A Starcraft dream with Huỳnh Gia Tài

May 2002, getting ready for the high school graduation exam and the university entrance exam.

I was sitting over coffee with my friend Huỳnh Gia Tài after a whole exhausting day of fighting each other in Starcraft. We asked each other about our future careers — what do you want to do, where will I end up. Once Tài finished twelfth grade he'd be emigrating to the US. If I remember correctly, he'd placed in the Olympic math competition and had been admitted straight to university. Me, I had a good grip on failing the university exam. The one who got to study without needing to test refused to study, and the one who wanted to study couldn't.

Tài told me to try harder — a little more effort and I'd get there. If you lose this year, try again next year. Then he shared his dream: one day he'd build a mighty army of robots to rule the world. The same way he'd ruled the Starcraft scene in Vĩnh Long and trained me to be the yin to his yang. When he got to the part about ruling the planet, with no one able to stand against him, I realized I'd already lost — he'd killed everyone. But there had to be a way to beat him, right? Of course there had to be! I'd lost to him plenty of times, and I'd flipped his winning streaks plenty of times too — I couldn't just give up. "Fine, I'll be a hacker, and I'll create a virus that can infiltrate your robots, just like I used mass Dark Archons and Mind Control to beat you so many times! But my hacking ability is also pretty low, so I'll just hire hackers to make the virus. I won't tell them what the virus is for — that way I won't have to pay them much."

He lost. He lost twenty-four years ago. He lost twenty-four years later. And Zít @[100003320395826:2048:Phuong Bui Minh] has lost along this same twenty-four-year road too.

Who could have known software would rule the world? Who could have known what AI would be able to do? You can only think. When the theory is firm enough, if you wait long enough, theory becomes reality. Contribute every day, build every day, to build the dream.

I've named this dream Oasis, at my company called Papaya, alongside the brothers I call my sworn brothers of the peach orchard. Oasis will be the platform providing Agents to partners as Service-As-A-Software (not a typo, this is a new age of SaaS). Oasis will be looked after by devoted people who want to serve, and the Agents will be born with souls passed down from the hearts of the people who make them: to bring value to the customer.