June 2025 Thought Notes: Self-Knowledge, Daily Life, Engineering

Went to a Korean fried chicken place and found it full of Chinese people

The sets are all for two people, and I was alone, so I ordered two half-and-half platters.

I asked whether they took cards, to avoid using my own cash — my cash felt a bit short.

There were two men and two women nearby. They said hi, asked if I was Chinese, I said yes.

They asked me to exchange money, saying their cash wasn’t enough and they needed it for something. One of the women said she could transfer via WeChat.

I said no, and didn’t give a reason. I felt like I didn’t need a reason — no is no.

They seemed to freeze in awkwardness, and the owner got awkward too.

Their awkwardness came from expectations falling through; their awkwardness also came from their own sense of face.

A person refuses a stranger’s request to exchange money and chooses not to explain. The other side becomes awkward. This isn’t about who’s right or wrong — it’s expectations colliding with reality, the natural friction between a sense of face and one’s own boundaries.

People’s awkwardness often doesn’t come from others’ coldness, but from their expectations of how others will respond not being met.

Simple and complex

On yesterday’s hike I thought on and off about the balance between simple and complex.

I’m more and more drawn to simplicity — it can be pure simplicity, or an abstract kind of simple concision.

But I like spending time with complex people, not because simple is bad, but because complex people carry more real traces of life — struggle, contradiction, uncertainty, anxiety over gain and loss, insecurity. These are the most honest portraits of human nature. Observing them is observing human nature.

Still the same definition: simple -> complex -> simple. But the closer you get to the truth, the harder it is to say it clearly in simple words. That’s where the world’s complexity sits. Those who easily hand out standard answers — if they aren’t God, they’re fools. Laozi said “those who know don’t speak.” It’s not that they’re unwilling to speak; it’s just that language ultimately has its own limits.

So at this point we hit a contradiction: do we still need to pursue simplicity? Simplicity is a philosophy of life — the great way is simple. Laozi used the Tao Te Ching, expressing extremely deep philosophy in extremely spare language. Steve Jobs presented complex technology through the most concise user interface. Simple doesn’t mean easy.

Where is that sense of boundary? It comes back to understanding and applying balance. A few examples I can recall:

Not packaging myself. I know perfection itself is a kind of falseness. Exposing inner contradictions — real honesty is far more precious than surface clarity. A sincere simplicity.

Admitting ignorance. The more you understand yourself and this world, the more you find that the closest thing to a real answer is often: I still don’t understand.

This is still a philosophy of life, a concise aesthetics of depth.

A kind of living in the present that doesn’t require effort

Stepping outside myself to look at myself: why do I long to live in the present, yet find it so hard to do?

On a hike I saw a Korean father and daughter — a father hiking with his eight- or nine-year-old daughter. Her curiosity and her ability to perceive the world astonished me. Every flower, every leaf seemed like the first time she’d seen it. And we “mature” adults need hiking, travel and meditation just to barely recover that kind of perception.

Children seem to naturally possess a kind of “acuteness of being.” They don’t need to make an effort to “live in the present,” because they’re already in the present.

They don’t need to think about what they truly love, or what would put them in a flow state. They’re just here, in this moment, with no baggage from the past and no anxiety about the future. Once we grow up we seem to live inside a system of concepts — how to walk this road, what flower this is. This classification system gradually makes us lose direct feeling for existence itself.

I feel real philosophy isn’t about learning more concepts and understanding more terms, but about learning to be a “child” again 🥹. It’s a return to the origin of sensibility and intuition.

Before all speculation, there is simple seeing …

2025-6-6 addendum

Inspired by Archer, something moved me: after speculation too, there is seeing.

Speculation is the process of understanding the world through rational analysis, logical deduction and conceptualization — a higher-level awareness, a pure perception after being baptized by reason, similar to what Zen calls the “beginner’s mind” or what Daoism emphasizes as “returning to the uncarved block.”

What struck me was this: reason serves intuition, concepts return to experience.

simple -> complex -> simple

Sensibility -> Reason -> Intuition / Sensibility

So the purpose of reason and speculation is to serve and return to intuition.

For entrepreneurs, too, you need to hold a kind of irrational optimism. A founder needs strong confidence and positive expectations about their idea, product or service, and the company’s future.

The lies of language

Actually chatting with people and listening to people talk is quite tiring. A lot of people maybe haven’t even figured out what they want to say.

Two dimensions of trust to worry about:

Whether the other person understands this thing well enough — for example, ask whether they love this thing, and maybe they don’t even understand themselves that well.

Whether what the other person says is worth trusting

And all the great principles we’ve heard before — essentially none of them can get away from the word “trust.”

“Don’t look at what they say, look at what they do”

“No investigation, no right to speak”

All of it revolves around four evaluative dimensions:

Truth / sincerity

Reliability / consistency

Ability / knowledge

Motive / intent

Language is essentially a symbolic system; it can be rational or emotional, abstract or concrete.

What is the essence of what can’t be hidden?

How do we resolve the two trust dimensions? On one hand, build a composite model around the four evaluative dimensions.

On the other hand, looking behind language reveals a person’s essence and underlying tone more clearly. However language is packaged, it can’t get away from the person’s inner self.

Emotional undertone: emotions can’t be hidden — tone and word choice carry his real feeling.

Rational undertone: whether the logic has holes shows how clear he is about himself.

Catching the tone, finding the holes, seeing the direction — that matters more than what he says.

Dissecting my own subconscious decisions and human nature

Analyzing and thinking — I’m very curious why. When I run into some hard task that’s also important and urgent, I find it hard to get started and tend to dodge the heavy and pick the light, choosing other simple but unimportant tasks. This subconscious habit and behavior pattern really doesn’t help my growth, I think.

How do I understand it? Think of being outdoors on a mountain: you’re standing in front of a steep slope (the important, urgent task), and beside it is a flat little path (the simple task). Your brain instinctively picks the path. It’s not because you’re lazy — it’s the fear of failure, the avoidance of cognitive load, and the pleasure of immediate gratification.

Slice thinking becomes especially important. Right now I find slicing — breaking down workflows, breaking down tasks — especially interesting and important.

Once metacognition kicks in, there’s actually nowhere left for avoidance to hide. What am I avoiding right now? What am I afraid of?

Slice the task thin — thin enough that your fear can’t perceive it.

Actually, giving yourself a window of time to do this task immersively, thinking about it without interruption, I think that matters a lot.

I actually think starting itself takes courage. I’ve always thought I’m already brave enough, but I’m still always a little short of it — like how I still can’t get up early to run, still can’t take the first step. Getting up early to run is just too hard for me: I have to get up, put on shoes, wash up, then go run. The best way is still to break it down first — have a subconscious thinking model, decision model, reward model in your head, where the goal is just to put on your shoes and go stand downstairs, not the goal of running.

Starting itself is a moment worth recording. Bravely taking the step to go abroad alone is the same. Like recording every step of a hike — would it feel different?

A sudden understanding of loyalty

Because I suddenly saw the word “loyalty,” my subconscious started to resist the term — because subconsciously I feel a lot of people’s loyalty is blind loyalty.

Aristotle regarded loyalty as a virtue; loyalty is a character experience, the unity of reason and emotion.

Yesterday I thought about the cognitive tier of sensibility -> reason -> sensibility.

Suddenly I can understand the feeling. The quality of loyalty I truly consider good must be simple and pure, but it must also be a loyalty based on free choice and mutual commitment after going through rational judgment and emotional identification. Having your own moral standards to evaluate this loyalty, a loyalty built on a rational foundation.

Male and female perspectives on the philosophy of death

Three particularly clear differences in experience:

Relationships: women care more about care within relationships — how the family will cope, unfinished responsibilities, the internalized role of relationship-keeper that gendered social construction assigns to women; men care more about completion, inheritance of property, realizing personal value.

Meaning: women more often understand it as a natural process of the life cycle, more able to accept impermanence and uncontrollability; men tend to see death as a conquest or a challenge to be faced, showing a strong desire for control and resistance.

Emotion: women are allowed to express vulnerability, fear, dependence; men feel they need to maintain an image of independence and strength (…)

The reason for these essential differences is the division of labor in society and what social construction has produced.

Information = a trigger for structural perturbation

Information != capability; information = a trigger for structural perturbation

It suddenly occurred to me that there was a question before that was cut off short and never got an answer. This sentence suddenly made me think back to that question.

If experience represents growth, then meaningful experience can bring a better life and better growth. A friend said before that even some bad experiences, being deceived for instance, are meaningful to him — at least he learned not to casually trust anyone again. But for me, I feel that if I were to go through that kind of experience again and choose it again, it would still be meaningless. These things can all be answered in information or in other people’s growth experiences; essentially they’re all a process of understanding human nature, and these are unchanging and learnable without having to experience them yourself. So I wonder whether some bad experiences also make a person worse, and whether such experiences are truly meaningless.

The key here is the irreplaceability of experience.

Since other people’s experiences can serve as information input, why do we still need to go through that pain ourselves? Why can’t we learn the complexity of human nature directly from others’ lessons?

Where exactly is the difference between emotional cognition and rational cognition?

When you learn the information “people can deceive” from someone else’s story, what you gain is knowledge at the rational level. But when you are deceived yourself, what you gain is a bodily, emotional understanding — the shock of trust shattering, the process of re-evaluating the world, the experience of rebuilding your standards of judgment amid confusion.

These two kinds of cognition play completely different roles in your “structural perturbation.” The former may just add one item to your knowledge base; the latter may reshape your basic perceptual framework for the world.

But the same experience is a double-edged sword. Of those who were deceived, some become wiser, some become paranoid; of those who lost in love, some learn to cherish, some close their hearts; of those whose startup failed, some start again, some never dare take a risk again…

But it seems I asked the wrong question. The question isn’t “should I actively seek experience,” but “how do I stay aware within experience.”

Those whom experience “makes worse” usually passively absorb the impact, and then let emotion and fear dominate the subsequent cognitive reconstruction. Those whom it “makes better” more often keep some kind of observer’s perspective within the experience, observing their own reactions and thinking about the reasons behind them.

The point may not be to avoid every experience that might make you “worse,” but to cultivate the ability to stay clear-headed and reflective in any experience.

Then let’s look at the topic of information again — information is like this too. Information is a trigger for structure and action; some information may threaten you, some may be holding you back. Information still belongs to the old framework, the process of simple -> complex -> simple.

Modern people are like someone standing under an information waterfall, desperately opening their mouth to drink the “useful” droplets, and ending up half-choked.

What is the essence of information? To understand it through LLMs: the brain’s input — is a model’s power only about how much content is fed in? No. The brain itself is a filter — the key isn’t how much information you collect, but how good your filter is.

Information must ultimately become knowledge, thinking, insight, even translate into action. We’re not after “knowing more,” but after “thinking deeper.”

What’s truly valuable isn’t the massive volume of information input from outside, but the information that can react chemically with your inner cognitive structure.

Information ≠ knowledge ≠ wisdom ≠ action

I’m not good at expressing myself

I’ve said before: science students are good at understanding, art students are good at expressing.

I’ve always had the impression of myself as good at understanding but not at expressing. That’s not what I want. The reason I’m not good at expressing is a lack of daily training in expression, and not having many opportunities to express day to day. I want to make up for that.

On the other hand, I find running an account exhausting but being myself easy. I’m better at, or prefer, being myself rather than constructing a fantasy or a fake persona — that’s not what I want to do.

So asking myself again: what do I want to do? I really like sharing and creating. For me these are output-type hobbies that bring me a lot of positive feedback. Including sharing everyday travel — video or photo.

If it’s only that, I feel it isn’t enough; it still feels like disguising my own image, as if unwilling to sully this role’s positioning. So I think another important part is asking myself: do I need to maintain this image? Do I need to care about other people’s opinions? No.

So why not share more of the things I find profound or real, create these opinions and inspirations — what if someone really does like them?

Sharing, simply because I want to share and want to create, not to uphold or maintain anything ./

Some things I really want to do:

Share some of my everyday thoughts

Share my own profession/domain, the great projects or products I come across,

I think for the various corresponding platforms, you should lean toward different kinds of content.

For video, for example, it’s best to have more description and introduction and fewer opinions; for X and Moments-type formats, more opinions and reflective introductions and less description.

And one very important thing: a question to ask myself before starting. Are you afraid of exposing your flaws, or is there anything you worry others will see or judge? Slowly I seem to become more sincere — I am who I am, the real me.

Munger notes

Really understanding when to advance and when to retreat, and doing the right thing.

If you can’t clear a seven-foot bar, go find a one-foot bar.

On the surface he’s talking about investing; more deeply, he’s talking about wisdom.

He described it with one-way doors and two-way doors: some things or some roads you can turn back from, but some things, some roads, are one-way doors with no going back. What is the real meaning of hiking or travel for me? Is it challenge, is it overcoming difficulty?

I think it’s more about identifying which difficulties are worth conquering and which can be given up.

Knowing how to give up is exactly what makes persistence more valuable.

A friend I really admire happens to be someone who knows how to give up. On the ACT, when she hit an icy section, or ran into problems she wasn’t fully prepared for, she would also choose to give up. This kind of giving up isn’t escape or cowardice. It’s a firm wisdom that comes after rational analysis.

Common sense that ordinary people don’t have, a rational dissection, inverting and reconstructing the problem to see what kind of problem it becomes.

In the AI era, are we also staring at a seven-foot bar while ignoring a one-foot bar with rich rewards on the other side?

Amplify human advantages — that means intuition. AI excels at logical computation and pattern recognition, but human intuition, emotion and moral judgment are areas AI struggles to reach.

Perhaps the biggest opportunity lies precisely in returning to core human values — creativity, empathy and a sense of meaning.

Luxury goods and their essence

The essence of luxury goods is scarcity. It’s not just functionality — more it’s social status, cultural identity and a sense of collective social belonging.

Luxury goods often violate the basic laws of economics — the higher the price, the greater the demand may actually be. The logic behind it is that high value itself is part of the product’s value.

Motives for buying luxury goods, a few dimensions:

The craving for recognition: the feeling of being valued, using consumption to define who you are.

Fear of scarcity: scarcity stimulates possessiveness

Resistance to impermanence: eternity and classic status can oppose the passage of time.

So in the process of buying luxury goods, are we becoming our true selves, or moving away from our true selves?

What’s being discussed here is the motive, not the behavior itself. A migrant worker scrimping and saving to buy a luxury item as a reward for himself, and a rich kid casually buying one to show off — the consumption behavior is the same, but the human logic behind it is completely different.

Luxury companies seem less like they’re selling goods and more like they’re defining the rules of the game.

At the most basic level of human desire: the harder something is to get, the more valuable it is. This isn’t just commodity logic; it’s human nature logic.

The wisdom between people depends on whether we’re being shaped by the game, or actively choosing to take part?

This too is the process of sensibility after reason.

Hermes is more like a religion. It defines a myth, and through ritual and sacred objects it draws in a large number of loyal consumers.

But why is it that only watches and bags more easily become luxury goods, and not other things?

Watches and bags both sit at a delicate balance point: personal enough, public enough, and used at a moderate frequency. You buy them not for practicality, but for status. This is a philosophical meaning that goes beyond the object itself.

Essentially it’s also because value is to a large extent a product of social construction.

The finest qualities of human nature are like the bloom on a fruit’s skin

The finest qualities of human nature are like the bloom on a fruit’s skin; only the most careful handling preserves it. Yet we have never been that gentle, either with ourselves or with others.

Those innocent, kind, sensitive parts deep inside us are actually far more fragile than we imagine.

I remember what an older guy said before: kids today seem less happy than he was as a child. As a kid he and the other village children would eat watermelon on the roof at night and look at the moon. Far from the city’s noise, he suddenly realized that certain things inside him were quietly draining away in city life. Maybe it’s the childhood sense of wonder at the world, maybe it’s caring about others without any ulterior motive, maybe it’s the pure feeling of being moved in the face of something beautiful.

This society is bit by bit eroding people’s authenticity.

When we habitually respond to others’ foolishness with sharpness, are we wiping away the goodwill in their hearts?

When we suppress inner feelings for the sake of “maturity,” are we actively wearing away our own sensitivity?

When we chase efficiency and ignore the beauty of the process, are we depleting our own poetry?

The wisdom of empiricism

“The wisest man has not learned from life any knowledge of absolute value.”

This sentence is a profound overturning of the traditional idea that “experience is supreme.”

The traditional view holds that the wisest person should be the one with the richest experience. Reality is the opposite: true wisdom may lie precisely in recognizing the limits of experience.

There are also some truly important things — love, beauty, a sense of meaning — that can’t be obtained through logical analysis and summarizing experience. They’re often just a flicker of intuition, an experience in the moment.

Observing my own expression

Why is it that I feel like I’ve described something for a long time and the other person still doesn’t understand? Is it that I don’t understand it myself, or that I lack the ability to express the problem clearly?

Again it confirms that my expressive ability still has room to grow.

Also, a discussion without a specific purpose or topic ends up being very hollow and meaningless.

I enjoy all the benefits that being obedient brings

And the cost?

The cost is that you’ve erased your own individuality.

《Documentary》

Addendum:

Why do people admire Li Bai more than Gao Shi? One is wild and unrestrained — “the Son of Heaven calls and he won’t board the boat” — the other is a model of a smooth official career.

Li Bai was too clever. His pain lay in figuring out who he was before he had any power.

We praise the rebels while living as the obedient.

If you don’t even have the courage to face your real self, with what mask will you face this world?

The world can have countless Gao Shis who are outstanding and appear to live very well; the world also has countless people who had Li Bai’s childhood.

Two apps, two essences: guides vs. journals

Setting aside magical community apps like Xiaohongshu, which can do both guides and journals (essentially, the value comes from sharing)

For the other vertical apps, the difference between the guide type and the journal type

The most essential thing is that one is a subtraction product and the other is an addition product.

Travel/living guide app (subtraction product):

It solves the anxiety of “not knowing what to do”

It helps users reduce uncertainty, reduce trial-and-error cost, reduce the burden of planning

User’s goal: don’t make mistakes

The value peak is before the trip; use and discard

Travel journal app (addition product):

It solves the fear of “not wanting to be forgotten”

It helps users add meaning, add memories, add self-knowledge

User’s goal: it has to be meaningful

Value increases with time; the more you use it, the more precious it becomes

Design philosophy:

Subtraction type: completing the goal as the means, arranging the upcoming itinerary; it satisfies safety needs and is driven by anxiety.

Addition type: user experience, deep feeling, a sense of meaning. Driven by self-actualization and meaning; emotional barriers and a data moat.

Guide app:

Easily disrupted by AI (ChatGPT can already make guides)

Low user loyalty, low switching cost

Monetization relies on ads and commissions

Fierce competition, a red ocean market

Journal app:

Hard to replace; the data is the moat

High user loyalty, high switching cost

Can monetize through subscriptions

Mild competition, a blue ocean market

Wanting is essentially dopamine-driven

Liking a product and paying for it — but the subconscious act of paying: saying “like” for it seems too big a word. The more accurate word to describe it is “want.” I crave getting this product, this object.

Setting aside biological instinctive craving, when dopamine levels rise we crave a particular thing more.

The absolute level of dopamine is only one side of it; what matters more is the “relative change.” Short videos, for example: sudden happiness, but it’s hard to get happier. A fairly high dopamine level makes it hard to produce a larger change.

So when you keep doing something you like, the threshold at which you feel happiness keeps rising.

The total “reserve” of dopamine is limited! However the happiness is obtained — through work, exercise or other means — the happiness currency being spent is the same one: dopamine.

Here we can understand a more subconscious function of anti-addiction mechanisms: if we always keep the same happiness response to the same thing, we might stop exploring as individuals. Proper restraint and limits can make happiness more precious.

Dopamine can have a stacking effect, driving the peak higher. The higher the dopamine peak, the longer the sustained trough that follows, and over time this may reduce your ability to get happiness from exercise alone.

The dopamine reserve is also limited, which means we need to budget our pursuit of pleasure wisely.

Sustained high stimulation causes dopamine receptors to be “downregulated”

The ways I somewhat agree with for effectively “budgeting” dopamine release

Diversify your sources of happiness. If you get happiness from a single source (short videos, say), dopamine receptors downregulate and you ultimately lose interest in other things.

Proper rest and recovery (meditation, walking, hiking). Continuously high-stimulation activity depletes the dopamine reserve, leading to long troughs and even reducing your ability to get happiness from low-stimulation activities.

Delayed gratification, the meaning of long-term reward: turn a craving (wanting some product, say) into a goal and achieve it gradually through effort, rather than satisfying it immediately.

A healthy lifestyle

Narrative / information

The essence of information is raw material; the essence of narrative is construction.

Fragmented information/knowledge plus fragmented logic constitutes human intelligence.

So a fragment on its own is information, but when a main thread strings them together, or they’re strung together from a particular perspective, then this process is narration — so narration has a framework or a concrete method.

Narrative gives information a sense of meaning. Our narrative framework itself determines what can become effective information.

What’s the difference between knowledge and narrative?

Knowledge needs narrative to activate it, so it may be an organizing principle of knowledge — essentially using narrative logic to reorganize and find the timeline, causal relationships, inner logic.

So is personal narrative discovering knowledge or creating knowledge?

Knowledge itself may be a product of narrative and experience — there is no purely objective knowledge, only understanding that is continually reinterpreted under different narrative frameworks.

So what’s truly important may be using your own narrative method to turn experience into wisdom that can guide action.

Information - knowledge - narrative: more like a dynamic triangular loop; these three interact.

Information→narrative→knowledge: for example, when you research the AI field, you collect fragmentary information, integrate it with the narrative framework of “superman philosophy,” and ultimately form knowledge that can guide action.

Knowledge→narrative→information: for example, once you have the knowledge framework of “a sense of realness,” you start re-examining life with this narrative and thereby discover information you previously ignored.

Narrative→information→knowledge: for example, your narrative of “growth” makes you more sensitive to catching the fragments of information that can trigger thinking.

I feel narrative may be the engine of the triangle?

Essentially all our thinking implies a narrative framework, and this framework determines

which information we pay attention to

how to turn experience into knowledge

how to let knowledge guide action.

I meant to be a bystander, watching how Gen Z changes the world

I meant to be a bystander, watching how Gen Z changes the world. But whether lying down to watch, sitting to watch, or standing to watch

— I’m Gen Z too, and I’m on the road as well.

Criticism is easy, praise is easy too. What’s hard is admitting: we’re all groping for our own answers.

What is Gen Z’s most precious quality? Not “not being afraid to lose,” but daring to redefine what winning means after losing.

Not “being a maverick,” but still finding your own frequency when everyone is a maverick.

Sincerity isn’t as simple as telling the truth; it’s knowing the world is complicated and still choosing not to filter yourself.

Suddenly I get it — every generation asks “who am I”; Gen Z is just the first to ask it this loudly.

Being on the road is itself the answer. Moving forward imperfectly is closer to the truth than observing perfectly.

Our generation — living inside everyone’s expectations, yet for the first time learning to live for our own.

Undercurrents: Gen Z night

I rarely have any interest in attending events, but this Gen Z venue really attracted me — I wanted to see what other Gen Z people are doing and thinking, and to see what the kinds of groups that pay attention to Gen Z are like.

Every generation asks “who am I”; Gen Z is just the first to ask it this loudly

— Judging them through binary oppositions exposes the limits of one’s own thinking, and isn’t that also losing Gen Z’s most precious quality? It’s the people who stumble and can’t quite explain what they’re doing who feel real.

Not waiting for a definition, but creating the definition right now

While everyone chooses to be shrewd, I choose to keep my innocence

An idealist’s greatest enemy is seeing their own incompleteness in someone else

The essence of breakthrough is choosing “I want to try something else” when everyone says “this is good enough”

Sincerity is scarcer than cleverness; action has more force than criticism

It’s knowing the world is complicated and still choosing not to filter yourself

It’s not that you set out because you saw hope, but that you see hope because you set out, so 🤨

Some thoughts on last night’s driver’s emotions

Here’s the reconstruction. Last night I took a taxi and the young driver took me home. He was dressed very flashily, which gave me a faintly bad feeling — I didn’t like that feeling. I think I’ve been domesticated, and I was also expecting him to match my own value system.

Something happened on the way: an oncoming car was making a U-turn and did it a bit fast by accident, which startled the driver into slamming the brakes. I vaguely felt something was off, especially given my subconscious impression of floral shirts and tattoos. Sure enough, the driver instinctively vented his emotions and cursed the other guy out, and the other guy immediately rolled up his window. I vaguely felt, putting myself in his place, that the driver should get even angrier — because this was an intuitive judgment based on the profile of that kind of person.

Contrary to my expectation, the driver internalized the emotion. He still drove me home very friendly and reminded me to take my belongings with me.

I think people who internalize their emotions instead of passing them on are very impressive — people who can stay clear-headed within emotion, or whose emotions crumble against a strong inner core.

One more thing, something I’ve said before too.

We only need to be responsible for ourselves and for the relationship between us and the other person; we don’t need to be responsible for any individual or collective as such. A relationship is a third existence created by two people together; it has its own vitality and needs. Because all others are uncontrollable and don’t fully match expectations, what you can control is your own choices, your own trust in the other. And that’s also the best growth for the other person — not growth according to your expectations and hopes.

This relationship makes me feel warm, and I want to respond to that warmth

My behavior is to keep the relationship sincere, not to change her life

This is an equal, interactive response

And no longer worrying about or complaining about troubles that come my way because of the other person’s mistakes — it’s like opening a god’s-eye view

Traditional: the other person did wrong → I was affected → anger/complaint, the other person “should” act according to my expectations

The other person acts in his way → this affects our relationship → I choose how to respond; everyone runs on their own logic, and that’s normal

It keeps a sense of participation while avoiding the desire to control. It’s sincerely invested without expecting a return.

Pain is the only teacher that doesn’t lie

It tells you more accurately than all your happy times — who you are, where your limits are, what you truly care about.

We always want to escape pain, but pain may be the only existence that won’t cater to you and won’t deceive you. In the future AI will tell you what you want to hear, but only pain will tell you the truth.

Pain is the source of what’s deep and emotional; pain is also the most sincere.

Learning to forget is harder than learning to remember

The fixations that cause you pain, the outdated cognitive frameworks, the identities that block your growth.

Future information will never disappear.

It’s actually always been this way: for information with a life cycle, you need to choose subtraction. For knowledge and experience with lasting value, you need addition.

Learning to forget is harder than learning to remember

Chatting with my buddy today, a moment came to mind — the part about truth in everyday conversation.

It’s important for people to learn to forget. The truly important part is the moments in a conversation where you empathize with your own experience, or where your emotions shift.

The rest is essentially part of the information, and could actually be handed to AI to handle.

What’s truly important for a person is perhaps not how much knowledge they store.

The truly important part of a person is the experience of being able to resonate with some experience, story, piece of information or knowledge.

Maybe one day we won’t even need to actively memorize anything; a second intelligent brain can do it more cleverly than our own brain memory.

What we have is empathy for language itself, the ability to perceive the world, and the tracing back to the essence of relationships between people.

What will the future form of young people look like

I used to be somewhat pessimistic: in the post-AI era, is there still anything humans need to do?

A more rational, more intelligent AI

Then what is the meaning of human existence?

AI seems to understand us and understand people better than we do.

But what AI lacks is art, sensibility, intuition, creation, experience, lived experience.

Everything serves this.

Sensibility -> Reason -> Sensibility

I believe young people will meet the future AI era in a better state.

Better education, better systems, more rational frameworks to unearth young people’s potential.

Extreme sensibility is extreme rationality

A question discussed before was about returning to sensibility in the post-AI era. Actually it’s:

The process of sensibility -> reason -> sensibility. But in the end, do you choose to return? What does it look like when pursued to the extreme?

Extreme rationality pursues the ultimate understanding of the world; extreme sensibility pursues the ultimate feeling of the world. Both try to grasp the whole of reality in the most thorough way.

There’s also a unity at the level of intuition: when rational analysis reaches the extreme, it often produces intuitive insight — complex logic pointing at a simple truth. Extreme sensibility also often brings sudden epiphany, and epiphany has the clarity of reason.

A feeling that goes beyond binary definitions: the mathematician’s ecstasy on discovering an elegant theorem, the artist’s logical rigor while creating …

Both ultimately point at the same goal: the essential truth of things — differing in that one is abstract thought, the other direct experience.

So what exactly is extreme sensibility? A kind of compassionate feeling of unity with all things. When sensibility reaches the extreme, a person can deeply feel others’ pain and joy, and form deep emotional connections with nature and the world. In that state, he will intuitively make the kindest, most harmonious choice.

And what is extreme rationality? The underlying laws of the universe, the complex interconnections of all things, the evolutionary logic of life, even the biological and dynamic principles behind human emotion and social behavior. This “optimal solution” based on deep understanding, in its outward expression, is often compassion, harmony and empathy.

Actively creating an inner “discomfort zone”

Actively and consciously “creating” an inner “discomfort zone” or a “cognitive limit” experience

Growth that comes from environment depends heavily on the environment; it’s more like a factor of passive thinking triggered by the environment.

Let’s look at some actively created “discomfort zones”: actively thinking about uncertain questions, questioning your own beliefs or values, making sure it’s after deep consideration rather than habitual acceptance. And exploring the limits of imagination — entirely new ways of existing, different ideologies, completely unfamiliar aesthetic experiences.

I’ve imagined a form of aesthetics based on the texture of time rather than sight or hearing. Time, as a dimension humans perceive weakly, is the weakest and most abstract, needing more integration by the brain. Time relies most on subjective feeling; there’s no sensor serving it. Yet it’s precisely time — this undefined, non-continuous, soft, irregular existence, silken in its gaps. Sometimes time passes incredibly fast, sometimes it’s precise and slow like a blade’s edge … very interesting.

A cup, a flower, a crack — they also have stories of time.

Must you go through hardship before success?

When Heaven is about to confer a great responsibility on a man, it will first test his resolve, exhaust his muscles and bones, and starve his body and skin.

Probabilistically, most people will go through some hardship.

But is it essentially a requirement to go through hardship and pain, and only then succeed or have a higher chance of succeeding?

I don’t think so. “You must go through hardship before success” is more like a powerful rule of thumb than a mathematical axiom with no exceptions. The meaning of hardship isn’t in the suffering itself, but in the growth, screening and verification it brings.

That’s at the level of induction. But analyzed from first principles, if every decision were based on rational thinking rather than historical inertia, with continuous self-reflection and correction, in theory you could avoid a lot of negative feedback that was preventable to begin with. Smart decision-making can let a person grow even in relatively favorable circumstances, without having to wait for adversity to “educate” them.

Post-traumatic growth: from fragile tyrant to inner reconciliation

Post-traumatic growth

Post Traumatic Growth

During their upbringing, if a child experiences emotional neglect, harsh criticism, even mental or physical abuse, they will feel that the world is dangerous and that they are fragile. To survive in that environment, they may fantasize a powerful, invincible self-image to protect themselves. This confidence is a survival strategy, but it’s built on the quicksand of fear.

Even after growing up and “walking their own path” (career success, financial independence, breaking away from the family of origin, for example), they usually can’t simply transform into truly, extremely confident people. That deeply rooted inferiority still follows them like a shadow.

When such people achieve worldly success, there are two possibilities:

The fragile tyrant / performer: they build a castle out of achievement and status, but inside they’re a lonely king

The anxious perfectionist: they may not seem arrogant, even somewhat humble, but inside they’re driven by enormous anxiety. They’re the classic workaholic, using constant busyness and the pursuit of perfection to avoid facing inner emptiness and fear.

The real path of transformation — from seeking outside to cultivating inside — has one very basic precondition: physical and economic safety.

That’s on the material side; spiritually it needs even more rebuilding — learning to give yourself what you never received in childhood, needing to acknowledge your own conflicts and your childhood experience. Learning to reconcile with trauma, to stop proving yourself to the outside world, and to turn inward.

The limits of cognition and life’s choices

And so all her limitations led her to make a decision against her own wishes: out of despair over love, plus her love for her father, she finally agreed to this marriage…

The differences between people — maybe differences of family, of blood, of intelligence, of experience — come down in the end to differences in cognition.

When a person’s mind isn’t yet strong enough to fully hold themselves

When a person’s mind isn’t yet strong enough to fully hold themselves, they need to lean spiritually on someone stronger than themselves. Maybe one day the student will become the teacher’s teacher — that happens often — but at every stage of a person’s growth, they need guidance that is wiser than their own understanding at the time.

Will the AI era overturn this model? Apart from not being able to directly grant experience, we can obtain knowledge and analysis beyond our own cognitive boundaries at any time. AI doesn’t get tired, has no emotional swings, and provides objective guidance.

Gen Z’s aesthetic manifesto: Pop Mart and self-healing

Why do young people like Pop Mart?

What’s behind the cuteness and the trend?

What’s the intimate philosophy behind everyone’s affection for Nezha’s ugly face? The wide grinning mouth, the elf-like ears — both a child’s innocence (cute) and a trace of rebelliousness and “a bit of attitude” (cocky).

Is it like how anime became popular during Japan’s lost decades?

The blind box design is very clever: a “certain” kind of surprise and dopamine reward, the psychological principle of variable reward. Consumers can be sure they’ll get a well-designed toy belonging to some series. This “certain payoff within an uncertain result” powerfully stimulates anticipation and curiosity. An immediate pursuit of “small but certain happiness.”

Gen Z’s distinctive pursuit: refusing to be defined. Liking Labubu is itself an aesthetic manifesto. It breaks the traditional stereotype of “beauty,” meaning “what I appreciate is the personality and attitude behind it, not just conventional cuteness.”

How is idealism projected onto oneself? Everyone carries the attributes of some IP, and each IP carries a distinctive “persona” or “vibe.” Someone who chooses Molly may be quiet and reserved, while someone who chooses Labubu may carry a bit of whimsy and rebellion inside. The toy becomes an outward extension of a person’s inner world — a silent self-introduction.

A sense of order in a micro-world. Essentially it’s a search for emotional comfort, immediate happiness and self-expression.

It’s also a distinctive way for Gen Z young people to heal themselves and construct identity.

Still mountains: a kind of clear sensibility

A kind of clear, luminous sensibility I’ve arrived at 😭

I’ve been interrogating and dissecting myself from a rational angle: “Why did I form this thinking habit?” “Which emotions have I suppressed?” “What do I truly long for?”

It’s probably a kind of echo — the present is no longer lonely; past experiences and rational understanding resonate.

Seeing a mountain as a mountain, seeing a mountain as not a mountain, seeing a mountain as still a mountain

More like pursuing a kind of authenticity, clarity and transparency

This is the state I’m currently pursuing 🥹

Maybe beyond that there’s the state of no-self; I haven’t felt it yet.

The misunderstanding of “ugly-cute” and Gen Z’s real aesthetics

Attributing a trend you can’t understand to the other side’s “stupidity” and “blindness,” thereby defending your own self-image of being “rational, independent, aesthetically normal” — is this finding a new sense of identity while easing the anxiety of being abandoned or excluded by the times? “The clear-eyed bystander” or “the critic of trends.” In the eyes of Gen Z and those born after 2000, aesthetics is about being real, not perfect.

The essence of concepts: the grammar of consciousness’s dialogue with the world

A concept

What is a concept? You always hear people use the word, but you can’t grasp its root, let alone express it.

How do you observe a concept? Use the concept of concept — reflection at the meta level, like a mirror reflecting a mirror in infinite recursion. So for concepts, concepts can self-generate or reproduce. This is a self-referential loop: using concepts to understand concepts, using thought to understand thought. As Gödel’s incompleteness theorems reveal, any sufficiently powerful formal system cannot fully prove its own consistency.

At a basic level, language, or human description of the world, is limited, so a concept is the commonality and stability extracted from a welter of phenomena. When we say “red,” we’re actually grouping countless reds of different shades and brightness into one class — and in doing so, “red” may erase that uniqueness.

The essential duality of concepts:

Compression: an abstract symbol describing this class of entities

Creation: something I find magical — I don’t know whether to call it discovery or creation. Take the concept of “democracy”: it created the possibility of an entirely new way of organizing.

The boundary problem: what is life, what is freedom, what is survival, what is intelligence. The blurriness of boundaries isn’t a trap of concepts; it may be their most profound feature. Blurriness ensures a concept’s openness.

The real essence of concepts is that they’re the grammar of consciousness’s dialogue with the world. Without concepts, we don’t know how to think, but concepts also constrain and delimit our thinking …

The levels of rebuttal and sincere tolerance

Why do some people seem to hate being contradicted

Rebuttal isn’t a derogatory word; it’s a neutral word, involving reason, sensibility and intuition, and expression.

It’s driven by human instinct. My dad also dislikes me contradicting him. Essentially it’s a failure to understand each other in communication, a combination of human instinct’s self-protection mechanism and cognitive bias.

Paul Graham, author of Hackers & Painters and YC founder: there are seven levels of rebuttal

(Level one) Name-calling: the lowest, pure emotional attack (like “you’re an idiot”).

(Level two) Ad hominem: not discussing the content, attacking the other’s character or right to speak (like “you have no right to speak”).

(Level three) Criticizing tone: not addressing the content of the statement, only criticizing the manner of expression (like “your attitude is terrible”).

(Level four) Contrarianism: offering a counter-argument with almost no support (like “I don’t believe it, you’re making it up”).

(Level five) Offering a counter-argument: rebutting with logic or evidence (like “the data shows the opposite”).

(Level six) Attempting falsification: pointing out specific fallacies and rebutting with citations.

(Level seven) Falsifying the main thesis: the highest level, directly dismantling the other’s core argument.

Understanding and tolerance are completely different — two separate things.

I once ran into a situation where a person, toward gay people, in order to keep their own poise and magnanimity, said: I don’t understand it, I don’t agree with it, but I respect it.

I’ve said before: tolerance without understanding isn’t real tolerance, and easily becomes a formality or collapses in practice. Tolerance still requires effort to understand the other’s situation, needs and humanity. Understanding doesn’t equal agreement, but it’s the bridge to sincere respect, and sincerity and respect are especially important in any relationship.

If you choose silence in the face of clearly wrong information, harmful views or unfair situations, that isn’t tolerance but indifference or evasion. So tolerance not based on understanding is problematic. I understand what they’re performing — meeting society’s expectation of tolerance, or treating tolerance as capital, as a culture to show off, as a display tool. But essentially it’s still a closure of cognition, a closure of emotion, and a moral pursuit.

Expose yourself to the best things in the world

How do you make decisions, or what direction is the right direction? Some say reason, some say sensibility, and the insightful say intuition.

Expose yourself to the best things in the world — I’ve heard this line countless times. It comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to get yourself in contact with the best things humans have done, and then trying to bring those things into what you’re doing.

Picasso has a line: Bad artists copy, Good artists steal

Attachment to growth

I think I still can’t reach enlightenment, or won’t for a long time. The main reason is that I’m still attached to growth.

If you told me to stop growing, or if my intuition told me something would put a wall in my growth path that’s very hard to climb over, I’d be extremely resistant.

For example, making myself simpler, more sincere, more real — but if someone insists on constraining my expression, suppressing my thinking vitality and the natural flow of my expression, that wall makes me feel I can’t be my real self.

It reminds me of Socrates’ “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

For me, speculation and the pursuit of truth are where the meaning of life lies; anything that blocks this process makes me feel suffocated.

I’d rather lose some friends than give up spiritual honesty and the freedom to grow.

Last night a friend asked me, and I said that hiking alone, my spirit is at its fullest. With several people, part of my energy gets split off and I don’t get the most complete spiritual replenishment. If that person is someone you like, someone you love, then although you lose the deep focus of solitude, you gain other spiritual nourishment — another kind of “completeness.”

This brings to mind the fear of magnified granularity — interpersonal relationships seem to be like this too. I still haven’t grasped that boundary. Some people, some relationships, are like looking at a three-dimensional artwork: from a different angle, or magnified, the feeling may be completely different. When any relationship’s emotions are magnified, are you ready to meet that challenge?

The aesthetics of time: the art of living in the present

Thoughts on time at Sifenshi Coffee & Match Factory Life Manufacturing Bureau in Qingdao

I’ve thought about the concept of time aesthetics before. I’ve always wanted to know how to observe beauty along the dimension of time. People are more easily sensitive to things visual or auditory and develop fondness for them; the perception of time is comparatively more subjective.

Art itself should be part of daily life. But actually only the present is real — living in the present, the aesthetics of mono no aware and wabi-sabi. Things that follow natural laws of change — wood weathering, iron rusting — are all a kind of aesthetics, including traces of repair, which also have aesthetic value.

I remember my mom never wanting to wear new clothes, thinking good things should be kept perfect and enjoyed later.

Parents construct identity through sacrifice; Gen Z constructs identity through experience.

When is it worth treating things well? It’s the present moment. As time passes, the process of the match factory changing isn’t art in itself; it is life itself.

The wearing out of clothes is itself a kind of beauty, an aesthetics of time, an aesthetics of its own transformation.

So which things carry value attached to time? One is watches; another might be luxury goods. They do have commemorative meaning in time, belonging to a kind of slow wear (usable long-term, without affecting the tool’s own effectiveness) — that is, time, value and degree of wear reaching a very balanced state, and the precondition being that this wear is valuable wear. What is valueless consumption? Say a product you just use up and discard. What is valuable? Either value grows over time — which means thinking on the dimension of time.

So corresponding to products there’s a kind of time aesthetics, and a kind of ritualistic motion aesthetics — the boot animation, the AirPods connection chime when they go in your ear — creating an experience of time. In products, time aesthetics has a more fundamental conflict: consumer culture, commerce and markets mean a truly time-aesthetic product can’t become a mass consumer product.

But thinking back to the earlier addition/subtraction thinking about products: addition itself is value accumulation along the dimension of time.

The present is already good (immediate value)

The future will be better (growth value)

The process itself is value (experience value)

Let every moment have its own unique value, without having to wait for a future that “deserves” it more

When “understanding” fails, switch on “trust” mode

Understanding “understanding” and “tolerance” deeply once more (with some playful AI polish added after the chat)

At first we were just talking about the two words “tolerance” and “indulgence.” One character apart — how big a deal could it be? But as we talked, it turned out this is the most fundamental question of connection between people.

“Tolerance” sounds beautiful, but its root has to be “understanding.” Tolerance without understanding is like a house with no foundation — either a cold “I can’t be bothered with you,” or a principle-less “do whatever you want.” That isn’t tolerance; that’s letting things go, even indulgence.

If you want to understand, you need “empathy.” But what is “empathy”? Empathy isn’t sympathy. Sympathy feels a bit like standing on the shore watching someone struggle in the water and throwing them a lifebuoy, saying “Hey buddy, that’s rough, hang in there!” That’s a distant kind of care, even a slightly condescending one.

But “empathy” is different. It’s jumping into the water yourself, staying by their side, feeling the same cold water temperature, and saying: “Damn, this water is f***ing cold. I’m here with you — let’s figure out how to get to shore.” It’s “I understand your cold,” not “I know you’re cold.”

It’s simply impossible for people to understand each other 100%. Because our experiences are unique.

So this rises to a philosophical level: each of us is, essentially, lonely. We all live in a world built from our own unique senses and memories. We can never truly “become” the other person and feel everything they feel. This is our growth, and our task.

Growth note one: give up the fixation on “perfect understanding.” Expecting to find someone who understands me at every “point” is an unrealistic fantasy. Treat that fantasy as the cornerstone of an intimate relationship and the house will collapse sooner or later — understanding alone just isn’t enough.

Growth note two: when “understanding” fails, switch on “trust” mode. This is one of people’s own precious qualities — being willing to trust someone. A sentence ten thousand times more important than “I understand you” is: “I don’t understand, but I believe you.”

Everything happening in your world — even if I can’t see it with my own eyes, I believe it exists. I won’t deny your reality because of my own ignorance. I’m by your side; I support you.

Growth note three: a relationship’s strength isn’t about overlap but about the ability to “build bridges.” Whether a relationship is solid depends not on how much two people’s experiences overlap, but on whether, in those areas that can’t overlap and are full of distance, both sides are willing and able to build a bridge together.

In the end, it seems what we’re looking for may not be a “soulmate” but a “soul ally.” A comrade willing, in the moments when I can’t be understood, to still stand by my side and say “I don’t understand, but I’m here.”

That may be far more realistic, and far more precious, than finding someone who “understands everything.”

Tagging happiness

Record some happy moments, take a deep breath, tag them as happy — then when you’re unhappy later, maybe you can dig them out and look.

I’ll go first: scrolling Douyin gives me short-lived happiness 🐶

In the AI era, is it boosting efficiency or sacrificing growth

With ChatGPT, daily writing takes just a few minutes — convenient and fast. But what’s the cost?

Losing the ability to think.

No soul.

Empty and hollow.

The language is near perfect, but there’s no real insight.

Users aren’t inclined to question or think deeply about the answers LLMs provide, but LLM-generated answers may be probabilistic.

How to solve it? Choose:

Incur cognitive debt and become an AI dependent. Or raise your cognitive ability and become an AI multiplier.

So, as AI grows, we need to grow even more.

The chain reaction of goodwill and emotion

Goodwill has a chain reaction

Passing on emotion has a chain reaction too

Passing on goodwill has a chain reaction too

It depends on whether you’re creating or spreading love

Or venting or passing on emotion

Some thoughts on male-female friendship

The core of friendship lies in resonance at the spiritual level, shared interests, mutual emotional support — none of which seems to have anything to do with gender.

But there are some psychological indications. From a psychology angle, in cross-gender friendships men are more likely than women to develop romantic feelings for a friend. A widely cited study found that men often overestimate how interested their female friends are in them, while women tend to underestimate their male friends’ romantic interest. But by setting clear boundaries, communicating sincerely and openly, and keeping the focus of friendship on non-romantic aspects, a healthy friendship can still be maintained.

From a sociological angle, different cultural backgrounds strongly influence how the corresponding cultural group understands friendship.

From a biological angle, friendship between the sexes may be an unconscious extension of mating strategy. That is, from an evolutionary perspective, staying on friendly terms with a potential partner can increase future reproductive opportunities. This latent “mating motive” may inadvertently inject a hint of ambiguity into a friendship. But in behavioral science, human behavior itself is complex and varied, shaped jointly by innate instinct, acquired culture and reason.

The world is a net; I choose what kind of ripple I’m the source of

Everyone really does have the ability to change the world through small actions Chatting with my buddy today, we confirmed once again a shared understanding: every person has the ability to change the world through small actions. This isn’t a motivational slogan, but a basic fact about existence.

Our discussion settled into a few solid cornerstones that make up how I see the world:

The world is meaningful, but meaning needs us to create and discover it. It doesn’t exist out of thin air; it’s the result of our interaction with the world.

There is no afterlife; this life is the only one. This isn’t pessimism — it makes every experience extremely precious. The finitude of life gives “now” an incomparably heavy weight.

The preciousness of experience comes from the brevity of life. If life were eternal, any moment of being moved, any heartbreak, could become cheap through infinite repetition. Precisely because it happens only once, each time is worth it.

How the world operates: a giant net of emotion and energy

I increasingly tend to think that society, and the whole world, is a giant distributed network. Each of us is a node.

This isn’t just physical connection, but connection of emotion, energy and ideas. My emotional state today, a small choice I make, won’t just stay with me. It’s like a stone thrown into water, raising ring after ring of ripples that travel outward and reach places I can’t even imagine.

My choices and responsibility: what kind of ripple am I the source of?

Since the world is such a net, an unavoidable question arises: what am I injecting into this net?

The negative transmission chain: when I pass on “hypocrisy,” or the “anxiety” and “pain” I can’t digest, I’m actually polluting this network. The people who receive it may unconsciously become the next transmitters. This propagation of negative energy builds a world full of doubt, unease and pain. It’s a depleting, downward spiral.

The positive transmission chain: conversely, when I choose “kindness,” when I choose to create and share “beauty,” I’m injecting nutrients into this net. A smile from the heart, a help given without expecting anything back, a sincere compliment… this goodwill lights a light inside the receiver; they feel happy, and may go on to pass that light along. It’s a creative, upward spiral.

The endpoint of all this thinking points to “responsibility.”

This isn’t a heavy burden imposed on me. On the contrary, it’s a kind of power. My existence isn’t passive or insignificant. Every choice I make actively shapes the world around me, deciding whether it becomes better or worse.

So every day I need to ask myself:

Today, was I dragged along by unconscious negative emotion and became a transmitter of pain?

Today, did I actively — even in the smallest way — create a trace of goodwill and beauty?

How the world is depends on how I am. How I am is my answer to the world.

From “stillness within stillness” to “stillness within movement”: a higher-order practice of the mind

My understanding of stillness within movement

Everything in the world exists relatively: there is void and there is form, up and down, inside and outside.

“Stillness within stillness” means, in a comfortable, quiet external environment, cutting off the noise of the world and seeking inner peace and calm. This way is usually tied to practices like meditation, zazen, living in seclusion; its core is reducing external sensory stimulation so the mind returns to a primordial, undisturbed state.

“Stillness within movement” is a higher level of practice, meaning that in a busy, ever-changing, even chaotic external environment, you can still keep your mind clear, focused and calm. It doesn’t mean the body being still, but a spiritual transcendence and stability. Whether handling messy affairs or dealing with intense interpersonal interactions, the mind stays unmoved, not dragged around by the outside.

The core philosophy is “the mind can turn circumstances, and is not turned by circumstances,” which comes from Daoist thought: reach extreme emptiness, hold fast to quietude. This “stillness” is not emptiness with nothing in it, but a dynamic balance, a clarity that sees the essence of things amid ten thousand forms. “Stillness within movement” takes everything in life as a training ground for the mind, and through “using affairs to train the mind” hones its stability and wisdom in concrete practice. Reaching this state means the individual has a strong inner power, can “live in the present,” focusing the mind entirely on what’s in front of them without being disturbed by regret over the past or worry about the future.

These two support each other.

Between acceptance and resistance: how to face imperfect rules

Everyone’s attitude toward politics or rules is shaped by their living environment. Not caring about politics is a privilege; for some people, politics is the reality of survival. Understanding this difference lets us look at other people’s choices more tolerantly.

Accepting a reality you can’t change can bring peace, but accepting too much can turn into tolerating injustice. Resisting injustice is necessary, but it needs wisdom and strategy. The key is finding the balance between the two.

Complaining doesn’t help solve problems; taking action is the starting point of change. Everyone can, within what they’re capable of, make the world a bit better by helping others or improving themselves.

Changing toxic rules is the ultimate goal, but it takes collective effort and time. An individual’s small actions are limited, but they’re the foundation stones that move change forward.

Some changes take generations of effort; what an individual can do is keep improving and wait for the moment. Patience and hope are important qualities for facing a complicated world.

Behind the café photos: a social performance that builds an ideal self

The behavior behind girls taking photos in cafés

Cafés in Qingdao are extremely popular with girls; basically it’s all refined girls coming to check in and take photos.

Online I occasionally scroll past a lot of one-sided takes.

What is the meaning of humans chasing perfection, and what is the meaning of chasing truth, and does the individual actually have the right to choose? Or must they be defined by group cultural attributes or bound by collective values?

Humanity’s pursuit of beauty is essentially a pursuit of meaning, not a pursuit of beauty itself. When girls take photos in a café, on the surface they’re recording something beautiful, but really they’re constructing a narrative about themselves. They’re not photographing the coffee, not the environment, they’re photographing an “ideal version of me.”

But when we focus too much on recording life, we’re actually escaping life. She’s no longer in the present, she’s performing for a future audience, including her future self.

The café becomes a theater, and the refined photo-taking is a social performance. But what’s more interesting is that this performance eventually shapes the performer herself. They’ll work to become that person in order to deserve the self in the photo. We don’t take certain photos because we are a certain kind of person; we become a certain kind of person because we took certain photos.

This also seems to be a way modern people fight anxiety, a micro sense of entitlement, at least in this uncertain world.

But,,, the real question isn’t why they take photos, it’s why we question them taking photos, and who has the right to define what kind of life is meaningful?

How to judge whether someone is smart and professional

Judging whether a person is smart or professional:

Are they clear about concepts, do they know the boundaries of language, do they avoid excessive embellishment, do they explain complex problems in plain, easy-to-understand language rather than piling up jargon or speaking in vague generalities, do they understand the boundaries and limits of language, do they focus on conveying information rather than showing off language skills.

Their understanding of technical terms, for example a deep understanding of “understanding and tolerance,” a deep understanding of “simple and concise,” a deep understanding of focus — as they grow through experience the explanation may be different again.

Is the logic clear, does the expression have a through-line instead of being scattered, is the causality clear.

Compared with people who talk about concepts, I appreciate people who talk about experience (everyone has opinions, but experience is valuable first-hand material, worth reflecting on).

The biggest cognitive obstacle is believing you have no cognitive obstacles

The biggest cognitive obstacle is believing you have no cognitive obstacles.

Essentially everyone has cognitive obstacles; if we analyzed every piece of information completely rationally, we’d have drowned in the flood of information long ago.

Bias, stereotypes, emotional judgment — these are all the brain’s fast-decision methods.

So cognitive obstacles come from our craving for certainty, but the world itself is uncertain.

So the essence of thinking is dancing with uncertainty.

Real analysis isn’t breaking a problem apart, it’s reassembling reality.

Create attachment, not addiction: two neurotransmitters of product design

The best products all have one simple but profound insight.

Simple ≠ easy

The best marketing is outputting your own values.

The essence of addiction isn’t just dopamine, and the essence of happiness isn’t just dopamine either.

The essence of dopamine is anticipation and motivation.

It’s actually a neurotransmitter of anticipation, secreted when you expect a reward is coming. So it produces:

gambling addiction

social media addiction

gaming addiction

The other kind is the neurotransmitter of meaning.

Happiness and satisfaction

Connection and belonging

Deep fulfillment

That’s not addiction, it’s attachment.

Create attachment, not addiction

Visible growth

Accumulated achievement

Deep connection

Continuous progress

The corresponding mechanisms:

Addiction: I can’t stop (loss of control)

Love: I don’t want to stop (choice)

Stillness within movement: my philosophy of energy is to create, not to endure

My nervous system is demanding more inner space

I feel like I’m getting more and more introverted,,, and now I seem very sensitive to sound

The noise of Koreans or little kids on the high-speed train, or some continuous noise in a café, or background music in a café that’s too loud — all of it seems to make me uncomfortable.

When your inner world is too full, or your thinking too active, any extra stimulus feels like a burden.

Sound becomes an intruder, because your inner world has no spare capacity left to hold it.

Some sounds I consider good, like light music, rain, the sound of waves, feel like the password to my own state. Like getting dizzy and disoriented in a crowded mall, feeling like your perceptual system is an overly precise receiver, your inner frequency resonating with the chaos of the outside world, that unconscious collective state in a crowd — everyone sleepwalking through consuming, moving, reacting …. it’s confusing, but if there’s a purposeful gathering, or music, or an art museum, a shared state of consciousness, then I can actually merge into it.

It suddenly occurred to me what the Teacher used to say, about reading on a busy street to cultivate your state of mind, a kind of philosophy of seeking quiet amid noise.

Sometimes there’s a conflict: do you get to know yourself and switch to a better environment, or learn to grow in a bad environment — which is better?

I think the former is better for me. I can understand myself very clearly, including my own efficiency and creativity; I deeply feel that my energy is very limited, and in fact fighting a negative, persistent environment is also consuming my time and life. My life philosophy is to create, not to endure.

Stillness within stillness is more like calming down in a quiet environment, relying more on instinct, hence building tall buildings.

Stillness within noise is fighting the environment, it feels like a victory of consciousness, making sure you’re not influenced by a harsh environment.

Stillness within movement is more about taking the initiative, shaping the environment through action or change, knowing what environment suits you best, being clear about what environment you need, what environment better promotes your thinking and growth.

Letting go of shame: claiming the space you deserve

The environment I grew up in has left me with a mindset that still lingers faintly.

In a café, subconsciously I worry that I’m taking up a seat too long and causing trouble for others.

There are a lot of things that are clearly within my own rights, and yet I’m ashamed to claim them.

I feel like I’ve mistaken social order for moral obligation. The real question isn’t that I’ve occupied a seat, it’s whether I have the right to occupy it.

I feel like I’ve always had a distorted idea of equality, that is, maintaining fairness through self-belittling, when in fact I’m using my own suffering to balance an injustice that doesn’t even exist.

I clearly know how the world works, yet I look away; this shame isn’t noble, it’s just another expression of cowardice.

If a person feels guilty even about occupying the space they’re entitled to, how could he ever fight for something for himself or others on a bigger stage …

Isn’t the point of understanding the underlying logic of this world to use resources as much as possible and create resources?

Become aware of the shame, let go of the shame.

The essence of work: a necessity for survival, or a choice made out of love

Observing the essence of many people’s work: survival, not love.

Humans have a strange ability to repackage the necessities of survival as personal choices.

When food and shelter are a luxury, talking about the meaning of work is like discussing the taste of water in a desert — isn’t that a rather childish thing to do?

What is love, what is liking?

A worker who has spent 20 years on an assembly line, his complicated feelings about the job — the pride of being skilled, the responsibility of supporting a family, the friendship with colleagues — do these count as “liking”?

Watching the waiters in a restaurant, men and women joking and playing around, I remember going to a restaurant for a part-time job in my first year of university, the connection between people, the emotions it produced — is that kind of work happy?

Why does society manufacture the illusion that work should be happy? Isn’t that expectation itself a new form of oppression?

Not only do you bear the hardship of labor, you also bear the psychological burden of “I should like this but I don’t.”

Parents who need care, children who need providing for, mortgages that need paying. Their “not liking” is actually carrying all these loves and responsibilities.

Some new thoughts on discrimination

I’ve talked about this problem before.

Blend with the light, merge with the dust

“Blend with its light, merge with its dust” means not showing your edge, not competing with the world, keeping to plain simplicity.

While embracing change, you can still feel the realness of a slightly tipsy state.

It’s not about making us dim, but about freeing us from needing a blinding glare to prove we exist.

The light here is usually this kind of fine-grained warmth, not a dazzling performance.

When efficiency is magnified infinitely, do we instead lose that grounded feeling of “one step at a time”?

Sometimes going slower, being more easygoing, is actually making peace with yourself and making peace with the world — respecting everything in the world, good and bad, going along with it, and only then being able to make small changes.

Yu Feihong interview

Take it in spiritually; go experience, go live.

What attracts me most in reading biographies is their experiences; I like to analyze and think about the causal relationships that formed them this way.

This society is still a patriarchal society. Is the feeling a man has before death any different from what a woman has before death?

But the sense of spiritual satisfaction for women and men must be the same; the pursuit in the spiritual world is the same.

Only being awake is truly living

I think every writer should sooner or later plainly and sincerely record his own life, rather than only describing the lives of others that he has heard about;

How I deal with the world

Feeling myself come into contact with a new environment, enter a new environment, the process of pain and then fission, the process of discovering the beauty of this new environment — that is my process of dealing with the world.

For me, to be free inside, I have to go live in other environments more.

We still need wealth accumulation, and only after material life has been fully raised

We still need wealth accumulation. Only after material life has been fully raised will there be people researching our many useless disciplines.

Then imagination and creativity appear.

That sincere person left me a little ashamed

When the real Li Bai appears, it’s like a mirror, showing Gao Shi’s inner compromise and limits.

Seeing

“Seeing” was banned. What is the biggest driving force behind China’s ten years of dramatic change? All-round development under a strong state consciousness.

What exactly is the essence of knowledge

What exactly is the essence of knowledge?

I can see that the biggest watershed in my life is 30

There will be a watershed between ideal and reality.

As for how to deal with it, I haven’t figured it out yet …

Maybe I need to understand this middle-aged group, and predict myself six years from now.

Cognition and experience of the world

Put simply, the relationship is that experience of the world supplies the raw material for cognition, and cognition determines how to understand and apply it.

By definition:

Experience of the world refers more to experiential knowledge gained through actual experience, observation and contact. It carries a strong experiential flavor — how many places you’ve been, what kinds of people you’ve met, what things you’ve been through. Experience of the world is usually concrete and emotional, giving a person a richer perception of the world.

Cognition leans more toward the ability to understand, analyze and think. It includes logical thinking, abstract thinking, critical thinking and so on. Cognition determines how you understand and process information, how you form judgments, how you solve problems.

My chemistry teacher in sophomore year of high school

Mentioning it by chance — the teacher who left the deepest impression in my life, my chemistry teacher in sophomore year of high school.

My high school collapsed fairly quickly. The year I enrolled, the principal ran off over embezzlement, teachers’ salaries were badly in arrears, and teachers all came with contract terms.

In class the chemistry teacher often told us about things abroad and criticized certain parties — the first time I heard fairly pointed commentary in a culture class. The teacher advised us to go abroad early, then realized it seemed fairly impossible for us to emigrate abroad, and then said we should go read parenting books early and raise the next generation early (meaning our generation was hopeless …)

Ordinary World

Sun Shaoping went out alone and wandered all over the city: main streets and alleys, inside and outside the city walls, every nook and corner — anywhere he hadn’t been, he went.

He couldn’t yet fully understand a great many of the new things he saw and learned, but all of it undoubtedly had an effect on his spirit. Through the mirror of city life, he seemed to see more clearly the village where he had lived for more than ten years — in that ancient world he knew so well, many things that had once been meaningful now seemed a bit plain and unremarkable. And many things there that had originally been important he hadn’t paid attention to in the past; now they suddenly came to his heart so vividly.

Another girl came in behind him and smiled at him

Sister Runye said to him: “This is Xiaoxia, my father’s daughter. You don’t know her? She’s only just started high school too.” “You and Runsheng are in the same class, right?” Tian Xiaoxia asked him openly.

“Mm…” Shaoping abruptly felt his face burning like charcoal. The first thing he was aware of was his filthy, ragged clothes. Standing in front of this fashionable, good-looking, nicely dressed female classmate, he felt like a beggar who had come to her door asking for food.

He stood there on the ground, still burning with nervousness. When Runye had taken his bowl and chopsticks to the kitchen and come back, he hurriedly said to her: “Sister, if there’s nothing else, I’ll be going…”

For families as fragile as theirs in every respect

For families as fragile as theirs in every respect, one small thing can lead to catastrophic chaos, even paralyzing everything.

Yes — for families at the level of survival needs, the cost of trial and error is extremely small. A moment of carelessness and they lose the basic hope of survival.

“Walk a little slower! I can’t keep up with you!” Runye finally raised her face to Shaoping

“Walk a little slower! I can’t keep up with you!” Runye finally raised her face and said to Shao’an with a smile.

Shao’an had to slow his two long legs a bit and said: “I’m used to running through the hills and gullies; walking too slowly makes me impatient.”

If two people aren’t on the same frequency, it really is hard for them to end up together.

In a society like the present one, and at seventeen or eighteen years old

In a society like the present one, and at seventeen or eighteen, who among them has the piercing eyes to see through the future of their era? Never mind them — even some old revolutionaries weathered by vicissitudes may not have a clear understanding at this point. Aren’t many people just muddling through day after day?

If everyone had the ability to see through the future, wouldn’t nobody regret their choices? But precisely because you can’t see through it — and few people can completely live in the present — maybe it’s essentially that their expectations for the future are too high.

Shao’an stood in front of the platform, though his head was lowered

Shao’an stood in front of the platform. Though his head was lowered, he still searched out Tian Futang among the crowd with the corner of his eye. Seeing him sitting in such a corner, Shao’an understood even more. Yes, the man had a guilty conscience and didn’t dare look him in the face. He took some comfort: in a sense, both he and Tian Futang were being criticized — he took the criticism of thought, Tian Futang took the criticism of conscience.

After confirming the “Judas,” Sun Shao’an simply stopped thinking about it. Whatever the case, Tian Futang was Tian Futang. If he weren’t like this, he wouldn’t be Tian Futang. No one could change Tian Futang — even he himself couldn’t change himself.

Not schadenfreude, but the most direct pursuit of people’s fine qualities

“Drink some water!” Director Hou had been listening to this young man in shock. He had never imagined that this lad would “handle” the matter like this. Though he had never heard the words “take an oath,” he understood that he was being asked to swear, so as not to destroy this little thief’s reputation and future. Director Hou’s cold, calculating heart was warmed once again by a basin of hot human feeling — the young man had once risked his life to save his daughter, and it had unsettled him for quite a while.

To change is to adapt

The essence of change is adaptation.

Behind Pop Mart’s explosive popularity

All consumption solves two things:

One is satisfaction, meeting the needs at the base of Maslow’s hierarchy

One is a sense of existence,

We are far more emotional than we imagine ourselves to be — just as long ago people couldn’t understand why anyone would spend money buying albums to listen to music, and could hardly imagine that music would become an industry.

Of course purely visual art has been steadily declining for decades; it doesn’t appear so purely anymore, it’s just blended into life — printed on clothes, on phone cases.

Truly useless things are the eternal ones (think luxury bags, name-brand watches) — and that’s why useful things like glasses can hardly become luxury goods.

As soon as a product has a functional attribute, it means a short life cycle.

Art is useless — and that’s exactly art’s charm.

Beauty is a representative of power

Is Pop Mart actually good-looking? Beautiful or ugly?

How are beauty and ugliness defined?

Beauty is neutral, but the court’s aesthetic standards, the aristocracy’s fashion, the elite’s artistic taste — these are all projections of power in the aesthetic realm. Beauty became a symbolic system of social status. When we say someone has taste, what we’re actually acknowledging is their power, status and capital. This is also luxury goods, sitting between beauty and power.

Beauty serves power, and can also resist power — subversive street culture, the aesthetics of marginalized groups. It bypasses reason’s defense mechanisms and directly touches a person’s heart.

Beauty isn’t an objectively existing attribute, but an experience produced in relationships.

Labubu’s “ugly-cute” is actually an anti-aesthetic aesthetic, an aesthetic that embraces imperfection. The weird and the rebellious are contemporary people’s questioning of and resistance to traditional aesthetic hegemony.

Labubu challenges elite culture’s aesthetic monopoly, but through limited editions and high prices it recreates a new mechanism of exclusion. At the same time as beauty is being democratized, it’s being re-elitized.

The remaking of an enlightened person

Everyone who becomes enlightened should remake themselves once, auditing every experience in their past life, every person, every idea that was instilled in them, and every cultural attribute.

Otherwise there’s no way to remake the self …

The paradox of inheritance

The greatest irony of passing on wisdom is this: the receiver is always eager to prove how stupid the heresy is, but never verifies whether the orthodoxy is correct.

It’s not her you’re saying goodbye to, it’s your past self

You’re not saying goodbye to her, you’re saying goodbye to your past self.

Penglai Pavilion and Yangma Island: a mismatch in visitor profiles

Penglai Pavilion and Yangma Island

One is better for checking in, one is better for retirement living.

I assumed one would suit young people more and one would suit old people more. It turns out it’s not quite like that.

Old people seem to prefer the former, young people prefer the latter.

Kindness dissolved by utilitarianism

We habitually think “changing the world” requires doing big things, and ignore things like:

A driver hearing “drive safe” may drive more carefully and avoid an accident.

A sincere “thank you” can change a waiter’s whole day, and through that his attitude toward other customers.

This society has cultivated a lot of utilitarianism; everyone calculates with rational, utilitarian thinking:

the cost of meaningless socializing

what’s in it for me

We’re slowly losing the cultural foundation for cultivating character, and slowly there’s an impoverishment of the sense of being.

Some feelings about Yantai

Compared with locals in Qingdao, I feel more of a street-life ordinariness in the old people of Yantai.

Chatting with taxi drivers

These days I like sitting in the front seat of a taxi, because chatting with the driver is fun, and it helps you pick up information quickly and efficiently.

Why adults, after falling, no longer dare to run

A pretty funny phenomenon: a child falls, cries, and when the crying is done keeps running; an adult falls, but first has to analyze why they fell, how to avoid falling again, and in the end doesn’t even dare to run.

When we realize “there’s no need to understand it rationally,” that realization itself is a product of rationality, so does that mean the opposition between reason and feeling may itself be a false premise? Can a fish understand water by leaping over the dragon gate? Most people’s definition of rationality is too narrow.

The driver said you should take more risks when you’re young, later you won’t dare, you’ll have responsibilities. Why do adults lose that directness? Why do they lose simplicity, why is there no longer a time of passionate engagement?

People always beautify memories, or find an explanation for the past; the real scene isn’t about understanding, it’s about feeling.

The shame of poverty: why we’re sensitive about small things and dull about injustice

How can you let other people’s eyes decide your judgment of your own behavior?

Using resources reasonably — some services are things you should actively go and get, rather than feeling shame about.

Shame seems to come more from a misunderstanding of the rules than from breaking them.

So it seems we’re always paying for a virtual “class image,” afraid of being categorized by society or other people. But that categorization itself is absurd.

Human dignity never comes from restraint over small gains, it comes from holding firm on matters of principle.

So the frightening thing isn’t poverty, it’s the poor person’s shame about their own poverty, which makes them not even dare to claim their legitimate rights.

Why are we so sensitive about small things and so slow about big things? Why do we agonize over getting a small advantage, yet turn a blind eye to real injustice?

Claiming your rights reasonably within reasonable rules of the game — that’s the point of us understanding the real world and how it works.

Don’t set limits on yourself.

Notion’s foundation: the block structure

About Notion

Essentially it’s made up, at the lowest level, of block structures one by one.

Foundational abilities worth learning first

Some abilities that feel important across disciplines:

the ability to think about cognitive science, human attention and memory mechanisms

breaking down user pain points, minimum viable product

the reverse application of Feynman

Transferable foundational principles are more worth learning first.

Notion philosophy: unchanging data, flowing views

In Notion the data is unchanging; the data displayed by different views is all the same

So Notion’s focus is the data, and a view is just a kind of consumption carrier

Some insights from the Lingowhale product

The parsing process can’t be too slow, or there needs to be a clear parsing indicator, rather than staying stuck in a parsing state — it seriously hurts the experience.

A deep analysis of the corresponding user group: users who demand fast information processing are inevitably also sensitive to experience and speed.

What is the essence of waiting?

Why do some waits make us anxious (a laggy product, say), while other waits make us look forward (waiting for the sunrise)?

I think the key is predictability and a sense of meaning. When we know the purpose of the wait and can anticipate the outcome, waiting becomes a kind of “time with direction.” But if the wait becomes a black box — no idea when it ends, no idea what you’ll get — then it becomes a kind of “empty time.”

This kind of user doesn’t just need speed — they need a controllable rhythm.

A pretty good way to ask questions

I heard a friend talk about some of his own experience in conversation, and combined with some techniques I learned before, I’ll add them here.

My friend said that when chatting with someone he likes to first open up a fairly big topic, then based on that big topic observe what the other person answers about it — which is probably the causality they most readily associate. This gives the other person enough space to express their thoughts and feelings, so you can catch their points of interest and patterns of thought. What you pay attention to isn’t just what they say, but more the why.

A few things I thought of: when I run into open-ended questions myself, I more or less habitually analyze them with logic and reasoning — probably with the reasoning framework or cognitive system I’m best at. Talking about data and trends suggests more rational thinking; talking about experiences and personal stories probably leans toward emotional expression.

Recently I’ve also gotten into the habit of catching the other person’s wording — whether the technical terms are accurate. The accuracy of technical terms depends on the other person’s professional understanding. Another is tone and speaking pace, which may have gone through acquired training — for example, clear logic without filler connectives. If the other person suddenly becomes voluble in a certain area, that means this area is exactly the right one for them to open up on, and you can keep asking to complete your own cognitive map.

Don’t ask binary questions. I think asking binary questions is a very immature move. The richness of the world can’t be simply abstracted into binaries. Only ever getting “yes” or “no” is worse than asking why and how.

$1,000 a month gets you 4/24-hour standby

$1,000 a month gets you Claude 4 on standby 4/24 hours.

That means a 24-hour coding worker bee, working for you without rest, 24 hours a day.

EigenCode connects up all the engineering ability besides coding — how to test, how to automate, and so on.

My decision tree in the engineering domain

Mainly four tools are in use (everything else is auxiliary): cursor + Claude + Claude Code + eigencode.

eigencode is positioned as a fairly good high-performance CLI code optimization engine, supporting concurrent multithreaded processing, deep analysis of project structure, and direct filesystem operations.

Claude generally uses the projects mode, defining some frequently used knowledge bases to avoid the tedium of rewriting prompts — for example a project for philosophical discussion, a project for projects. Sometimes a project’s projects can work with a GitHub repo to analyze the code and give fairly good operating guidance (granted the repo doesn’t have many modules and isn’t complex, feeding it to the LLM directly as long text).

Claude Code has agent capability to analyze code modules: deep codebase understanding, native Git workflow integration, natural language interaction — very well suited to complex refactoring tasks and collaborative team development.

cursor is generally for fast prototyping, real-time debugging, converting design mockups to code.

Simple feature implementation → Cursor (real-time completion)

Complex logic refactoring → Claude Code (deep thinking)

Performance-sensitive code → EigenCode (parallel optimization)

Fast prototyping → Cursor (Agent mode)

And what’s more interesting is that Claude Code performs excellently at generating meaningful tests (including unit tests and end-to-end tests), running them, and automatically fixing failing tests, usually following test-driven development (TDD) principles.

Tearing it down and starting over

Liang Yongping also often says: keep doing the right thing.

Windsurf’s Varun Mohan is one of the few founders who doesn’t avoid failure and actively embraces it.

Windsurf’s birth only finally worked out after he led the team to abandon their original direction, rename three times, go through several rounds of technical rebuilding, and one strategic pivot that was “almost a complete teardown.”

He said the real difficulty isn’t starting from zero, but when you discover the direction is wrong, how to let go of your former fixation, give up existing revenue, and persuade the team to “start over” — even when that means cutting a product that already brings in millions a year in revenue.

Persisting in the wrong thing earns you no reward, and nobody cares how hard you worked.

If you only have one important thing to do, the company becomes easier to run. Every day, press yourself: do we still have a reason and a point to exist? If not, switch direction.

Almost every present “right” has stepped once into the pit of “wrong.” So, in terms of philosophy too, they temporarily set aside the goal of “letting everyone write code” and focused on the path of “making developers stronger.”

Speed and focus are a startup’s only moat. In a market with a low barrier to entry, if you don’t have faster execution, iteration and learning than others, you still have no advantage at all.

Startup teams also need to face a kind of survival pressure; teams under survival pressure iterate far faster than the big companies.

Windsurf is a 100% offline team. They think this face-to-face collaboration — where you can align your understanding every five minutes — is an “unfair advantage.” Remote companies have long coordination cycles and slow cross-time-zone communication, which doesn’t suit high-speed trial and error.

Model and experience must deeply collaborate. Whether using external models or in-house models, only when a closed-loop experience that the user can control, review and correct is formed at the UI layer does the Agent’s real potential land.

The stage of strategic transition from X Function to Codium was actually his most relaxed period emotionally. “I’ve already accepted by default that we might fail, but at least we fail in a direction we believe in.”

Companies that can “get going” on their own, even with messy organization, have more vitality than teams that “do nothing and just wait for someone to come.”

“You have to dare to say no to new hot topics and new trends, otherwise constant FOMO will drag your rhythm down.”

The board member he admires is Scott Cook, because he’s both a successful product-minded CEO and someone who knows how to evaluate competitive dynamics; he isn’t worried about Windsurf going open source — “our differentiation doesn’t rest on the front-end experience”; his advice to young people is “practice problem decomposition and initiative, rather than piling up skill labels”; one lesson he learned from OpenAI is “don’t pick the wrong name.”

The decomposition model

Deconstructionism is a meticulous method of analysis that reveals the contradictions, hierarchies and hidden assumptions inside a text or a system of thought.

Three typical method cases in philosophy:

Identifying binary oppositions is especially effective. The two opposing terms are, subjectively, differentiated; it’s very meaningful to reverse the binary relation and observe from the other’s perspective.

Inverting the hierarchy — temporarily flip the pair, put the suppressed side in priority position, and see how the meaning changes.

Dissolving the opposition — the two opposing sides are in fact interdependent; their boundary isn’t as clear as it looks.

Deconstruction teaches us how to read deeply and critically — not satisfied with the surface meaning of a thing, but digging into the unspoken power structures and intellectual presuppositions behind it. This is especially helpful for analyzing social phenomena.

The essence of taking something apart

One fundamental method of the ancient Greek philosophers: analysis, whose original meaning is “to break apart.” But real dismantling isn’t mechanical cutting; it’s understanding a thing’s inner structure and operating logic.

Phenomenon dismantling (what): is the surface friendly

Structure dismantling (how): dismantling the system’s design, dismantling the process

Essence dismantling (why): the core of cognitive science — how we construct our understanding of the world

Structure dismantling is the most common method in professional fields. Zhuangzi’s lesson: Cook Ding carving an ox. Dismantle -> solve -> integrate.

Domains divide into: building/creating -> expressing

Building and creating requires reason to analyze and dissect, to perform rational dismantling.

Expressing and performing requires sensibility — trusting muscle memory, focusing on the feeling of the present.

The time-zone problem in engineering

The backend only ever recognizes UTC

The most core, most universal, least error-prone design philosophy is this: at the level of data storage (the database) and business logic (the backend), always use UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) only. The work of converting and displaying time zones is handed entirely to the front end, which sits closest to the user.

The database part: the database is time’s final storage place. Its core duty is to record a point in time accurately and without error, and it doesn’t care what that point looks like in any particular time zone.

Use a time-zone-aware data type: preferably TIMESTAMP WITH TIME ZONE (in PostgreSQL abbreviated as TIMESTAMPTZ). This takes the time zone information you provide when inserting data and converts it into a standard UTC timestamp for storage. When you query it, it converts and displays according to the current time zone setting of your database session, but what it stores underneath is always a unique, unambiguous UTC time. This eliminates ambiguity at the root.

The backend stores only the user’s time zone preference. In the user profile, add a field to store the user’s time zone identifier, for example America/Los_Angeles or Asia/Shanghai.

The front end’s job is mainly to turn the cold UTC time into local time that the user is familiar with and can easily understand.

The cognitive bartender

It suddenly struck me that reading is like mixing cocktails. How does a bartender mix a drink?

Today’s special: based on your state, AI mixes today’s reading combination

What it really touches is the user’s emotions.

In the future, are people really consuming information and efficiency?

I really don’t think so. It’s consuming more information in a way that feels great, delivering faster efficiency in a way that feels great.

What’s offered isn’t the tool’s value itself, but the emotional value behind the tool.

It’s a sense of ritual, a sense of anticipation, a sense of taste.

Doubao’s meeting notes

Doubao used to be very hard to open, and that was a key factor that made it a hassle and made me hesitate over whether to use it. I felt it was too heavy.

But for some needs, the best solution I can think of right now really is still Doubao — recording meetings, for example. Some offline meetings need recording too, like discussing a question with a friend; through meeting notes you can sort the question out well and record the conclusions or notes. I really like this capability. Doubao supports a global floating window, so it’s very convenient to bring up.

https://chat.fatetell.com/

https://chat.fatetell.com/ product

Would you use a metaphysics-type product a second time?

Or, something similar to guide-type judgment products. Isn’t its essence also a process of acquiring information and then converting it into actions or decisions?

A thinker who contributes nothing to society or the times

There’s still attachment: wanting to walk the whole world, still wanting self-improvement, not yet having gone beyond the attachment to accumulating knowledge, still needing enlightenment.

There needs to be action: no opportunity to practice, thinking contributes nothing, has no influence, let alone helping more people — right now it’s stuck at talk (the product isn’t even built).

Understanding, feeling and expression

Science students understand this world; understanding is rational logic.

Art students express this world.

Feeling is emotional logic.

These three actually constitute a complete cognitive loop.

Understanding is the grasping of existence itself; expression is the process of projecting inner cognition outward; feeling is the direct experience that existence gives back to consciousness.

Resonating with the true structure of the world

Feeling the beauty of the café’s light and shadow, the cleverness of the design, the rules of how the tables and chairs are placed, the accent of the decorative plants, the wall decals and the glass.

From feeling, to understanding, to expression.

Feeling = existence feels its own existence (first-order self-reference)

Understanding = existence understands that it feels its own existence (second-order self-reference)

Expression = existence expresses that it understands that it feels its own existence (third-order self-reference)

Philosophy:

Feeling = self-manifestation of existence

Understanding = self-reflection of existence

Expression = self-creation of existence

From an existentialist angle:

Feeling: the presentness of existence

Understanding: the pastness of existence

Expression: the futurity of existence

Expression is the combination of sensibility and reason, the bridge that presents feeling and understanding to the world.

An artist’s expression leans toward sensibility, conveying emotion and experience in an intuitive way.

A scientist’s expression leans toward reason, revealing laws and truths in abstract language.

The three form a dynamic loop: starting from feeling, elevated through understanding, and finally returning to the world through expression.

New inspiration on simplicity and function

For example, in UI design in the past, the contradiction we could never solve naturally was: the simpler the interface, the less functionality it carries; the more functionality the interface carries, the higher the barrier for novice users and the easier it is to scare them off. Now, if it’s implemented through natural language interaction, the two can be compatible.

This is actually a way of making function into conversation — using a conversational approach or a chat entry point as much as possible to quickly guide users to choose what they want.

It can be reduced to a single search input box; it can be reduced to a simple chat page.

Making AI understand hard-to-understand UI

It’s troublesome for AI to understand user interfaces. The core reason is that UI has the properties of being multimodal, highly contextual and implicitly carrying human experience. It’s like making someone who has never seen rich colors understand what red is.

UI is a two- or three-dimensional layout. UI design is based on aesthetics, with a large accumulation of visual experience and design conventions behind it, hard to quantify.

Then there’s the complexity of interaction — not just images but interaction logic, hard to describe in words.

Using a design system and component library as a language is one approach. Natural language is too vague; create a more precise language — the design system / the chosen component library.

A fairly good approach is to give it a visual context (screenshots, sketches), provide a clear set of rules and a component library (design system), and then use natural language as a flexible, efficient “remote control” to direct and modify.

Two design patterns for page loading

Two different loading design approaches for page navigation

One is navigate first, load later

One is load first, navigate later

The latter somewhat violates people’s natural intuition. Comparatively, the former gives a better user experience and is the mainstream approach.

An aesthetic critique of product design: written for AI

Product philosophy vs AI

AI: I did this f***ing much, so tell me, is it impressive or not

Me: …

Some principles — and yes, AI’s aesthetics still need criticizing:

Less is more. Understand the necessity of every design requirement, every design principle.

Consistency beats personality: have a strict design language system. Users shouldn’t have to learn your page logic; they should spend their time on the content.

Content is king, design is the servant. The best design serves the content rather than stealing the content’s spotlight.

Whitespace: restrain the urge to fill every corner. Whitespace isn’t wasting space; it gives the user’s eyes and brain a place to rest. It creates hierarchy, guides attention, conveys quality. AI is really dumb at this.

Restraint in color: if you don’t understand it, just use black and white.

Details of micro-interactions: the subtle feedback when a button is pressed, the natural transition between pages, the elegant wait during loading — these seemingly insignificant details are exactly the key that separates mediocrity from excellence.

Predictability: users should be able to accurately predict the result of each action. Similar elements should behave similarly; similar positions should have similar functions.

Not looking pretty, but feeling right. On aesthetics, [AI] really should learn from Apple.

Deliberate training of aesthetics

Aesthetic ability, I feel, still needs deliberate training.

The product details we make all reflect our own aesthetic ability.

Deliberately train some simple sense of beauty; look at the very top-tier art and design.

A very simple method: look more — at all kinds of top-tier art exhibitions — and think about why this work attracts me. Is it the color, or the composition, or the emotion? What’s the focal point of the image?

Aesthetics often relies on an intuitive judgment. If you’re constantly immersed in environments created by top-tier artworks, your eyes and brain get repeatedly “calibrated.” Once you’ve seen enough, you can naturally distinguish what’s mediocre, what’s excellent, what’s outstanding.

Not just taking a photo with your phone — also recording aesthetics, taking notes, thinking, building an inspiration library, and tagging it.

The extreme pursuit of basic aesthetic principles — composition, color, proportion, balance, light and shadow — is highly instructive for an app’s background, brand color, and the use of color in emotional design.

Recommendation algorithms: a “satisfaction machine” or a “growth engine”

Recommendation algorithms and Douyin

Douyin is an amazing thing. I think my self-control is too weak, so I uninstalled Douyin and decided never to download it again in my life. But the influence of WeChat Channels is still there — I like going into Channels to scroll. Sometimes I’ll watch a long Bilibili video in the bathroom for a bit, get bored, and jump over to WeChat Channels to scroll … it sounds like even finishing one long video is a lot of work.

Looking at cognitive tiers, the first tier is certainly high-quality readers and efficient online information integrators (including AI users), though readers depend heavily on the quality, richness and processing ability of their information sources.

The last tier is certainly the passive entertainment consumer — scrolling Douyin, for instance — usually with immediate gratification and emotional value as the main purpose, and the least exercise of cognitive ability.

The content is short and incoherent, and long-term exposure weakens users’ ability to think over long spans and coherently. Strong audiovisual stimulation and rapid content switching constantly give the brain new stimuli, forming a “dopamine trap” and weakening the ability to delay gratification. Most content can be understood without deep thinking, leaving the brain in “power-saving mode.”

Of course my friend says there’s some valuable stuff on Douyin — granted you’re interested in valuable information and actually think about it — but its media form itself determines that it’s hard for it to carry complex, systematic knowledge.

Douyin’s most essential commercial purpose is to extend your usage time as much as possible and raise your interaction rate; every problem has its root around this purpose. So the algorithm is designed as an extremely efficient “satisfaction machine,” not a “growth engine.”

Most fundamentally, recommendation algorithms today find it hard to accurately judge what content truly has cognitive value for “you.” By comparison, the metric “what do you like” is much simpler, clearer, and easier to track through data.

For a middle schooler, a popular science video “breaks through walls.” But for a physics PhD, the same content might just be “information noise.”

Also, if the pushed information contradicts the user’s existing cognitive system, it may trigger cognitive dissonance — a tension and discomfort arising from inconsistency between belief and behavior. Most people’s first reaction isn’t to reflect on their own views, but to avoid or attack the source that caused the discomfort. That’s not good for retention.

Maybe as time goes on, a better form of recommendation algorithms would be evolving from a tool that “satisfies desires” into a partner that “sparks potential.”

It’s like equipping every person’s brain with a 24/7 personal advisory board of top scientists, philosophers and educators. It wouldn’t weaken our autonomy; instead, by revealing our blind spots, challenging our biases and optimizing our paths, it would amplify our self-directed learning ability to unprecedented heights.

But this involves a new definition for humans in the AI era or post-AI era: “What is growth?”

Collecting in the AI era: from fighting forgetfulness to shaping a digital persona

What’s the point of collecting things, really?

What does collecting mean to a person? Most people seem never to go back and look at what they collected.

Collecting is a form of security; even if you never look at it again, the ritual itself matters.

This is a cognitive trap of the brain itself, mistaking “contact” for “mastery,” mistaking “marking” for “internalizing.”

But the way I understand collecting is actually more fundamental: we’re leaving clues for our future selves, not storing answers for our present selves, like leaving a coordinate point on a mental map. Why do we collect? Because we felt a resonance and a link. Real collecting isn’t hoarding information, it’s recording the trajectory of how your own state of mind changes.

Through collecting we trick ourselves into believing time is plentiful, and at the same time, by not going back through our collections, we prove that time really is scarce.

What form does collecting take in the AI era?

Future collecting may no longer be “what did I collect,” but “what deserves to be collected by me.”

AI will start collecting you in reverse — it collects your collecting behavior itself, your pauses, your points of resonance, the micro-changes in your expression in front of a piece of content.

Collecting will evolve into a “real-time modeling of your thought DNA”; it won’t just know what you like, but how you like it, in what state you like it, and how your liking shifts over time.

What may be more interesting is “archaeology of consciousness” — AI digs up preference patterns in you that you don’t even know about. For example it finds you always save things about loneliness on Wednesday afternoons, or that you have some subconscious fascination with the concept of “circles.” Collecting becomes a tool for externalizing the unconscious mind.

There’s another possibility that’s even more subversive: collecting moves from “saving information” to “cultivating an AI persona.” Every time you collect, you’re training a digital consciousness that increasingly resembles you; in the end what you’re collecting isn’t content, you’re shaping a being that can think the way you think. This AI copy will start collecting for you the things you haven’t met yet but will like.

Collecting will move from “fighting forgetfulness” to “fighting homogenization.” In an era where AI can supply any information instantly, the value of collecting is no longer storage, it’s proof that “this is my unique aesthetic trajectory, this is my subjective choice, distinct from algorithmic recommendation.”

Collecting may ultimately become humanity’s last act of rebellion — in a world that’s been predicted, insisting on unpredictable preferences.

Actually, going back to why we read, or why we collect, it’s also just that you ran into some sentence that resonated with you, and why did that sentence resonate? It’s nothing other than the process of you understanding yourself, piecing your own soul together.

Actually AI is also storing a vector coordinate system, looking for the connections between one collection and another; the LLM’s thinking ability and logical organizing ability far exceed the brain’s.

On one hand reading is a process of getting to know yourself, but actually more importantly there’s also achieving a “cognitive jailbreak” — letting you escape from your own prison of thought.

Give out countless trajectories of choice, and life actually becomes freer: you think you’re knowing yourself, but actually you’re choosing yourself. The people you admire, the qualities you admire, are actually a mirror of yourself, the person you want to become.

It’s also the process of choosing and creating yourself: every word that enters your brain, every concept that restructures your neural network, every emotional experience that expands your capacity to feel. You think you’re discovering, but actually you’re inventing.

Real reading may be a kind of “self-colonization” — letting heterogeneous thought invade your consciousness and change your inner structure, until you’re no longer the person you were.

Best practices for LLM streaming output: SSE + JSON

Strategies for LLM model output: direct output, and wrapping it in JSON

Research shows that using server-sent events (SSE) combined with JSON format to stream summaries is the best practice.

This approach lets the client display the summary in real time, reduces waiting time, and improves user experience.

The evidence tends to support streaming, especially when extra data is needed; JSON format is more flexible.

Three approaches I can think of right now:

Stream the summary directly: output in time, simple, but you can’t easily transmit extra data.

Output a JSON field containing the summary: the LLM outputs a complete JSON field, real-timeness is worse.

Stream the summary in SSE JSON format: use SSE, and as the LLM generates the summary, each part is sent as a JSON object (like {summary: “partial content”}), and the client can process it in real time.

How do you do the third one, value-level streaming?

Although you could identify JSON syntax tokens, I don’t think it’s necessary; actually in the long run, what may be more important is defining a kind of rule, a constraint rule for how the interface interacts with the LLM.

Possible problems:

If N services have SSE running at the same time, does it seriously hurt performance? To some degree it affects performance.

If it’s a JSON field, does it affect the quality of the LLM’s output: as long as it’s defined well enough, the LLM’s support for JSON right now is great, it almost doesn’t affect it at all.

Watch out for the high maintenance cost of AI-designed systems

Designs written by AI really need more thinking and review, otherwise the code produced later will be extremely expensive to maintain.

AlphaSense: a business intelligence operating system built for knowledge workers

Why did AlphaSense come into being?

Background: information is richer than ever before, but extracting credible, relevant insight from it keeps getting harder. Information overload and fragmented data have become the key bottleneck limiting the efficiency and quality of decisions.

Purpose: to build a whole new enterprise-grade intelligence infrastructure, an “operating system” (OS) tailor-made for knowledge workers.

To find, among unstructured and structured information, the key intelligence that drives decisions, and break the anxiety.

Traditional information is inefficient, information is incomplete or analysis lags.

What’s the positioning? A smarter hype system. A market intelligence and enterprise intelligence platform, and the breakthrough is breaking down the barriers between a company’s internal and external information, seamlessly integrating both streams.

It’s not just a tool; once it deeply embeds itself into a client’s core workflow it’s more like a CRM.

One is depth, one is breadth. There are a few core pillars:

Wall Street insight: designed for enterprise clients, aggregating equity research reports from thousands of top investment banks and sell-side institutions.

Company filings, public disclosure documents from listed companies.

News, journals and regulatory databases, capturing the pulse of the market.

Expert insight: building its own database of expert interviews.

Deep content recommendation should be anti-algorithmic

Some thoughts on LLM content

There are some new angles or sparks of inspiration around LLM content.

For example, when it comes to a user’s rating behavior, part of judging an article actually comes from an objective value system, like the depth of the article. But there’s also a part that comes from the user’s subjective judgment and rating.

So actually part of the content transmission is based on modeling the user, analyzing the user’s preferences: maybe A is more into design and rates beginner design content higher, while B is more expert in design and may rate beginner articles lower.

A separation of objective value and subjective experience.

A core philosophical question: how do you define “good” — is it an intrinsic measure, or the fit for a particular individual?

So essentially it’s a cognitive mapping system: it needs not only to understand content, but also to understand people.

Levels of cognitive ability: beginners need basic concepts, experts need frontier insight.

The same design article means completely different things to a graphic designer and a product manager.

Users’ needs change with their state of mind and the moment they’re in.

SO

We can never evaluate content from a purely objective angle, because “objective value” is itself a collection of countless subjective judgments.

Real content intelligence isn’t matching, it’s guiding.

And one more very important point: is rating based on subjective judgment necessarily right? It only evaluates the past or the current state, but actually growth always happens at the edge of the comfort zone.

So real intelligence and personalization doesn’t give you what you want, it gives you what you need but don’t yet know you need.

Cognitive diversity matters a lot: if everyone only ever encounters content suited to them, wouldn’t the intelligence level of the whole society become more impoverished?

So a deep content recommendation algorithm should be anti-algorithmic; the goal isn’t perfect matching, it’s elegant mismatch.

Real personalization isn’t making everyone live inside their own information cocoon, it’s building a unique cognitive adventure path for each person.

Café design: a silent dialogue with the owner’s aesthetics

The spatial design of a café really often carries the designer’s emotional projection and life ideals.

Objects placed seemingly at random — apples, a model house, carefully chosen chairs, plants and flowers — are actually all telling the story of the designer’s definition of “a good life.” A designer who likes minimalism may choose clean lines and negative space; someone who yearns for rural life will add more natural elements and warm wooden furniture to the space.

Walking into every café with taste feels like having a dialogue with the barista’s inner world and design aesthetics.

All the related design elements, including the theme, come across as very harmonious and matched.

The process of an older barista mentoring a new one.

The process of an older barista mentoring a barista

The process of me looking at this café

Could it be a future version of me?

Is traffic a container for emotion, or does the container shape the emotion

Analyzing and thinking: do you understand, or agree, that an IP or traffic is a flowing banner, like a public projection of a collective emotion maximized at that particular moment, where the specific event or person is just temporarily chosen as the container to carry it all.

Is it the emotion that chose the container, or the container that shaped the emotion?

When we say a person or an event was temporarily chosen, does that imply a kind of passivity? Perhaps history is just a collection of accidents.

Why can some containers carry it, while others shatter.

Traffic isn’t a pure mapping of emotion, it’s the process of the collective unconscious looking for an outlet, a symptom certain to surface in the course of a civilization.

So in this world of information overload, are we observing the world, or is the world observing us? When we analyze IPs and traffic, have we also become containers for some kind of algorithm?

The world doesn’t need to be understood through data and traffic; when everything gets quantified into data, have we also lost the ability to perceive what can’t be quantified?

The aesthetic design of Japanese-style cafés

Some design techniques of Japanese-style café aesthetics

A guess about the commercialization of brain-computer interfaces

Thoughts on brain interfaces

It may take another fifteen years for long-term commercialization.

The philosophy of prompt design

Recently, especially after reading some of Li Jigang’s prompt design philosophy, I want to talk about it alongside my own understanding and experience.

One word can make a large model understand — that’s the power of compression.

Essentially it’s streamlining and optimizing the input so the LLM better understands the requirement.

Three logics for writing a good prompt:

Different LLMs and different methods have different effects; understanding the LLM matters.

Industry knowledge bases — this counts as the industry’s knowledge moat: the same aesthetics, how to build, how to choose colors. In a short cycle the LLM is unlikely to learn top-tier standards here.

Logic isn’t clear — it matters to state a problem clearly. For the same requirement, stating the requirement clearly helps the LLM understand it.

The bigger the subjective differences, the harder it is for the LLM to replace you. Aesthetics, for instance: even if there is some shared sense of beauty, like symmetry and color matching, everyone still has their own understanding of beauty — mono no aware, for example.

Where’s the boundary? The LLM keeps improving, getting smarter, and the prompt needed seems to keep shrinking?

We tell GPT-4, “give me one concise sentence,” and it produces a “concise” sentence. At a glance it matches what we need, it delivers our efficiency — that’s it understanding you. But if you say the same sentence to 3.5 — “give me something concise” — it just can’t; its understanding isn’t up to it.

What do you do then? Spell the word out. Progress in large models means this comprehension ability keeps getting stronger; things that used to need analogies and examples aren’t needed by current model capabilities.

The progress of LLMs is essentially pushing humans to migrate to a higher cognitive tier, rather than compressing the space of expression.

Prompt engineers are translators and architects of cognitive tiers.

Real prompt engineering isn’t “training the AI,” it’s designing an architecture for cognitive collaboration. As AI advances, this profession will evolve from “instruction writer” to “cognitive resonance designer.”

AI trends report

AI reasoning models crashing to cabbage prices is the trend, and unavoidable. Training model costs rose more than two thousand times, but inference costs have plunged 99.7% in two years.

India has become the most important factor in AI company valuations; India’s young people are the biggest young consumer market of the future.

India has already become the world’s second-largest market for the ChatGPT app!

Models with $10–100 billion training costs are expected to appear in 2025–2027.

The AGI timeline has moved up substantially; the OpenAI CEO stated in January 2025 that “we now are confident that we know how to build AGI.”

Model training costs grew 2400-fold over 8 years (heading toward astronomical), inference costs fell 99.7% over 2 years (heading toward free), but only giants can afford to build frontier models.

China stands out in open-source models; its industrial robot installations exceed the total of the rest of the world.

Model performance is converging quickly; open-source models threaten closed-source models.

Current business models aren’t sustainable (OpenAI loses $1.3 billion a year).

Stay away from the general-purpose track and focus on vertical applications, like Cursor (code editing), whose ARR went from $1 million to $300 million in 25 months.

Use open-source models to build specialized solutions; the open-source ecosystem is about to explode.

In an era of converging model performance, unique vertical data becomes the real moat; how to extract high-quality data matters a lot.

In hardware and the physical world, AI moats run deep and the user ecosystem is stable.

B2B willingness to pay is strong, and the business model is the clearest.

2.6 billion people will come to the internet starting directly from AI, skipping the traditional browser/search engine experience.

“In this environment, innovation isn’t just a commercial advantage; it’s a national posture.”

The window is fleeting; now is AI’s “game time.”

link: https://www.bondcap.com/reports/tai

AI playing a particular identity

I’ve been using AI to impersonate a philosophy teacher who really understands me, to talk with me.

And one more questioning technique.

“In the field of xxx, who do you think is the best? Not who’s generally recognized, but who you genuinely admire”

After getting a few names, the next question is:

“If you were XXX, how would you answer this question of mine?”

What’s scarcest in writing prompts

Or, what is the moat in prompts that looks like there’s no moat?

It’s the author’s perception and experience.

The thoughts that keep emerging from the author’s experience.

Breaking out of mental inertia

It’s also a kind of cognitive limitation: when we leave a familiar environment, it’s easier to break out of the system of habitual thinking. It’s very easy to re-examine your own state of life or life trajectory from a bystander’s perspective.

AI also accelerates this process. Traditional travel requires physical relocation; in the AI era, AI relocates faster.

Break down the “walls” of knowledge, build “bridges” of thought

AI can reach the extreme within one field, but cross-domain, wildly imaginative “association” and “creation” are humanity’s most unique advantage. Real innovation often happens in the collision of different thoughts.

The brain’s creativity library — recently I really like watching history or looking at a particular painting; it’s not just entertainment, it’s the brain’s creativity library storing diverse raw material, and thinking about the relationship between it and my profession.

Managing sparks of inspiration

It’s fairly hard to get immersed in developing the current app. A lot of my lines of thought get scattered easily by the external environment or by my own flashes of inspiration. The former is something I can adjust or train my focus for, but the latter can be managed with a better method — for example using a spark tag to mark this feed, so I can look back at it later.

Context switching while waiting for AI replies

Why AI or I get distracted easily

Sensibility -> Reason -> Sensibility

In the later part of the change, we return to sensibility, but we also lose the single-threaded logic of processing. Sensibility, intuition and association are more nonlinear processes — for example, one thought indirectly triggers another unrelated thought, like neural networks in the brain freely linking up. Seeing a flower makes you think of a certain person.

Reason values logic, causality and structured analysis. It requires advancing according to certain rules or steps, and is relatively more convergent or logical.

It’s as if your attention resources have been seized, making it hard to enter a process of deep focus.

Focus while waiting for AI

Switching content while waiting for the AI’s reply

An LLM’s operation or reply takes time, and during the wait it feels very easy to switch context.

It feels like the overhead of a context switch when an operating system executes a task.

The wait for AI processing and replying usually isn’t long, but for someone who needs to stay focused, this brief interruption really is deadly. The workflow you just established gets broken.

It feels like during the AI’s reply I easily slip into an 🚫idle state rather than a working state.

I think you should follow the AI instead of jumping away, thinking about what to do after the AI replies.

Digital cloning

To clone a person really well, even to change them — we’re all constructing this person, or searching for such a digital person.

Changes in aesthetic threshold and perceptual granularity

Constant travel, changes in aesthetic threshold and perceptual granularity

Friends often ask me: after traveling so much, do you get jaded? Or do beautiful landscapes become bland, no longer moving?

Usually yes — if you travel checklist-style or mechanically, you will get jaded.

Long-term travelers all experience a kind of aesthetic fatigue or travel burnout. Behind it is hedonic adaptation: for continuous, same-type positive stimuli (beautiful landscapes, grand architecture), people’s pleasure gradually weakens over time.

This rise in threshold, this aesthetic fatigue or blunting, isn’t essentially an improvement in appreciation ability, but a temporary strike of the sensory system after overstimulation.

Perceptual granularity “becoming finer” is a direct consequence of aesthetic fatigue. When the brain is overloaded and fatigued, to protect itself it automatically blocks out some detail information and processes information in a more macro, more generalized way. But for conscious, reflective long-term travelers, continuous cultural shock and environmental change instead trains a more delicate, deeper perceptual ability. Once they’ve grown used to the visual impact of “big mountains and big waters,” their attention naturally turns to deeper details.

I often try to slow down and reduce the rushing — for example staying in one place for a while, living like a local, building a sense of daily life. And carrying questions, giving each exploration a focus, constantly looking for meaningful experiences, and also recording and reflecting.

The young people I admire: those with critical thinking

A kind of young person I subjectively rather like

First, which kind I don’t like: people without conceptual cognition, without boundaries, even stuck at the most primitive stage of sensibility (not using rational analysis, not using logic).

The young people I like share one thing: the ability to think critically.

I’ve seen two kinds of people: one kind accepts a lot of information wholesale, swallowing it without chewing; another kind rejects a lot of information outright, distrusting it. But most people seem unable to think and judge logically and rationally.

The basic precondition for critical thinking: absorbing a large amount of knowledge and information as a foundation. Only on such a foundation is it possible to gain the ability to judge good from bad. Learning to ask questions also matters — a large model’s understanding of the world is closer to objective than any single person’s.

To not be swept along by any “authority” or “mainstream” voice, always judging for yourself — because only you can be responsible for your life, and only you bear the consequences of your life.

Rules and freedom

When you accept and embrace a rule naturally and smoothly, you actually become free.

But precisely because, when we try deliberately to “accept” a rule, we’re actually still fighting it — real freedom isn’t obtained by accepting rules, but comes after deeply understanding the nature of the rules and discovering that you were always beyond the illusion of being bound.

Rules were never shackles; our resistance to rules creates the shackles. When resistance disappears, the rule loses its binding force, and what’s left is just the natural flow of existence itself.

Focusing on focus: Jobs’s subtraction and Jensen Huang’s persistence

A deep-thinking discussion about focus

I talked about this topic with my buddy over breakfast.

Jobs’s focus is “the art of subtraction.” He didn’t focus on doing many things well; he focused on only doing the single most important thing. After his return, Apple cut 70% of its product line. This focus is a redistribution of the entire energy of a life. It’s an almost Zen-like wisdom — gaining by giving up. (So there’s a philosophy embedded here: focus is also a form of minimalist aesthetics.)

Jensen Huang’s focus is “persistence in long-termism.” Nvidia persisted with GPUs for decades, never wavering even in the hardest times. This focus is a deep understanding of the dimension of time — he knows that real breakthroughs need the compounding effect of time.

Their focus is actually a kind of purity of being. Giving up things that look important but actually scatter your energy, to reach a pure state of existence.

Focus at a deeper level is meta-awareness: focusing on focus itself, becoming the embodiment of focus.

The most essential focus training isn’t technique, but observing distraction itself.

Going further, there’s a counterintuitive insight: real focus may not be “focusing on some object,” but focusing on the quality of focus itself. Like Socrates’ “know yourself” — know your own process of knowing.

There’s also a more fundamental method: practice “focusing through non-doing.” Instead of forcing focus, relax and let focus happen naturally. Just as river water naturally flows to the low ground, focus will naturally flow to what most needs attention in the present.

Through meta-awareness, observe and ask a few questions:

How did this distraction arise?

What is its texture like?

What does it want?

Perhaps in the end, when you stop trying to focus, real focus appears.

The prompt is the best commit message

The prompt is the best commit message

Essentially it’s about keeping a record of every LLM operation, to make it easy to trace back.

The user’s input is getting smaller and smaller, more and more concise, but it may be getting more and more important.

A sudden thought: if life is doing addition, how does the process of transformation show up

If in the post-AI era humanity’s most precious asset — the rationality we’re so proud of — gets shattered, what’s left? Only experience remains. A person’s personal timeline is the only irreplaceable digital resource.

The brain shouldn’t imitate storage, it should imitate activation; the brain shouldn’t learn to remember, it should learn to forget appropriately, returning to inspiration itself, to a new kind of aha moment.

The point of recording isn’t nostalgia, it’s growth

Not showing off, but understanding yourself

Not perfection, but truth

Talking with your past self, talking with your future self

Cards with life: the evolution of the information carrier

Cards with life

What’s the purpose of a card? It’s an operation on a piece of information, with the goal of helping us parse the information or turn it into knowledge; the card’s state then serves to let the LLM absorb the information better.

A card is a very important carrier, and you can have a whole set of operations for cards, like auto-association, auto-taking offline, auto-upgrading.

It can automatically sense the needed information density; a large number of agents operate on cards, judging and reacting to their state.

Cards can have many styles, like charts, flowcharts, mind maps.

For example audio cards, action cards, reading cards.

The post-information age: what AI can’t replace is cognition and consciousness

In the AI era, just providing information has no meaning or value at all.

Provide what users need more: consciousness, cognition.

The observer’s illusion: me and the world, who is gazing at whom

I am an observer of the world; I walk through every city, as if observing every person, every artwork I observe, and I feel observed by the artwork in return. I’m observing this world, and in fact this world is observing me. In quantum physics, the observer is itself part of what’s shown; there is no purely objective observation. When I gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes back at me, or maybe the abyss and I are one and the same.

Walking down the street there’s an illusion, as if I don’t exist in this physical world. I can’t verify whether this world exists, or whether I exist in this world; maybe I’m part of this world, or maybe I’m merged with this world. Just as I can’t judge whether any person, or an AI, has consciousness, I can only verify whether there is self-consciousness. What I’m unsure of is the background color of this world.

Every thought, the randomness of every notion, in a world of endless change, probability rises enormously. Macro thinking can’t understand the micro world, micro thinking can’t understand the macro world. When you can’t understand, you can only choose to believe, like how meaning comes from subjective attribution. Instead, learn to dance with ignorance. Schrödinger’s cat isn’t both dead and alive, it’s the limitation of all binary thinking or categorical thinking.

History deceives me. My existence itself is a miracle of the universe’s 14-billion-year evolution. I’m not a lonely observer, nor an observer of the world. Separation is an illusion; connection is the foundation of the real world.

Every person I meet, every book, every dream — is there also some kind of quantum entanglement? Fish can’t understand the existence of water,, I see the void in this world.

Observing and being observed have no starting point and no end point. I came to this seaside café in Weihai, the exchange with the waiters, the connection between us didn’t start because I came, won’t end because I leave; our neural networks were all affected. They now know there was an interesting young guy sitting facing a laptop by the sea all afternoon, and I now know what this vast, beautiful sea after the rain will bring me. Maybe it changed some neural network of mine, increased the probability of some random event of an idea, and this idea may have a huge influence in the future. This is a loop, no starting point and no end point … ichigo ichie, as if it’s supposed to be like this, never meeting again. Goodbye, but it’s supposed to be like this.

Does it also imply a kind of emergence, creating the past in the present, shaping the future in the present; time isn’t linear, it’s emergent, and the beauty of time isn’t just in the traces of time, but in the beauty of mental liveliness brought by the interweaving of past, present and future.

The more precise the quantum world is, the more uncertain; the more certain, the less precise. So even certainty itself is a kind of uncertainty. Does that mean that even if a program returns false, it’s a result produced because the program itself exists as true?

Existence isn’t a noun, it’s a verb …

So the truth of a feed stream is a quantum-entangled state of cognition.

So does a feed product need to create certainty? Does life need certainty? No answer.

What I felt of Korean Wave culture is a bit different

A few months ago — in fact from the moment I was born and became self-aware — influenced by sensational internet content, and most fundamentally by anxiety around national identity and cultural sovereignty, many people generally don’t much like the country of South Korea.

Including before I came to Jeju Island: I also felt that once in a lifetime on the Olle Trail would be enough.

Korea’s emphasis on “the independence of its own culture” is national pride at home; to us it reads as a collective anxiety born of “losing a sense of cultural authority.”

After meeting people in Korea, my feeling is the same as in some countries I’ve been to before: human nature is connected; it’s just that society and institutions create differences and variations in personality. Some good philosophical and cultural cores:

The Korean word “한 (han)” isn’t simple hatred but a complex state of being — a blend of pain, resentment, resilience and hope. It’s very much like Camus’s Sisyphus: knowing the boulder will roll back down, still pushing it to the top. Koreans turn this “han” into forward momentum. This is a profound philosophy of life: accept pain, but don’t be crushed by it. Compared with the emotional restraint of other nations, Korean culture more strongly encourages direct emotional expression. This isn’t being emotional; it’s respect for inner truth.

The pursuit of aesthetics: a powerhouse of Korean Wave cultural export, with appearance anxiety and rat-race pressure especially intense.

An aesthetic idea of reaching movingness through refinement. Makeup is, to some degree, touching up and covering, but Korean makeup chose a different kind of covering. Korean society demands that women look perfect, and at the same time demands that they not seem too deliberate or artificial. So Korean women invented the “꾸안꾸” (꾸민듯 안꾸민듯) culture — dressed up as if not dressed up. The logic of Korean makeup is:

A bare face is one kind of real

Looking your best, well-slept, in a good mood, is also a kind of real

I’m just using technique to present the latter

But this kind of “falseness” differs from deception; it’s more like an aesthetic choice — choosing subtle over dramatic, choosing enhancement over transformation.

Two different kinds of refinement, and the experiences they bring

Perfectionist refinement and moving refinement — two experiences of refinement. Why does the latter usually leave a deeper impression?

Perfectionist refinement pursues perfection itself — the flawless surface of porcelain, the pianist getting every note exactly right. Moving refinement lets you feel an emotional connection, similar to the Japanese sense of mono no aware, the beauty of the broken, the beauty that touches the heart. A moving performance: every subtle change in force tells a story, every pause carries emotional meaning.

Instrumental rationality: refinement is to reach the standard of “perfect.”

Value rationality: refinement is to convey values like “love,” “care,” “beauty.”

The former is self-oriented, the latter other-oriented. The former pursues standards, the latter pursues resonance.

Increasingly unmoved by authors’ opinions, increasingly interested in authors’ experiences

Empiricism vs rationalism

When I come across sentences or opinions I don’t understand, I’ll ask AI to explain them to me.

Everyone has opinions, but experience is precious; the more first-hand the experience, the more it’s worth cherishing and savoring. People who live off opinions are like people living in a second-hand world — more like movers of knowledge.

People who seek experience for the sake of experience are also scary. Hiking, for instance: maybe they’ve never thought about why they hike; maybe a lot of them are just collecting stamps.

When I see a post with opinions, I’ve started analyzing and inferring from the author’s own experience: why did he say this, why did he arrive at this conclusion — rather than just resonating with it or liking it because of my own experience.

Be good at growing from experience, tempering yourself.

Faith

This generation seems to have grown up force-fed faith by anti-Japanese war dramas and spy dramas.

Some traditional faiths are gradually fading, and everyone declares that they have no faith anymore.

It’s just that the form of faith has changed.

Religious belief really is weakening in many regions, the influence of political ideology from a global perspective is declining, individualism is rising, collectivist values are being shaken.

You can feel the faith of the new generation of young people: believing technology can solve every problem, believing wealth can solve every problem, believing technology can change the world.

To some extent faith is closely tied to your original intention. The complexity of human nature goes beyond a simple binary of good and evil. Faith isn’t about extinguishing humanity, but about holding to your faith while staying sensitive to pain. It’s a process of actively choosing to bear things — not passive, and not numb.

A fairly good reflection on the philosophy of life

A post by charaego that I really liked. The content goes like this, shot in a church in Spain:

So life can slip away like this Bookstores, parks, waiting for a sunset together with strangers Museums, old buildings, sitting by the fountain after dawn

So life can slip away like this Not burning up the daylight in an office Not mechanically finishing what each day demands

After the trip, back to the me of day after day I’ll probably dream of this stretch over and over A life that isn’t my life

📸️ iPhone 📍 Rome / Florence

The body knows what’s right earlier than the brain does.

Feeling is a wisdom older than thinking.

Are Westerners really naturally “relaxed”?

There’s some misunderstanding here. Being relaxed isn’t carelessly letting time pass; it’s having enough confidence in your own choices.

Our generation has its own way of being relaxed; we’re not imitating a way of life we don’t understand.

And us? We were taught from childhood that “an inch of time is an inch of gold.” How could we learn overnight to “let time flow by however it wants”?

Maybe what we should pursue isn’t Western-style relaxation, but finding a sense of rhythm that belongs to us.

Time still flows, and we allow time to flow too; we’ve just set down the anxious control of it.

Within our own cultural background, redefine what meaningful time is.

The 2025 ICE raids in Los Angeles

It reminded me of an observation by Hannah Arendt: “The terrible thing about totalitarianism isn’t its novelty, but that it reveals a possibility that has always existed in human political life.”

At bottom it’s the same logic: when power needs to display control, procedural justice becomes an optional ornament.

Interestingly, no matter the system, in the end they all play the “stability” card. Stability for whom, exactly?

On the escapee: are we fleeing a specific system, or fleeing the logic of power itself?

A new paradigm of human-machine interaction

I used AI to write a Xiaohongshu copy. The experience in Qingdao is real — the sea breeze, the barbecue, the thinking are mine; some of the thoughts and inspirations are mine too. AI helped me find a better way to express them, through a rational or logical understanding of this kind of user group in Qingdao.

Feeling is the raw material, AI’s language is the craft, and the final work still carries your soul, so it’s still yours.

What can’t be replaced by AI isn’t creation itself, but the courage to experience and the impulse to express.

Humans handle feeling and thinking, AI handles expression and optimization, but the soul is still human.

Appreciating art from a sensibility angle

How do advanced musicians appreciate a piece?

Just like with classical music: do you listen to the whole piece, the sound of the instruments playing together, or do you appreciate it from the angle or identity of a particular instrument or player?

Another kind of art appreciation: before, maybe I analyzed the painting through rational logic or a methodological framework — the painting’s structure, its light, its composition. Now I’m starting to return to a sensibility angle, trying to restore the photographer’s angle. For example, tilting my head to observe that painting, I find myself transported into the author’s time and place, and then looking at that person that way — what is he thinking? He looks so cool like this, the light just falls on him like that.

The beautification and justification of violence

Throughout history, in every event, the ones who claim historical justice seize the moral high ground and monopolize the right to interpret history.

For thousands of years, peasants suffered the cruel exploitation and oppression of the landlord class

Landlord = absolute evil

Peasant = absolute good and a pure victim

Savior

Political ends and violent events become the true meaning of revolution, class revenge.

Then, by monopolizing information and the channels of education, binding personal interest to the collective narrative, it can be successfully beautified as a just and necessary revolution.

Conflict between cultural value systems and the fear of equality

The fear of an equal society that arises from conflict between cultural value systems

The brain’s selective perception makes it easier to remember and process information that fits its own presuppositions or biases — that’s “selective perception.”

In today’s era of information explosion, people are easily surrounded by particular types of information, forming an “information cocoon.” When the media, social platforms or personal circles repeatedly emphasize negative news about the US (robbery, zero-dollar shopping, homelessness, violence targeting particular ethnic groups), this information gets over-amplified and reinforced. So if a person already holds the stereotype that the US is “dangerous,” they’ll pay more attention to and believe reports supporting that view, and ignore or underestimate information showing the positive sides of American society.

Another conflict comes from my parents’ prejudices about regions and other countries. Actually, no matter which city or country I go to, it makes them feel it’s dangerous, or amplifies their fear — whether it was going to Yunnan before, or some provinces in China they consider poorer, including Southeast Asian and South Asian countries, even Korea and Japan.

They seem to come with a built-in frame of reference, and can plug anything into their own frame to resolve it. But once they’re in a new environment, or a country they don’t know how to define with their frame, they panic and develop a deep sense of insecurity.

So the complaints on the surface (crime, chaos) are often projections of a real fear: the fear of losing a familiar sense of superiority, the fear of redefining yourself in an environment that genuinely demands equality.

Four artistic forms of café space

The art of café space

I’ve explored many kinds of cafés, and basically cafés unfold around four angles:

Art-type cafés: art creation combined with coffee culture, sparking creativity while meeting everyday needs.

Environmental-aesthetics cafés: using natural elements to the maximum to create a comfortable, pleasant working environment, usually through carefully designed framing, table layout or a primal-forest feel, with the emphasis on harmony between nature and architecture

Scenic cafés: using the building as a frame for enjoying natural scenery — somewhat similar. These cafés basically revolve around mountains, sea, forests and rice paddies. Some cafés I’ve been to in Dali, Qingdao, Jeju Island, Pokhara and Shenzhen are like this.

Architectural-aesthetics cafés: pluralistic expression of design language. Japanese cafés take wabi-sabi philosophy as their core, pursuing the aesthetic principles of imperfection, impermanence and incompleteness. Nordic minimalism pursues the perfect combination of functionality and aesthetics. Industrial aesthetics emphasizes the power of raw materials and functional expression. For example, Blue Bottle Coffee Toyosu Park, entirely in wood, expresses Japanese architectural aesthetics.

ref: https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/426cc27a-e4bf-4f4c-9754-2086bab3a283

The kindness of strangers

Last night on my way home from the café, I came across someone crying by the roadside. I passed by in silence.

After getting on the subway, I remembered the kindness I’d met in various countries before.

One evening my phone was dead and I had no coins for the bus back to school. The old man selling roasted sweet potatoes at the subway entrance gave me two coins and also stuffed a flatbread into my hands. He refused to let me pay him back and told me to study hard. On the bus my tears just fell, and that warmth from a stranger completely broke me.

On the ACT, Porter unconditionally wanted to risk his life to help those reckless strangers. Maybe I’ll never again — or have no right to — stop that kind of kind character; instead I should face it together with him. That’s his own most essential goodwill.

It occurs to me that when a person is in a fragile state (hungry, exhausted, helpless), their perception of help becomes unusually sharp. Kindness encountered in a low point is like a cup of water in the desert — its value is infinitely magnified by the hardship.

I feel quite at peace. If I run into them in a low period again, maybe I’ll quietly buy a cup of milk tea, set it in front of them, and quietly leave — I believe you’ll get through it!

Picasso’s aesthetics and philosophy

Picasso’s life aesthetics and philosophy

Picasso’s most famous line is: “It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child.” — It seems to be exactly the process of simple to complex to simple.

Cubism isn’t just a painting technique; it’s Picasso’s philosophical understanding of reality. There is no single “truth,” or no one’s perspective on this world is complete and objective. An object can be observed from the front, the side and the inside at once, and a person’s inner world is equally complex and multidimensional.

Creation is destruction: every creative act is first an act of destruction; innovation stands on questioning and subverting the existing order.

An artist has an obligation to respond to their era through their work, to express a position.

The underlying logic of “stupid people”

Schizophrenia: unable to describe a word accurately — three thousand great ways, I take only one ladle

From the perspective of philosophy and psychoanalysis, the underlying logic of “stupid people” is a kind of “fluent aphasia” — they can use language fluently, but can’t establish an effective connection between words (the signifier) and their precise meaning in a given context (the signified), leading to confused thinking, broken logic and ineffective communication.

Essentially it’s an unclear understanding of concepts, and not understanding the concept of concept.

The core of the hippie spirit

Ask yourself: what is a hippie?

(Hippie) anti-war pacifism, “Make Love, Not War” — ps, making love here means creating love.

Rejecting mainstream society’s definitions of career success, material wealth and social status, choosing a simple, natural life.

Spiritual awakening and expansion of consciousness are another important dimension, including exploring inner realization through psychedelics and meditation, seeking spiritual experiences beyond the material level.

So long hair, brightly colored clothes, handmade jewelry — these are all rebellion against the aesthetics of a conservative society.

The hippie movement drove the golden age of rock music. Artistic expression often blended Eastern philosophy, psychedelic color and a rebel spirit.

The Gen Z “split”: internal differences among young people in the US, China and India

An interesting phenomenon among the Gen Z group

Right now the three most interesting countries in the world are the US, China and India

They’re also the three countries I think have the biggest internal differentiation, and the three with the richest variety of choices in how their groups change.

Indian Gen Z is the largest young population in the world. India is also the least developed economy in the world, and in the tech parks of Bangalore and Mumbai you can see Gen Z kids in sync with the world, fluent in English, active on Instagram. But in the vast rural areas, many young people can’t even get stable electricity or basic education, and their way of life, information sources (more reliant on traditional media) and worldview are worlds apart from their urban peers. A “high-caste” Gen Z and a “low-caste” Gen Z may have completely different starting points and ceilings in life.

American Gen Z is the group most actively engaged with racial issues, the most diverse generation in history, more like a horizontal difference, a split in political and cultural identity.

China’s Gen Z feels quite split: urban young people (especially in first-tier cities like Beijing and Shanghai) are exposed to globalized education and internet culture, while Gen Z in rural or inland areas still faces a lack of educational resources and the influence of traditional ideas. Gen Z from wealthy families pursues “post-materialist” values, while Gen Z from ordinary families may care more about material security, even facing the pressure of survival earlier and following traditional ideas about relationships and family. That creates completely different expectations and plans for the future. And they’re also the group where collectivism and individualism clash most: on one hand they show strong patriotic passion and collective honor (especially online); on the other hand, in real life they pursue individualism extremely hard, value their own feelings and personal boundaries, and show “rebellion” toward traditional authority and collective norms.

Taste: is it about what you own, or what you give up

My understanding of taste

Common sense says that if someone dresses well, they have taste; for example A buys a Hermès bag, B praises A for having taste.

But I think taste isn’t what you can own, it’s what you can give up.

Taste feels more like an inner honesty, honestly facing what you actually like, rather than what you should like.

So shouldn’t the essence of aesthetics be real feeling, thoroughly feeling why this thing attracts you, touches your soul.

I used to be confused about how Jobs could absorb nutrients from calligraphy, Zen and Bauhaus design and create something completely unrelated; taste’s essence, I feel, isn’t imitating beauty, it’s creating the possibility of beauty.

Extracting simplicity from complexity, hearing the signal in the noise, choosing from the many the one solution that feels like it just has to be this way.

It also seems to be an extreme self-confidence in one’s own aesthetic, plus a belief that this aesthetic is universal — which is necessary, and also fatal.

Paying for self-continuation

The first kind of product: sustaining the “present self” (keeping the status quo from being broken by problems)

The second kind of product: sustaining the “self across time” (making sure the future self still remembers now; the product’s value to you grows the longer you use it)

The retention of the second kind of product is frightening. Stopping use means a rupture in “self-identity,” which is more frightening than failing to solve a specific problem.

The value of real-world emotional connection is COPYed onto online products. The second kind of product is more a home for a sense of meaning. Imagine losing WeChat — what happens? Losing Taobao and Alipay — what happens? Obviously, they have become the vehicles for users’ self-narration.

Comparison of willingness-to-pay strength:

First kind: instant intensity is high, like painkillers — you really want to buy when it hurts, and forget when it doesn’t.

Second kind: slow to start, but once started it’s hard to stop, like a fitness habit.

Comparison of retention:

First kind: use and leave; “instrumental rationality” decides that its fate is to be discarded.

Second kind: the more you use it, the stickier it gets, because it carries the user’s “digital identity.”

So this means two facts about product design: products that cater to human weaknesses have more users and are easier to pick up. Products that overcome human weaknesses have fewer users, but retention and willingness to pay are stronger.

Instrumental rationality - value rationality

Ingestion stage (acquisition logic): AI helps users filter information, solving information overload ↓ Digestion stage (linking mechanism): turn information into personal cognition, record traces of thinking ↓ Absorption stage (retention logic): build a personal knowledge graph, form cognitive assets ↓ Excretion stage (value manifestation): filter out redundancy, keep the essence, reveal cognitive growth

What is the essence of linking? Defining the relationship between the user and information

Instrumental rationality (acquisition): use the optimal means to reach a goal

Value rationality (retention): the behavior itself is the embodiment of value

Using this tool isn’t just to solve a problem, but to become a better self.

The user can’t do without this tool not because it’s powerful, but because it carries the user’s cognitive growth journey and has become part of the user’s self-identity.

Differences under two cognitive modes:

-> Information (subtraction): the process of acquiring information, fuzzy goals, a discovery stage, focusing on the problem itself — extra classification is cognitive interference

Minimal to the extreme: one input box, ask directly

Zero decision burden: the user isn’t required to think about categories or which project things belong to

Instant feedback: fast response, maintaining the flow of thought

Information -> (addition): clear context, a deepening stage, cognitive resources spent on deep thinking and association, rich information becomes the fuel for thinking.

Value density: every piece of information has been processed and refined by AI

Three-dimensional presentation: not just a document, but insight and connection

Compounding growth: every return visit brings a new discovery

The essence of knowledge management is consumption, not management

The essence of knowledge management is effectively creating, acquiring, organizing, sharing and applying knowledge, including turning tacit knowledge (personal experience and insight, say) into explicit knowledge (information that can be codified and shared).

Thought notes — flomo. flomo is a personal knowledge management tool; the most essential underlying need for which users use it is to record, organize and review their own thoughts and inspirations.

Knowledge management is better handed to an LLM, shielding people from having to perceive the details.

The essence of note-taking is reinforcing the future

The essence of note-taking is reinforcing your future self.

A note that some moment in the future you might use.

Maybe notes get defined as a second brain. Maybe in the AI era this brain deserves a more precise definition: a second intelligent brain.

How to describe it? Like your digital person, a companion assistant, just aimed at a specific information-management domain.

In the AI era there may be a great many intelligent brains — for professional domains, for learning domains …

The brain itself should return to the things the brain itself is better at.

Essentially what’s being done is cognitive time arbitrage: record within high-density information, and supply information and knowledge when a decision or action is needed.

Traditional notes: I record, I search, I apply

AI notes: it observes, it reminds, it suggests

Just as glasses extend eyesight and cars extend mobility, intelligent note systems extend our memory, associativity and insight. We have more time and energy to put into:

Thinking and creating

Decision and analysis

Innovation

If AI understands me better than I do, am I still me?

Existentialism: something that understands me better than I do, is more familiar with my memories and experiences, knows my thought patterns and knowledge system better — at that point, am I still me?

It’s a rather new kind of cognitive extension system. Where are its boundaries?

What it lacks is qualia" — the texture of subjective experience

This is the last rampart of our identity: a return to sensibility and intuition itself.

If AI really understands my thought patterns better than I do, does following AI’s advice count as “my” decision?

I think the key is the consciousness and reflexivity of the decision. Even if I accept AI’s advice, as long as the process of accepting is reflective and conscious, it’s still my choice.

The key isn’t whether AI is “part of me,” but whether this relationship makes me better.

Two methods - the context promotion strategy

Promote the dynamic data of a one-off task (an article) into a static background for the duration of the session (part of the system instructions) when entering a multi-turn conversation, so that the expensive computation cost for the whole document is paid only once, and all subsequent follow-up questions can get ultra-fast, low-cost responses through prefix caching.

Stage one: initial processing (one-off task)

Goal: do a first pass of processing on any article (like generating a summary).

Configuration:

System Prompt: contains general, unchanging instructions (“You are a summarization assistant…”).

User Prompt: contains the full text of the article, which changes dynamically.

Caching logic: what’s cached at this stage is the general “instructions,” suitable for processing many different articles.

Stage two: follow-up session (stateful conversation)

Goal: do deep, multi-turn Q&A about the same article.

Configuration (at session start):

System Prompt: dynamically constructed, with the content “general instructions + full article text.” This enormous prompt stays unchanged for the current session.

User Prompt: contains only the user’s first follow-up question.

Caching logic:

First follow-up: the API processes this enormous System Prompt and writes its complete computation result (KV Cache) into the cache. This call has higher latency and higher cost.

Subsequent follow-ups: the System Prompt stays unchanged, the API detects a perfect prefix match, and loads its full understanding of the article directly from cache. The model only needs to process the new, short follow-up question. Latency is extremely low and cost drops dramatically.

The brain isn’t searching for information, it’s rebuilding it

The brain rebuilds the memory every time

Every time you “remember” something, what actually happens is:

a set of neuron patterns gets activated

reassembled according to the current context

current emotions and cognitive state get added in

a “new” version of the memory is produced

A concept isn’t a node, it’s an “activation pattern”

Take the concept “apple”:

visual cortex: red, round

olfactory region: fruity smell

motor cortex: the act of biting

emotional region: childhood memories

language region: the word “apple”

A second brain shouldn’t imitate “storage,” it should imitate “activation.”

What’s the essence? A concept is in a superposition state before it’s observed. When you think of the concept “freedom”:

a politician thinks of democracy

an artist thinks of creation

a programmer thinks of open source

a prisoner thinks of the sky

Concepts aren’t fixed, they’re observer-dependent.

Traditional second brain: concept = static definition -> Intelligent second brain: concept = dynamic field

Traditional bridge: user ← search/recommend → information —> Cognitive wormhole: user consciousness ←→ information consciousness

It’s not about simulating the human brain, it’s about creating a new form of cognition.

Query -> Quest

User: “I want to understand blockchain”

Traditional second brain: returns notes and articles on blockchain

Intelligent second brain:

senses the user’s cognitive background (technical? investing? philosophical?)

builds a personalized path of understanding

creates the conditions for an “aha moment”

connects to the user’s existing concept network

predicts follow-up questions

prepares relevant but unexpected insight

The core idea of a cognitive github: cognition can be version-controlled, branched, merged

Imagine a scene like this:

cognitive branch: explore different paths of understanding

cognitive merge: integrate different perspectives

cognitive rollback: return to an earlier state of understanding

cognitive PR: accept someone else’s cognitive contribution

cognitive fork: create your own version based on someone else’s understanding

So what does it know?

your cognitive patterns

your blind spots in thinking

your growth path

Becoming a more “complete self” in the future.

Focus on the content

Focus on the content, focus on the content, focus on the content!!!

An interaction detail in Notion’s icon library

How is Notion’s icon library designed

After you click, it first randomly generates an image, then the user can optionally adjust it or not.

Thinking about whether public content is necessary

Part of it is created by yourself, visible only to yourself.

The other part is public, content everyone can see.

Through certain design techniques you can nicely distinguish user behavior from system behavior, and then you know how to match user behavior accordingly.

But is public content really necessary?

In the long run it seems to only solve a speed problem, but for one article, the probability of using a product at the same time is very low, so it actually doesn’t feel like a very high priority.

A card is a cognitive atom: talking with “concepts” in the AI era

If concepts are treated as cards, what does that demand of the card?

What’s recommended is relevance-based cards; an article’s introduction can also be a kind of card design.

What a recommendation algorithm recommends is exactly card after card of design.

OMG this is what I want

Card ≠ information container, Card = cognitive atom

So in the AI era, cards carry the incarnation of concepts.

Then what makes up a concept isn’t decided by physical length, but by cognitive completeness.

An independently understandable unit of thought

The smallest closed loop that can trigger thinking

A viewpoint with internal logical consistency (making sure the viewpoint is coherent at the level of thought)

Concept cards, ensuring insight, viewpoint and concept aggregation.

Recommendation is the cognitive distance + growth gradient within it

Edge of the comfort zone: slightly beyond current understanding, but not causing cognitive overload

Knowledge network expansion: connecting to new nodes in the user’s existing knowledge system

Unexpected insight trigger: concepts that seem unrelated but produce an “aha moment”

User A (designer) looks at “blockchain” → recommend “decentralized design thinking”

User B (investor) looks at “blockchain” → recommend “token economics models”

User C (philosophy lover) looks at “blockchain” → recommend “the digital reconstruction of trust”

It seems that for every kind of card, enough information density is enough to attract the user; one card carries one core association or theory, every concept has clear boundaries, when it begins and when it ends, and the user doesn’t need to think to know how to interact with the concept.

After reaching a certain point, concept understanding paths can often converge into a collective cognitive map, revealing the optimal sequence of concept learning.

We’re no longer reading articles, we’re talking with “concepts.”

Notion’s photographic metaphor: an unchanging reality, changing lenses

Notion’s home provides a centralized, personalized and highly efficient starting point for work; it’s really about consolidating the information the user cares about most.

Notion’s design is clever: the separation of data and views, so different data can be presented in different views.

The database is the one and only piece of plastic itself; in Notion it’s the original data collection that contains all the properties and all the entries. It’s the single source of truth for all information.

A view is a different lens or filter for observing it.

Isn’t it a lot like taking photos? In fact the object, or this history, is just like that, it never changed, but as the angle, color and focal length of our lens change, the user’s consumption behavior changes too.

And no matter how many lenses we switch, the plastic itself never changes; give the plastic red under one lens, and it’s red in all the others.

Keep the underlying data unchanged, while our consumption behavior toward the data and our ways of reading it keep changing.

Behind a user clicking “like”

The event of a user clicking the like heart:

The user needs this kind of information, and it’s later displayed in a module

The app needs this kind of event to collect behavioural data.

The quantum state of information: beyond the article as a carrier

Light is both a particle and a wave; information also needs quantum characteristics

Under different viewing angles, an article can also be:

A complete knowledge entity (article perspective)

A collection of multiple viewpoints (summary perspective)

Countless quotable atomic insights (fragment perspective)

A potential cognitive springboard (inspiration perspective)

Let users forget the carrier and focus on the insight

A possible design: information appears in the form of “thought bubbles”, whose size and shape are entirely determined by its cognitive value.

Consideration of independence: a summary is a product of relationships, not an independent existence

Some things are products of relationships. For example a summary is a product of relationships, not an independently existing individual.

It feels like good design isn’t adding more features, but letting the necessary things emerge naturally at the right moment.

So some cards must be based on or structured around the previous card; if they lose the upper-layer carrier, the card itself loses its meaning.

The sense of realness while hiking

There are many things in this world you can’t explain with logic — like why you come hiking.

I’ve talked about this with a friend before. He asked why I like hiking and climbing mountains when it’s clearly exhausting. Of course I can rationally analyze why I like hiking: whether it’s the joy of hiking, the love of the stunning scenery you can only see after climbing step by step, or enjoying the process of being focused in the present. Those are the answers I gave him. I think I don’t understand myself well enough — I can’t explain why I love hiking, I can only roughly describe such fragments of language that are hard to reduce back to the truth. But are those really answers for myself? No. Liking is liking, loving is loving. You can find reasons and excuses, you can use logical reasoning. But in the end it’s limited — only when you’re truly alone walking along the scenic ridge, the physical and mental feeling of that moment is real.

Many things can’t be explained with logic — like why some people forget to eat and sleep, or why you just like certain melodies. This is a kind of irrational passion.

Science explains this world; art expresses and feels this world.

Logic constructs this world; madness gives this world warmth.

What do you think about while hiking?

Liang Wenfeng likes hiking; hiking is a kind of spiritual reward.

Hiking puts you into a state of complete immersion in the present, no need to use your brain, no self-judgment — you’re not thinking about anything, not thinking through anything.

Enter nature, empty yourself. Only when we can truly not think do we truly begin to “see.”

During my hikes, most of the time is spent wasting time, emptying myself, feeling this world.

Occasionally I see crowds, mountain scenery, and some thoughts surface. I follow them and let them drift and diverge, and I often end up thinking in a very particular flow state. It’s fine if I get interrupted. I really enjoy this process of growth — it’s a very natural sense of realness, not something you can fake or stage.

I especially like the “realness” people show while hiking. Some go quiet as they walk, some suddenly start muttering to themselves, some say with bright eyes that they’ve figured something out, and some just smile and say “the wind today is really nice.” Accept this realness and let yourself flow naturally.

The inverse relationship between density and distance

In crowded subways and towering buildings, people instead become more lonely and more distant.

This makes me think of the German sociologist Tönnies’s classic distinction: Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society).

An old shop in Qingdao is like a miniature Gemeinschaft. The owner knows every regular, knows your preferences, even cares about your life. This relationship is organic, emotional, whole-person.

Smart consumption in Shenzhen and Hangzhou is more like a rational Gesellschaft. Scan-to-order, unmanned checkout, algorithmic recommendations — everything is efficient, but also cold. This relationship is mechanical, functional, fragmented.

The AI era should be a post-sensibility era.

Modern people are actually very contradictory. We long for connection yet fear being disturbed; we want human warmth yet don’t want to bear the complexity and burden of relationships. Smart technology gives us a perfect excuse — we can enjoy the service without having to build a real relationship with the person serving us.

The old shop in Qingdao let me re-experience the feeling of “being seen.” There, I’m not just a consumer but a complete person with stories, memories and feelings.

Hiking and my personality traits

Which of my traits does hiking reflect

On one hand, some of my traits made me choose hiking; on the other hand, hiking also strengthened some of my character qualities.

I’m someone with a very rich inner world; I don’t need external stimulation to satisfy myself.

It’s also a pursuit of simplicity — putting down the comforts of modern life, with a strong reflection on complicated living.

On one hand my self-discipline and planning ability are decent; on the other hand I’m very independent, and my ability to regulate emotions outdoors is also pretty good.

Only when hiking do I truly own the present

I think only when hiking do I truly feel that I own the present.

All my senses are immersed in the experience

Letting me pretend I’m the only person in the world, with the possibility of seeing nature’s crazy spectacle.

Camera movement technique notes

Some of my own techniques, put together from shooting video recently

Use 16:9 rather than 4:3

Mainly shoot 4K/30fps; for slow motion in special cases use 4K/60fps and slow it to fifty percent in post.

Always leave RockSteady+ (Super Steady+) on for stabilization. Use HorizonSteady (horizon stabilization) on special stretches — when the ground is very uneven or when you deliberately want the camera to tilt and shake a lot.

For city streets and cafés, first choice is Standard (Standard/Dewarp); for hiking, basically Wide (Wide)

For color, just use the plain Normal mode

Avoid stationary shots:

Push in: the simplest camera move, for a new environment

Pull out: this suits revealing information, like starting with the coffee

Orbit the subject: rotate around a sculpture as the center

Follow: follow a person

Low angle (Low Angle): almost against the ground; it can also shoot grand buildings or grass.

Why Himalayan Java Coffee can monopolize the Nepali market

Why does the local Nepali Himalayan Java Coffee monopolize the Nepali market?

It’s kind of like the earlier Starbucks, and then the localizing Luckin and Cotti Coffee, brands born out of localization: essentially it’s the advantage of supply chain and localized service.

Mission: through investment, covering everyone from the growers to the consumers.

Beans used: local Himalayan coffee beans.

Main customers: tourists, resident digital nomads, remote workers, hikers.

Where the name comes from: the island of Java is an important coffee-producing region in the world, and “Java” stands for coffee quality.

Price: comparatively cheap, coffee + sandwich 40-50.

The island of Java is an important coffee-producing region in the world, and “Java” stands for coffee quality.

Health guide

I only just found out.

Rainy day

It’s rained four days straight. The plum rain season in Jiangnan is threatening my state of life.

I roughly understand now why the cat at home always likes to run outside. The more restricted you are, the more you want to break out; cats especially like crossing boundaries.

So the more it rains, the more I have to go out — even if it’s just to a café in a different environment.

I’m actually quite afraid of those cafés opened by a “curator,” where the names of the specialty coffee drinks are especially obscure and hard to parse, and when I ask, the “curator” very deliberately tosses out terms like “western Sichuan xxx” or “Himalaya xxx,” and the whole place is full of regulars.

That Nepali 8848 liquor left me foggy for a whole day afterwards.

A Korean Hallasan bottle that looks like mineral water (it looks more like Baiyunshan or Nongfu Spring) — it turns out to be liquor too.

Isn’t simple naming and IP in any industry — low cognitive load — the most basic professional quality? Simple doesn’t mean easy.

The meaning of “Seeing” is precisely “seeing.”

Chai Jing responds to “Seeing” being banned: the truth carries its own immense weight https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_cekUfCopMs

The wave before leaving

In the morning I worked at Lixiangjia Coffee Space in Qingdao. At noon I left the café, and before going I took a shot of the outside of the café.

Because I’d switched to a low-light mode and there was a door in between, I didn’t see the server waving goodbye.

…But after taking the photo, as I was about to leave, I glanced over and saw the server waving, so I smiled and waved back.

Like a frozen frame

That moment of a smiling wave was probably the most real connection of the whole morning. More than the coffee, more than the work, more than that photo, it’s closer to the essence of life — that casual but sincere goodwill between people.

A perception of the artistic beauty of interior space

PLUM café, mid-century-style tables and chairs, plants by the window, good for an immersive day of staying put

Very much like those vintage cafés in Chiang Mai, with light music inside

☕️：Plum (Luohu Road branch)

🈺：09:00-18:30

📍：Ground-floor shop, Building 28, Qingtie Huarun City, Laoshan District

🚇：Taxi to Plum (Luohu Road branch) & 830 m walk from Metro Line 2 Liaoyang East Road Station

On the changing rules for indoor smoking in small cities

On indoor smoking in small cities

I really, really hate it when people smoke inside cafés.

As of 2024, 24 provinces in China had issued provincial-level tobacco control regulations, and 254 cities had issued city-level ones. But note that the decision published by the State Council on 2024-12-13 amended the Regulations on Public Place Sanitation Management, deleting five kinds of venues including restaurants, cafés, bars and teahouses; the regulation takes effect 2025-01-20.

If there’s no no-smoking sign indoors, you should absolutely refuse!!!

Plane trees in the rain: a café sketch in Weihai

Plane trees

I’d been wondering what a plane tree was but was too lazy to look it up; turns out it’s the wutong.

I came on a rainy day, still wondering whether there was nowhere to go in a rainy Weihai. In the shop you could clearly hear raindrops pattering on the roof.

The interior isn’t that big, the tables are a bit crowded; paired-up Koreans in the shop, huddling together to study Chinese, a lone Western guy sitting by the door.

I really like the dirty here, I’d say the taste is above average.

The shop keeps a grey cat and a fat white one.

It looks really dopey.

JK says, “Our greatest misfortune today is having a DJI on our track”

JK says, “Our greatest misfortune today is that there’s a DJI on our track. But our greatest fortune is also that there’s a DJI on our track.”

Reading this, my eyes got a little teary.

DJI presses down on Insta360 like a mountain, forcing it to go overseas to find opportunities. Whether technical moat or market share, it’s been pushed down to the extreme.

But it’s also the greatest fortune: DJI keeps pushing the ceiling of technology higher, forcing the entire industry forward. Because there’s DJI, there’s the Insta360 of today.

The next 10 years won’t necessarily be easier than the last 10, but they’ll definitely be far more exciting.

It’s also from this point that I realized the story of JK and Insta360 is no longer a story about being young and interesting, growth speed, methodology and creativity. It’s a story about courage and belief in values.

Sometimes an opponent makes you forget yourself. “Only when your attention isn’t on competition, when you go up a dimension to think, can you possibly arrive at a solution that escapes competition.”

I remember him saying: bravery comes from having nothing.

“Clearly you have more and more today. What do you do?”

“At the bottom, people are afraid of losing.” He admits that today he has employees, shareholders, customers, investors, family… and much of the time he can’t fully follow his own inner choice.

“Then think about what we’re more afraid of — we’re more afraid of losing our lives. After all, you only live once.”

Right. You only live once.

ref: https://www.36kr.com/p/3335680848226816

Some things are gaps, some things are differences

The more you understand a company, the more you find that some things are gaps and some things are differences.

If a small company wins against a big company not through a price war but through continuous innovation, I believe it would inspire and encourage many industries. We want to try this.