Favorite on Nguyen's Blog

K-pop is a religion

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You might not be surprised hearing this. But how, exactly, is K-pop a religion?

Ninian Smart was a religious studies scholar who argued that religion isn’t primarily about belief in God. It’s about how humans organize meaning. He identified seven dimensions that characterize religion, which are:

Ritual: what you do repeatedly
Narrative: the stories the group tells about itself
Experimental/Emotional: what it feels like from the inside
Doctrinal/Philosophical: what you’re supposed to believe
Ethical/Legal: what you should and shouldn’t do
Social: how the group organizes itself
Material: the physical stuff that carries meaning

These dimensions map cleanly onto K-pop fandom.

Why Steam's thumbs up/thumbs down system works better than star ratings

Thu, 18 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Steam asks players a simple yes or now question. Not “rate this game from 1 to 5 stars” but “Would you recommend this game?”

Nearly all major platforms such as Amazon, Google Play, Yelp,… use star ratings, while Steam review seems less precise and less comprehensive.

But here’s the thing: it actually gives you better information for the decision you’re actually trying to make.

Answering the real question players have

When someone browses Steam, they’re not asking “is this a 7.4 or a 7.8?” They’re asking “should I buy this game or not?”

Why chatbots skip the uncanny valley

Tue, 18 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

There’s something strange about the fact that we can have long, winding conversations with Claude or ChatGPT and never really hit that wrongness of the uncanny valley. We interact with non-human intelligences daily, and mostly it just feels… fine? Sometimes charming, sometimes frustrating, occasionally weird, but rarely uncanny in that skin-crawling almost-but-not-quite-human way.

The uncanny valley is supposed to kick in when something is almost human but not really. And LLMs are probably closer to passing as human in conversation than any technology we’ve ever made. So why don’t they creep us out?

Intermittent reinforcement in Valorant

Mon, 25 Dec 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Valorant is a popular first-person shooter (FPS) developed by Riot Games. If you’re not familiar with the game, watching a few minutes of this video will give you the general idea.

Intermittent reinforcement is a concept in psychology, involving providing reward or punishment for a behavior irregularly and unpredictably, rather than every time the behavior occurs. This phenomenon is present in various forms of addictive activities. Gambling is an obvious example, where participants don’t receive rewards on a fixed interval, but rather experience wins and losses in an unpredictable manner.

Why did Google create Chromium?

Mon, 18 Sep 2023 00:00:00 +0000

Chromium, the open-source web browser developed by Google, lays the foundation for many popular web browsers such as Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and my favorite: Arc from The Browser Company.

Developers can create their own browsers using Chromium’s codebase at no cost. So what does Google gain from doing this? In essence, the Chromium project fortifies and safeguards Google’s core business: online advertising. To accomplish this, Chromium pursues the following objectives: