Alastair Tse

Alastair Tse

@liquidx.net

Design & Software & Snowboarding & Maps // Tokyo, Japan. https://liquidx.net & https://aversion.one

202 followers199 following134 posts

Weird AI bots are replying to my posts. I spend time to reply and then find out it's a bot churning out 100s of replies in an hour. Happening on both bluesky and threads. I might just stop replying to stuff on socials.

I wanted to know if, when and where you could see the sun setting right on the peak of Mount Fuji. So I worked with Claude Code to build a Fuji Sun simulator.

Encountered two mosaics in kudanshita on opposite platforms, took these photos 8 hours apart. When I flipped through the photos afterwards I realized it was the same mosaic but one was luckier than the other.

Content on my website liquidx.net is backed out of my Obsidian Vault. I have a convoluted way that involved Obsidian Sync, a server I wrote a few years ago that converts the files into something that velite and SvelteKit munges into a website.

It's really great for editing, but creating a post is a bit annoying to get the frontmatter right. So I made a custom CMS app to post like I would on social media that just writes directly into Obsidian.

We had a great Geo Tokyo Meetup last night! Highly appreciate all the people showing up and participating. I built a website for the meetup after the 8th one, I think it was worth documenting all the map links and demos we shared and discussed. geotokyo.com/meetups/2026...

geotokyo.comGeo Tokyo Meetup Summer 2026 ยท Geo TokyoThu, Sep 17 2026, 18:00 โ€“ 20:00 at FabCafe Tokyo, Shibuya, Tokyo. Casual chat about all things cartographic. Bring a project from Japan, or whatever you're building.

Most of June was spent on this: my hyper-personal finance app that's designed for my needs and only my needs. It takes all my financial documents, uses an LLM to read and classify the contents and produces visual analysis of my financial world in a way I understand. liquidx.net/posts/2026/f...

liquidx.netFine FinancialsFine Financials is my hyper-personal finance app that's designed for my needs and only my needs. It takes all my financial documents, uses an LLM to read and classify the contents and produces visual ...

I just realized that the world cup started, and also realized I just watched the first two games, and also realized I have all the free time to watch every single game. #retiree

I added colors and all sorts of controls. Honestly, 90% of my usage of AI was making it remove all the UI it generated. But one cool thing I was able to do with ease was animating the lines which I've always wanted to do.

Finally deleted all my tweets from Twitter. The web API rate limits to 200 deletes per 15 mins, and I had 13209 tweets - roughly 16 hours if nothing went wrong (and it did a few times.) My Twitter For You feed immediately went from geeky japanese cartographers to AI bros arguing with each other.

After 6863 days, yesterday was my final day at Google. Two months shy of 19 years. There's no next thing, I'm retiring to spend time completing my side quests.

Grateful for all the opportunities. The opportunity to travel the world, to work on the first iPhone app, to bring people together, to work with wonderful people, to redesign Google, to work on my favourite products and to eat all the free food.

I'm this ๐Ÿ‘Œ close to muting anything that starts with "the future of" because there's nothing more annoying than someone trying to predict the future. Let's stay in the present.

I dislocated my knee a month ago snowboarding, and so I've been channelling all my frustration and energy into building this big site about Japanese snowboards. The world of Japanese snowboards is very fragmented and not so well documented, but also huge and fascinating.

I feel like I should also launch an AI browser. AI browser is the new todo list. Everyone thinks everyone wants one, but actually we all secretly hate it.

Another #vibecoding update. Spent the long weekend making an Android app of my dreams . A check-in & location timeline app that allows me to check in post visit. Did so much I ran out of quota on Claude Pro that I decided to try out Codex (w/ ChatGPT Plus) and Gemini CLI.

Found that these coding agents are great at writing code, but really bad at coming up with good UX. Most of my interventions were making it use standard components, fixing icons, placement, etc. Also it got stuck on integration with the Activity Recognition API which took a full day to resolve.

(Nearly) daily vibe coding: I've been making changes every day but haven't been posting about it. I've got to the point where the UI is more refined after a lot of specifying how the UX should be. The more I do, the more features I want to add! aversion.one/of/metro