI systems. The other remains largely unchanged. How long would those groups remain equals? History offers a sobering answer: they probably wouldn’t. Humans have never had an especially impressive record of treating less powerful groups as peers. And if one group genuinely became more capable, stronger, smarter, longer-lived, the incentives become uncomfortable to think about. The enhanced population might eventually ask difficult questions: Why sustain billions of unenhanced humans consuming resources? Why preserve inefficiencies? Why maintain systems built for biological limitations that no longer apply? I know how insane this sounds. Trust me, I hear myself saying it. But what makes this thought experiment disturbing is not the futuristic imagery. It’s the possibility that we may already be seeing early hints of these pressures emerging. Consider the enormous expansion of AI. Hundreds of billions of dollars are being poured into data centers, chips, energy infrastructure, and computational power. The public narrative is productivity. Efficiency. Innovation. And perhaps that is entirely true. But another possibility exists: The systematic reduction of the need for human labor itself. If labor becomes less valuable, then what happens to people? We may already be seeing fragments of that answer. Mass layoffs. Shrinking opportunities for younger workers. An economy where many increasingly rely on gig work, subsidies, and algorithmically mediated systems simply to survive. Meanwhile, social structures that once stabilized human life, families, communities, churches, neighborhoods, appear weaker than they once were. Instead, many people increasingly exist within digital ecosystems designed to capture attention. We become consumers of endless content. Endless outrage. Endless distraction. And perhaps the most striking consequence is demographic. Across much of the industrialized world, birth rates are collapsing. Young people aren’t rejecting families because they hate children. Many simply cannot imagine stable futures for themselves. If life increasingly feels like survival, building the next generation becomes difficult. East Asian nations may be offering a glimpse into this future. Population projections in some regions suggest declines so severe they would have seemed unimaginable just decades ago. Canaries in the coal mine. Which raises a haunting possibility: What if these aren’t disconnected trends? What if they are pieces of a larger transition? Imagine the year 2100. AI and machines perform most productive work. A small enhanced population controls technological systems and resources. A larger population of ordinary humans receives sufficient resources to survive, perhaps through mechanisms like universal basic income, but exists largely dependent upon the system itself. From the outside, this civilization might look beautiful. Clean cities. Renewable energy. Little pollution. No visible poverty. Almost a solar-punk paradise. A Star Trek future. But beneath the surface lies a difficult question: If basic material needs are met, but human agency disappears, is that still freedom? I don’t claim that this future is inevitable. I don’t even claim it is likely. I may be completely wrong. I sincerely hope I am. But history suggests civilizations often drift into destinations they never consciously intended to reach. Not because of a master plan. Not because of hidden conspiracies. But because countless incentives quietly push society in one direction over time. Perhaps Transhumanism will ultimately free humanity from suffering. Or perhaps it will simply create a newer, more technologically sophisticated dystopia. I don’t know. I only know that the question itself has become difficult for me to stop thinking about. And maybe that’s the point. The future rarely arrives all at once. It arrives gradually one technology, one incentive, one compromise at a time. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe [https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

The Tech Layoff Crisis No One Wants to Talk About

Another week passes and another wave of layoffs crashes through the technology industry like a tidal wave. At this point, the disappearance of thousands of highly experienced engineers has become so common that it barely shocks anyone anymore. Entire departments vanish overnight. Decades of institutional knowledge disappear behind a carefully worded email and a severance package. But there is another group of people affected by these layoffs that nobody really talks about. The survivors. The people who remain employed are often viewed as the lucky ones. They still have a paycheck. Their stock grants are still vesting. Their LinkedIn profiles still say they work at a prestigious company. From the outside, they appear safe. But inside many large technology companies, surviving layoffs can feel like becoming trapped inside a pressure cooker. The workload grows heavier while job security becomes thinner. Teams shrink while expectations expand. Critical systems still need to function, deadlines still need to be met, and billions of dollars still depend on software that was often stitched together over decades by engineers who no longer work there. The survivors inherit all of it. In the summer of 2023, I found myself inside exactly this kind of situation. After a brutal round of layoffs at my company, nearly half of my organization disappeared. Senior leaders were gone. Teams were forcibly merged together into a larger organization built from the wreckage of the previous one. I went from serving as a Chief Architect to functioning as a Senior Enterprise Architect again. Professionally, it felt like traveling backward in time. I was angry about it. But I stayed. Like many people in tech, I had financial reasons to endure it. My next round of RSUs had not vested yet, and walking away meant leaving a significant amount of money on the table. So I convinced myself to keep pushing forward. Then came the project that nearly broke me. Our company operated a massive legacy platform that handled relationships with partner companies. The system processed billions in annual revenue, but under the surface it was a digital Frankenstein monster. Over twenty five years, dozens of separate web applications had been piled on top of one another until the entire thing barely functioned. Different fonts. Different navigation systems. Different visual styles. Some pages looked like they belonged to completely different companies. Yet somehow this fragile structure continued to support an enormous stream of revenue. Executive leadership decided that our newly reorganized department would completely replace this legacy system with a modern enterprise CRM platform in a single release scheduled only four months away. It was the kind of decision that sounds bold in a PowerPoint presentation and terrifying to the engineers responsible for actually delivering it. The challenge was not merely technical. The layoffs had already gutted the teams that understood how the legacy platform worked. Much of the institutional knowledge had vanished. At the same time, the replacement CRM platform required specialized knowledge that very few people possessed. So every day became a race against time. I spent countless hours trying to understand both systems simultaneously while also coordinating teams spread across multiple continents. Meetings started at six in the morning and stretched late into the evening because our squads were distributed between North America and India. Then there was the commute. Our company enforced a hybrid return to office policy that required me to travel into New York City every other day. The round trip took roughly three hours by bus. By the end of each commute, I often felt physically nauseated from the constant swaying motion. At one point, I realized I was regularly working more than twelve hours a day while also sacrificing weekends to keep the project alive. That is when the burnout truly began. People often describe burnout as stress, but burnout feels different. Stress still contains energy. Burnout feels like the complete absence of it. I felt mentally foggy all the time. Concentration became difficult. Solving technical problems that once felt routine suddenly required enormous effort. I forgot details. I lost focus. Even after taking several days off during Labor Day weekend, I returned to work still feeling exhausted. Emotionally, something stranger happened. I stopped caring. Projects that once would have energized me now felt hollow and meaningless. I became detached from the work, detached from the teams, and in many ways detached from myself. Sunday evenings filled me with dread. Then the nightmares started. Over and over again, I dreamed that my coworkers and I had somehow become low wage restaurant workers. The product manager became the greeter. The Chief Architect became a busboy. The engineering manager became the dishwasher. I was always the waiter. And in every dream, disaster struck. A customer would die after eating spoiled food. The restaurant would catch fire. Chaos would erupt. Every single time I woke up drenched in sweat. Looking back now, I think my subconscious was trying to tell me something important. Burnout does not simply exhaust the body. It destabilizes your sense of identity and security. It transforms your career from a source of meaning into a source of survival anxiety. Eventually I realized that if I continued living this way, something inside me was going to break permanently. So I made changes. I forced myself to sleep consistently. I stopped scrolling through devices late at night and began prioritizing seven hours of uninterrupted sleep. I exercised every morning, even if only for thirty minutes on a treadmill. That small amount of movement changed my mental state far more than I expected. I intentionally reconnected with people outside of work including family, friends, church groups, and online gaming communities. These interactions reminded me that my existence extended beyond corporate deadlines and Jira tickets. Most importantly, I began enforcing boundaries. I stopped working weekends. I stopped responding to messages at all hours. On office commute days, I refused early morning and late night calls. At first, saying no felt uncomfortable. Then it felt liberating. Over several weeks, the nightmares stopped. The anxiety softened. My concentration improved. I became functional again. Not perfect. Not fully recovered. But functional enough to finish the project and survive the experience. The modern technology industry celebrates resilience almost obsessively. We glorify hustle culture, constant availability, and productivity at all costs. But there is a dangerous difference between resilience and self destruction. A human being is not a distributed system designed for infinite horizontal scaling. Eventually the system crashes. And increasingly, I think many engineers are approaching that point simultaneously. The layoffs may dominate the headlines, but the deeper story unfolding inside the industry is psychological exhaustion. Thousands of survivors are quietly carrying impossible workloads while trying to convince themselves they should feel grateful just to remain employed. That is not sustainability. That is survival mode. And survival mode comes with a cost. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe [https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

I Never Understood This Kind Of Love… Until I Had A Daughter

Mother’s Day weekend took us to Pennsylvania to visit my parents. At some point during dinner at a fancy Chinese restaurant, an amusing but strangely revealing family intervention unfolded across the table. Two of the three most important women in my life joined forces against the third. My mother and my wife began criticizing the way I raise my eight-year-old daughter. According to my mother, I’m far too soft on her. She said I give in too easily, indulge her too much, and risk turning her into a spoiled, dissatisfied adult. My wife escalated the prosecution even further. She joked that if my daughter somehow climbed on top of my head and took a dump there, I would probably still smile and tell her she did a great job. And honestly? They’re probably not entirely wrong. But I also think they misunderstand why fathers become soft around their daughters. Because what a little girl gives her father is a kind of love many men go their entire lives without ever experiencing. Before the world hardens her, before social dynamics complicate everything, before adolescence introduces distance and self-consciousness, a young daughter often loves her father with complete sincerity. To her, he is a superhero. He is capable. He is safe. He can fix anything. He is the strongest person alive. And whether or not any of those things are objectively true almost doesn’t matter. What matters is that she believes it with her entire heart. That kind of trust changes a man. Especially because many men grow up learning that love is deeply conditional. You are valued for what you produce. For how much pressure you can absorb. For how useful you are. For how much suffering you can quietly endure without complaining. The modern workplace sharpens this instinct even further. Spend enough years in corporate environments and you begin to feel less like a human being and more like a performance engine. Your worth becomes measurable. Quantified. Ranked. Optimized. You are admired when successful. Tolerated when useful. Ignored when broken. But a little daughter doesn’t care about your LinkedIn profile. She doesn’t care about your title. She doesn’t care whether the world respects you. You bring her a cheap sticker from the grocery store and she treasures it like sacred treasure. You spend ten minutes drawing something silly with crayons beside her and she talks about it for days. You let her climb onto your shoulders and suddenly you’ve given her the greatest moment of her week. And in return, she gives you something that no promotion, no paycheck, no professional accomplishment can ever truly replicate: The feeling of being loved simply for existing. Not for winning. Not for providing. Not for performing. Just… for being you. I think this is why even the hardest men often melt around their daughters. The exhausted worker who never complains suddenly softens when a tiny voice asks, “Daddy, did you have a hard day today?” The exhausted engineer who spent all day absorbing stress suddenly feels his nervous system unclench when small arms wrap around his neck as though he is still the greatest hero in the world. For one brief moment, the armor comes off. Because many men spend their entire lives pretending to be invincible. At work, they swallow stress silently. They internalize disappointment quietly. They carry responsibility without acknowledgment because somewhere along the line they were taught that this is simply what being a man means. So when they come home exhausted and their daughter still looks at them with complete love and admiration, even if they are ordinary, flawed, frightened men, it touches something incredibly deep inside them. To her, they are still enough. Still safe. Still her favorite person in the world. And perhaps that is why fathers become so soft. Not because they lack discipline. Not because they are weak. But because that tiny little girl may be the only place in their entire lives where their heart is allowed to fully rest. And honestly? I think that’s worth protecting. Get full access to AsianDadEnergy's Newsletter at asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe [https://asiandadenergy.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Quantum Computing Is a Lie (Here’s What I Discovered)

Hello world. I’m an unemployed ex–Big Tech software engineer, watching from the outside as the industry I helped build pours billions into its next obsession: quantum computing. Some say it’s the next trillion-dollar industry.Others say it will dwarf the current AI boom. And having briefly stepped into that world myself… I understand the excitement. I also understand the madness. The Promise: A Computer That Tries Everything at Once A couple of years ago, I attended an internal conference at my company, a kind of innovation showcase where research teams unveiled their latest breakthroughs. Tucked inside that facility was something extraordinary: A quantum computer. At the time, it may have been one of the most powerful machines of its kind in the world. Now, I’m not a physicist. I barely survived physics in school. But even I could grasp the core idea: A classical computer solves problems step by step. A quantum computer? It explores many possibilities at the same time. Imagine trying to solve a problem with four possible inputs. A normal computer checks each one individually. A quantum computer, in theory, evaluates all four simultaneously and gives you an answer in a single step. Scale that up to trillions of possibilities, and suddenly you’re talking about solving problems that would take classical supercomputers centuries. Drug discovery. Climate modeling. Cryptography.Entire categories of “impossible” problems become… possible. It felt like magic. The Reality: One Answer, Not All Answers Then I started experimenting. And that’s when things got weird. The fundamental problem with quantum computing isn’t generating answers, it’s getting useful ones out. Yes, a quantum system can represent many possibilities at once. But the moment you measure it… everything collapses into a single outcome. One answer. Chosen probabilistically. The rest? Gone. This is the paradox at the heart of quantum computing: * It can explore many paths simultaneously * But you only get to see one After decades of research, we’ve discovered only a handful of algorithms like Shore’s and Grover’s that can reliably extract useful information from that chaos. For most real-world problems? We don’t yet know how. That’s the bottleneck. Not hardware. Not funding. Algorithms. The Descent Into Quantum Weirdness The deeper I went, the less intuitive things became. At the core of these systems are qubits, often represented by particles like electrons. And unlike anything in classical computing, these particles don’t exist in a single state. They exist in superposition. Not here. Not there.But somehow… both. Like a coin spinning in the air, neither heads nor tails until you stop it. Except this isn’t a metaphor. This is reality at the smallest scale. And it gets stranger. Distance Might Not Be Real To perform operations, quantum systems rely on something called entanglement. Two particles become linked. Their states are connected. Change one… and the other changes instantly. Not at the speed of light. Instantly. Even if they’re separated by unimaginable distances. Which raises a deeply uncomfortable question: Is distance even real in the way we think it is? Or is everything somehow connected at a deeper level we don’t yet understand? The Moment That Broke Me At some point, I came across research exploring whether quantum systems could be manipulated in ways that resemble reversing time. Not time travel in the Hollywood sense. But something subtler and arguably more unsettling. A system evolves.Then, using carefully designed operations, you force it back into its previous state. As if the past had been… undone. When I first wrapped my head around that, something clicked and not in a good way. If you can reconstruct the past from the present… What does that say about cause and effect? What does that say about time? About free will? When Physics Starts Sounding Like Philosophy From there, the rabbit hole deepened. I started reading late into the night: papers, books, theories. Some of them sounded like science. Some sounded like science fiction. * That our universe might exist inside a black hole * That reality could be layered, like nested simulations * That everything we experience might be a projection of deeper underlying rules At one point, I was lying in bed, muttering to myself about quantum states and reality. That’s when my wife woke up, looked at me, and said: “Stop thinking so much. Go to sleep.” Honestly? That might have been the most practical advice I encountered the entire time. So… Is Quantum Computing the Future? Yes. But not in the way most people think. Right now, quantum computing is less like the early internet… …and more like early flight. We’ve proven it’s possible. We’ve had moments of brilliance. But we’re still figuring out how to make it useful in a practical way. The Real Takeaway My brief, feverish journey into quantum computing left me with three conclusions: * The potential is enormousEntire industries could be reshaped. * The practical barriers are realEspecially on the algorithmic side. * Reality is far stranger than we’re comfortable admitting And maybe that last one is the most important. Because once you start pulling on that thread, once you truly engage with how the universe behaves at its most fundamental level. You realize something unsettling: We don’t just lack the answers. We might not even be asking the right questions yet. If you’ve made it this far, you probably share that same curiosity. The kind that keeps you up at night. The kind that makes you question things you probably shouldn’t. Stick around. This journey is just getting started. 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