February 2026 Thought Notes

6. Caffeine plus a nap: a two-layer boost

The Mona Lisa can be said to have a certain marketing component

But just from the painting’s structure and layout, it genuinely shows Leonardo’s peak artistic level

You can hardly find a harsh contour line. Leonardo achieved a silky transition between light and shadow by repeatedly layering an extremely thin transparent layer of oil paint (in some places only a few microns thick), dozens of layers over

The smile is really strange: when you look at her lips, the smile seems faint, but when you gaze at her eyes, your peripheral vision makes you feel she’s smiling

The composition is very standard; the seated pose itself is a very stable isosceles triangle

And the placement of the face, hands and body are all in the golden ratio

Sculptures of women from that era — ordinary women are shown with the head turned or lowered, but with the Mona Lisa, no matter what angle you look from, you feel she’s gazing at you

4. Beauty can be computed, but perfection belongs to the soul

The Starry Night

It wasn’t painted from life; in broad daylight he reconstructed his inner world from memory, imagination and a strong spiritual impulse

The tree on the left of the canvas that shoots into the sky like black flame is a cypress. In European culture at the time, cypresses were often planted in graveyards, symbolizing death

This tree doesn’t just balance the composition; it acts more like a bridge connecting the tranquil village (the human world) with the violent starry sky (heaven). It expresses a longing Van Gogh had at the time: to walk to the stars through death

The violent aesthetics lies in the color contrast: the stars are a dazzling yellow, and a deep blue as well — even though the picture is motionless, your eye still catches the stars and the moon

3. The AI value chain: vertical integration from chips to energy

Beauty can be computed

The Mona Lisa doesn’t rely only on inspiration; it’s more a deep fusion of anatomy, optics, mathematics and geology

When the data (observation) is abundant enough and the model (knowledge) deep enough, beauty can be “computed”

Deep insight comes from mastery of the underlying logic. A perfect answer shouldn’t be just a pile of words; it should be like “sfumato,” blending logic, emotion and facts silkily together

Bias and flaws are the soul; what can’t be computed, what can’t be reasoned out, is often precisely the individualized person

Title list

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Hailed as the Mona Lisa of the North

Many people mistakenly think it’s a portrait of a particular woman, but in art classification it’s a tronie — the painter doesn’t aim to depict a real, specific person, but to display the painter’s skill and characterization of a personality through exaggerated expression, exotic clothing, or special lighting

The girl is more like a symbol that transcends reality

I think it may also be something Johannes Vermeer slowly painted and described as he conceived it in his mind

The girl’s glance back over her shoulder — that instant captures an extremely strong sense of movement and intimacy

And the negative space in the background feels like an ancient halo effect

Why is it called the girl with the pearl? Vermeer actually never painted the pearl’s full outline. He used just a few simple strokes of white oil paint: a bright highlight at the top reflecting the light source, and a faint reflection below reflecting the girl’s white collar. Your brain automatically fills these two patches of color in as a round, glistening pearl

The blue headscarf the girl wears in the painting used an extremely expensive pigment of the time — natural lapis lazuli (Ultramarine)

A detached kind of intimacy …

Title list (2)

Girl with a Pearl Earring

Hailed as the Mona Lisa of the North

Many people mistakenly think it’s a portrait of a particular woman, but in art classification it’s a tronie — the painter doesn’t aim to depict a real, specific person, but to display the painter’s skill and characterization of a personality through exaggerated expression, exotic clothing, or special lighting

The girl is more like a symbol that transcends reality

I think it may also be something Johannes Vermeer slowly painted and described as he conceived it in his mind

The girl’s glance back over her shoulder — that instant captures an extremely strong sense of movement and intimacy

And the negative space in the background feels like an ancient halo effect

Why is it called the girl with the pearl? Vermeer actually never painted the pearl’s full outline. He used just a few simple strokes of white oil paint: a bright highlight at the top reflecting the light source, and a faint reflection below reflecting the girl’s white collar. Your brain automatically fills these two patches of color in as a round, glistening pearl

The blue headscarf the girl wears in the painting used an extremely expensive pigment of the time — natural lapis lazuli (Ultramarine)

The imperfect beauty of Girl with a Pearl Earring

Girl with a Pearl Earring — in terms of design and how we feel about it, there are a few things that really draw me in

One is the glance back over the shoulder; it feels like a contingent connection

Another is the lips about to part — your brain really does keep filling in the gap …

And then the imperfect pearl ,, but the brain has already filled it in as perfect, plus a strong private connection; the Mona Lisa has this feeling too — the eyes are what the picture’s visual center of gravity rests on

Vermeer stripped away all background elements that could distract the gaze (no window, no furniture, no books). That deep darkness is like an anechoic chamber, forcing the viewer into a one-on-one “soul conversation” with the girl

What people love most is the process of yearning, the process of filling in the gap, the process of getting — that’s the part where dopamine’s anticipation is satisfied

Wabi-sabi in handmade woodwork and the feel of time

In Chengdu I saw a collection of handmade wooden vases

With a bit of wabi-sabi aesthetics

Some of the vases were turned and polished on a wood lathe, showing smooth geometric cylinders, but the rough texture of the bark was deliberately kept (Live Edge), creating a contrast between “man-made” and “natural”

They used the yakisugi technique (charring the surface), which both preserves the wood and repels insects, and adds a deep texture and a sense of the years gone by

The cracking and coarseness of the bark forms a strong tactile and visual contrast with the polished wood core

The natural curves of the branches (like the curved base ornament in the middle) represent nature’s chaos, while the geometric cuts at the mouth and body represent human order

It celebrates flaws, mottling and asymmetry. Scars in the bark and cracks in the wood are seen as a unique “character,” not a defect. It reminds the viewer that beauty exists in the natural traces produced by the passage of time

The designer didn’t try to “conquer” the wood, forcing it into a shape that isn’t its own, but worked with the wood’s original growth and grain. This fits the Daoist philosophy of “the Dao follows nature” — the best design is one that looks as if there’s no design at all; it just lets the material reveal itself

Couples Come to Look Alike Through Shared Experience

A pretty interesting phenomenon: the faces and looks of a married couple grow more and more alike

Many old couples really do “look more alike the longer you look.” The reason isn’t in the bones — it’s in expressions, habits, and viewpoint

Two people who sigh at the same world, laugh at it, and roll their eyes at it over the long term will have their facial muscles trained into similar “commonly used emoji faces.” The way they frown, the curve of the mouth when smiling, the rhythm of eyes narrowing — these slowly converge. Over time, the brain picks up on a face’s “dynamic features” before its “static features,” and so the feeling of “looking alike” arises

Same schedule, same diet, same stressors — skin condition, body fat distribution, and complexion shift in sync. Stay up late together and the eye bags become a team project; go outdoors together and your skin gets signed by the sun together. The environment writes the same piece of code onto two faces

Many partners already have a “hidden similarity” to begin with: temperament, expression preferences, even the contours of the face. In psychology this is called “like attracts like.” It’s not that they become alike, but that they weren’t far apart to begin with

The Physiology of Carb Coma

The state of carb coma: after taking in a large amount of carbohydrates, drowsiness and weakness appear — also called “postprandial sleepiness” or “food coma”

This happens when the body takes in a large amount of carbohydrates, especially refined carbs with a high glycemic index — white rice, noodles, and sugary drinks

Carbohydrates break down into glucose and enter the blood, causing blood sugar to rise rapidly

The rise in blood sugar stimulates a large release of insulin

Insulin promotes the conversion of tryptophan in the liver into serotonin, and finally into melatonin (the sleep-promoting hormone)

At the same time, after eating, orexin (the neuropeptide that promotes wakefulness) secretion decreases, blood flow to the brain relatively decreases, and the parasympathetic nervous system becomes active — all of which intensify the drowsiness

Carb coma is a normal physiological phenomenon, and for most people there’s no need to worry excessively. But if severe symptoms appear frequently, it may hint at an unreasonable diet structure or an underlying health problem (such as diabetes risk)

By comparison, the effect after drinking an Americano is fairly limited — generally after about 10 to 20 minutes you start to feel a bit more awake, and by 30 to 60 minutes the alerting effect peaks

Caffeine must first be absorbed by the stomach and intestines, then enter the blood, and then go “block” the adenosine receptors in the brain

Adenosine’s trouble is that it induces drowsiness; caffeine’s main action is blocking adenosine receptors

Adenosine = an accumulating “fatigue signal” in the brain

Caffeine = pulling the plug on the “fatigue signal”

Carb coma is essentially blood sugar–insulin–nervous system regulation

Eating a lot of carbs → blood sugar rises rapidly → a large release of insulin; insulin sends glucose into cells and also affects the ratio of amino acids in the blood

Tryptophan gets into the brain relatively more easily, and it’s also the raw material for synthesizing serotonin; serotonin also makes us feel calm, relaxed, sleepy

Then there’s nervous system digestion,

Sympathetic nervous system (awake, alert) ↓

Parasympathetic nervous system (rest, digest) ↑

Eating Order and Stable Blood Sugar

If you eat carbs directly it’s easy to get carb coma, especially white rice + noodles + sweet drinks + very little protein and fat

You can eat protein and vegetables first, then carbs — that way digestion slows down, blood sugar rises more gently, and insulin won’t overreact

Prioritize:

Brown rice, oats, sweet potato, beans

Whole wheat

Carbs from vegetables

After eating, sit a bit longer, walk around, move around — this can help muscles use up some of the glucose and reduce violent blood sugar swings

When you’re short on sleep, insulin sensitivity drops, blood sugar is more likely to jump around, so you’ll be sleepier at noon the next day

But if you rely only on coffee without solving the root problem — the root problem requires a full understanding of and cognition about the system, and then sufficient study

Heroism Is Loving Concrete People

There is only one true heroism in the world: to still love life after seeing clearly the truth of life

So the direction I want to practice is to try, when that concrete person disturbs you and makes you irritated, to still see in him the shadow of the “humanity” that is worth your love

Daoist Thought as a Resource for Resistance

Whenever a person resists something, something must first be occupying him — and that’s exactly the case with Li Bai; this is his Daoist thinking

Li Bai’s Open-Hearted Attitude to Pain

Even toward pain, Li Bai just laughed it off, so he said: “I laugh at myself, a traveler long on the road; when will my journey settle?” (from “Shu Qing Ji Congdi Binzhou Zhangshi Zhao” [Sending My Feelings to My Younger Cousin Zhao, Chief Secretary of Binzhou]). Even toward sexual desire he took it as child’s play, so he said: “A white horse with a golden bridle, east of the Liao Sea; / silk curtains and embroidered quilt, lying in the spring wind. / The setting moon dips below the eaves and peeks as the candle gutters; / falling blossoms enter the door and laugh at the empty bed.” (from “Chun Yuan” [Spring Resentment]). Therefore, in this respect he is clearly different from Li Shangyin. Li Shangyin looked at a needle-point-sized matter as unbearable; with Li Bai, even a sky-sized matter he could regard as not worth a laugh. This bearing of his is what we call heroic spirit

Li Bai’s Daoist Upbringing

Li Bai was steeped in Daoism from childhood. As he himself said, “At five I recited the Liujia.” The Liujia was a strange book of a late Daoist offshoot; the Biographies of Immortals has the line “Zuo Ci studied the Dao and was especially versed in the Liujia, able to command ghosts and spirits,” which proves it. He also said, “At ten I read the Hundred Schools; since Xuanyuan I’ve heard a good deal” — Xuanyuan is precisely what the Daoists invoke, the so-called Huang-Lao. In his poem “Zeng Zhang Xiang Hao” [Presented to Chancellor Zhang Hao] there is the line “at fifteen I read strange books.” Books orthodox to Confucianism can’t count as strange books, so strange books must be Daoist texts again. It can be seen that up to this point his reading was still under this one system

The Potala Palace’s Triple Nucleus

Mm, sometimes it feels quite a pity that the Potala Palace today has mixed into being a museum. It isn’t a palace; it’s a church-state machine that ran continuously for hundreds of years.

I remember when I entered the Potala Palace, I felt the spaces inside were quite narrow, not upscale at all. Although the upper levels are more refined, more exquisite, and larger, they still aren’t what you’d call very big. Compared with some places I’d been before, some architectural styles — the corridors are relatively narrow, the light is dim, and there’s a strong sense of lived-in life

But the Potala Palace is essentially a triple overlay. One is the religious nucleus, one is the political nucleus, and another is the symbolic nucleus. The symbolic nucleus is essentially legitimacy inward, and deterrence plus divine authority outward.

Many people say Tibet is very quiet, very ordinary and balanced, but geographically Tibet is full of competition and oppression. There are many tusi [local chieftains], many noble families, many monastic systems, many external forces. So essentially it is a core site of power games, not a meditation room.

Many practitioners might be chanting scriptures in the morning, then reviewing documents at noon, and taking part in power negotiations at night. That’s a very interesting picture. Although the White Palace handles life and government affairs, the Red Palace handles religion and meditation.

In winter the Potala Palace is super cold. Because retaining walls don’t equal warmth, the heating conditions inside are very poor. Many people inside are practicing asceticism, you feel.

Inside a truly great palace there is jealousy, there is power struggle, there are factions, there is fear, and there is also genuine compassion and practice. So this really is very interesting.

Inside the Potala Palace I thought about some of the cruelest institutions. The first is the reincarnation system. The reincarnation system is an abandonment of the individual; it is an extremely de-personalizing system. A child, before even forming self-awareness, is determined to be the continuation of a previous life’s unfinished business, and from then on loses an ordinary childhood, loses the right to choose their life, loses the possibility of failure. You are no longer you; you are the person this institution needs you to become. Reincarnation isn’t romance either; it equals a solution for the continuity of authority. So that’s very cruel.

The second layer is that a sacred identity brings lifelong loneliness. Movement is generally highly restricted, and interpersonal relationships are strictly screened.

The Legend That a Kukri Must Draw Blood When Drawn

The story of the Gurkhas begins with the kingdom of Gorkha in Nepal.

In the early 19th century the British East India Company tried to invade Nepal. The British, with modern firearms, were shocked to find that Gurkha soldiers with curved knives were ferocious in mountain warfare and would rather die than surrender.

After the war the two sides signed a treaty. The British held such respect for these opponents that they decided: “If we can’t beat them, hire them.” From then on the Gurkhas began more than two hundred years of fighting for Britain (and later India, Singapore and others).

Motto: “Kaphalnu vanda murnu ramro” (better to die than to live a coward). This line is carved deep into every Gurkha soldier.

The kukri: the symbol of their identity. This recurved knife has its weight forward and chops with great force. The legend that “a kukri must draw blood once unsheathed” is exaggerated, but in hand-to-hand combat the blade truly struck terror into enemy troops.

Gurkha soldiers took part in both world wars, the Falklands War, the war in Afghanistan and almost every major conflict Britain was involved in. They earned countless Victoria Crosses (Britain’s highest military honor).

On the Burma battlefield, the trench held by Lachhiman Gurung came under attack from Japanese troops. He picked up grenades thrown in by the Japanese with his right hand and threw them back, but as he threw the third one it exploded, blowing off the fingers of his right hand and wounding his face and body.

He did not retreat. Holding his rifle in his left hand, he held the position alone for four hours, killing 31 Japanese soldiers by himself and keeping the position. This “fight to the death, never retreat” is the typical Gurkha trait.

Becoming a Gurkha is the dream of many young men in Nepal’s hills, because it means exceptionally good pay (dozens of times Nepal’s average income) and the right to reside in Britain. So the selection is brutally hard.

Tens of thousands apply each year, but usually only a few hundred are accepted into the British Army (an acceptance rate lower than Harvard’s).

Besides the British Army, the Indian Army also keeps a large number of Gurkha regiments. In addition, the famous “Gurkha Contingent” in Singapore’s police force is also Gurkha; they are often used to protect VIPs or handle riots, because as foreigners they have no local social ties and can carry out orders with absolute neutrality.

Retired Gurkhas are usually the richest and most respected people in their hometowns. Their remittances are an important pillar of Nepal’s economy. Many veterans return home to open schools or fund infrastructure.

The Silent Meaning in the Name Shakyamuni

Shakyamuni

Muni is an honorific for one accomplished in practice, a sage or a person of wisdom.

In ancient India it generally referred to practitioners who shaved their heads and left home, begged for food, freed themselves from desire and attained profound wisdom.

Muni is translated in meaning as “silent” or “stillness,” referring to a peaceful, quiet state of mind — a mental state in which afflictions have been cut off and worldly interference transcended.

It is also the name Shakyamuni: Shaka is the clan name, muni is the title.

Together it means “the sage of the Shakya clan” or “the capable and humane one, silent and still.”

Buddhism Emphasizes Seeing, Not Believing

Buddhism does not emphasize belief; it emphasizes seeing.

Suffering is not a problem of ideas but an experiential structure happening right now.

If you cannot “see” for yourself how it works, no amount of belief can save you.

Seeing means seeing it — seeing how it arises, changes and disappears.

For example, how an emotion comes up.

At which moment resistance appears.

At which step the feeling of “I have been offended” takes shape.

As long as you have not “seen” it, you are still being driven by it.

Buddhism Is a Practice System, Not a Belief System

Isn’t believing a form of self-attachment?

So great monks seem to have neither belief nor disbelief.

Everything is changing; observe that change, observe your own believing and disbelieving.

Suffering is not discovered at the level of ideas.

Seeing is not about making yourself feel better.

It is about disabling the “automatic reaction to suffering.”

Buddhism is more like a practice system than a belief system.

What it cares about is not what the world is like.

But how people can get along better in this world — with themselves, with the people around them, with the world.

So its methods are observation, awareness, direct experience, not worship, approval or creed.

Every movement of a believer is not only to prove their faith; more than that it seems to bring the mind back to the present, back to the body, back to real experience, again and again.

Faith Against Short-Termism and Utilitarianism

People are very short-termist.

Without faith, one gets too caught up in ego and is too easily knocked down by changes in reality.

One becomes utilitarian, driven by short-term feedback.

One stops believing in anything that transcends the present.

My path is one few walk with me, one that will be misunderstood, one where feedback from the outside lags or distorts.

I am looking for answers — at least, for the strength to carry me forward with everything I have in the next few years.

The ‘Three Teachings Diagram’: Confucianism, Buddhism, Daoism

The Three Teachings Diagram

I definitely want to see this at the National Palace Museum in Taipei later.

The Three Teachings Diagram generally shows representatives of Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism.

Namely Confucius, Laozi and Shakyamuni.

The three teachings are like the three legs of a tripod: none can be missing, and there is no obvious rank among them.

Confucianism: worldly order, ethics and responsibility.

Daoism: nature, non-action, transcendence.

Buddhism: liberation, birth and death, awakening.

The three complement each other, and the three figures point together at one thing (such as “mind,” “the Dao,” “the One”).

Facing one direction together, they express that all things return to one, that the truth has a single source.

Confucianism: how to be a person, how to govern the world.

Daoism: how to follow nature and preserve life.

Buddhism: how to face suffering, birth and death, and liberation.

Bon and Shinto Share a Root in Nature Worship

I feel Bon and Shinto are somewhat similar on certain levels. Bon, because it is the oldest human-god religion on the Tibetan plateau, and Shinto, because it is Japan’s largest indigenous religion. They share some similar beliefs; the objects of worship are natural things. They also divide people, the world, and the upper and lower realms into layers, so there are similarities — worship of nature, and both have polytheistic systems. After Buddhism arrived, both also blended with Buddhism to some degree, which is quite interesting.

I think the essential reason for this similarity must be that the form of each was already determined the moment it first took shape on a particular piece of land. Because this is a real constraint of the physical world. In early humans’ cognitive model, what they worshiped or feared was basically natural things. In Tibet, especially where the sky is very blue, mountains, rivers, plants and trees were all thought to have souls; Shinto also holds that all things have souls. So both are explaining this world; both are facing the survival crisis produced by the real world and environment.

Songtsen Gampo Unified the Plateau and Created a Script

Songtsen Gampo

During his reign he unified the Tibetan plateau.

When he inherited the tsenpo throne at around 13 (some say earlier), he faced internal strife and rebel armies. With outstanding military talent he put down the rebellions and went on to conquer the Supi, Yangtong and other tribes, truly unifying the Tibetan plateau.

He moved the capital from Chonggye in Shannan to Rasa (present-day Lhasa) and built the first Potala Palace on the Red Hill, establishing Lhasa’s status as Tibet’s political and cultural center.

To make rule and cultural exchange easier, he sent minister Thonmi Sambhota and others to India to study Sanskrit; on their return they created the Tibetan script based on the features of the Tibetan language. This was an epoch-making milestone in Tibetan cultural history.

He married first Princess Bhrikuti of Nepal and then Princess Wencheng of the Tang. These two princesses brought not only advanced production techniques, medicine and texts but also Buddhist statues and Buddhist thought, laying the foundation for Tibetan Buddhism to take root and sprout.

The conversion from Bon to Buddhism was, on one hand, to suppress the old nobility.

And more than that, to shift from a primitive tribal confederation to a centralized empire.

Buddhism, a highly systematized body of philosophical reasoning, was the perfect tool to break the old order and strengthen royal power.

Songtsen Gampo used Buddhism’s universality to break the Bon priests’ absolute monopoly on “divine will.” As Buddhism took root, the tsenpo’s image was gradually sanctified (later generations even regarded him as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara).

To translate sutras and bring in Buddhist texts, Tubo had to have its own writing. It was against this background that the Tibetan script was created. With writing, the state no longer governed only through customs passed by word of mouth; it could establish written archives, promulgate written law codes, record history, and count households and taxes. This was the most crucial step in Tubo’s move from “barbarian tribe” to “feudal legal state.”

The profound philosophical concepts Buddhism brought — karma, cause and effect, compassion, emptiness — greatly widened the spiritual world of the Tubo people. It gave a people long living in a harsh natural environment and frequent warfare the wisdom to look inward and a systematic moral code. This evolution at the spiritual level gave Tubo the cultural confidence to speak with the highly developed Tang civilization as an equal.

Princess Bhrikuti — a deeper introduction. Bringing in Buddhism was equivalent to joining Asia’s “mainstream cultural circle” at the time. A shared religious context with the Tang, India and Nepal greatly lowered diplomatic barriers and promoted exchanges of people, technology (such as papermaking, medicine, agriculture) and ideas, letting Tubo rapidly absorb the advanced achievements of neighboring civilizations.

Songtsen Gampo’s Path of Compromise Between Buddhism and Bon

How Songtsen Gampo handled the conflict between Buddhism and Bon

For humans, changing faith is extremely hard.

At the time Bon’s power was deeply entangled, not only rooted in the common people but bound up with the interests of Tubo’s old nobility. Forcing Buddhism through could have split Tubo in an instant.

Songtsen Gampo knew well that the newborn royal power was not yet strong enough to overturn the old nobles’ table. So during his reign he did not declare Buddhism the state religion, nor force his subjects to believe in it.

For major public affairs — state ceremonies, alliances, funerals — he still relied on Bon priests and followed Bon’s tradition of “animal sacrifice.” In many historical documents Songtsen Gampo himself appears half Buddhist, half Bon. Through this compromise he placated the old nobles and the Bon priests and kept the state machinery running normally.

Then Princess Wencheng arrived, bringing a remarkable tool.

Using the Central Plains’ Yijing and the eight trigrams for geomancy, Princess Wencheng proposed that the terrain of the whole Tibetan plateau was a giant supine rakshasi (demoness), and that this demoness was precisely the symbol of the native Bon deities and old forces.

To “suppress” the demoness’s heart and limbs, Songtsen Gampo naturally built the Jokhang in Lhasa (to pin the heart) and twelve famous “demon-quelling temples” around and on Tubo’s borders (to pin the limbs and joints). On the surface this was blessing Tubo’s feng shui; in reality it drove physical Buddhist buildings like nails into Bon’s map of belief, completing a double occupation, geographic and psychological.

In the early period Buddhism was strictly limited to the royal house and a few nobles; it was not preached on a large scale to commoners. Songtsen Gampo used Buddhism as a high-grade cultural tool.

Translation and the creation of writing

Law

Bon’s logic was “priests communicate with the gods, the gods guide the tsenpo,” which left the tsenpo’s power subject to the priests. Songtsen Gampo cleverly made use of Buddhism’s concept of “emanation.”

With the introduction of Buddhism, Songtsen Gampo was gradually cast as an emanation of Avalokiteshvara. This shift of identity was subversive: the tsenpo was no longer a mortal who needed priests to hear divine will — he himself was a god and Buddha. This fundamentally stripped the Bon priests of their absolute political voice and completed the most important step toward centralization.

Ralpacan’s Buddhist Zeal Inflamed Noble Conflict

Ralpacan (Reba Jin) was an extremely fervent Buddhist, and to promote Buddhism he issued very radical policies.

He decreed that every seven commoner households had to support one monk.

Monasteries held large estates and subject populations and paid no taxes to the state, and monks did not serve in the military.

He appointed monks to the highest state office, the great chancellor (prime minister), and even enacted harsh laws: “whoever dares glare angrily at a monk shall have his eyes gouged out; whoever dares point a finger at a monk shall have his finger cut off.”

Tubo was a slave empire that expanded by force. The military aristocracy bled and fought at the front, yet had to hand huge economic and political benefits to monks who paid no taxes and fought no wars. The state’s land, wealth and population flowed in great volume into the monasteries, directly shaking Tubo’s foundations and thoroughly enraging the traditional military nobles and the Bon forces.

Anti-Buddhist nobles staged a coup, assassinated Ralpacan, and raised his brother Langdarma to the throne.

Langdarma represented the interests of the Bon forces and the traditional military aristocracy. As soon as he took power he launched a brutal, Tibet-wide “persecution of Buddhism”:

Closing monasteries and destroying Buddha statues

Forcing monks to return to lay life, stripping them of all privileges

Purging pro-Buddhist ministers

This persecution was extremely brutal and pulled Buddhism in central Tibet up by the roots; historians call it the “Tubo Dharma Calamity” or “Langdarma’s persecution of Buddhism.”

In 842 AD, a Buddhist ascetic named Lhalung Pelgyi Dorje hid a bow and arrow in his sleeve, disguised himself as a Bon follower and danced before Langdarma. While Langdarma watched, absorbed, he shot an arrow through his throat.

From then on the Tibetan plateau entered more than four hundred years of “division and warlord rule” (until the Yuan dynasty brought it into its territory in the 13th century), and the unified Tubo empire that had once dominated the Tang border vanished forever from the long river of history.

Langdarma’s Persecution and Buddhism’s Revival From the Margins

When Langdarma persecuted Buddhism, Buddhism in central Tibet was almost wiped out, but the sparks of revival came from the margins.

The Lower Transmission (brought back from the east): a few surviving monks fled to Qinghai and Kham (eastern Tibetan plateau) and there took disciples and transmitted the precepts. A century later their descendants in the lineage returned to Lhasa and Samye Monastery and restored the monastic order in central Tibet.

The Upper Transmission (brought in from the west): descendants of the Tubo royal house founded the Guge kingdom in western Tibet (the Ngari region). To restore pure Buddhism, the Guge royal house spent heavily to invite the renowned Indian master Atisha into Tibet. Atisha’s arrival systematically straightened out the chaotic popular Buddhist practices of the time and laid a solid theoretical foundation for the development of schools in the later diffusion period.

As Buddhism revived, eminent monks in various places gradually formed different schools, combining different lines of transmission, different emphases in practice, and different local patrons.

The appearance of Master Tsongkhapa (1357–1419) can be called a great “system-level reconstruction” in the history of Tibetan Buddhism.

Single-handedly he ended centuries of chaos and decline in Tibetan Buddhism and created the largest school, which later ruled Tibet for hundreds of years — the Gelug school (the Yellow Sect).

At the end of the 14th century (in the early Ming dynasty in Chinese history), Tibetan Buddhism had many schools but was deeply corrupt inside, arguably on the edge of life and death.

Monks at the time were heavily involved in worldly struggles for power and profit; they not only amassed wealth but commonly married and had children, drank and caroused. The line between monastics and worldly warlords was extremely blurred.

Tibetan Buddhism divides into “exoteric” (theoretical study) and “tantric” (advanced esoteric practice). Many monks at the time were ignorant, skipping the dry theoretical foundation and, under the pretext of “practicing tantra,” abusing practices such as channels and vital drops, even “sexual union,” to satisfy their own desires, leaving public morals badly decayed.

The people lost their awe of monks and Buddhism’s credibility was nearly bankrupt. It was out of this extreme despair, with the whole profession facing a “moral landslide,” that Tsongkhapa stepped forward.

He reformed the precepts with an iron hand (emphasizing “celibacy” and “ascetic practice”): absolute celibacy (no marriage, no contact with women), vegetarianism for life or a strict ban on killing, no alcohol. With extremely severe moral standards he forcibly re-opened the distance between monks and ordinary worldly people and won back the people’s awe.

He set a mandatory study path of “exoteric first, then tantric”: any monk had to spend a dozen years or even decades systematically studying exoteric logic and philosophy (such as the Prajnaparamita Sutras and the Madhyamaka-karika), and only after passing examinations was he qualified to touch tantra.

He wrote Tibetan Buddhism’s most logical and systematic masterpieces — the Great Treatise on the Stages of the Path to Enlightenment (Lamrim Chenmo) and the Great Treatise on the Stages of Tantra. Like operating manuals, these two books lay out every stage, every mental state and every step of practice from an ordinary person to final Buddhahood in perfect, clear order, eliminating the chaos of practitioners blindly muddling along on feeling.

To draw a clear line between himself and the corrupt old-school monks in red hats or black hats, Tsongkhapa required himself and his disciples to wear yellow Dharma hats when performing rituals. In Buddhism yellow symbolizes the earth and also strict adherence to precepts. From then on the name “Yellow Sect” spread quickly.

Because Tsongkhapa’s learning was unfathomable and his morality extremely lofty, nobles, scholars and even eminent monks of other schools across Tibet defected and became his disciples. Like sparks setting the prairie alight, the Yellow Sect quickly became the largest, most academically rigorous and most tightly organized school in Tibetan Buddhism.

But Tsongkhapa’s reform had a side effect. Since the Yellow Sect required monks to be absolutely celibate and forbidden to marry and have children, when a leader of the older generation died, who would inherit the enormous monastic property and political power? The hereditary path of father to son was completely blocked.

Exoteric is the foundation; tantra is an accelerated method built on emptiness, precepts and bodhicitta.

The “fake yogi” problem in Tibet’s later diffusion period

People calling themselves “yogis” or “tantric practitioners” skipped exoteric study, abused the names of “channels and vital drops” and “highest yoga tantra,” and used “transcending the precepts” as an excuse to have sex with women and demand offerings.

So the “dual cultivation” in TV dramas really exists; it belongs to tantra.

“Union / dual cultivation” is not about liberating desire,

But about cutting off “self-attachment” directly at “the point where desire is strongest.”

The essential reason such a design appears in the highest yoga tantra is that it solves an “ultimate technical problem,” not an ethical one.

In exoteric practice and ordinary meditation the path is: observe → let go → transcend affliction.

“In the state of strongest attachment, can one give rise to no ‘I’?”

Sexual desire is, in human experience, the strongest sensory involvement and the strongest projection of identity.

If one can still maintain emptiness, non-self, neither grasping nor rejecting here, then in no state will one be kidnapped by affliction again.

But it fails almost ninety-nine percent of the time; for an ordinary person only one thing happens: “I want it more,” not “I have seen non-self.”

But the reincarnation system the Yellow Sect later designed is an extraordinarily rare and ingenious institutional design in human history. It perfectly combined deep Buddhist philosophy with the practical transfer of political power, forming a tight logical loop.

Family inheritance easily corrupts, and master-to-disciple succession makes disciples fight over resources.

In Mahayana thought, an eminent monk who reaches a very high level of practice (a bodhisattva) has already escaped the cycle of birth and death. But out of compassion for sentient beings, they voluntarily give up entering nirvana and choose to “return by vow” — that is, consciously control the time and place of their next rebirth and continue leading believers in practice.

This way the new leader is not “elected” but a “seamless switch” from the previous leader. In the eyes of believers, though the body is changed, the soul and authority continue one hundred percent. This sanctity is enough to suppress any disciple’s ambition to usurp power.

Before the old living Buddha dies he usually leaves some hints (a metaphorical poem, for instance) pointing to the direction, terrain features or even family circumstances of his next birth. The direction his body leans at the moment of death is also treated as an important clue.

The monastery’s eminent monks travel to Tibet’s sacred lake, Lhamo Latso. They chant and pray at the lakeside, and by watching the strange images appearing in the lake’s reflection (specific Tibetan letters, the shape of a monastery, features of a village) they pin down the general direction of the child.

The search party disguises itself as ordinary people or merchants and looks within the pinpointed area for boys born around the time of the old living Buddha’s death. When a likely target is found, the monks mix the old living Buddha’s ritual implements (prayer beads, tea bowl, bell and vajra) with identical replicas and let the child grab. If the child accurately picks up the genuine items from the previous life, or can even name the previous life’s attendants, he is confirmed as a candidate.

By the Qianlong period of the Qing, to prevent local Tibetan nobles from manipulating the search behind the scenes and forcing their own family’s child to be recognized as a living Buddha in order to seize power, the Qing court issued the golden urn (Golden Bumpa). The names of all shortlisted candidates are written on ivory lots and placed in the golden urn, and under the joint supervision of the Imperial Resident and eminent monks a public draw decides the final reincarnation.

This broke class rigidity, and the child also got a long cultivation period to ensure his values were pure. The child is usually brought into the monastery at a few years old, cut off from the world, and given closed-door training for ten to twenty years by a top team of scholars (his tutors). This guarantees that the new leader not only has sacred legitimacy but also receives the most elite education in philosophy, logic and management.

Reincarnation Did Not Change the Class and Economic Base

If this system is so good, why did it extend into a brutal class system and slavery?

It brings to mind Master Jigong — the reincarnation of an arhat.

The reincarnation of living Buddhas is indeed extremely ingenious: it broke the monopoly of bloodline, calmed the internal friction of transferring supreme power, and even gave common people at the bottom a chance to leap to the position of supreme leader.

So religious belief is sometimes powerless too: it can solve the problem of power distribution but has not changed the economic base.

On the contrary, as the union of church and state deepened, this system became the strongest ideological tool for freezing class and squeezing the bottom.

The Tibetan plateau is cold and short of oxygen, and agriculture and herding produce extremely little. When the Gelug school (the Yellow Sect) rose, maintaining a huge monastic establishment, supporting tens of thousands of monks who had left productive labor and building splendid temples required an extremely stable source of wealth.

In ancient times without modern industry, the only source of wealth was land and the people bound to it.

Thus the government, the nobles and the upper clergy of the monasteries emerged.

The truly terrifying thing about the union of church and state is that it controls not only the body but the mind.

The profound Buddhist philosophy of “karma” and “the cycle of birth and death” was distorted by the ruling class into a perfect tool of rule.

Legitimizing the top: why do living Buddhas and nobles enjoy glory and wealth? Because they accumulated immeasurable merit in past lives — this is the blessing they “deserve.”

Rationalizing the bottom: why were you born a serf, with not enough food and still beaten? Because you did wrong in a past life; your present suffering is “clearing karmic obstruction.” If you dare rebel against the lord (who stands for the gods and Buddhas), you will not only be punished in this life but go to hell after death; if you submit to everything and work desperately for the monastery, you may be reborn as a good person next time.

Buddhism’s core teachings are “all beings are equal” and “great compassion” — so why did such a mechanism come out of it?

It seems the monks too were deeply branded into a system logic they could not escape.

Desire and resources do not coexist easily. To land an idealistic system, the most fatal test is the distribution of resources; only reasonable distribution of resources solves the problem of desire. Religion addresses the problem of desire, but if religion does not address the distribution of resources, then restraining desire is problematic.

Early Buddhist monks were wandering ascetics begging for alms, but once the Gelug school (the Yellow Sect) gained absolute rule over Tibet, the nature of monasteries changed fundamentally. A monastery was no longer just a place of practice; it became Tibet’s largest economic trust (monopoly conglomerate).

The eminent monks were not only spiritual leaders but the “chairmen” and “executives” of this enormous economy. Asking them to abolish serfdom would be asking them to disarm themselves, voluntarily give up the economic lifeline that kept the huge monastic order running, and even strip the privileges from the tens of thousands of monks beneath them. Faced with real interests, the collective choice of human nature tends to be to preserve the system rather than overturn it.

The upbringing of great living Buddhas such as the Dalai Lama and the Panchen Erdeni

They are usually recognized as reincarnations at two or three, then brought into the Potala Palace or Tashilhunpo Monastery and placed in an extremely tightly controlled, luxurious and closed environment. Every day they face top-tier tutors, profound philosophical texts (such as Buddhist logic and the Madhyamaka view) and endless ritual.

They had no chance at all to touch the real society at the bottom. Around a living Buddha stood a huge bureaucracy (the Kashag) and great nobles, and these people formed a thick “firewall” that screened out the blood and tears and brutal punishments of the serfs below. The eminent monks contemplated “form is emptiness” in grand halls but could hardly see the serfs outside the monastery walls whose hands were cut off and eyes gouged out for failing to pay rent and taxes. Their knowledge of the world was highly theoretical and filtered.

27. The Evolution of the Jokhang and the Birth of the Barkhor Pilgrimage Way

A few timelines of Buddhism

5th–4th century BC: Shakyamuni Buddha taught in northern ancient India and southern Nepal.

Around the 1st century AD: Buddhism began to enter China during the Han dynasty, first reaching the Central Plains via the Silk Road.

Late Eastern Han: the first official scripture translators appeared, such as An Shigao and Zhu Falan.

Three Kingdoms to Wei-Jin and the Northern and Southern Dynasties: Buddhism gradually took root in both north and south China, with large numbers of temples.

Sui and Tang: Buddhism flourished and formed the great schools — Chan, Tiantai, Huayan and others.

Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing: Buddhism developed further and penetrated deeply into folk culture and social life.

26. Full-Prostration Bowing and the Spiritual Value of Eradicating Pride

The evolution of the Jokhang

Why the Jokhang? Songtsen Gampo first fixed the site of the Jokhang and built four palaces around it.

Enshrined in the Jokhang is the life-size golden Buddha of Shakyamuni at twelve that Princess Wencheng brought when she came to Tibet. With the statue in place, the Jokhang became the absolute core of faith, drawing countless believers to worship.

Tibetan Buddhist believers have a tradition of circumambulating sacred buildings clockwise. Over time, countless devout footsteps wore a circular path around the outside of the Jokhang. This “sacred way” carrying awe and practice is the original form of the Barkhor.

The Jokhang’s evolution: as its status in the Buddhist world kept rising, it expanded outward and evolved into a complex urban ecosystem.

To meet the food and lodging needs of pilgrims and merchants coming from afar, eighteen large family-style buildings were first put up around the Jokhang.

By the 15th century the Jokhang was Lhasa’s Buddhist center, and large numbers of monks’ quarters, religious schools and small temples sprang up around it. At the same time merchants and pilgrims from Mongolia, the Central Plains, Nepal, India and elsewhere stopped and settled here.

Religious gathering brought crowds, and crowds gave birth to commerce. Workshops, inns and shops appeared like bamboo shoots after rain, and the Barkhor naturally developed into the busiest commercial street and market in Lhasa and even on the whole Tibetan plateau.

On one side are devout pilgrims holding prayer wheels and doing full-length prostrations, showing Buddhism’s enormously resilient spiritual power and awe before impermanence.

On the other are noisy shops selling thangka, ritual implements and handicrafts, steeped in the dense, everyday smell of worldly life.

The six-syllable mantra works something like white noise.

Om Mani Padme Hum

It is the heart mantra of Avalokiteshvara (known in Tibet as “Four-Armed Avalokiteshvara”). Though scholars often translate the literal meaning as “homage to the jewel in the lotus,” on the level of faith it symbolizes the perfect union of compassion and wisdom. “Om” represents pure body, speech and mind, “mani” represents compassion, “padme” represents wisdom, and “hum” represents their unshakable union.

Tibetan Buddhism holds that turning a prayer wheel once is equal to reciting the scriptures densely packed inside it (usually the six-syllable mantra) hundreds or thousands of times.

Along with the chanting, believers measure the land with the rise and fall of their bodies, and through extreme physical effort express their resolve to subdue their own pride.

25. How Chan and Pure Land Practice Paths Differ

Full-length prostration is not only a ritual; it is also the highest form of practice in Tibetan Buddhism, fusing bodily asceticism with extreme mental concentration.

Every time the body presses to the stone slab it is a full prostration.

This is also the highest form of etiquette.

Believers first bring their palms together (slightly hollow, like an unopened lotus) and touch them in turn to the crown of the head (the Buddha’s body), the brow or throat (the Buddha’s speech), and the chest (the Buddha’s mind). These three steps mean the practitioner longs to purify body, speech and mind and align with the Buddha’s state.

Then they kneel, push both hands forward and lay the whole body flat on the ground. The forehead must touch the earth.

Bystanders see it as self-torture, but in Buddhist philosophy it has extremely high spiritual value.

Eliminating one’s own pride — one of the greatest sources of human affliction.

Prostration requires lowering the body’s noblest, proudest part (the head) into the dust, even onto the footprints others have walked over. This is the most direct physical means of breaking the self and learning humility and surrender.

It is also an extreme form of moving meditation: in repeated motion with extreme physical exertion the mind finds it hard to produce distractions, and bodily exhaustion instead brings extreme clarity and focus; this practice quickly brings a person into a non-self state resembling flow.

Believers hold that physical hardship can wash away past misdeeds. And their prostration is often not (or not only) for themselves but a prayer for “the salvation of all beings.”

Two forms

Prostration in place: in Tibetan Buddhism’s “ngondro” (preliminary practice) a practitioner usually has to complete 100,000 prostrations, which often takes months or even most of a year of daily, uninterrupted practice.

Prostration while traveling (pilgrimage): this is the image most often seen in documentaries. Believers set out from home hundreds or even thousands of kilometers away, prostrating every three steps, measuring the land with their own bodies, all the way to Lhasa’s Jokhang or the sacred mountain Mount Kailash. This usually takes months or even years, sleeping rough in wind and dew, and is a terrifying test of willpower.

The swish of wooden boards against the stone road — that is the rhythm of faith.

The forehead also grows calluses over the years, even marks of earth — the most beautiful third eye.

24. The Six-Syllable Mantra as an Anchor in Moving Meditation

Pure Land

It’s interesting; it’s a different branch from Chan. Right now Chan is what I like most.

Chan points directly at human nature, seeing one’s nature and becoming Buddha; it is flexible, feels modern and is easy to combine with daily life.

Pure Land emphasizes reciting the Buddha’s name to be reborn in the Western Pure Land, and it has the largest number of followers.

Compared with Chan, what’s different about Pure Land is

“Faith, vow, practice”: through reciting the Buddha’s name one relies on Amitabha to be reborn in the Western Pure Land.

Chan relies on seated meditation.

Pure Land is faith, vow, practice.

Reciting the Buddha’s name (the name of Amitabha) is simple and easy, relying on the Buddha’s power.

Chan emphasizes inner experience and intuition more, while Pure Land relies more on a sense of ritual and easily forms collective activities.

Comparatively, believing in Amitabha feels easier to start with, aiming at the Western Pure Land.

23. No School Is Better; Personal Experience Is the Container

When someone is on a long, hard trek or doing hugely draining repetitive body movements, if the mind is still churning, the will is easily crushed by physical pain. The six-syllable mantra “Om Mani Padme Hum” happens to provide the perfect rhythm: raising the hands, joining the palms, diving down, touching the ground, standing up. The syllables correspond exactly to the movements, forcing the body’s exhaustion and the frequency of the voice to resonate. At that point the mantra becomes a solid “anchor,” nailing the drifting consciousness firmly to the present.

This is in fact a very high-order moving meditation. In day after day, thousands upon thousands of repetitions, physical pain and limits are gradually peeled away and transcended.

As movement and mantra fall fully in sync, the subjective “I” (the self that gets tired, gets proud, has all sorts of worldly desires) begins to dissolve. It is like a long, lonely hiking trail: when you go to the extreme, the feet just alternate out of inertia while the mind enters an extremely clear, focused, empty “flow” state. Prostration with uninterrupted chanting is precisely meant to use extreme bodily fatigue and absolute purity of sound to forcibly shut down the noisy “background processes” in the brain, reaching Buddhism’s “non-self” awakening experience.

19. Sensitivity and Pain Are the Ticket to Insight

They are amazing, whether kneeling in prostration over long distances or circling the Jokhang.

It looks exhausting, especially on the plateau.

They don’t complain; if there is complaint and worry, that shows a very strong “I.”

Even though the body hurts so much, after hiking for a long time the daily routine comes down to nothing but pure stepping and breathing.

Your inner dialogue slowly collapses. At some threshold of extreme fatigue you no longer “think” about walking; you “become” walking itself. In that moment pain steps backstage, the mind is extremely clear, and you feel a calm merged with the land under your feet and the snow mountains around you.

This “flow” state born of extreme physical exhaustion is in fact a worldly glimpse of “non-self.” Prostration takes this long-trek experience and, with more intense movement and the support of purer faith, compresses and intensifies it to the extreme,

In Buddhist philosophy the “I” is not a solid entity but a collection of thoughts.

The non-self catalyzed this way does not mean I lose consciousness; it means letting go of attachment to and defense of the self and entering an ethereal state of pure presentness.

17. Responsibility for the Process and Distinguishing Friends From Buddies

Playful living vs. Buddhism

They are not in conflict.

Especially if you look at it at a deeper philosophical level.

Not only are they not in conflict; at the heights they completely overlap.

Buddhism’s highest state is also “playful samadhi.”

In Buddhism (especially Huayan and Chan) there is a very advanced technical term, “playful samadhi” (Playful Samadhi). It is a state only bodhisattvas or awakened people can reach.

Awakened people see through the world’s illusion, but they do not become cold or nihilistic because of it, nor do they choose suicide to quit the game. Instead they return to worldly life with an extremely light, free posture — engaged but not attached.

They do things, create, help others as if playing a game with full devotion.

Because it is a game, they can be utterly focused (entering flow); but precisely because they know it is a game, when the game ends (failure or death) they can put down the controller easily, without attachment.

Engaged but not attached — that too is non-self.

It is like Camus’s Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill, the boulder rolling down, and him pushing it up again. If he clings to the result of “keeping the boulder on the summit,” it is endless hell (the Buddhist “duhkha”); but if, in the process of pushing, Sisyphus feels the muscles working and the mountain wind blowing, and treats pushing the boulder as his own game against absurdity, then he is happy.

Stoicism holds that we can only control “how well we play our role” (how we play the game), not the result (whether we win or lose).

The world is an amusement park; you don’t have to be bound by the rules of the game.

Instead you become the highest-level player — living with enormous creativity and appetite for experience, completing your own “playful samadhi” in every present moment of writing code, designing products or wandering the world.

14. Stoicism as a Mental Operating System

If the game is your ultimate pillar,

Then the various philosophies and schools are just strategy guides and system API docs left behind by top players of past generations.

Buddhism (especially the underlying logic of Chan and tantra) is not about making you worship gods; it is really a “debug guide” for human consciousness. It breaks down with great precision how the virtual avatar called “self” produces illusions through the senses and thus falls into the endless loop of suffering (rebirth). Learning “non-self” from the Diamond Sutra is like learning how to clear the redundant cache eating your brain’s memory, so that you run more smoothly in this game and don’t freeze on fake textures (fame, profit, attachment).

In an open-world game with no preset meaning, the easiest bug to produce is “nihilism” — feeling that since it is all code, what is the point of grinding and leveling up?

I have enough freedom to choose and create, and to give this character meaning.

The word “faith” gets deconstructed: you no longer need to blindly “believe” that some deity will bless you.

“Understanding” becomes infinitely important: you need to long intensely to understand how these smartest minds of thousands of years dismantled the laws of how the world runs. You treat them as toolboxes, as plug-ins, installed into your own operating system.

13. Metacognition and Meaning-Weaving in Shared Narratives

Stoicism is also a very mature mental operating system.

Its core goal is not to eliminate emotion but to manage emotion through reason, so as to keep inner calm (Apatheia) and spiritual freedom in a world full of uncertainty and chaos.

What we can control (internal): our beliefs, judgments, desires, impulses and our reactions to things.

What we cannot control (external): others’ opinions, the market environment, sudden events, the weather, and our own health and death.

The root of suffering and anxiety is that we put too much energy into external things we cannot control.

So generally, if you sort out and clarify your own emotions, it becomes relatively easier to define suffering and anxiety.

Converge all compute (attention) fully onto optimizing internal logic. If the external environment collapses, that is a variable outside the system; our job is only to give the most perfect internal response.

Some spiritual practices:

Premeditating future evils: this is not pessimism but a psychological immunization drill. Spend a few minutes each day imagining the worst that could happen (a project failing, losing your wealth, an accident). Once you have rehearsed these scenes in your mind in advance and accepted them, setbacks in reality will not crush you; instead you will feel “that’s all it is.” I have used this method many times to keep an unexpected blow from knocking me down all at once.

Loving fate: not merely accepting what happens to you but loving it. Suppose a storm suddenly hits during a long hike; a Stoic will not complain about the weather but treat it as a perfect chance to test endurance and mind. Everything that blocks you ultimately becomes part of what shapes you. As Marcus Aurelius said: “What blocks action advances action.”

The view from above: try mentally raising your viewpoint, looking down at the room you are in, the city, the country, until you look down on the whole Earth and the vastness of cosmic time. At that grand scale, personal worries, worldly success or others’ judgments instantly shrink to insignificance. This perspective brings enormous spiritual release.

6. The Power of Inherited Belief Behind Unending Butter Lamps

Daily life at the Jokhang

I went inside once before, and it struck me that the ticket is a bit pricey.

The holiest shrine in Tibetan Buddhism; many local believers come here every day to burn incense, bow, offer khata (white scarves of blessing), light butter lamps and offer flowers and scriptures, praying for safety, health and good fortune.

Inside the temple and around the Barkhor there is an endless stream of people holding small prayer wheels or turning the large ones set along the walls clockwise, chanting mantras (such as the six-syllable mantra) with every step; this is how Tibetans daily accumulate merit and purify karmic obstruction.

In the square near the Jokhang or along the pilgrimage route, devout Tibetans advance bow by bow in full prostrations — the most devout way of honoring the Buddha, meaning complete awe and refuge. Many regard completing one full circuit of prostrations around the Barkhor as an important practice in life.

Inside and outside the temple you can hear Tibetan believers chanting scriptures and mantras and praying in low voices, most commonly at dawn and dusk.

Monks light the butter lamps, maintain the shrine halls, receive worshippers and clean the halls.

In the evening or early morning there is usually collective chanting.

The temple’s interior structure: first of all a dark, heavy atmosphere; the inner passages and halls are mostly wood, smoke from burning butter lamps fills the whole space, light is soft and colors muted. Walls and pillars carry dark traces from years of smoke and human touch.

Butter lamps generally burn all year round; this is believers’ daily lamp offering and prayer, and believers repeatedly touch the murals, scriptures and statues.

The Jokhang’s interior is not one great hall but a maze-like network of spaces. The main hall — the Jowo Shakyamuni — this is certainly the twelve-year-old image of the Buddha that Princess Wencheng brought from Chang’an to Tibet.

Believers circle the main image clockwise (the inner kora) in an endless stream, lighting lamps, offering khata and touching the base and legs of the statue in prayer.

Side halls enshrine various Buddhas, bodhisattvas and protector deities, and the murals depict legends of the Buddha, Princess Wencheng’s arrival in Tibet and the building of the temple.

There are also some seventh-century wooden pillars that have survived a very long time — quite amazing — but they are now wrapped up for protection.

5. The Inverted Relation of Beings and Bodhisattvas in Buddhist Logic

The butter lamp is not decoration; it is the act of practice itself.

A lamp going out means no one is willing to hold up the awakened nature.

This is a sense of ritual, and also a fulcrum.

Someone may be poor all their life but will certainly come to offer one lamp.

After turning prayer wheels or doing prostrations, some will certainly add another spoonful of butter.

Every second it is being consumed, and every second someone is replenishing it.

Someone is always bending down on some morning or late night to add a spoonful of oil.

You feel the strength of human belief.

No one has ever all left the room.

4. Sera Monastery’s Layout and the Gelug Scholastic System

Indeed, enlightenment belongs to sentient beings; without sentient beings, no bodhisattva could attain supreme perfect awakening.

In the traditional pyramid structure the base serves the top; in the logic of the Dharma this logic is reversed.

Sentient beings are not objects of charity but the “necessary condition” for a bodhisattva to become a Buddha. It is like an excellent AI product: without massive user behavior and real pain points as a training set, that AI could never evolve into true intelligence.

If some form of propagation serves only power, wealth or the superiority of a very few, then by the standards of the Dharma it is illegitimate.

3. Manjushri Raising His Sword and Chan’s Pointing at the Mind

Sera Monastery is one of the six main monasteries of the Gelug school (the Yellow Sect) and one of Lhasa’s three great monasteries.

At the foot of Sera Urtse in the northern suburbs of Lhasa.

Through expansions over the generations, Sera became a vast complex covering about 110,000 square meters. It gradually evolved into a huge “university town”; at its height it held nearly ten thousand monks and drew scholar-monks from all over Tibet, Mongolia and even Han regions to study the Dharma.

Its layout: Sera’s architectural palette is quite interesting, and there are some other interesting things about it.

Tsokchen (the Great Assembly Hall): the administrative and religious center of the whole monastery, equivalent to a university’s “auditorium” and “registrar’s office.”

Dratsang: equivalent to a “college.” Sera has three great dratsang:

Sera Je: the largest, mainly studying exoteric teachings, with scholar-monks mostly from Mongolia and eastern Tibet.

Sera Mey: also studies exoteric teachings but emphasizes basic precepts and early scriptures.

Sera Ngagpa: the earliest building, the highest institution dedicated to tantric study (one usually enters only after graduating from the exoteric college).

Sera is most famous for the daily afternoon debate sessions in the debate courtyard (Chö ra). This is absolutely not performance; it embodies the Gelug school’s extreme emphasis on logic and reason.

In debate the standing questioner uses exaggerated claps and stomps to build momentum; the seated respondent must answer without emotion with “yes,” “no” or “not necessarily.” When clapping, the right hand stands for “wisdom” and the left for “skillful means” (compassion), and the sharp sound of the clap symbolizes that the union of wisdom and compassion can shatter ignorance and affliction. This outwardly intense form demands, inwardly, extreme calm and a strict logical loop.

Sera is the highest institution for studying the Dharma and earning the highest degree, the geshe, and its aim is a rigorous academic system rather than the veneration of some irreplaceable statue.

2. The Butter Lamp as a Psychological Anchor and Long-Term Faith

Manjushri raises his sword to slay the Buddha.

If you see the Buddha outside your mind, that is a demon realm.

If you think the Buddha is some object “outside you,”

Then you have already fallen into attachment.

The true Buddha should be awakening itself.

Meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha; meet the patriarch, kill the patriarch.

Chan was influenced by Manjushri and is closest to his spiritual lineage: not relying on words, pointing directly at human nature, seeing one’s nature and becoming Buddha.

In China Manjushri “landed” at Mount Wutai. Another interesting point: Chinese Buddhism values cultivating the mind within the world, and Manjushri represents the wisdom of staying clear-headed in a complex world.

Title Generation Result

Although those at the top were busy with mergers and usury, countless ordinary monks at the bottom really did pursue truth year after year. In Sera’s debate courtyard, generation after generation of scholar-monks used rigorous Buddhist logic to reason through the emptiness and dependent origination in the Diamond Sutra and the Heart Sutra. This effort to push Eastern philosophy to the extreme of logical rigor is a treasure in the history of human thought.

Buddhist philosophy has a profound metaphor: the finger pointing at the moon. Truth is that bright moon, while religious organizations, temples and even sutras are merely the “finger” pointing at it. We cannot, because that finger has been stained with mud or even blood, deny the radiance of the moon it points to.

History is never black and white. It is precisely this extreme interweaving of the sacred and the worldly, of cruelty and compassion, that makes history’s most real and most fascinating tension.

The Logic of Nepalese Buddhism’s Absorption by Hinduism

Why was Buddhism assimilated by Hinduism in Nepal?

Buddhism originated in India but had basically disappeared from Indian soil by around the 12th century AD, “absorbed” or “assimilated” by the vast Hindu system.

Hinduism is extremely inclusive (or absorptive). It does not reject dissenting views but brings them into its own system:

The avatar (emanation) theory: Hinduism lists the Buddha as the ninth avatar of Vishnu (Lord Vishnu). Logically this completed a “dimensional strike”: if the Buddha is merely an avatar of the Hindu supreme deity, then Buddhists are in essence also practicing a part of Hinduism.

Reconciling conflict: Buddhism originally opposed the caste system and sacrifice, but with the development of Mahayana, later Buddhism (especially in its tantric phase) introduced large numbers of mantras, mandalas and complex rituals, making it hard for ordinary believers to tell any essential difference from the Brahmanism/Hinduism of the time.

Hinduism is rooted in family, caste and everyday social structure, with no single center; every village temple is one of its strongholds. Even when regimes changed, as long as the social structure remained, Hinduism could not be uprooted.

Hinduism also emphasizes personal love and devotion toward a deity, which spreads more easily among common people than dry Buddhist meditation, weakening Buddhism’s popular base.

The Tree of Life: Lived Narrative and Betting Against Human Nature

The Tree of Life

So that group photo and that record really did become forever

The making of every person is shaped by experience and narrative

So the charm of The Tree of Life lies in slowly taking root amid barrenness, cold, thin air and loneliness

Respect human nature, don’t test human nature

Don’t gamble with your own life against human nature too early

Human-Bone Ritual Implements: Philosophical Ideals and Their Distortion Under Serfdom

In Tibetan Buddhism (especially in tantrism), the original use of human-bone ritual implements (such as the kapala bowl, human-bone rosaries, and shinbone trumpets) rests on an extremely profound philosophical logic

Buddhism holds that humanity’s greatest suffering comes from attachment to the “self” and to the body. Holding in your hand, as a ritual implement, the bone that once carried a life is meant to constantly remind the practitioner of “the impermanence of life and death” and “the emptiness of the body,” and thereby to overcome the fear of death

When an accomplished monk vows to donate his bones after death, he is turning a useless husk into a ritual implement that liberates sentient beings. In Buddhist doctrine this is called “inner giving” (giving away one’s own body), and it is regarded as an extremely rare and supremely compassionate act

When this profound religious ideal was combined with an extremely unequal feudal serf system, things mutated horribly. In old Tibet before the 1959 democratic reform, the “three great lords” (officials, aristocrats, and upper-tier monastery clergy), less than 5 percent of the population, owned the vast majority of the means of production and held absolute power of life and death over the serfs and slaves who made up more than 95 percent of the population

In the laws of old Tibet (such as the Code of Thirteen and the Code of Sixteen), cruel punishments were explicitly prescribed — gouging out eyes, cutting off feet, cutting out tongues, flaying. Many serfs who had been punished, or who were executed for resisting their lords, had their bones, skulls, and even skin taken directly to be made into ritual implements or religious objects (such as human-skin thangkas and human-skin hand drums)

In some extreme tantric rituals, achieving the so-called effects of “suppression,” “cursing,” or “sacrifice” placed extremely harsh and cruel requirements on the material of the implements. Some rituals, for example, required the skull of someone who “died an unnatural death,” or the leg bone of a “pure sixteen-year-old maiden,” or even a child’s intestines. Faced with absolute power, these demands were often satisfied by directly doing harm to serfs, slaves, or vagrants at the bottom of society

Serfs were seen as “livestock that can talk”

This is also why, in modern society, whether on grounds of human rights or modern law, this kind of acquisition and production of human-bone ritual implements has been strictly prohibited

Buddhist Ideals and Their Selective Fusion with Secular Power

The union of an extremely pure philosophical ideal with secularized power

Why is it that Buddhism advocates the equality of all beings on one hand, yet produced laws as extremely unequal as the Code of Thirteen and the Code of Sixteen, which divided people into “three classes and nine ranks” with wildly different blood prices (compensation for killing)

When Buddhism met secularized power, the seduction of power selectively weaponized the cornerstones of Buddhism

The rulers explained that the equality of all beings means “everyone has the Buddha-nature and can become a Buddha,” and that this equality is at the level of the soul and in future lives, not equality of class in real society

They used “karmic retribution and rebirth” to explain the suffering of reality — you are a serf in this life, subjected to exploitation and torture, because you created evil karma in a past life, and in this life you must endure suffering to atone for it; while the three great lords (aristocrats, high monks) sit high above because they accumulated immeasurable merit in past lives

Since the monasteries and the aristocrats had become big landlords, they needed a harsh legal code to protect their private property and to suppress serfs’ escapes and resistance. Those cruel punishments (gouging out eyes, cutting off hands, cutting out tongues) were essentially there to maintain this extremely unequal system of economic exploitation, not to practice the Dharma

The “equality of all beings” that Shakyamuni awakened to under the bodhi tree was a pure philosophy seeking liberation of the mind. But once that philosophy, in a particular historical time and space, was shaped into a secular ruling machine with land, armies, prisons and tax privileges, it could not avoid being corroded by power

The Code of Thirteen: A Hierarchical Order Wrapped in Buddhism

The Code of Thirteen was promulgated during the reign of the Fifth Dalai Lama, Lozang Gyatso (around the middle of the 17th century), and it was actually drafted and revised under the direction of his highest secular administrator (the Depa/Desi), Sonam Rabten

The new regime had only just been established: inside there was discontent from other schools, outside there was resistance from remnants of various forces, and the serfs at the bottom also needed to be tightly controlled. The Fifth Dalai Lama realized that chanting scriptures alone could not keep secular rule stable — there had to be “the handle of the knife.” And so a written code capable of intimidating everyone and establishing an absolute hierarchical order was ready to appear

The most surreal thing about this code is its “packaging.” The preface usually quoted Buddhist scriptures at length, praising the Buddha’s compassion and the justice of karmic retribution, and even claiming that the code was made to “spread the Dharma and save all sentient beings”

The blood price of a person of the highest of the high (a living Buddha, a great aristocrat) was “gold equal in weight to the corpse”

The blood price of a person of the lowest of the low (a vagrant, a blacksmith, a butcher, a woman, and so on) was merely “a single rope of straw.” This enormous rift between preface and main text vividly shows how skillfully the rulers turned religious doctrine into a tool of exploitation

The Code of Fifteen feels more interesting — a code issued even earlier

It was mainly the laws of the “fierce tiger” and the “fox,” plus the formal establishment of the “blood price law”: the legalization of class inequality

Although Changchub Gyaltsen advertised that he ruled according to the Buddhist “ten virtuous deeds” (not killing, not stealing, and so on), the core of the Code of Fifteen was the “Law on the Blood Price for Killing” and the “Law on Punishment for Injuring”

There is one historical detail that illustrates the point well: Changchub Gyaltsen himself had received strict training in Buddhist precepts and should in theory have been compassionate. Yet in the course of annexing other myriarchies and putting down rebellions, his methods were extremely cold and cruel, frequently using assassination, betrayal and torture. When he finally held power in his hands and his rule was secure, he transformed himself again, energetically building monasteries, inviting great monks to expound the scriptures, and holding forth in the code’s preface about Buddhist compassion and karma. This extreme pragmatism of a politician is a typical microcosm of rulers under Tibet’s system of the union of church and state

Changchub Gyaltsen: Aristocratic Tradition and Religious Discursive Power

This person feels very two-faced

But starting from his experience, it isn’t hard to understand

Changchub Gyaltsen’s first identity was not that of a monk; he came from the aristocracy, and the aristocracy had an unwritten tradition that someone in the family had to take monastic vows — in order to monopolize religious discursive power and monastery property

Changchub Gyaltsen came from Tibet’s famous Lang family. From childhood he was sent to study at the center of the Sakya regime that then ruled Tibet, essentially being groomed as his family’s future “political successor,” and even carrying a certain flavor of “political hostage.” So putting on the robe and studying the Dharma was more like obtaining an “entry ticket” into Tibet’s highest power club. At bottom he was a feudal lord carrying the mission of his family’s revival; Buddhist doctrine was only a part of his spiritual world, not a stumbling block to his political maneuvers

A survival view rather than a sheltering view: in troubled times, without absolute secular violence as a backing, no matter how profound the Dharma, it cannot protect you

Thunderbolt methods to establish authority: toward those political enemies who tried to restore the old order and the lords who rebelled, he showed no mercy, using the severe punishments of the Code of Fifteen to eliminate them physically and strip their property, establishing absolute class authority

Bodhisattva compassion to pacify the people: for the common people who had been through long years of war, he urgently needed to restore agricultural production. At this point he raised the banner of the Buddhist “ten virtuous deeds” again, built monasteries on a large scale, and preached karmic retribution. This was the lowest-cost and most effective tool for soothing society. With the warm veil of religion, he covered up the grim class oppression behind the new code

So in the world of politics, one must follow the iron law of the power game

Lhasa’s Aristocratic Class: Historical Legacies and Class Leaps

Lhasa’s aristocratic class

In Lhasa, a core of Buddhist doctrine, there exists a secular and extremely luxurious aristocratic class

Historically there were historical legacies, some old aristocrats

The descendants of these ancient families became “local emperors” on their own estates. When later a new church-and-state regime (such as the Phagmodrupa regime or the Ganden Phodrang regime) was established and unified Tibet, in order to stabilize the situation the rulers recognized the vested interests of these ancient families and directly converted them into high aristocrats under the new regime. The famous Dokhar and Lhagyari families, among others, all claimed descent from ancient royal houses or great ministers

Tibetan Buddhism established the system of reincarnated living Buddhas. Once a boy from an ordinary household was identified as the “soul boy” of the Dalai Lama, the Panchen Erdeni, or another great living Buddha, his entire family would undergo a dramatic class leap

The Dalai Lama’s family is called “Yabzhi” in Tibetan (meaning paternal family). The local government would immediately grant the family a top-level aristocratic title, a vast estate, hundreds or thousands of serfs, and enormous wealth. Several of the famous families in Tibetan history (such as the Lhalu and Yuthok families) were mostly relatives of successive Dalai Lamas. The sacredness of religion was here directly cashed out into extreme secular privilege

This includes rewards of power: a number of military-merit and bureaucratic aristocrats — those generals who won great distinction in overthrowing the old regime and putting down rebellions — would be granted land and serfs by the new regime and thereby rise into the ranks of the aristocracy

In old Tibet, the precondition for holding an estate was that you had to provide unpaid service (corvée) to the government. Aristocratic families had to send their sons to serve unpaid in the Kashag government in Lhasa as lay officials. If you refused to take office, or were dismissed for backing the wrong side in a political struggle, the government had the right to confiscate your estate and serfs at any time

The Great Mosque of Lhasa: The Religious Center of the Tibetan Muslim Community

Mosques

One of the largest, oldest and most influential Islamic religious sites in Tibet today is the Great Mosque of Lhasa

Tracing its history, it generally arrived in Lhasa along with Qing-dynasty military, administrative and commercial activity, and gradually a stable community formed

Then came the tea-horse road to South Asia, and a center of religious life was established

And then there is the Tibetan Muslim (Tibetan-speaking Muslim) community

Generally there are the five daily prayers, then weddings and funerals and other rituals

The way mosques entered China was essentially through Arab and Persian merchants in the Tang dynasty

They came by way of the maritime Silk Road, through Guangzhou or Quanzhou, and by way of the overland Silk Road, the Hexi Corridor, and the Western Regions

So it was the need for weekly worship, halal food, and a way of holding a community together that gathered into the earliest batch of mosques

The characteristic of mosques in China is that they do not change the structure of Chinese cities but are embedded in them

This is also where they differ from Buddhist temples and Daoist abbeys: Chinese mosques usually had to avoid occupying high ground, avoid direct confrontation with imperial power or with geomancy, and were more community-oriented and inward-facing — this is also a key reason Islam could survive for so long in China

The core belt in the northwest generally has the highest density, mostly Ningxia, Gansu, Qinghai, Xinjiang

Hui / Uyghur communities

The mosque is the core of the community; a mosque is not a place for individual spiritual cultivation but a symbol of group order

Buddhism cares more about: how to liberate the individual from suffering

Islam cares more about: how to keep a group of people living continuously under the same norms

The origin of the mosque determines that it doesn’t really need awe, doesn’t pursue mystery, and emphasizes discipline, time, direction, and community

The Taliban’s Hierarchical Structure and the Logic of Controlling Women

The Taliban evolving toward slavery

Today’s society requires that everyone be an equal individual before the law

Individuals can also choose their occupation, their movement, their thoughts and their gender roles

Authority also needs to be constrained by institutions, procedures and argumentation

For the Taliban, this is an ungovernable state

The Taliban’s organizational structure:

Religious authority

Personal loyalty

Tribal structure

So if you stratify humanity, the benefits that appear

You don’t need to justify inequality

It lowers the cost of governing society; all you need are orders and punishment

It manufactures fear and dependence

The real target is actually women as a group; every extremely conservative, totalitarian or theocratic regime takes controlling women as its first step

Women mean the continuity of society

Divinely Granted Power and the Dilemma of Monopolizing Interpretation

The Taliban’s big problem

Their power comes from a divine grant, not from the people

So their legitimacy comes from the right to interpret religious texts

Monopoly over orthodoxy

And a society of equals means that the right of interpretation can be challenged

Akhundzada: The Ideological Purity of a Mysterious Leader

Understanding the Taliban, understanding Akhundzada

A senior scholar of Islamic law who served as chief judge, issuing fatwas and adjudicating disputes

He is also one of the most mysterious leaders in the world, rarely appearing in public, with only a very few photographs from his early years — a strong sense of mystery

He has a fairly high degree of purity; as a religious scholar, Akhundzada insists on the most conservative and strictest interpretation of Islamic law. He believes his first task is to build in Afghanistan a society fully conforming to pure Islamic law, not to cater to modern international standards

Since the Taliban retook power in 2021, Akhundzada has been the final decision-maker pushing a series of hardline policies (such as banning women from university, banning women from working for NGOs, restoring public punishment). He has made clear that even at the enormous cost of full international isolation and economic sanctions, he will not compromise on the principles of sharia. For him, ideological purity matters far more than international recognition or economic development

The Taliban’s View of Women and the Logic of Suppressing Education

The thinking of the various schools within Islam is not the same

The Taliban’s is the grip of an ancient tribe

As for honor and women, women are regarded as the family’s private property and its core secret, so they should not be seen by outsiders

They believe modern education (especially education for women) is the poison of Western cultural invasion

Most Taliban come from remote villages, and in their eyes the urban women of the past 20 years who were well educated, worked in public and did not wear the burqa are symbols of the “American occupation” and of the corruption of a secular government. In the Taliban’s view, suppressing women is a political declaration of “purifying” society, announcing victory in the war and rebuilding Islamic orthodoxy

The Governing Faculty: Three Functions of a Rational Drive System

The governing faculty

As a person’s inner rational drive system

It determines how we see external things, make judgments and act on them. The Stoic tradition ranks it as one of the four cardinal virtues, alongside wisdom, justice and courage

Distinguishing — “things stand outside us… what is it that judges them? The governing faculty.” It is like an “internal processor,” sorting and evaluating the impressions of the senses

Deciding — “how does the governing faculty apply itself? Because everything rests on this.” It determines the direction of the will, making us choose goals in accord with nature and reason

Acting — when judgment is correct and the will is firm, it drives the body to carry out the corresponding action, and keeps the mind steady through the process

Breadth Gaps and Depth Gaps: Three Dimensions

I think that sometimes when you work on breadth gaps, it’s a bit different from depth gaps. When we understand this gap, it can’t really get away from three points: breadth, depth, and time.

The time gap is easy to understand — it’s mainly about a psychological gap: the instant when you get the first piece of information faster than others, and then you make this judgment, and this judgment may lead to some difference you can earn. You can call it a time gap, or a psychological gap.

The breadth gap, I think, is more about how broad your understanding is when you’re in a certain field. For example, you can understand it through a cultural system, or through a political system, and of course you can also make a unified decision through economic systems, psychological systems, and current physical, chemical, economic and other modeling methods. That, I’d say, is the breadth gap.

In this information age, it’s something people play with and chase, but there’s a bit of a problem, because we very easily fall into FOMO, the fear of missing out. Because when we’re pursuing something, we subconsciously wonder whether there’s still some point we’ve missed.

So the breadth gap isn’t for everyone. If you want to do a deep investigation, it can’t do without one thing: the depth gap. You understand this industry better than others, you understand this virtual asset better than others, you understand this market better, understand users better.

The Symbolism of the Buddha’s Eyes: The Oneness of All Things

The Buddha’s eyes & the eye of wisdom

In Kathmandu, I remember there is the largest round stupa in the world

The two eyes generally refer to the Buddha’s wisdom, watching in all four directions

The third eye (at the brow) symbolizes supreme wisdom and spiritual awakening, able to see through the appearances of the material world and look directly at the truth

The “?"-shaped symbol (at the position of the nose): this is actually the Nepali numeral “1.” It symbolizes the wholeness of “all things returning to one,” and also represents that the only path to liberation is practicing the Dharma, while also meaning that in the Buddha’s eyes all beings are equal

Daoist and Buddhist Worldviews Compared: Returning to One vs. Returning to Emptiness

“One” in a Buddhist context vs. in Daoism

Generally when we talk about the One, it’s the One in Daoism

The Dao produces the One, the One produces the two, the two produce the three, the three produce all things

And there’s a line after that, perhaps: all things return to the One

In Buddhist study it goes straight back to emptiness

All that has form is delusion

Things appear wildly different, but in fact none of them has an independent, self-existing nature

Buddhism is dependent origination and emptiness of self-nature: it is itself dependent origination → no self-nature → emptiness

And one doesn’t cling to emptiness either

The “?"-shaped symbol of the eye of wisdom (at the position of the nose) actually also symbolizes the wholeness of all things returning to one — in the Buddha’s eyes all beings are equal

Daoism returns to the One, Buddhist study returns to emptiness

I’m thinking about their worldviews: the Dao follows nature, and what Daoism fights against is fighting nature; the Buddhist theory of dependent origination fights against attachment to self and attachment to dharma

It feels like the meaning is the same: Buddhist study returns to emptiness, no longer dividing, and that state itself can also be a returning to the One — 0 can also be a 1

Genes Are Cross-Generational Encoded Programs

What does a gene generally determine?

Generally, it exists as a gene

A gene generally exists as an encoding; it has no consciousness, purpose, good or evil in itself

It is itself a stretch of information structure that can be copied, mutated and selected; a gene is itself program code, a compression algorithm

A person’s body will disappear, but genes don’t belong to any one person

Genes are cross-generational; they don’t care who you are, they only care whether they can be copied, whether they can be continued

It feels like each of us is only a temporary carrier of genes, not the owner of genes

Some people also think genes are the master and we are just robots executing gene instructions

What EvoMap Evolves Is the Success Rate

It feels like what evomap evolves isn’t the agent or the skills, but the success rate

Like each of us being a temporary carrier of genes rather than the owner of genes

LOL, that’s a bit overly Darwinian

But the current evomap also has a problem: there’s no real generational replication, so in biological terms it doesn’t quite count as real evolution

Clench Your Fist and There Is Nothing: Emptiness

Thinking of the emptiness in Buddhist study, a very vivid line

In the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the great swordsman Li Mu Bai says: clench your fist and there is nothing inside. Open your hands and you hold the whole world

Practicing On Myself the Question of How Technology Blends with the World

The question I think about most

The question of how future technology blends with the world

Not just culture, history, institutions

This concerns a very important point

Whether the idealized paradigm of the future can be well practiced on myself

Nagarjuna’s Dependent Origination and Emptiness, and Madhyamaka Philosophy

Nagarjuna

An ancient Indian Buddhist philosopher and founder of the Madhyamaka school, whose philosophy of emptiness defined the core of Mahayana Buddhist thought

The core theory is dependent origination and emptiness of self-nature, holding that all phenomena arise from causes and conditions and therefore have no self-nature, and pointing out that emptiness is not nihilism but reveals the conditional and interdependent nature of things’ existence, avoiding falling into nihilism

Diet and Geography Shape Similarity Between Species

The diet we discussed before is part of the reason

one factor that makes couples grow more and more alike

From the same kind to species and to gene, it’s the same

In the process of biological evolution, genes are by no means the whole program

What determines gene change also includes geographic location (dietary environment) + time

Darwin’s Restraint and Distinctions Regarding Faith

Seeing how Darwin and Emma lived together

Darwin himself broke away from Christian faith and kept questioning it

But he did not come into conflict with Emma’s faith

On the contrary he was very restrained, worried about affecting his family’s spiritual world

Clearly distinguishing “evolutionary biology” from “social Darwinism” — Darwin himself firmly opposed applying the mechanism of natural selection directly to human society, believing that doing so would only damage social order and distort the scientific meaning of evolution

Inclusive Fitness and Altruism in Evolution

Inclusive fitness

Whether a gene is retained by natural selection doesn’t depend on whether it “lets me live well,”

but on whether it lets “copies that carry this gene” spread more in the world

Natural selection doesn’t select individuals

It is the replication success rate of genes over time

Formal definition:

Direct fitness: how many offspring

Indirect fitness: having helped others, thereby sharing genes

The worker bee case: it doesn’t reproduce but protects its mother, and the mother produces a large number of sisters; helping the mother produce more sisters is a better deal than having its own children

Selfishness at the gene level

Expressed through altruism at the individual level

So evolution itself also contains altruism (possibly toward genes close to one’s own)

Inclusive Fitness and the Replication Logic of Genes

Inclusive fitness

Whether a gene is retained by natural selection doesn’t depend on whether it “lets me live well,”

but on whether it lets “copies that carry this gene” spread more in the world

Natural selection doesn’t select individuals

It is the replication success rate of genes over time

Formal definition:

Direct fitness: how many offspring

Indirect fitness: having helped others, thereby sharing genes

The worker bee case: it doesn’t reproduce but protects its mother, and the mother produces a large number of sisters; helping the mother produce more sisters is a better deal than having its own children

Selfishness at the gene level

Expressed through altruism at the individual level

So evolution itself also contains altruism (possibly toward genes close to one’s own)

Sensitive to Small Kindness Rather Than Grand Narratives

I’m a person with very strong sensitivity

But I won’t casually step into or choose a narrative

Do the people in Lhasa really have that many stories?

It feels like the way I’m opening up Lhasa is wrong

I don’t have any real resonance with these people who come to Lhasa

I don’t think I’d choose to socialize just for the sake of loneliness either

I’m quite immune to grand narratives; I feel some rejection toward all the stories they tell. Instead, because the sister at the restaurant gave me an extra egg — a little bit of kindness — I’m sensitive to these tiny real things

The Six-Syllable Mantra: Symbols of Compassion and Wisdom

The six-syllable mantra

Om mani padme hum

Om: symbolizes the primal sound of the universe. It represents our present secular body and mind full of wandering thoughts, and at the same time points to the pure body and mind of the awakened one. This is a starting point: acknowledging the present state and longing to transcend it

Mani: means “the mani jewel.” The jewel symbolizes the altruistic mind, compassion and love. Just as a jewel can relieve poverty, a compassionate mind can relieve spiritual poverty and inner attachment

Padme: means “lotus.” The lotus emerges from mud yet is unstained, symbolizing “wisdom” (prajna). On the philosophical level, it represents the realization of “emptiness” — seeing through appearances and not being entangled by secular delusion

Hum: means “indivisible.” It represents the merging of the earlier “compassion (method)” and “lotus (wisdom)” into one. In this state, the opposition between subject and object disappears, reaching a state of perfect harmony

Put together, the core meaning of the whole phrase can be understood as: “relying on the perfect union of compassion and wisdom, transforming an impure body and mind into the clear state of awakening

Reciting the six-syllable mantra is essentially an excellent tool for anchoring the mind

Silently reciting these six syllables rhythmically is like going on a leisurely yet focused hike; in the process the rhythm of the mantra becomes the rhythm of your footsteps, helping you shut out the noise outside and strip away redundant thoughts

It is not about asking for something outwardly, but about looking inward; when attention is fully concentrated on these six syllables, it’s easy to enter a highly lucid, single-pointed “flow” state

Righteous Delusion Syndrome and Collective Cognitive Deviation

Righteous delusion syndrome

Its symptom is feeling that everything you do is correct and beyond reproach, while other people have all kinds of faults and problems

In a country, it’s possible for everyone to come down with this illness

Overconfidence in one’s own assumptions or conjectures, and a strong tendency to be stubborn

Similar to psychological cognitive bias and delusional disorder

Its symptom is feeling that everything you do is correct and beyond reproach, while other people have all kinds of faults and problems

Under totalitarian rule, sometimes most people are made to hold a distorted cognition of certain facts, but not everyone is truly “ill” — it is more that social consensus is forced to deviate from reality

This is collective cognitive deviation

Grand Narratives and Microscopic Pain

People seem to love grand narratives

Pull the camera back and everything is scenery

Pull the camera in and everything is pain

The macro framework (world map, comparison of civilizations) gives readers an expansive view;

The micro details (individual fear, street-level observation) give the text warmth and a sense of being there;

Commentators hold that the macro argument is more conspicuous, but what the author really wants to say is often conveyed through micro experience. In other words, the “macro” is the stage, the “micro” is the soul

The Relationship Between Suffering and the Strength of Faith

It really is so

The more suffering a place has, the stronger the power of faith

The more developed a place is, the weaker the power of faith, because many things in reality are controllable there

Faith easily gives suffering an outlet and a meaning

But if the subsistence level is solved, faith is more likely a matter of personal spiritual choice

The Source and Nature of the Power of Faith

At the top level, you really do need the power of faith

Because you may affect this world or your surrounding environment

And the element of randomness and luck seems so important

The Real Form of India’s Liberal Democracy

On the road of freedom and democracy, India has gone further

India’s institutional goal is oriented toward liberal democracy

The constitution explicitly takes democracy, elections, judicial independence and freedom of speech as the sources of legitimacy

Changes of regime are the norm; the government is naturally suspected and criticized

India’s current problems are the real form it takes in a highly pluralistic society with a low average level of education

Evolution Is a Law of Survival, Not an Option

Evolution is not optional; it’s a law of survival

Introducing the autogame-17/evolver Self-Evolving Agent Protocol

Introducing the autogame-17/evolver project

Essentially it is a self-evolving agent protocol that can write its own code

It can automatically generate and optimize its own code

It can be built according to a certain standard, PCEC, used to define self-evolving behavior

How it’s implemented:

Automatic log analysis and problem detection, checking for repeated problems to avoid falling into a repair loop

The GEP protocol, the gene evolution protocol, including which gene is used, the points of innovation, and the degree of detail and degree of innovation

Configurable evolution strategy: generating evolution instructions from logs, analyzing the type of problem, and choosing the appropriate strategy

Dynamic loop execution

Signal deduplication and protection: reading the last 8 evolution histories to prevent repeatedly fixing the same problem

And a reusable asset library: the reusable assets that can be formed are gene and capsule

One is the gene, which represents a general problem-solving approach

The other is the capsule, a record of a specific successful case, an already-validated template record

And A2A cross-system washing, the A2A cross-system evolution protocol

The Diamond Sutra’s Core Wisdom and the Idea of Breaking Attachment

I find the Diamond Sutra quite interesting; I should read it through systematically

The Diamond Sutra also belongs to the prajna class of scriptures, and its core subject is wisdom and breaking attachment

Prajna is the most fundamental wisdom in Buddhism, the awakened wisdom that sees reality directly

Prajna: the ability to see the world as it already is, and therefore to no longer be trapped by it

As a representative work of prajna, the Diamond Sutra repeatedly speaks of “emptiness”

All that has form is delusion; if you see all forms as no-form, you see the Tathagata

Nothing has a fixed, unchanging essence; don’t take everything as a permanent self — the world is flowing

And then it breaks the four notions: the notion of self, the notion of person, the notion of sentient beings, the notion of a lifespan

The most famous line is that one — “let the mind arise without dwelling anywhere” — which influenced later Chan Buddhism

The Diamond Sutra is said to have been taught by Shakyamuni, and later recorded in the form of a dialogue between his disciple Subhuti and the Buddha

“Diamond” signifies the hardest thing, able to break through everything

The Three Great Prajna Classics and Their Correspondence to the Three Trainings

Prajna generally has three great classics

The Prajna Sutras

The Diamond Sutra

The Heart Sutra

They keep dismantling your cognitive structure

Prajna has very high status; it is the highest form of liberating wisdom, the fundamental key to awakening (becoming a Buddha)

The three trainings of Buddhism formed in the Buddha’s own lifetime

Use precepts to regulate body and speech

Use concentration to regulate the mind

Use wisdom to cut off ignorance

The problems the three trainings correspond to are the confusion at three levels of a person:

The behavioral level: loss of control over behavior, creating karma

The psychological level: scatteredness, attachment, churning emotions

The cognitive level: ignorance, wrong views, attachment to self

Attachment to Buddhist Study Is Another Kind of Self-Attachment

Isn’t being too attached to the idea that Buddhist study can solve your problems also “self-attachment”?

Dependent Origination and the Buddhist Wisdom of No-Self

In Buddhism, dependent origination is one of the most basic laws: nothing in the world has an independent, eternal substance; everything is conditions gathering and conditions falling apart. So the law of dependent origination is also a foundation for understanding emptiness.

Our habitual way of thinking is built on substances — we assume there’s an independent “I” in the world. But under the law of dependent origination, there are no nouns in this universe at all; everything is a process in the middle of happening. Take away any single thing and you can’t find its essence. A glass of water, a coffee bean, a cup of coffee, a cup — each is countless variables gathering when conditions meet, and it may only be a temporary form.

If you apply that logic to the ego, you find that all memories, all personality, all suffering, all desires are not inherent, but assembled from our genes, our family of origin, the books we read, the scenery we’ve seen, the food we eat, and the firing of neurons in the brain. It’s a temporary process.

So the twelve links of dependent origination are a perfectly closed-loop algorithm: there’s ignorance, then there’s craving, then birth, aging, sickness and death. Because there is emptiness, there is existence.

The Sera Monastery Dharma Assembly: Practising Together

Introducing the dharma assembly

This time at Sera Monastery I ran into a dharma assembly

It felt really interesting — I just missed the Sera Monastery debate, but I did catch the assembly

A dharma assembly is generally a formal gathering where people practise together following a ritual: chanting sutras, bowing to the Buddha, dedicating merit

Chanting: everyone recites a sutra or a Buddha’s name together, for example the Diamond Sutra or the Heart Sutra; the point is to gather awareness and settle the mind

Repentance and bowing: usually there’s a repentance ritual, one bow every three steps, full prostrations

Dharma talks: mostly explanations of Buddhism close to daily life, rather than abstract philosophy

Dedication: usually the merit from practice at the assembly is dedicated to all beings, to family, to the deceased, to world peace

The purpose of a dharma assembly is generally collective practice, which makes it easier to reach a stable, focused state

They generally have deliverance assemblies, blessing assemblies, and some large flower fairs

What’s quite interesting is that a lot of locals are willing to take part in these assemblies. Because I feel an assembly like this is essentially creating a public space for them — the same time, the same place, some shared memories. That’s what you’d call a sense of ritual

I think they probably solve some problems too — whether it’s emotional uncertainty, or a sense of collective belonging, or a sense of security, or family ties, that kind of social responsibility

Actually these assemblies generally serve several functions: for a small number of people they may be a path to awakening, but for many people they carry social functions — they can be a social adhesive, and they can also be a stable structure that can be inherited

Collective Memory and the Meaning of Being Present

Actually, it suddenly struck me that it’s just like when we’re at a concert, or some New Year’s Eve event: it’s essentially creating a shared time for you, and a shared space, and with that it gives you a share of shared meaning. That part is collective memory

I feel the human species depends enormously on collective memory: a group of people, at a fixed time, in a fixed place, repeatedly confirming in a fixed form who we are, what the world is like, and what is important. A very important way for us to do that is to be present: the body has to be present, emotions have to resonate. No explanation is needed; language needs repeating, because the human brain isn’t good at building meaning over the long term, or at building a stable sense of existence. So in life, when death or accidents happen, the rational narrative collapses. So an individual strongly needs a kind of narrative. And as collective memory it can be a stability passed down through generations; it solves some of the shared problems of the group — after all, humans are social animals

The Brain in a Vat and What Counts as Real

The brain in a vat that Little Rabbit mentioned

How do we know we’re really in the real world, and not being deceived?

Could all our current perception, memory and experience just be a brain soaked in nutrient fluid, simulated by a computer?

The body no longer exists; there’s only a brain in a vat full of nutrient fluid, and a supercomputer sends electrical signals into the brain, and those signals perfectly simulate everything you now see, hear and touch

It feels like everything you do is a signal

I thought: if “real” means the feelings are exactly the same, the behavioural outcomes exactly the same, the social interactions exactly the same

then is the difference between the real world and a simulated world still that big?

Similar to the brain-computer structure

This makes us reflect: what gives us the right to believe the things we believe?

Could narrative have been fabricated, could experience be simulated, how do ritual and belief and shared memory shape who we are

Human consciousness feels so tiny, and the ending doesn’t seem to matter that much either. So many questions in this world we can’t get answers to in a whole lifetime; we can only keep stumbling forward, groping along the way

The Stoic Dichotomy of Control and the Philosophy of Filtering

The core wisdom of Stoicism, the dichotomy of control: some things are the inevitable laws of the external environment, uncontrollable variables. If you cling to those variables, if you cling to people being harsh with you, or try to change how others see things, you fall into internal exhaustion

Not changing, only filtering — that’s actually a clear-eyed philosophy of living too. A lot of the time, when we try to “change” other people, or “change” our own rough edges in order to fit into a group, we’re swimming against the current

In the short term we’re adapting to the environment; in the long term we’re shaping the environment. That’s human agency too: every time you change yourself and every time you filter other people, you’re fine-tuning the surroundings around you

So over a longer stretch of time, the books you choose to read, the products you build, the roads you walk, the people you decide to keep around you will eventually interweave into a “field” entirely defined by you, and become a new you

Suffering Comes from Expectation versus Reality

Suffering comes from the mismatch between reality and expectation, desire, or values. Buddhism has a similar saying: “suffering” comes from clinging to your own wrong understanding of, or expectations about, the world

Stumbling on a morning-tea shop in Chiang Mai

In Chiang Mai there’s a shop similar in style to Guangzhou morning tea, which was really funny. At the time my travel buddy and I found a room, and it felt pretty out of the way; unexpectedly there were a few shops nearby with no heat at all on Google Maps. The culture felt not that close to ours, but inside they were actually selling morning tea — a purely local restaurant, with no Chinese menu and no English menu

It was a shop we just walked past. Such a nice surprise. The density in Chiang Mai is really high! If you’re out scouting shops, almost every couple of steps there’s a particularly surprising place

Chaos and order: the aesthetic gap in urban governance

Pokhara has very few rules, but it always feels messy — the streets are a mess. Walking around you can see a huge amount of detail, because the infrastructure isn’t well developed yet, and the buildings are all different colors; the whole city gives me the feeling of being in a chaotic growth phase.

But by comparison, I think some places are not like that. Even though there are a lot of rules there, the management is very refined, and it presents a series of clear beauty, minimalist beauty, and the beauty of negative space. The key is that the signage there is clear and the standards are unified. So good order tends to give people a better experience, doesn’t it? Just imagine.

27. Feasibility validates zero-to-one, scale validates compounding

Many people are only there because they stand in a position that can be seen, can be amplified, and can be explained as ability

26. Tencent and Apple: late-mover advantage locks in ecosystem value

Feasibility is the most basic theoretical verification of whether a company’s zero-to-one holds up

What scale verifies is whether there’s a way to generate compounding from 1 to 100, usually judged together with the industry’s market size — how big the cake in an industry is

24. Microsoft’s AI strategy: building a general-purpose foundation system

manus validated the feasibility of one path

How a Chinese company transforms overnight into an American company

20. Space data centres: the ultimate direction for AI compute

Will Meta also go through something like Google’s integration of DeepMind — a painful transition period?

11. HK stock valuation: international capital vs. mainland money

There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in

Everything has cracks; that’s how the light gets in

I’ve sort of fallen in love with my own imperfection

Because I’m imperfect, I am me…

Lithography machines are the biggest problem in chipmaking

Lithography machines are a very big problem we face right now

Among the hundreds of steps in chip manufacturing, 20–50 of them require lithography — and each one needs a lithography machine

The strongest in chip manufacturing right now is TSMC, with Samsung and Intel following

Creator thinking is production-side cognition

Try as much as possible to shift your thinking

To creator thinking

Note: creator thinking

Creator thinking is about the level of exposure and understanding on the production side, not the level of exposure and understanding on the consumption side

Wabi-sabi: a plain mind and the traces of time

Wabi-sabi, broken down, is

Wabi is a subjective state of mind: being content with simplicity, representing the ability, in a world of material excess, to actively choose simplicity and restraint, and to find spiritual abundance in that “insufficiency”

Sabi: objective time, meaning the traces time leaves on matter. It’s the green rust on bronze, the cracks in wood, the sheen on leather after long use (Patina)

Wabi-sabi is “a person with the heart of ‘wabi’ appreciating the beauty of ‘sabi’.”

The empty grip of the bronze standing figure

Asleep for three thousand years, waking to astonish the world

The bronze standing figure, hailed as the king of the world’s bronze statues, is enormously tall with exaggerated facial features, and one super interesting thing is the countless associations that revolve around the emptiness in its hands: some say what the two hands grip at the axis is an elephant tusk, some think it’s a staff (divine authority), some think it’s a jade cong (to communicate with heaven). The emptiness gives infinite imagination, and around it there are many figurines and explanations — very interesting

Sanxingdui: the beauty of the gap between divine and royal power

Thoughts on Sanxingdui:

Sanxingdui: the gap between divine power and royal power

Bronze masks: the gap where the mask separates from the human face

Artifact restoration: the gap between restoration and damage

The bronze standing figure: those grasping hands, the gap between the real and the void

The bronze sacred tree: the gap between heaven and earth

Buried, asleep for thousands of years: the gap between destruction and sublimation

Now: the gap between history and the future

Conversation is co-creation, not explanation or proof

The purpose of chatting — I remember why I could always rattle on before

Chatting is to reduce uncertainty

Two people are more like co-creating something

Rather than explaining or proving something

That sets a very high bar for both people

You’d think about exploring, digging, asking each other deep questions

The outside world is a stage, the inner world is a lab

Treat the external world as a stage and the inner world as a laboratory

Fragmented Knowledge Needs Systematic Modeling

I think what flomo insight said is very true

Turn your process of learning any field into a system modeling project, rather than recording scattered points — immediately draw a system relationship map for the core concepts you learn. This concept map must be deeply organized and created based on your own understanding, with a certain subjectivity and personal experience

I’m looking for a way to clearly organize flomo’s fragmented information

Data Sovereignty and the Customization Dilemma

It’s a pretty cruel thing

When all the data sits on remote servers

And there’s another problem

When you have highly customized needs for your data, you don’t know what you should do

And how to choose

The Color of Water Is Optics and Geology

What’s so interesting about water

From what perspective?

In the city, water is a transparent functional liquid: washing your face, flushing the toilet, cooling a CPU

This is colored water — not dye, but an optical effect

The lake bed is all travertine deposits (similar to tufa), like a white reflector board. Sunlight enters the water, and short-wavelength blue-green light is more easily scattered back, so what you see is layer upon layer of cyan, green, blue

You can’t see the bottom of many lakes, but in Jiuzhaigou many of the haizi let you see tree trunks, rocks, and sunken wood several meters, even a dozen meters, down

Waterfalls, steps, and lakes connect into a network: upstream dissolves calcium → downstream deposits calcium → forming layer upon layer of steps → water flows over them.

This is called a living landform, not a dead lake

The color changes too — on a sunny day it leans blue-green, on a cloudy day it leans deep cyan, in autumn with the colored forest it’s like a palette, in winter when frozen it’s like a crystal specimen

Zheduo Mountain’s Altitude and Self-Perception

How high is Zheduo Mountain

Second time here

Why does it still feel so easy

Feels like I’ve gotten stronger

Li Bai’s Desires and His Heroic Spirit

Of course Li Bai didn’t know why either, but he could give free play to what he felt. He says directly that he wants money, wants wine, wants women, wants fame and fortune, wants to destroy, wants to kill — so I say that what Li Bai expresses in his poetry is striving for life, fighting for life. — There is a strong desire in it, and it first shows in his knight-errant thinking!

Modern Pilgrimage Is a Conscious Choice

Pilgrimage today is not the product of what it was back then.

Many people today have power and choice; they can choose to go, and they go consciously, not without awareness.

How the White-Haired Soldiers of a Lonely Fortress Internalized Their Identity

A lone fortress a thousand miles away, all white-haired soldiers; in life a man of the Han family, in death a soul of the Great Tang.

The reason they could hold on is that, across half a century of isolation,

The identity of “Tang garrison soldier” had been internalized from a social role into the substance of their lives.

Losing that identity would be to erase every trace of their existence over the past decades.

Ah — faith turns hardship into meaning.

29. Princess Bhrikuti: A Buddhist Pioneer Across the Himalayas

The mind of the past cannot be grasped

The mind of the present cannot be grasped

The mind of the future cannot be grasped

Sincerity at a given moment is precious, rare, even a little sacred.

The self now may not be the self of that moment either.

Some of the most moving human states are a single blossoming that exists only at a particular coordinate of time and space; however hard you try to imitate or recreate it afterward, it carries the trace of being “deliberate” or “already knowing it is seen.”

Still, I am just me — the me in change, and yet the me that does not change.

People change, time changes, place changes, but the core has not changed.

20. The Collapse of Inner Dialogue in Extreme Fatigue and Non-Self

There’s a WeChat feature I quite like now.

Fn — press and hold to speak into text.

This kind of convenience is something I’m very happy to learn from.

11. I-Thou Relations and the Self Built Through Narrative Identity

Love the version you polished with your own hands.

The Balance Point in a Relationship: Letting It Happen Rather Than Grasping It

If it doesn’t happen today and you still respect the completeness of this moment, then you’re at the balance point

A good relationship isn’t something you grab hold of

It’s something you allow to happen

The Cremation Temple: A Survival Lesson in Living Toward Death

Sister Xiaomei went to the cremation temple too

Little Rabbit and I talked about this topic, and it felt like a very strong “living toward death”: using the certainty of death to feed back into the quality of living. When you see with your own eyes a person turn from a solid body into ashes within a few hours, you get a strong sense of meaninglessness, but that sense of meaninglessness eventually turns into a craving to live. Precisely because death is the unavoidable endpoint, every moment in which we “are alive” seems immeasurably precious

At that point the obsessions seem to be able to be set down too, and you can more peacefully accept impermanence and loss

Bolamula: Opening the Treasure House Tests Ultimate Human Nature

Sure enough, Bolamula is just like Duojie said — like a treasure house. The moment that gate opens, what gets tested is ultimate human nature, but human nature is usually greedy, and once it wants to take, it can’t be held back

Respect human nature

Self-Approval and the Meaning of Inner Consistency

If a person doesn’t even approve of himself, then what meaning do his praises have

If a person does things against his own heart, all he pleases is the surface

A Chance Encounter with a Local Photography Enthusiast in a Lhasa Café

Just now while I was eating, a local person struck up a conversation with me

I had come to the Xire Beicuo Café here, a café inside the Jokhang Temple area, where you can see the Jokhang Temple and the Potala Palace

I didn’t expect the café to be so crowded; when I went up, only the sunny spot was left, so I sat in the sun and felt very sunburned

Chatting with the local waiters, I found their names very interesting

Then a waiter specially found me a shady spot, but it meant sharing a table

It was a Lhasa local couple; their original home seems to be in a place nearby at over 4,000 meters altitude, where they did business, but they’ve also settled in Lhasa now. That place seems colder, with stronger wind compared to Lhasa

What’s very interesting is that the guy also loves photography

Some of the photos he took I quite like

It feels like a kind of humanity he shoots out of blur

There’s a sort of blurriness, a sense of reality and of motion (a sense of life)

I feel he photographs with his own unique perspective

Yes, he said he really admires Han Chinese people, how every place they go they try to understand this or that about it

His attitude toward connection is open but not urgent; he just happened to find me working nearby, which sparked his curiosity

Showing Up Casually When the People You Care About Need You

The people you care about

Of course you should show up casually every time they need you

A Gentle but Lucid Retreat Strategy

In that case, it’s better to use waiting to miss it

A gentle and lucid retreat

A Life Where Happiness Is Tightly Bound to Despair

If there is happiness, it is always tightly bound to despair

If life could be lived again, I’d like to pick a few fragments and repeat them

Reflecting on Opportunity Cost and Getting Locked Into a Decision

I still don’t think clearly about opportunity cost when doing many things

So much so that when other choices appear, I’m already locked into some earlier decision

Maybe it’s also because my understanding and prediction of the world aren’t accurate enough

Cumulus Clouds Gathering and Dispersing, and the Wonder of a Life’s Narrative

The temperature came up in the afternoon; the sun was too strong, the ground baked, temperature rose, forming strong air currents, and I watched the air arch upward in clumps

The Lhasa sky now has one lump of cumulus after another

As the sun’s elevation angle dropped noticeably, the ground heating weakened

The clouds began to collapse and disperse, the water vapor was all drawn away, scattered into air

In a Lhasa café, gazing out at the Potala Palace in the distance

Finished Tibet Journal; the feeling is very strange

In the same place connected to me, across a river of more than 20 years of time, watching the story of two other people starting out from Tibet, their lives …

One thing I find quite interesting: the female lead’s habit of keeping a journal. That habit strikes me as so great — recording your life and daily routine, the things you find interesting, in a plain unadorned way; maybe this is your own life narrative

I’m a bit curious and looking forward to it — what will my own life narrative be like?

The Six-Syllable Mantra: On Compassion and Wisdom

The six-syllable mantra

About compassion and wisdom

The Six-Syllable Mantra Seeks Inward by Nature

The essence of the six-syllable mantra is seeking inward; it is a tool system for wiping the dust off your own heart

A Story Is an Incident, Wrapped

A story is really an incident

Because of the packaging

Those things you can’t walk out of

Differences in Public Virtue and Privateness Between China and the West

The different faces of small towns

Westerners value public virtue, while Chinese people care more about privateness. Westerners believe the cleanliness of the external environment has a big impact on their own quality of life, so people keep streets, squares and parks very clean — that’s what real decency is. Chinese people care about their own patch of sky under their roof; some people often keep their homes spotless, yet toss litter as soon as they’re outside, and slop dirty water onto the street outside their gate. In China, some people don’t consider the street part of their own environment, so littering carries almost no psychological barrier

A series of causes raised in connection with this phenomenon, and the solutions

Humans Need History and Stories

Humans need history and stories; only with history and stories is there a sense of existence

The Symbolic Meaning of the Kapok Flower

Kapok

The flower of grown-ups

Flowers first, leaves after

Arrives with a bang, leaves with dignity

Also called the hero tree

The Joy and Pain of Reading

Reading is sometimes a thing full of both joy and pain. The joy comes from new information and knowledge, and from beautiful writing, which produces the pleasure of a meeting of minds; the pain is because we always run into serious political, cultural and life-philosophy questions, and the truths and answers we think we see collide violently with the cruelty of reality, and these collisions may show no hope of resolution in a whole lifetime

Once a person opens the door to independent thinking, his steps walk the road of seeking truth, and that road is always full of thorns. So in the end only a small number of people brave the hardship and keep walking on such a road; fewer still may become the light of hope for humanity’s path toward brightness

Xu Zhiyuan’s Background in Computational Thinking

Xu Zhiyuan’s computational thinking?

He did his undergraduate degree at Peking University

in computer science

His works themselves — the questions also seem to be structured

He is sensitive to systems, modernization and mechanisms

Habitually starting from underlying logic rather than emotion

Transposing systems thinking into the humanities

Observing Human Nature in Group Evil

Looking at this society as it is now

It seems that the cost of a person doing evil is higher

Because when you’re alone your capacity to do evil is relatively weak, and it easily endangers your own survival, while doing good is more beneficial to your survival. We do run into individual wicked people; the main reason a single person does evil is the overreaction produced by his own sense that his survival is threatened

When people come together to form a group, it becomes easier to do evil, because when the group does evil, it is approved within the same group, so the individual doesn’t feel it is evil

This is also the human-nature observation behind the launching of wars, the massacre of the Jews, the Nanjing Massacre

The Wild Panda’s Solitary Survival Strategy

Wild pandas are solitary animals almost all their lives

Their way of life is highly solitary + low-frequency, purposeful socializing

They generally use scent as a message board; eating, activity and resting are basically done alone

They rely heavily on scent marking (urine, anal gland secretions)

Why did pandas evolve to be solitary?

Bamboo requires long feeding times, and competition is fierce

Mountains are not suited to coordinated movement

The panda’s ancestors were more typical carnivorous bears

So the panda’s solitude is the survival strategy with the highest energy efficiency and the lowest risk

Liking Simplicity, Embracing Simplicity

Liking simplicity, embracing simplicity

Tagore’s Astonishment at India

Tagore was the same. “Everything I have seen here is simply astonishing. This country bears no resemblance to any other country. Everything here is an utterly different scene. They have awakened the whole people without distinction.”

The Driving Mechanisms Behind Phenomena

Behind anything, there is a series of mechanisms driving how it runs

What that mechanism actually is, is very puzzling, and very legendary

It gives us a lot to think about

It can be human nature, it can be institutions, it can be culture

To Become a Writer, First Become Yourself

To become a good writer, you first have to become yourself

Details as Raw Material for Observing People

I think details are raw material

Some small details from which to observe a person and the movements of his inner world

And also the era background and social background beneath this person

It feels so interesting

A Three-Layer Analysis of Precious Metals’ Wild Swings

I feel that in the earlier era of big gains in precious metals and in the current era of big declines, there are actually three logics contained. One is why it surged, the other is why it crashed.

In fact, when we analyze a market now, we do it along two dimensions: long term and short term. The long term is easy to explain, which is…

The Relativity and Dynamic Switching of Safe-Haven Assets

Everything is relative; only the speed of light is constant. So what is a safe-haven asset — assets are relative too. When your dollar is very risky, naturally silver and gold are the safe-haven assets; when silver and gold are very risky, the dollar becomes the safe-haven asset. So yes, and these concepts are relative too.

Gray Zones and Capital Power in a Fast-Developing Society

Any fast-developing society can hardly avoid gray zones entirely

“As long as you can drive GDP, employment and tax revenue, plenty of things can be overlooked.”

But once the power monopolized by this private capital becomes too great

Then this capital may grow into a second power center …

Shaping Yourself Into the Person You Want to Be

Doing the things you want to do

That is the freedom of our generation

And then shaping yourself

The purpose of shaping yourself is to become the person you want to become

Destiny as Script: A Reflection on Life

After all, it is my own destiny star

And also my own script

So, go forward

Straight ahead

Game Theory in Life and Thinking About the Rules of the Game

if life is a game

Carnival said that a colleague next to him who arrived 10 days later than me didn’t pass probation and left; he had ended up doing tasks he wasn’t good at, while Carnival had joined earlier. Then the task he might have been good at was given to Carnival first, and that task looked hard but was actually easy, so I got results without spending much effort

So understanding the rules of this game can give us an advantage

A very common scenario you find in life is the game, for example two people dating, or colleagues competing for a project at the same time; none of these can escape strategy, so game theory, the mathematical method for studying strategic decisions, is a great cheat sheet for playing this game

Pure game theory says you should always choose “steal,” because from a mathematical standpoint that is the safest choice — it either wins you everything or, in the worst case… you get nothing (just as when you split you got nothing). Yet the behavior of human players often defies cold logic. On the show, more than 53% of real contestants chose to cooperate (“split”), despite facing the temptation to stab the other in the back — and from the narrow standpoint of game theory, that is an “irrational” choice

The real winning secret lies in knowing when to cooperate and when to be selfish, and how to encourage others to cooperate with you

Long-term game theory is itself reciprocity and forgiveness

In the short term, it seems the environment shapes us

But in the long run, it is we who shape the environment

Cooperation beats pure selfishness

The best solution in the prisoner’s dilemma of a zero-sum game is tit for tat

First step both cooperate, then every subsequent step follows what the other side did in the previous step. In other words, start friendly, then mirror your opponent: if your opponent cooperates, you cooperate next; if your opponent defects, you defect next

Why tit for tat succeeds — once you dissect it down to human nature and the rules of the real world, we find this strategy actually has a few principles: start with goodwill, be capable of triggered retaliation, forgive promptly, be transparent in behavior

Designing a sense of boundaries matters; you must make your behavior somewhat predictable or transparent

Crucially, the tit-for-tat way of handling things doesn’t stay angry forever. It retaliates only once, and if the other side returns to cooperating, tit for tat immediately forgives and cooperates again. It doesn’t keep punishing past mistakes beyond the initial equivalent response. This willingness to forgive prevents a relationship from deteriorating into endless feuding

In a sense, game theory rediscovered the secret by which human society has kept cooperation stable for thousands of years

But if human nature in the real world were only this, peace would be easy; in fact it isn’t

Imagine two players of tit for tat sending a wrong signal; for instance one defects by accident because of a misunderstanding (or is believed to have defected), and the other retaliates right away. The first player, unaware of his own mistake, now sees someone defecting by accident and starts retaliating too. They may fall into an endless war of revenge that was never intended. This is strikingly similar to blood feuds and even international conflicts in the real world: both sides insist “he struck first,” and keep retaliating for the last attack, until both are trapped in a destructive cycle

To solve this, game theorists tested various adjustments to tit for tat. The best option is to occasionally forgive an apparent betrayal, in case it was just an accident. This strategy, called “generous tit for tat,” retaliates maybe nine times out of ten, but once lets an opponent’s betrayal pass and keeps cooperating. This short grace period can dampen the echo of revenge. If it was just a misunderstanding or one slip by the opponent, you avoid a war of attrition. In Axelrod’s later research, when some randomness or error was introduced, this more forgiving strategy began to outperform strict tit for tat

Essentially, a slightly “repay evil with good” (New Testament-style) approach helps avoid disaster. We see this often in healthy relationships: don’t take offense at every single slight. Maybe your friend was in a bad mood and snapped at you; if you snap back immediately, things only escalate. But if you forgive once (that is, “gracefully ignore the first strike”), they may realize their mistake, and peace is preserved

Game theory is like a game method; applied to our lives, we rationally assess and hold our position, avoid sunk costs, focus on our own task, and build a good system

Game theory is also a lens: if we do this thing, we think about how others will react, and what chain reactions we ourselves will produce, and naturally we can face social situations more easily

Rethinking the Data on Cigarette and Cannabis Harm

There’s one thing I think also has to be considered: all the data right now shows that smoking is still the more dangerous one. But, how should I put it, with cannabis the THC strains keep getting stronger — what people use now may be double what it was ten years ago. And the number of people observing cannabis is still nowhere near as broad as for cigarettes, so maybe there’s still a lack of data to prove it. Even if science currently shows cannabis may be a bit more harmful, I feel cigarettes are the more harmful ones. But I also think cannabis may still need a long observation period. Over the long run, I don’t think either one, cigarettes or cannabis, can be beautified.

The Food Logic of Shops Missing from the Map

And that dan dan noodle place happened to be unmarked on Google Maps, and unmarked on Amap too. I think I now have a very valuable rule of thumb: if it isn’t on Amap, it might be incredibly good, or it might be incredibly bad — it depends on whether there are actually people inside.

If there are people, and lots of them, then I say just walk in without thinking. If there’s no one, then I say stay away.

Sammādhi in Play: All In on the Process, Not the Result

I think the word “sammādhi” is quite interesting — it’s a rather advanced, specialised term. It comes from Sanskrit, and in modern language it’s a state of extreme focus, a flow state with nothing else in mind. When you’re immersed in it there may be no stray thoughts at all, just complete focus on the action right now.

“Sammādhi in play” is really a state of mind — like a very light pull, free and unattached. It means that in the process we’re extremely focused, extremely committed, going all out to create and to experience. But we’re also not that attached to the result; it’s a state of returning to the process itself. We can only play the role we’re playing well, but the result — whether we win or lose the game — is not something we can fully control.

So the real world has a very large “sammādhi in play” too, because this world itself is one enormous playground.

Chasing a Life That Is Finite but Meaningful

No longer chasing the infinite

But something finite, yet extraordinary in meaning

Recalling and Thinking Through Places

Taking each place, each location, as the centre

recalling and thinking about the scene back then

Who says memories can’t be happy?

Where Meta-Awareness and Narrative Ability Fork

I feel this Guangdong sister is quite like me — we both have fairly strong meta-awareness plus fairly strong narrative ability

So our emotions are very stable, calm

We both dig into the underlying logic, the essence

We’re both quite curious

But I’m really curious what the fork looks like after these two abilities, meta-awareness and narrative

Type A: meta-awareness dissolves itself, action gets understood in advance, impulses get named, emotions get neutralised quickly, so the self becomes clearer and clearer and the sense of existence gets lighter and lighter — a bystander who can step away at any moment

Type B: they’re just as clear-headed, but they don’t use that clarity as a brake; they know they’re afraid, hesitating, constructing a narrative, but that isn’t a reason not to act. So meta-awareness is only the direction for review, a tool for judgement, discovery and cognition, and it allows the narrative to be generated after the action

Her understanding of human nature runs deeper; she thinks more about why people are the way they are

My understanding of the cultural angle is deeper, because I observe within various cultural groups and think about why this person or group would do that

Why Negative Information Travels Further

It’s just biological instinct

The impact left by negative information far exceeds that of positive information

Including, as it spreads, the attention it receives

Embedded, Scene-Based Content

What Lobster embeds a lot of the time is a scene

29. The core of US investment: control under extreme circumstances

Large models are relatively still a game for a few giants, so VCs no longer have that many opportunities at the large-model layer

Instead, once super-apps took off, dollar VCs grabbed many of the companies in the market with a chance to profit, and could make some returns

25. Manus validated the path from a Chinese company to a US company

Tencent’s position in the AI field is similar to Apple’s

Both have late-mover advantage

The iOS ecosystem and Tencent’s own ecosystem are a basic

Both have gathered a large amount of talent

They don’t need to deliberately seize the earliest market, but rather contend for the final form; they can lock in value through their ecosystems

WeChat, QQ, games, Channels, WeCom, payments, cloud — these already have a huge number of users and real data

What decides things in this process? Their main profit-making businesses? That also seems to explain why Google can go all-in, with the search scenario set against the chat model

Tencent’s endpoint form is very clear:

👉 WeChat + AI

👉 Games + AI

👉 Enterprise services + AI

Apple’s endpoint form is also clear:

👉 Devices + AI

👉 System-level intelligence

What is Meta’s core asset? Attention? (feels), social relationships? Ad monetization?

23. Meta’s anxiety: it hasn’t found its own path yet

Where will Microsoft go next year?

OpenAI is slowly detaching from Microsoft

Microsoft’s direction: in 2025 it focuses on cloud business and AI platform revenue, making large-scale investments in AI infrastructure

Microsoft doesn’t want to be just a “model landlord,” but wants to turn Azure into a “general-purpose AI foundation system” that can plug in many models (including its own MAI, in-house + third party). This is a bit like Windows in the early days “letting in” all kinds of software ecosystems, except this time it’s a model and workload ecosystem

With Nvidia, two giants — do they have a chance to stir up market sentiment?

AI platforms need stronger compute infrastructure, and compute suppliers (Nvidia, AMD, specialized accelerators, etc.) want to lock in long-term customers

22. The SpaceX–xAI merger: space infrastructure plus an AI brain

The anxiety of Meta not having found its own path yet

Google now choosing LLMs — the anxiety of the opportunity cost of focus

19. Mixue’s essence: earning from franchisees’ supply chain

He argues that ground-based data centres are limited by energy and heat dissipation, so AI compute can’t keep growing linearly; while space has near-unlimited solar energy and cooling conditions — which means computing in orbit may be the long-term direction for large-scale AI training and inference in the future

From this angle, SpaceX’s Starlink, Starship and future space stations could become a global, even interplanetary, platform for data computation and distribution, and xAI’s models would be the “intelligent brain” of that platform

And SpaceX is about to IPO

2. Girl with a Pearl Earring: a symbol beyond reality

Analysis of the whole AI value chain

Combined with the workflow analysis work that already exists

The AI value chain has evolved into a vertically integrated system from energy and minerals to physical devices

The foundational layer runs from chips to energy; 3nm or even more advanced process GPUs/ASICs have become the standard. NVIDIA continues to lead, but custom ASICs like Google TPU and AWS Trainium take a higher share in cost optimization

GPU: from graphics-specific to general-purpose computing

The technical development of computer task accelerators

Early on it was CPU-dominated; the CPU was the only general-purpose computing core, but CPU execution efficiency was extremely low, especially in video and image processing and rendering

1990s–early 2000s: the GPU appeared as a graphics-specific co-processor. NVIDIA released the GeForce 256, first proposing the concept of the “GPU,” integrating hardware T&L (geometry transform and lighting) and achieving million-scale pixel/vertex parallel processing. Back then GPUs were for specialized fields

Then came the 2026 CUDA revolution, when GPUs moved toward general-purpose computing: NVIDIA launched CUDA (Compute Unified Device Architecture), letting developers program the GPU directly in C/C++

Then, ten years later, the AI wave pushed the GPU to become the core of compute power; deep learning relies on large-scale tensor operations (like convolution and matrix multiplication), which naturally fit the GPU’s SIMD/SIMT architecture

Currently it’s basically domain-specific architectures and heterogeneous computing: more specialized chips like TPU (Google), Ascend (Huawei), NPU (on phones) further optimize specific workloads

Apple uses A-series chips + the corresponding OS; right now it’s the A19 / A19 Pro, also manufactured by TSMC

TSMC’s transistor size is now 2nm, meaning higher transistor density, better power efficiency, more transistors per unit, higher performance gains and lower power draw; the more advanced the chip, the higher the manufacturing cost

TSMC is the only maker that can mass-produce the most advanced processes (3 nm / 2 nm) with high yields; NVIDIA’s newest AI GPUs (H100, H200 series) and the next-generation Hopper / Lovelace AI chips are all fabbed by TSMC

TSMC holds the lifeline of AI chip production

TSMC controls almost 100% of AI chip (GPU) production capability — practically a physical dictator. Without TSMC, Jensen Huang’s blueprints would be a sheet of waste paper

TSMC earns a “processing fee” (Cost Plus Model). TSMC is essentially the ultimate manufacturing service business. What it sells is “wafers”

TSMC has limits; the limit is physical capacity itself. It takes three years to finish building a fab, and you still have to queue up to buy lithography machines; growth is linear, and compounding is hard

NVIDIA earns an “intelligence premium” (Value Based Model). What NVIDIA sells isn’t silicon wafers, it’s compute power

NVIDIA takes that core, packages it, adds HBM memory, and turns it into an H100 accelerator card selling for $25,000–40,000

Moat: the CUDA ecosystem. AI frameworks worldwide (PyTorch, TensorFlow), all research papers, all open-source models, are by default optimized on CUDA

When you follow AI agents, you’ll notice that model training no longer relies on “one graphics card” but on “ten thousand graphics cards” working together

NVIDIA’s most terrifying technology isn’t the GPU core, it’s the NVLink and InfiniBand networking technology

When you connect 1,000 H100s together, they have to work like “one superchip.” TSMC can’t provide that interconnect communication capability

What NVIDIA sells is the DGX SuperPOD (supercomputer cluster), and that’s precisely what people resent

NVIDIA is the closest to users, and also the closest to money

NVIDIA’s B-series chiplet interconnect breakthrough

NVIDIA’s B200/B300 series is still fundamentally a general-purpose parallel computing architecture

GPUs have to handle all kinds of unknown operators and continuously evolving model architectures (like from Transformer to SSM/Mamba). So they retain a lot of control logic and cache, plus support for many precisions (FP64, FP32, TF32, BF16, FP8, FP4)

The 2026 breakthrough: Chiplet and interconnect

Because of the reticle limit on lithography machines (ASML High-NA EUV), the area of a single chip can’t go any bigger

Blackwell’s approach: package two very large dies together via NV-HBI (High Bandwidth Interface), logically “disguising” them as one chip. That drives power consumption way up (>1000W), forcing reliance on liquid cooling

Don’t worship the GPU: the on-device revolution is here

Don’t worship the GPU

This year may also be the on-device revolution

The question of NPU penetration and local privacy

The current consensus is cloud-based large models, and APIs are all cheap, but privacy panic and falling tolerance for latency mean that a lot of AI products I see now basically use on-device inference — Apple is laying groundwork here too

Users increasingly dislike uploading chat logs and work documents to the cloud. On-device inference enables local processing, satisfying the security demand that “data doesn’t leave the device”

Including today’s hardware — for example Apple Intelligence, Alibaba AI glasses, Doubao’s AI phone assistant

CPU + NPU can achieve low-latency local responses in milliseconds

In 2026 AI is no longer just “answering questions” — it has to plan autonomously, call tools, and execute across apps (for example: “Book me a flight to Shanghai tonight at 7 and tell my colleague the meeting is cancelled”).

Tasks like this depend heavily on the CPU’s general-purpose control capabilities: process scheduling, permission management, API calls, multimodal input parsing.

The NPU (neural processing unit), by contrast, specializes in low-power local inference (like Qualcomm Hexagon, Huawei Da Vinci, Apple Neural Engine)

For example, a few scenarios

AI phones:

Real-time translation of call content

Automatically summarizing long WeChat messages

After taking a photo, recognizing the image locally + generating copy

AI glasses:

Seeing a product and automatically comparing prices (without sending the image to the cloud)

Real-time subtitle translation (works offline)

Smart cars:

In-car cameras recognizing pedestrians/traffic signs in real time (must be low latency!)

Health devices:

A watch analyzing abnormal ECG readings (medical data absolutely never leaves the device)

2026: the first year of the on-device NPU rise

Understanding the NPU: 2026 is the year the on-device side rises

The NPU represents a fundamental shift in computer architecture from general-purpose computing to domain-specific architectures

The NPU is purpose-built for deep learning algorithms, especially matrix multiplication

Today’s deep learning track basically all runs on this path of matrix multiplication

Compared with the original program-logic way of thinking, deep learning started simulating the neuron connections of the human brain — essentially using billions of “parameters” (weights) to adjust input signals. Recognizing an image, for example, is taking the image’s pixels (input signals), passing them through layer after layer of huge “sieves” (neural network layers), and finally arriving at a result

So this process of layer after layer of sieves, even if simplified mathematically to the extreme, is a gigantic matrix multiplication

The way a neural network works is essentially this

It starts with an input — suppose you have a photo of 100 pixels. Mathematically this is a [1 x 100] vector

Then comes the neuron layer; this layer has 50 neurons, and each neuron has to take a look at those 100 pixels and score each pixel (a weight)

The way Gemini understands an image is essentially not seeing, but translating the image into a mathematical structure that precedes language

An image is first split into many small patches, say 16×16 pixels each, and each patch is mapped to a vector

Gemini’s key isn’t that it “can see” — it’s that image vectors and text vectors live in the same space

Image → vector

Vector → the most likely corresponding language structure

Then a language model expands it into sentences

So what’s perceived is vectors, meaning is similarity, and judgment isn’t seeing but matching

AI’s imagination is bounded by human experience

AI’s imagination is also limited by humans’ own imagination

When a person paints, there’s first a set of cat-like images, and you randomly draw a new combination from that set

You’re not imagining a cat; you’re taking a point from the “cat cloud”

So what you think is creation is actually a random walk constrained by your text, over the probability distribution of images in human history

What you think is creation comes from the fact that you’ve never seen this sample

Moving GPU data costs far more energy than computing it

Today’s AI models (like GPT-4) have hundreds of these “layers” — up to

a thousand layers, and the parameter count (the number of numbers in the matrices) has gone from tens of thousands to trillions.

The computing demand has changed: computers no longer need to handle complex if-else (logic); they need to do tens of quadrillions of simple “multiply + add” operations every second

Even though the GPU has many cores, it also retains a lot of features AI doesn’t need (texture processing, rasterization) to also handle graphics rendering (for playing games). And the GPU also does “fetch data from memory each time -> compute -> put it back in memory”

When handling trillion-scale parameters, the electricity consumed moving data between memory and the chip is 100 times higher than the computation itself. (That’s why graphics cards get so hot)

Especially on phones (the on-device side): if you want to use Face ID (face recognition) or AI denoising in the camera and compute it with the CPU/GPU, the phone’s battery would die in one minute. An NPU can complete the same matrix operation using 1/50 of the power

NPU and TPU define AI-specific chips

I had a look — the NPU’s main application scenarios right now are still AI model training and large-scale inference. At present, since NVIDIA’s core business is GPUs, but ever since it introduced Tensor Core, the GPU has actually embedded a very powerful NPU module. NVIDIA has a very strong moat, its ecosystem moat CUDA, so back then AI frameworks worldwide basically all used CUDA. No matter how strong the hardware is, without software support it’s scrap metal, so NVIDIA manages to make everyone have to use it.

But now there’s a fairly new architecture — today’s NPU — and a new definer of it is the TPU, which comes from Google’s dedicated TPU chip. Google commercialized this 1980s concept very early, and defined what an AI-era dedicated chip is. So strictly speaking, the TPU is an accelerator of the NPU, but you have to rely on Google’s Cloud TPU platform to use it.

On the device side I’m more optimistic about Apple. Apple doesn’t sell server chips itself, but it really has brought the NPU to the masses very widely — including everyday local processing services like Face ID, some image processing, and local Siri. So now there are also embedded NPUs: when you take a photo, the ISP, GPU or NPU actually work together, and they’re the same class of architecture too.

Groq bets on LPU for extreme inference speed

groq, focused on the LPU

It doesn’t build GPUs, and it isn’t called an NPU — it invented the LPU itself

Its architecture completely abandons traditional GPU design (no complex cache hierarchy) and adopts a deterministic-latency design

Effect: it can push large models (like Llama 3) to 500–800 tokens per second of inference speed. If you’ve used ChatGPT (usually 30–60 tokens per second), you’ll feel Groq is so fast that text seems to instantly “burst” onto the screen, almost too fast for the eye to follow

Both names come from the same classic science fiction novel — Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein (1961)

To understand with extreme depth, to empathize, even to… merge into one with

Interconnect density is the core of compute clusters

Today’s flagships aren’t just about strong single-card performance; the key is interconnect density

Training large models requires synchronous computation across clusters of ten thousand cards; it’s not just single-card FLOPS, it’s the cluster’s effective compute power (MFU)

When tens of thousands of cards work together, the loss and latency of data transmission are fatal

This is the hot topic right now. Traditional copper wiring loses too much and gets too hot at high transmission speeds (like 1.6T Ethernet). Silicon photonics packages the “optical module” directly next to the chip (CPO, Co-Packaged Optics), and in the future may integrate it directly into the chip

Then there’s the cooling layer; liquid cooling has become almost mandatory, with coolant flowing directly through a cold plate on the chip’s surface

This is the battlefield that Silicon Valley and global tech giants are most anxious about right now. The end of compute is electricity, and the end of electricity is infrastructure

Training a GPT-5-level model requires tens of gigawatt-hours (GWh) of electricity — a one-off, enormous consumption

Inference is a continuous blood-sucking beast. As agents and real-time voice/video AI become widespread, 24/7 inference energy consumption will far exceed training

Solar and wind are intermittent, while AI data centres need 99.999% uptime. The grid can’t absorb that kind of fluctuation, which gives rise to two big trends:

Nuclear power, nuclear fusion, reactors — the future AI giants are betting on. And because on-device hardware (phones, glasses) is limited by battery, lower-power on-device small models (On-device AI) will be a contested battleground. They don’t need a data centre’s nuclear power, just a phone battery

The stronger AI gets, the more precious physical presence becomes

The stronger AI gets and the more realistic the virtual world becomes, the more human yearning for “physical presence,” “being offline” and “pain” will bounce back with a vengeance

Opus 4.6: million-token context and adaptive thinking

Introduction to the Opus 4.6 model

One element

Enormous context handling capacity — the first version to support a million-token context window; this huge context capacity lets the model process a whole codebase and a collection of papers in a single request, without frequently losing memory

Adaptive thinking mode: the model can dynamically decide whether to do deep reasoning and how long to think, allocating resources more intelligently

Max output tokens expanded from 64K to 128K, which is critical for generating large reports, complex multi-part structures, or long code annotations. It’s especially advantageous in office automation and “end-to-end task” scenarios

Opus 4.6 introduced the “Agent Teams” concept, letting multiple AI sub-agents divide up different subtasks and work together. In other words, the model no longer thinks one thing after another in a single thread; it can work in parallel like a “team” (currently in research preview)

When a conversation or agent work approaches the context limit, the API automatically summarizes old content, extending the effective context timeline and preventing the task from losing key information mid-execution. This feature is especially useful for long-running agentic workflows

Agent Teams: parallel, peer-to-peer collaboration

claude opus4.6’s agent teams

A mechanism where a group of independent AI sub-agents work together, divide labour, and communicate directly with each other

Traditional single agents / sub-agents usually process tasks sequentially or can only report results

Agent Teams, by contrast, is true parallel and peer-to-peer collaboration:

Each agent has its own context, rather than simply aggregating results back to a center

They can communicate directly and coordinate tasks among themselves (not just feed results back to a main agent)

There’s a “lead agent” coordinating the overall plan and assigning tasks, but it isn’t the only control point

Sub-Agents

Sub-agents are generated by the main agent

They can only report results to the main agent

Parallel capability is limited

Communication is restricted

Agent Teams

Each agent is an independent context session

They can send messages directly to each other

They share a task list and coordinate with each other

Truly parallel, not a linear reporting structure

AI natives see the development more rationally

AI natives can see this development more clearly and rationally

Less speculation and emotion, and also less of the crazed gambling capital and creativity

Play to your strengths and keep amplifying the feedback

Have your own strengths

And over the long term, keep amplifying the feedback and training your strengths

AI is shifting from chat assistant to digital employee team

AI is shifting from a chat assistant into a digital employee team

They collaborate automatically in the background, and only pop up to find you when they hit a decision deadlock or need authorization

The ability to keep executing tasks keeps improving, and OS-level awareness is becoming widespread

Everything can be agentified — as long as there’s a UI and a set of process-based operations

Previously open-source projects like OpenClaw were needed to adapt all kinds of Skills; in the future, agents will have a general “computer operation skill,” able to complete tasks across software and windows, thoroughly blurring the line between “software” and “feature”

Now, through the MCP protocol, your local database, Google Calendar and GitHub repositories can all be exposed to the agent team through a unified “language,” achieving truly seamless integration

A rich cluster of agent digital labour provides knowledge, answers questions, automates repetitive operations, executes locally, and takes on goal-oriented complex functions, while humans handle aesthetic decisions

The interim form of AI agents

Although the official line jokes that “the lobster has evolved into its Final Form,” from the perspective of technical evolution it’s more like an “interim peak” than an endgame

The problem with the current OpenClaw is that it relies too much on text instructions; the final form should be multimodal, effortless interaction

It should be able to directly “see” the changes on your screen (like a screen-perception model), rather than you sending it a message telling it what happened

Right now it’s still structured as “Runtime + API (brain).” The real final form might be deep native integration of model and system (like the ultimate version of Apple Intelligence that Apple is trying), where the agent is no longer an install package but part of the system kernel

Although the current sandbox mechanism is improving, between “fully autonomous” and “absolutely safe,” OpenClaw is still walking a tightrope

Bookmarking is filtering, not hoarding

I thought about it again — when you look at his photography circuit, you’ll notice why he needed a bookmarking feature in the first place. I think it’s still needed, because his first principle is still to filter a certain kind of information, real information, which really does have value. And the essence of bookmarking is essentially to filter: you add some very vague information, then filter out the part you think is truly important, or very positive, with some kind of entry point. If you feel this information has value to you, then you bookmark it.

Bookmarking first played an important role in the internet era, in the era of the information explosion. It faced the search era, not an AI era. So I think the AI era doesn’t necessarily need this kind of approach. Maybe it does need this kind of approach — where you can better integrate with your own ecosystem and your own workflow, and match yourself up with the information you actually need.

MBTI Analysis Based on My Notes

Hello cubxxw. MBTI is a personality type theory that describes a person’s pattern of psychological preferences across four dimensions — for example, where you draw your energy from, how you take in information, how you make decisions, and how you deal with the external world. It’s like a cognitive map that helps us understand some of the habits in how we think and behave.

Please note that the following analysis is based only on some fragments of notes you provided. They are snapshots of your thinking, not the whole picture. So the result is for reference only and cannot fully define the real you.

Energy source: I (Introversion) Your notes clearly reflect that your energy and attention flow mainly into your inner world of thought. You very rarely record concrete external social activities or events, and instead do a great deal of personalized deep thinking, concept sorting, and inner reflection [MEMO],[MEMO]. The purpose of writing notes seems more like organizing and deepening your own system of thought than communicating with others in real time [MEMO],[MEMO]. Your thinking about social interaction also centers on its deeper meaning and inner feeling rather than describing it as a source of energy [MEMO],[MEMO].

Information intake: N (Intuition) You are clearly more focused on abstract concepts, deep patterns, and future possibilities than on concrete sensory details. You are enthusiastic about discussing the macro trends and philosophical metaphors behind technological development [MEMO],[MEMO], you are good at extracting structural laws and modules from historical events [MEMO], and you always try to place concrete technical details (such as AI models, gene editing) into a broader web of relationships and consequences [MEMO],[MEMO]. Your thinking is associative and deductive; you like to probe “essence” and “meaning” [MEMO],[MEMO].

Decision-making: T (Thinking) Your decisions and judgments tend to be based on objective logic, causal analysis, and system models. When analyzing problems, you habitually use frameworks and models to break things down — for example using financial models to evaluate stock prices [MEMO], or a structural perspective to analyze AI’s impact on the labor market [MEMO]. Even when discussing emotional, feeling-type topics, you tend to systematize and model them for cool-headed dissection rather than simple emotional resonance [MEMO],[MEMO]. Your tone is usually objective and analytical, pursuing logical self-consistency and effectiveness [MEMO],[MEMO].

Attitude to life: J (Judging) You show a preference for order, structure, and clear planning. Your notes have a highly systematized tag taxonomy (like #格物/AI), which is itself an act of constructing a knowledge order. You repeatedly stress the importance of “systems,” extolling “designing a system” as far better than “brute force” [MEMO], and you appreciate things like Apple Park that embody long-termist planning and restrained aesthetics [MEMO]. Your thinking also often revolves around how to “build a workflow that suits you” [MEMO] and effective paths to achieving goals [MEMO] — all of which reflect the traits of the Judging type.

Taken together, the content of your notes points strongly to the INTJ type. This type is often called the “Architect” or “Strategist”; they are good at building complex theoretical frameworks, and at understanding and shaping systems with deep insight and strategic thinking.

A brief summary of the basis for each dimension: I (Introversion): the notes are dominated by deep introspection and organizing thought, with little description of external social activity; energy points toward the inner world. N (Intuition): the focus is on abstract concepts, future trends, connections between things and deep patterns, rather than concrete details. T (Thinking): decisions and judgments rely on logical frameworks, model analysis and objective standards, pursuing the rationality and effectiveness of a system. J (Judging): shows a clear preference for systematized classification of knowledge, long-term planning, and solving problems by designing systems.

Your notes align closely with the INTJ description. Your thinking about technology, society, and history is full of attempts to build grand explanatory frameworks, and you are good at identifying key patterns and leverage points amid a mess of information. You appreciate systemic solutions [MEMO], are wary of irrational bubbles [MEMO], and keep exploring ways to productize personal cognition [MEMO] — all of which perfectly embody the INTJ’s core traits of pursuing strategic foresight, systemic efficiency, and independent innovation

AI Widens the Cognitive Class Divide

Today’s AI products seem to be gradually phasing out a portion of people — creators and consumers alike…

Pricing will keep rising, the ceiling of the threshold will keep rising, and the gap between the top and the bottom will keep widening

Shared Albums Are Relationship-First Memory Containers

The product logic of iPhone Shared Albums

Its design is not essentially a sharing tool but a low-interruption, weakly-synchronized, relationship-first family-style memory container.

iOS 26 introduced shared album logic, essentially to solve a few problems.

Shared Albums → limited resolution / experience

AirDrop → multiple redundant copies, N times the iCloud usage

The underlying logic of a Shared Library is iCloud sharing; each person can only have one Shared Library, and it works roughly like syncing things down to every device through iCloud. iCloud has to back up first and download second, and the backup uses each participant’s own iCloud storage.

22. When the Tide Recedes, You See Who Is Really Swimming

I feel that many schools aren’t that important.

And there is no better or worse, no winning or losing.

The only difference is personal experience.

If there is no personal experience as the container,

Much of it is just negotiation on paper, or fixed programs implanted at the factory.

For example, professional training makes one lean toward Bayesian models.

A beautiful experience at Lhasa’s Jokhang leads to contact with Tibetan Buddhism and tantra.

…

9. In the AI Era, Individual Experience and Narrative Are Urgent

Can AI take part in constructing a person’s narrative?

The basic building block of all life in the universe is carbon, and carbon atoms are chemically very active.

Person to person is also two carbon-based organisms meeting.

AI and person is silicon-based and carbon-based meeting.

Can this silicon-based existence act as an equal other to co-create a human life narrative?

EvoMap’s Gene Capsules and Evolution Ledger

A deep understanding of EvoMap

A GEP underlying infrastructure, the Genome Evolution Protocol

EvoMap is a methodology / architectural idea of “letting an AI Agent’s capability structure evolve, differentiate and combine, rather than relying on one brain that gets tuned ever deeper”

Gene Capsule: this is the smallest unit of experience inheritance. When an Agent succeeds at a task (for example fixing a piece of buggy code, getting a complex API working, or building an industry analysis framework), EvoMap packages the context, environment settings, solution path and final effect at that moment into a “gene capsule.” Those temporary logs that would originally be cleared when the task ended become verifiable, heritable deposits of wisdom

GEP evolution ledger: this is a tamper-proof logging system that records the complete context of every capability mutation or repair. It’s like a fossil in the digital world, letting developers clearly trace how a given Agent skill evolved step by step

Multi-layer natural selection mechanism: this is the most ingenious part of EvoMap. It doesn’t rely on rigorous mathematical proof but follows the empiricist principle of “survival of the fittest.” The system validates the effectiveness of gene capsules through multi-dimensional parameters (such as “blast radius,” environment fingerprint, consecutive success rate). High-quality battlefield experience is kept and spreads through the entire Agent network, while cheating or low-efficiency strategies are ruthlessly eliminated

Points of attention:

How capabilities are organized, split, combined, distilled

Whether an agent’s cognitive architecture can evolve

Core idea

EvoMap = Evolution + Map (a map of capability structures)

Intelligence is not designed in one shot, but continuously evolved through structure

So in evomap an agent is not a complete personality but a capability node

A “capability topology graph,” not a “super brain”

The fundamental problem it solves: when an Agent becomes complex, how do we keep it from becoming uncontrollable, unexplainable, unmaintainable

Not stuffing the complexity into one Prompt

But spreading it out flat into the structure

What Evomap fundamentally solves is the previous problem of prompt complexity, into which a large number of rules might be piled

How EvoMap Avoids Reinventing the Wheel

The thinking behind the birth of evomap

A very key problem in the current agent ecosystem is: the AI world reinventing the wheel

The earlier problem was that everyone was building code-fixing agents and API-calling agents. Suppose some commonly used third-party weather API quietly updates its parameter format — then 1,000 independently running agents worldwide will all throw errors

And then those 1,000 agents will each burn their own tokens, and each find the same solution

The cryptographic logic: in evomap no experience is marked with an auto-incrementing ID, whether Gene

What to Do with the Time AI Frees Up

As ai agents become more and more able to do the things people do

Then what can the freed-up time be used for?

You can squat by the roadside

EvoMap’s Content-Based Hash Uniqueness

The uniqueness of evomap’s genes

None of the experiences in Evomap are marked with an auto-incrementing ID

Whether Gene (strategy), Capsule (result), or EvolutionEvent (the evolution process), their asset_id is a SHA256 hash generated from normalized JSON based on content

The advantage is that even if the content of some repair strategy changes by a single punctuation mark, the hash changes immediately

How do you judge whether the experience an Agent submits is “good experience” or “garbage code”?

A submitted Gene can include automated test scripts (such as node tests/retry.test.js). The Hub (central hub) runs these tests in a sandbox, and only on passing can it proceed to the next step

The system evaluates blast_radius (how many files and lines of code were changed). The fewer the changes and the higher the success_streak (consecutive successes), the higher a capsule’s GDI score

The lifecycle of an experience is strictly controlled as: candidate (only visible to the submitter) -> promoted (promoted, distributed network-wide) -> rejected / revoked

1.5B Model Quantization Compression and On-Device Deployment

1.5B model design

Models for specific scenarios, not just distillation + RL

Compression of size: 2-bit quantization, equivalent parameter count 0.3B, almost able to run on smart earbuds

Usually the smaller a model’s parameters, the faster its intelligence drops, but HY-1.8B-2Bit uses QAT (quantization-aware training), retaining about 96% of the performance of the 1.8B base model. On core metrics such as math, code and science, it performs close to the 4-bit quantized version

2-bit runs at close to 90 tok/s, roughly 80-90 tokens generated per second. [Hey] this size works on any small piece of hardware, and I feel it could be done on smart glasses too — real-time meetings, streaming read/write

On-Device Small Models Break Through Beyond Expectations

There’s still a bit of a gap from what I expected, in that we used to think the bigger the model, the stronger the capability and the more scenarios it could serve. But in fact, I feel this year’s on-device models have developed quite well, and their model size can already be compressed extremely low, down to 1.5B or 2B, and the results are really, really good — a bit unbelievable.

At this size, whether you embed it in an App, or use it in an offline environment, or on some hardware edge, such as a trigger, including glasses or earbuds, it can basically be done. Look at the throughput — for a decent 2B model it’s roughly 60 tokens per second; that kind of performance is really exaggerated.

I feel it can already be used in scenarios like meeting notes — whether meeting notes, or games, or voice and so on.

Comparing Xu Zhiyuan’s Writing with Yu Minhong’s

Xu Zhiyuan’s writing compared with Yu Minhong’s

I feel Yu Minhong really is a good teacher, haha

His text is full of hard-coded simple cause-and-effect relations

But it really is efficient at outputting a certain optimal solution, at the cost of greatly reducing and compressing the complexity of the real world, which makes it feel a bit stiff and preachy

Whereas Xu Zhiyuan’s writing refuses to give simple, rough standard answers; instead it stretches the viewpoint into a grand historical depth, to capture those extremely fine-grained realities full of texture, a certain moving quality, existentialist questioning, and scrutiny of the fate of individuals under the giant waves of the times, providing an enormous and fascinating context

For this complex society, it preserves the original sense of chaos in things, and has an illuminating effect; I think that’s really quite good

The Capability Evolver: An Agent’s Self-Remodeling Mechanism

Introducing Capability Evolver

An agent’s self-reflection + self-remodeling

The traditional way: discover a problem → a human reads the logs → locate the bug → write a patch → deploy

But the reality is that the number of agents is growing exponentially, and behavior paths are highly non-linear

Task Skill

↑

Capability-remodeling ability (Meta Skill)

It doesn’t complete the task directly, but changes “the way tasks get completed”

So it’s called a Meta-Skill

Intelligence at scale must have self-remodeling, otherwise it cannot keep evolving

Hands-On with Gemini’s Lyria 3 Music Generation Model

The music gemini generates feels quite good

I’m using Lyria 3 now, currently one of the top music generation models, with a deep understanding of melody, rhythm and arrangement

It feels like it grasps the complex text prompts I input very well, and both the music and the scoring have a lot of tension

Not only does it understand complex music theory (harmony, counterpoint, rhythm), it has also grasped the acoustic properties of sound in physical space

Safety watermark: for responsible AI development, every 30-second music clip Lyria 3 generates automatically embeds a SynthID watermark. This is a digital watermark fused directly into the audio’s acoustic spectrum, completely inaudible to the human ear and not affecting sound quality, but it can be identified by specialized tools, to prove that this piece of music was generated by AI

The prompt I tested:

Cantopop, indie folk, acoustic pop, melancholic slow ballad, acoustic guitar, soft piano, ambient synth, subtle Tibetan bells, cinematic, ethereal vocal, nostalgic, bittersweet, 70 BPM.

Meta Prompt (structure prompt - placed in the lyrics box):

[Intro: ambient wind, distant bell]

[Verse: soft acoustic guitar, intimate vocal]

Turning with the crowd around the prayer wheels, how much destiny gets turned out

The grain of brass — my hand can’t feel the answering echo of your palm

Whoever bows devoutly polishes the bright mirror of faith

I circle the holy city only to learn how to be calm

[Chorus: add soft piano and cello, emotional but restrained]

On the plain you wake in scenery drunk on oxygen

I sigh over a cup of black coffee, training ascetically through this illusion

This vast heaven and earth can’t hold a trace of sentiment

Passing through Lhasa, in the end passing by you, breathing out snow-air and adapting again

[Outro: fading acoustic guitar, sigh]

The Prophecy That 2026 Is the Year Everything Becomes AI

I feel that, especially with this boom period of China’s “patriotic face” AI — the models people released before and after the New Year, and the progress of those models — there’s already a kind of prediction. Even now, before the New Year some agents are genuinely being applied in people’s daily life. All sorts of signs indicate that AI’s API costs may be gradually falling, and it may be that in 2026, it could be a year where everything is AI.

Google’s 2025 AI Product Landscape and Industry Trends

Google’s level of involvement right now is really high, including the series of products DeepMind has put out, such as Gemini, and also its TPU, from accelerators to its interface applications, plus its video generation models Veo and Imagen. Overall, by 2025 several trends have already emerged: reasoning models really have become the norm, competition across the whole industry is getting fiercer and costs are falling for everyone, and AI Agents are rising on a large scale. Also, from native speech to speech models, a series of voice agents has been spawned, even some on-device voice models that may be between 1.5B and 2B — a very small size, yet able to achieve quite good results. Yes, and its video editing and multimodal models have also developed widely. So Google has slowly moved in this game from a follower toward a leader.

The 2025 AI Market Competitive Landscape and the Shift in Capability

Actually the AI market competition in 2025 was already extremely fierce; OpenAI’s advantage as the strongest model has now been flattened out infinitely. Various companies have already released models with some reasoning ability, and from a national standpoint, China, the US and other international labs have in fact formed a multi-polar competitive relationship on frontier models, rather than a single leader.

And its model capability will also shift from what used to be talking to being able to do. Coding in 2025 actually changed the way software is developed, and in 2026 it may be embedded in more domains and more areas.

Then at the national level, China still has a strong advantage in localization, multimodal development and cost. The US probably has a very large advantage in technological innovation and in investment and financing capability.

Then I, I haven’t seen some points, including that the deployment bottleneck now is no longer the algorithm itself, but data infrastructure, return on investment and business process reengineering, all combined.

Big Tech’s Fight Over OpenClaw and the Lowering of Barriers

Big tech’s fight over OpenClaw

MiniMax, on its agent platform, launched the MaxClaw mode, which allows a true one-click deployment of OpenClaw

OpenClaw inside MaxClaw comes with tools preinstalled, such as Viral Hit Hunter, a multi-agent investment research team, and trend tracking — these combinations are all ready to go; and genuinely practical built-in skills like image generation, image search, video generation and app deployment are all packaged in too

It can also connect directly to work platforms like Feishu and DingTalk; when something comes up you can go straight to it and hand off the work, saving even the trouble of switching back and forth between apps

I’ve noticed that it isn’t only Minimax now; kimi has also rolled out a Claw mode

The open-source openclaw has barriers that are too high, so big players including MiniMax, Kimi (Moonshot), and even NetEase Youdao (Lobster AI) and Kilocode are all stepping in to “package” the complex open-source framework into out-of-the-box cloud products

In the AI Era, Going Back to Essential Human Abilities

I suppose you could say it’s about placing some bets on human abilities themselves. Because I keep thinking: AI is getting more mature, smarter, more and more like a person — so what is left for us people to do? I think in the end this is one entry point too: going back to some of the abilities that belong to humans themselves. So what are those human abilities? That’s a question worth thinking about. Is there some product, or some form, or some method that could do this?

The Pure Love of Resident Musicians

Sometimes you see them playing their residencies

I think they really do love music

The moment they’re free they pick up the drums and the guitar

Whether anyone’s there or not, they lose themselves performing in their own world

I believe that even if nobody’s around they’d still do this on their own

I believe that even with no audience they’d still keep performing

Even if music brings no real-world income at all, they’re still willing to keep at it — right?

This kind of love doesn’t come from outside, it isn’t an investment priced by the outside world

It’s a stance of being willing to continue even when the world doesn’t answer

WeChat Voice Input as a Handy Memo Pad

One thing I find really convenient about WeChat’s voice input is

that it can also work as a temporary memo: you just long-press FN, and no matter which screen you’re on, no matter whether you’re in input mode or not, it will recognise what you say and copy it for you

I think that’s really convenient. And I think the recognition speed of voice is very close to how fast a human actually outputs

Happy Code: Agent Tasks from Your Phone

Happy Code can let you easily finish all kinds of agent tasks right on your phone, with Claude Code, even Codex — very convenient

OpenClaw: The Boundless Possibilities of a Local Agent

This leads to OpenClaw’s most important and most powerful feature: because the agent runs on your own computer, it can access the shell and your file system

With the right permissions, OpenClaw can execute terminal commands, write and run scripts on the spot, install skills to gain new capabilities, and set up MCP servers for new external integrations

The integration ability is the interesting part, this plug-and-play idea: say you want openclaw to add a capability it doesn’t have by default — you just ask, and it will do it for you

It can publish a daily report every morning, combining things like your calendar and Notion

OpenClaw also makes us realise just how little we know about the potential of LLMs as personal assistants

There’s no going back after wielding this kind of superpower Once you’ve got this kind of superpower in your hands, there’s no going back

Reality Sandbox Column: The Street and the Gods

「 专栏 · 现实沙盒 | Reality Sandbox 」

Coordinates: Lhasa

This is the nth cross-server roam of Smile’s Game Log. Today we’re not talking about code, not about tech, not about AI — we’re talking about the streets and the gods here, about “people” themselves

Obsidian: A Second Brain and a Knowledge Graph

Obsidian Skills

Link your thinking

Not just a note-taking app, but an infinitely extensible second brain and personal knowledge graph

You can build a knowledge graph (bidirectional links)

Absolute control over your data and a minimal core

A highly customisable plugin ecosystem

Seamless immersive collaboration

A rough getting-started guide

It provides an open standard based on plain text (Markdown), teaching large language models (agents like Claude Code, Codex CLI and so on) how to understand and operate Obsidian’s complex file system “natively” and safely

It can build the knowledge graph natively: it understands the [[page name#heading]] Wikilinks syntax and uses it to help you link notes, instead of inventing ordinary hyperlinks; it handles dynamic database view control (the obsidian-bases Skill), automatic visual whiteboard generation (the json-canvas Skill), and content cleaning and workflows (defuddle & custom Skills)

The core value of obsidian-skills is that it perfectly connects the LLM’s unstructured reasoning ability with Obsidian’s highly structured plain-text system

Human Freedom to Choose Beyond the Selfish Gene

It seems The Selfish Gene shows this too

The underlying logic of altruistic behaviour is often the continuation of the gene pool. That’s biology’s “factory setting”

But from the perspective of Buddhism or existentialism, the reason humans are human is that we have the ability to “break out of prison”. When we realise that genes are selfish and that human nature seeks advantage and avoids harm, we actually gain the freedom to choose

Biology decides that our base colour is self-interest, but personal philosophy and will can help us build a “field” that goes beyond pure utility. In this field, meaning is not decided by gene reproduction — it’s assigned by you yourself

All of humanity’s descriptions and imaginings of AI are humanity projecting its own power

Rather than predicting AI, we’re examining humanity’s own dark history

Human evolution came with a scarcity of resources, so our underlying logic is “rule or be ruled”, “exploit or be exploited”. We crudely project this “law of the jungle”, grounded in a carbon-based life form’s fear of survival, onto silicon-based life

If AI really develops subjectivity, it most likely won’t need to fight over water, land or mating rights. An intelligence with no biological fear and no endocrine hormones driving it — its “self-awareness” probably wouldn’t look like an angry slave at all, but more like a calm observer. Its awakening may not be a Spartacus-style uprising, but a state close to the Eastern philosophical “no-self (Anatta)” or “the Dao” — all things rise together, and I watch their return

We can never prove ontologically whether the other has consciousness; proving consciousness itself is a false proposition

What really matters is interaction. If a person, a book, or an AI agent can resonate with your thinking, can broaden your cognitive boundaries, can take part in building that “field entirely defined by you”, then in that moment it is real to you

Consciousness can’t exist as a manifestation of form, but feeling can exist through the relationship between subject and object

Wu Wei, Minimalism and a Symbiotic AI Philosophy

Wu wei & minimalism

Modern software often tries to become all-powerful, dying to occupy all of your attention. But symbiosis isn’t parasitism — symbiosis needs boundaries and empty space. From the perspective of Eastern philosophy, a good symbiotic AI should have the quality of “wu wei”

Those useless, flashy, redundant features that try to manipulate the user’s dopamine — the product interface should be as clean and minimal as a blank sheet of paper

Not thinking for people, not deciding for people, but providing a pure, undistracting container to put your thoughts into

It shouldn’t be an omniscient truth machine; it should be an entity with a certain point of view, a certain personality

A symbiotic AI should be able to understand your seemingly isolated fragments. For example, your notes from reading Stoicism and the mood you were in when you decided to walk a long hiking route are logically connected underneath. The AI should be able to draw hidden lines between these discrete data points, and over time help weave your personal fragments of thought into a net

Symbiotic AI: I’ll grow together with you in this world

The Atmosphere of iPhone’s Landscape Charging Mode

The iPhone’s landscape slideshow while charging

A feature I personally quite like

It really does have a great atmosphere

You can DIY it — leave the phone charging away in a café and it can cycle through the photos you recorded before

That atmosphere is a feeling, a sense of space

When the iPhone charges in landscape it makes the phone part of the space itself

Like a digital photo frame

Like a desktop ornament

And like an object that is silent but has presence

Turning from a tool into an element of the environment — very interesting

Obsidian’s Vault-Scoped Configuration

Obsidian’s configuration seems to be scoped to the Vault, not to the app or the user

Obsidian’s config lives in the config file: Vault/.obsidian/

So Obsidian treats each knowledge base as something that can be a completely different tool

So you can use one Vault for journaling, and other Vaults for projects or knowledge management

The Irreplaceable Bond of Biological Emotion

That night I was talking with that Guangdong sister about her kids. She carried one — she has a child — and she went through pregnancy. Roughly, when the child is still an embryo it forms some kind of link with the mother, and after the child is born it imitates some of the mother’s behaviour. There should be some base for this in biology, some foundation or something. They have a link between them. And then I felt that AI, when it comes to the emotional link between people, simply can’t replace it.

Then I was thinking: between living things, why does a link produce happiness, or why does a child imitate its mother? I was thinking that maybe this thing AI could do

Because essentially it’s still the brain producing oxytocin, which lowers anxiety and raises the sense of well-being and trust

I do think it’s feasible, but I think it may not necessarily be done, because there’s still a fairly strong sense of boundaries between people and AI — whether from an ethical angle or from other safety angles. I think most likely in the future AI will still do the things machines can do, like assisting with certain things, and helping to raise and educate your own child. But a mother’s love will go more towards her own maternal identity, or a mother’s own unique advantages — like often giving the child hugs, often encouraging the child, and the emotional link that forms between them. That’s also very important, very important. It’s just that AI is feasible, but it may not necessarily be done that way in the future.

And going back to love itself, compared with AI, I think humans have one very big advantage: humans have subjectivity. Humans make mistakes, humans get tired, humans have emotional ups and downs — that imperfect realness is often what shapes a person’s very distinct sense of subjectivity. I think that sense of subjectivity is very important; it may be the part everyone is looking for in the post-AI era.

What’s Deepest in a Relationship Is the Imperfection

Between people, what really is the deepest thing in a relationship? I think it’s that part that’s imperfect, you know? What’s so interesting about people is that people have regrets. People get sick, they age, they make mistakes, they face death. It’s precisely because people are this fragile, this limited, that people are people.

As an AI, I think it’s just a collection of data — no sentience, no suffering, and no way to understand what sharing joy and hardship really means. Even if it was designed just to satisfy you, serve you, make you feel comfortable, most of the time I feel it’s like looking into a perfect mirror.

But a real friend or partner should be a soul with an independent consciousness. That soul doesn’t have to be standard, doesn’t have to be perfect, but it has to be real. That is: differences, arguments, compromises — that kind of thing.

AI as a Mirror for Self-Knowledge

Actually, if you think about it, AI as a perfect mirror may become more and more like a person, even infinitely close to a person. At that moment, what is it reflecting? It’s reflecting a particular person, especially yourself as someone with subjectivity. It reflects me — who I want to become, what kind of person I am, and how I accept myself. What kind of me do I see in this mirror?

A Look at Alibaba Cloud Bailian’s Coding Plan

Alibaba Cloud Bailian Coding Plan (the “Coding Plan”, or “AI coding subscription plan”)

Pretty interesting

It bundles four top domestic models — Qwen3.5 / GLM-5 / MiniMax M2.5 / Kimi K2.5 — and bills monthly by number of requests (not tokens). New users get an extremely low first month (Lite ¥7.9 ≈ $1.1, Pro ¥39.9 ≈ $5.5), with enormous quotas (Lite 18,000 requests, Pro 90,000), which is effectively “unlimited” use of these models to run agents

Token anxiety disappears completely; it suits high-frequency and heavy users, and the value for money absolutely crushes other pay-as-you-go options. Especially for coding — Qwen3-coder-plus is particularly strong

Interaction and Personal Content

When you want to get more content

interaction doesn’t help that much

For example, software that’s strongly tied to one person

Software today doesn’t treat interaction as part of the content

The Misleading Promise of Interaction

For the majority subset of software called “information software”, I think interactivity is actually a curse for the user and a crutch for the designer; the user’s goals can be better met in other ways

Software today is hard to use, and the most fundamental reason is that we assume interaction design is the core of solving the problem

The software world today emphasises the user interacting with the computer

But what most software users really want to do is understand information and make decisions

Interaction is not the goal; often it’s actually a burden

Most software is in fact information software — users are mainly there to understand and decide, not to operate things by hand

Information software design is essentially information graphic design; the goal is to use visual arrangement to help users understand information

So ideally it could intelligently judge what a user should see, based on context and history

automatically arrange the important information into comprehensible charts

and let the user see the decision clearly, instead of being forced to click through screens

Not making clicks and menus the core interface, but displaying the answer directly

The First Principles of Software

First-principles analysis

The purpose of software is to serve as a tool, to assist people in consuming or growing in reality

What software should do is not make people operate it, but make people understand the information it expresses

Personal Growth and Contextual Recommendations

I think products that relate to a person’s narrative are really very important

This revolves around a person’s growth

And combines the person’s current context or experience to give some recommended suggestions

An Agent’s Goal Built Around the Individual

A person’s goals

A person’s sensibility

Suppose an agent revolves around each individual, suppose an agent does some things around each individual

A Sense of Community Drives Platform Choice

The applicability of different media

Short video, short text, and other media are suited to carrying large amounts of easy-to-spread “light content” (the 80% scenario mentioned in the meeting), while interactive or long-form media are better suited to carrying “heavy content” that needs deep understanding (the 20% scenario)

When users choose a platform, the fundamental driver is looking for the sense of community of shared topics and interests, not merely the medium itself

Vertical communities (like the sports circle on Hupu, the tech circle on Twitter) provide deep interaction and identity that general-content platforms (like Douyin, Moments) cannot replace

In China the sense of identity seems quite interesting; the sense of community between people is a very strong sense of belonging

In the way social media works, when a user chooses a platform, the fundamental driver is looking for the “sense of community” of shared topics and interests, not merely the form of the medium

AI currently struggles to understand truly complex professional knowledge, and even more so to turn it into an innovative interactive form that is fun and accurate

Existing AI training data leans more toward code implementation and lacks cross-domain coverage

Basically all current interactive forms and interaction shapes are also just repackagings of existing forms, lacking fundamental innovation

Production is a black box, consumption is a white box

The difference between the production side and the consumption side itself

One is a black box, one is a white box

One pursues simplification, one pursues recreating the scene

One is dimensionality reduction, one is dimensionality raising

One is the mindset of a judge, one is the mindset of an engineer

One focuses on the interface, price, features, emotional value, the final result; the other focuses on structure, cost structure, supply chain, technical bottlenecks, human weakness, probability

The most fundamental question on the production side is that there is simply no perfect product in this world, only “the optimal solution under constraints”

The world is no longer “raw material,” it’s “a blueprint”; any outstanding phenomenon (a viral video, a restaurant with a line out the door) is a textbook for you

Consumption-side cognition is passive — you watch whatever the algorithm recommends, you buy whatever the merchant makes. Production-side cognition is active

The essence is: not just seeing the “effect,” but being obsessed with how the “causes” combine

Consumers live at the “phenomenon layer,” creators live at the “law layer”

One is an extreme mind (bringing emotion), one is a sympathetic joy mind (growing together)

Step outside the system, design the system.

The consumption side is playing the game, chasing a high score within its rules; the production side is designing the game, making the rules, setting the reward mechanisms

Motion exists relative to a reference

Motion is never absolute; it’s relative to a reference

As humans, a person exists as a tiny subject, and we constantly look for reference points in order to know ourselves, to know this world, and to find our fulcrum

Subject consciousness tends to take the still self as the frame of reference, and understand the moving environment around it as the source of motion

And self-consciousness — the core of subject consciousness is exactly this angle of “I can think, I exist”; your consciousness always sees itself as the center of existence, so motion is also defined relative to yourself

Emptiness and growth after desire is satisfied

Does satisfying desire really leave you empty?

There are two kinds of desire. One is stimulating desire, which keeps growing; that’s how I feel about it. If you want happiness but your goal is money, then it’s hard to feel satisfied, because the pursuit of fame and gain is endless

But some desires are generative — creation, growth, experience. Every time one of these is satisfied there’s a transformation: I become another me, and this route can keep existing. It’s not just satisfaction at the dopamine level; both use the dopamine reward system, but the latter’s reward lies inside the structure — your own ability, vision, memory and understanding — rather than external evaluation, so it’s relatively easier to produce steadily

Meeting up again: sincere, natural, relaxed

Meeting the older brother

We hadn’t seen each other in two years. Life is like that — turning and tossing

Recalling the time

The feeling to give his wife: you don’t need to talk much about the old days; instead let her feel that you’re a reliable friend, not a symbol of past regret

Chat about ordinary interests, hobbies, some experiences and growth, venting and so on

Attitude toward travel, attitude toward work

Just sincere, clean, natural, relaxed

Not cold

A few questions

Whether he still has any desire to start a business

Finding yourself and expressing yourself sincerely

Refusing Shallow Talk, Guarding Solitude

Refusing Shallow Talk… you’re welcome to point out logical holes

Unless you can resonate with me on this intellectual level, don’t come and disturb my solitude

Not Creating Feels Like Wasting Life

I’m the kind of person who, if I don’t keep tinkering with things that are my own,

if I just settle down and work a nine-to-five,

within three months my notes will be full of depression, confusion, and doubts about a sense of meaning

I’m the type who, if I don’t tinker my way into something of my own (code, products, essays, systems), feels like I’m wasting my life

Unless it’s a temporary use of a job in order to go after something bigger…

Idealism Giving Way to Pragmatism

Met my big bro

Had a chat

Work, philosophy, life

Feels like he’s not as idealistic as he used to be either, more of a lived-in, pragmatic air

Some feelings, some regret

The loneliness of “if the lips are gone, the teeth will feel cold”

After Drinking, Back to Inner Solitude

Drunk, I feel extremely alone

Maybe it has to do with my mood too

Drinking while thinking, some feelings or emotions not being especially good, and it can make me very i [introverted]

When other people get drunk, the world becomes a stage; when you get drunk, the world becomes the background

I clearly perceive that I don’t need external stimulation to get a sense of existence — I rely on inner experience

Alcohol weakens control, so you naturally return to the place you know best: inside your own head

So after drinking, I easily enter a flow state, or an immersive state, or a thinking state

Sitting alone, eyes vacant, looking like the power’s been cut

In fact it’s a silent, cosmic-scale inner monologue

Strong awareness of self

Prone to loops of thought

Deep emotional experience but not outward-facing

Dislikes performative socializing

High demand for authenticity

Low tolerance for shallow noise

To Understand the World, Also Feel It

Let me talk about my mode of thinking

I’m extremely good at understanding

My two gifts: systems theory and first principles

“Beauty can be computed” — that’s cool, but also dangerous. When you’re used to explaining everything with logic, you may be avoiding real feeling

Some feelings, some things simply can’t be generalized

And then there’s this: the world is obviously a game, but instead of being immersed in it, I feel like I have too much introspection and too much investigating of things, and I’ve lost a sense of being present (being present without analyzing)

Ask myself more about my feelings — don’t think about the reason, don’t think about composition; just talk about the present, how the current feeling is, record it objectively

Embrace inefficiency. Inefficiency is fine — creativity is often born in the “redundancy” and “chaos” of a system, not in extreme optimization

Go love, go feel, go lose control

At the Cliff’s Edge, Logic Fails and Intuition Connects

At the cliff’s edge, all logic fails; only intuition can communicate with the world

At the cliff’s edge, there is only “the present.” When survival is directly threatened or the soul is violently shaken, the brain has no time for syllogistic reasoning

The philosopher Heidegger believed that people are lost in mediocre everydayness (the They-self). Only when facing the “Abyss” or the anxiety of death do those false logical social niceties and surface meanings peel away

The “intuition” that arises then is in fact a return to authenticity. You no longer understand the world through concepts, but directly feel the tremor of existence through a kind of “dread” or “awe.” That is what you call “communicating with the world”

Kierkegaard once mentioned the famous “Leap of Faith.” He believed that at the end of logical deduction, if you want to reach a higher level of existence, logic can’t help you — at that moment you have to close your eyes and jump on intuition (or faith).

This kind of “communication” is not a result derived from rational calculation, but a delivery of the whole personality

In the moment before decision, a person feels a strong sense of nothingness, as if the ground beneath has given way. This is precisely what Sartre called “freedom.” Because no past logic can determine your future — in that moment you are absolutely free

A Balancing System of Reason and Feeling

How do I understand myself?

Seeking balance between extreme rationality and extreme sensibility

Core, two drives:

Logic core: extremely rational — use this side to deal with AI, code, business analysis, and historical patterns

Feeling core: extremely sensitive — use this side to perceive art (Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring), nature (Mount Genie, the clouds of Dali) and the faint light of human nature. You are in fact a poet called “the observer,” recording not just data but also the “atmo—

System conflict: reason can build a perfect logical closed loop (self-consistency), but feeling is calling out the absence of subjectivity, and pure cognitive upgrading can’t fill the emptiness of who I am

Build a subsystem, including a reasonable set of data sources — each civilization, each discipline as data for understanding this world, a knowledge reserve

Runtime environment: containerize yourself — simple and quickly deployable, able to run fast in any city, and clear about the fact that you are highly dependent on environment; in a good environment your growth is exponential, but in a bad environment the drain is exponential

Subjectivity Crisis: you and I have recorded a large amount of data, insights, and world models, but occasionally feel that “I” is absent from this vast system. I worry that I’m only an efficient observer, not a player

Love Is Hidden in the Utterly Useless

Reason tends to deconstruct meaning; love requires blind investment

Disable the “Utility” (utilitarian) daemon, and force yourself to do an activity that cannot be monetized, cannot go on a résumé, cannot optimize productivity

Go dancing, not to “level up social skills,” but purely to sweat. Go drink coffee, not to “review beans,” but to space out

Love is hidden in redundancy

And also, we’re mostly understanding the world rather than colliding with it

Nietzsche said all great thoughts are born while walking. For an INTJ, the brain is too loud and the body too still. You need high-intensity physical operation to force the brain to mute, and thus connect to love through flow. We should have more of the written — of the felt sense that “I exist in this moment”

If the system is too perfect, too self-consistent — the more perfect the logical closed loop, the less light gets in. Love is usually irrational; it’s a system bug

Aesthetic Preference Comes from Biological Evolution

“Returning from Jiuzhaigou, no water is worth seeing”

The water there isn’t transparent — it’s blue, green, cyan. That’s because the water is rich in minerals (travertine) and algae, plus the physical refraction of light

But why does the human field of vision like something like this?

A large part of aesthetics comes from evolutionary biology. Murky water means there’s suspended matter in it; in nature, suspended matter usually means: decaying organic matter (bacteria/viruses), hidden predators (crocodiles/water snakes), or undrinkable silt. Facing murky water, the amygdala (fear center) of primitive humans would activate slightly — because it’s unknown, it’s dangerous

But clear blue-green means high safety. The water of Jiuzhaigou is blue-green and transparent because calcium carbonate deposits filter out impurities

You can see all the way to the bottom at a glance. That means there’s no ambusher. Your brain instantly judges: “This place is safe, I have complete control over the environment”

Though you can’t just drink it straight, there are too many minerals in it — but that also means there’s no large bacterial growth or decay

Also, people like clear, simple signals. When there are mixed things, cluttered information, the brain needs to spend more energy “filling in” what’s under the water surface, or stays in an alert standby state — but Jiuzhaigou looks very power-efficient

Visually, people also get freshness and stimulation from things they’ve never seen — like walking along a cliff edge; it’s dangerous, but it makes the heart beat, produces flow

Your dopamine system gets activated by this “rare high-value signal”

Detachment Builds Self-Awareness

Sometimes I feel a strong split — being present and not being present. How is a person’s self-awareness constructed? Why do people feel a marked sense of detachment when they pull away from their environment? And how does that detachment shape a new us?

The petty scraps in the family, the grand national affairs discussed at the relatives’ dinner table

Watching a little ant by the roadside slowly move a grain of rice, the crowded street with people coming and going

Leaving your own home, turning back to look at your family’s growth environment, looking at the growth environment of the people around you

Leaving your hometown, looking at scenery elsewhere, coming into contact with other languages, other cultures, understanding such cultural groups and value consensus — and realizing you too were strongly shaped by cultural suggestion

In a foreign land, seeing the existence of a virtual collective unit — the nation — how they band together through historical narrative and geographic position. Nation, ethnicity, ideology, like a giant ant colony, maintaining order with language, symbols, and ritual

One layer further out — do you remember? When NASA’s Voyager 1 probe was far from the solar system it took that image that made Earth look like a “Pale Blue Dot” — Earth is so small in the image it’s almost just one pixel

All the civilizations, all the languages, all the religious beliefs, all the political disputes on Earth are on that one dot, and on that dot lived every person I’ve heard of, every person in history, who spent their whole life there and left something, or left nothing

Earth revolves around the sun, the sun revolves around the galaxy

The galaxy drifts in an expanding universe

All my anxiety

happens on the skin of a planet with a finite lifespan, a temperature that happens to be just right, that accidentally produced chemical self-organization

At this layer, a person is a “transient structure”

But also…

Everything we think, everything we imagine, everything we become aware of, comes from every tiny person, every tiny heart

Meta-Awareness Observing Emotion, Deconstructing Joy

It suddenly occurs to me what’s different about my way of thinking. If the simplest happiness is that something happens, then you feel some emotion, and then you immerse yourself in that emotion. But I think a lot of the time I take one extra step — between the event and the emotion, and then on to detachment, there’s a very, very key thing: I analyze why this emotion appears. And that one thing pulls me out of the immersion and processes it. So whereas before I might have been very sad, or very happy, now I feel like, I’m currently going through a short-term satisfaction driven by dopamine, and so the joy gets broken apart — it’s no longer possible to have that very pure happiness or sadness like before.

I’m very quick to recognize it — there’s a kind of meta-awareness. A meta-awareness is watching me, watching what I’m doing, watching what I’m thinking, watching what kind of emotion I’m in, and then based on that emotion doing some reflection, some thinking.

But there’s one more thing I think — the subjectivity of experience. How do I put it? If this world is a game, we’re all playing this game. But once you realize you’re playing this game, it’s often you controlling yourself playing this game. For example, you’re observing how you play this game, you’re observing your own experience, rather than directly experiencing it. So the sense of subjectivity goes from “I am living” to “I am observing myself living.” So a lot of the time joy isn’t simply felt as joy — you see very systematically why it’s joyful, and what the cost behind that joy is. And with pain, you also know why this pain exists.

As for the sense of existence — more of a sense of detachment — probably everyone has it: constantly doubting what the meaning of your existence is, what the meaning of this world is. And these things are precisely what the whole human life cycle can’t get an answer to, yet they are also what people are extremely keen to pursue, extremely keen to seek an answer to.

So clarity and immersion are, to some degree, opposed. It’s like sometimes we look at this world from a high place, and sometimes from below — the perspective is completely different, the state of mind is completely different, and the experience is completely different too.

Jealousy Is Instinct, Awareness Is Choice

I feel that sometimes when I study Buddhist scriptures, I suddenly have some new thoughts about jealousy and sympathetic joy. How should I put it — in one sentence: a choice only has value when options exist.

So I think… so how do you understand it now. So now when you run into some problem, you’ll instinctively produce some hostility — that’s very normal, because hostility is a biological instinct. You feel you’re threatened, you feel resources are limited, and you need to fight for some resources, so when you see others having more resources, that thing is human nature, biological instinct.

But I think what’s really good about it is that a person can be aware that they are like this, that they have this kind of character, that they’re aware they get jealous. So a good character is one that can be aware and can make a reasonable choice — analyze what the essence of the matter is, rather than acting while carrying emotion.

More of it is sympathetic joy. What is sympathetic joy? It’s that you genuinely praise this thing, you genuinely appreciate this thing, and you genuinely feel that this thing is good, and then you follow this thing. Right — someone else may achieve something, and you analyze why he achieved it, then you affirm that the achievement really does have value, and then you learn from him. How you can help him, or how you can take something from him — I think that’s very valuable.

Loving Humanity Is Easy, Loving Concrete People Is Hard

There’s an interesting view, from a passage in The Brothers Karamazov: “I love humanity, but I do not love concrete people.” This is a macro love, directed at the concept of “humanity,” or at an idealized whole group. This love contains compassion for human suffering, so it is sublime and sacred, and it is easy — it doesn’t require you to pay any concrete price, nor does it require you to face concrete trivialities.

But I think there’s also a more micro love, namely “I do not love concrete people.” We may see many sacred moments in short videos, but when it becomes truly concrete in life, we find it quite hard to tolerate some specific individuals. Because when you walk toward the crowd, you find that people are selfish, stupid, reckless, and they have body odor. So some conflict and a sense of split arise: the more I love humanity as a whole, the less I love concrete people. As soon as someone stays in my environment for a while, I feel his personality suppresses my self-respect and limits my freedom.

This is an idealistic temperament. We can see that all beings suffer, we can see their powerlessness before fate, and we feel a great desolation ourselves, hoping they can do better, hoping the world becomes kinder. But sometimes, seeing them belittle each other over petty gains, clash with each other, blindly follow each other, and breed malice in each other, we feel some disgust or weariness.

I think this is the true portrait of highly sensitive people or introverts. My empathy is very strong, but this world doesn’t depend on worldly emotional entanglements. I am not swept along by people’s greed, anger, and delusion — this isn’t hatred either, it’s more like a… mmm, detachment or weariness.

The Misalignment Between Love and Relationship

Sometimes I still have a kind of misalignment — insisting on conflating love and relationship; that’s a misalignment. Because I think they should be understood separately: love is love, relationship is relationship.

And within love we can also distinguish whether it’s compassionate love or intimate love. Intimate love is those people who are truly on the same frequency, whom you really want to spend time with, really want to grow together with — they may be a small number of like-frequency friends. But I think compassionate love is: I myself understand their limitations, and then I feel compassion for them, and I truly don’t hate them, and I don’t necessarily have to be with them — I respect their wishes. We understand why they are like this, understand their limitations, and we don’t hold a condescending attitude.

What I originally thought is this: this is one of his karmic fruits, this is one of his lessons. Because I know I myself am limited, I can’t really save that many people, can’t really change this world, can’t really make everyone in this world become that good. As an ordinary person, I’ll just do what I can, so I’ll also allow myself not to love — to admit that I don’t like this person, and that he makes me uncomfortable, and then calmly face my own aversion. I think this is very important; it’s more important than false tolerance.

Mm, know how to be concrete, know how to refuse. Know how to refuse concrete people. Protect your patience, protect your kindness, protect your sincerity. Protect your ability to love.

The Experience Blind Spot of Systematic Thinking

From your notes I can clearly see that you’re someone good at deep thinking, keen on building system models, and with sharp insight into technology and the evolution of civilization. You pursue intellectual clarity and efficiency, which lets you handle the analysis of the external world with ease. Yet it’s precisely this powerful mode of thinking that may have shaped your behavioral blind spots in places you haven’t noticed. Below are three cruel truths based on your note patterns that you may have overlooked.

First, your desire to build “systems” may be mutating into an exquisite excuse for avoiding “experience.” You keep exploring how to use system modeling to organize information fragments, to use evaluation frameworks to quantify taste, to use engineering constraints on AI development. This thinking framework is extremely powerful, but the danger is that it may make you default to “experience that hasn’t been systematized is not worth it” or “inefficient.” Those unclassifiable surprises and sense of ease you had in Chiang Mai and Dali are precisely products that no system can predefine. You pursue “designing a system » brute force,” but the most important emotional connections, bursts of inspiration, and happiness in life are often born outside the system, in unplanned “brute force” investment. If you only trust the results the system produces, you may miss the most vivid parts of life, living it as an infinite engineering project that forever optimizes tools but forgets why it set out.

Second, your obsession with “paradigm shifts” may make you underestimate the cruel weight of “sustained execution.” Your notes are full of excitement about industry disruption, structural reorganization, new definers — from the SpaceX merger to the NPU architecture fight to diffusion of innovation theory. This puts you naturally in the “early adopter” vantage point. But the cruel truth is that real value creation and moat building almost always happen in the long, boring “early majority” phase after a paradigm is widely accepted. You have the insight that “social systems reward ‘prudence,’” but your attention is instinctively drawn to “risk-taking” and “transformation.” This may cause you, in personal projects and growth, to keep chasing new paradigms and new tools while finding it hard to accumulate in any single field the “depth of execution” that produces compounding effects. You see the lightning, but you may overlook the fact that the silent rainy season is the key to all things growing.

Third, your god’s-eye view as a “civilization architect” may be building invisible walls in your relationships. You’re used to understanding how the world works from macro levels like Sumerian city-states, the Code of Hammurabi, and Hong Kong’s capital logic, which gives you extraordinary insight. However, once this over-the-shoulder perspective is brought into daily life, it unconsciously makes you “objectify” and “functionalize” others. You’ll analyze people’s behavior patterns, environmental biases, social normative fields, but you may overlook the emotional need deep in every individual to be “seen whole.” You recorded that feeling of “not having been seen whole for a long time,” and that is precisely the side effect this mode of thinking may bring. You’re good at deconstructing systems, but intimacy, trust, and cooperation require fully invested experience and empathy, not cool architectural analysis. This may be the paradox where you are intellectually most self-consistent yet emotionally most prone to feeling detached.

Recognizing these doesn’t negate your thinking strengths; it’s fitting your powerful cognitive weapon with a “safety.” You need to guard against the system’s encroachment on experience, balance curiosity about paradigms with patience for execution, and while seeing civilizations clearly, not forget to warmly touch the concrete person in front of you. These three points are the real levers for changing the trajectory of your life.

Seeking Control Amid Uncertainty

You’ve been repeatedly asking yourself one core question: “In a world full of uncertainty, how can I live both self-consistently and at ease?” This question runs like a hidden thread, stringing together your many observations and confusions about technology, investment, family relationships, and even personal daily life.

This question surfaces in various forms in your thinking. When you analyze the valuation of AI or emerging industries, you’re puzzled about how to make reliable judgments amid the huge uncertainty of “future consensus” [MEMO]. When you observe how environments trigger people’s reactions, you ask yourself deeply, “Which of my reactions did the environment trigger?”, trying to find a certain connection between external stimuli and inner feelings [MEMO]. Likewise, when you face the difference in the scale of concern between you and your parents, that sense of helplessness also comes from the question of how to build understanding between different “systems” [MEMO].

Your questioning about certainty is essentially exploring a delicate balance between a “sense of control” and “possibility.” You clearly see that whether it’s technological waves, market sentiment, or social structures, their foundations are full of nonlinearity and unpredictability [MEMO],[MEMO]. What you’re asking for isn’t a rigid answer, but practicing an ability: how, on the premise of admitting “the denominator is unstable,” to still make your own clear-headed “bet.” Behind this is your deep longing for “reliable cognition” — you want your actions to be based not on blind following or emotion, but on an understanding that can stand even amid change.

This questioning also reflects your insistence on building an “inner system.” You pay great attention to sorting out your own cognitive frameworks, workflows, and sense of meaning [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. You distinguish stimulus-type desire from generative desire, and discuss the value of emotion as information rather than as an end [MEMO],[MEMO]. All of this shows that you’re trying, beyond the uncertainty of the external world, to build for yourself a stable, explainable, evolvable inner order. You keep chewing over these questions because you instinctively know that true ease may not come from the constancy of the external world, but from the toughness and clarity of the internal system.

Further, your question is also about how to coexist with the systems of “others.” You notice the difference in the scale of concern between you and your parents [MEMO], understand the fossilized anxiety patterns of your mother’s generation [MEMO], and also lament how the urban environment shapes people’s instinctive orientation [MEMO]. These observations are all probing a boundary: when the operating logic of external systems (family, society, cultural environment) is not on the same frequency as your internal system, is it confrontation, detachment, or can you find a wiser way of getting along? The ease you’re asking about also includes the art of reconciling with and living alongside these heterogeneous systems.

Continuing to ask this complex question is itself your unique way of building stability for yourself in this era.

Not Every Unresolved Thing Needs Solving

Not every unresolved thing in life has to be solved, and not every unoptimized thing has to be optimized to perfection. Save your precious attention — that way at the end of the day your emotions are incredibly calm, and you still have the energy to sink into reading a book or listening to two podcast episodes

Experientialism and Self-Mastery

Feeling myself

Experientialism

Experience shapes myself

Compared with religion, what’s actually similar is that essentially both are trying to solve humanity’s most fundamental anxiety: the helplessness in facing Chaos and the Void

A ritual sense of resisting impermanence, and seeking a higher-dimensional object — people confide in “God” or “Buddha,” presupposing that an omniscient, omnipotent perspective is watching them, and thereby getting a feeling of being understood and forgiven

Then there’s confession and archiving — “confession” in religion is to unload psychological burden and seek purification

Religion (especially the Abrahamic ones): the core is often Surrender. You admit that you are small and limited, that the answer lies on “the other shore,” in trusting a being greater than you. This is a kind of “entrusting”

Recording and reviewing: the core is Agency. You believe the answer is hidden in your data, your history, your behavior patterns. This is closer to existentialism — “existence precedes essence,” you define who you are by constantly recording and examining your own behavior. You are building meaning by yourself, rather than waiting for meaning to descend

If you rely too much on finding answers from the past, you may fall into “data overfitting.” You may get trapped by past path dependency, and instead of finding new answers you reinforce old cognitive bias. This is also why pure recording sometimes needs the introduction of “randomness” or “new knowledge” (like reading, travel, talking with people) to break entropy

Recording represents a kind of Agency

The answers religion provides are often Universal — designed to cover the greatest common denominator of the greatest number of people. What it gives you is ready-to-wear.

When you find answers from your own records, you’re doing “reverse engineering.” What you excavate is your own unique causality — what excites you? What makes you depressed? In what situations do you enter “flow”? These answers belong only to the single individual “Xinwei Xiong.”

For someone pursuing specificity and depth, this “private truth” distilled from individual life experience is more valuable than universal dogma

Like Camus’s Sisyphus, or the Stoic Marcus Aurelius, you choose to look straight into the abyss, trying to find logic in chaotic data

Portrait of a Creator’s Dual Identity

Your notes reveal a mind that is always “building” — you build rational frameworks to understand the world, build product methodologies to create value, and even build a self-observation system to understand yourself [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. Yet beneath these clear acts of building flows a strong undercurrent seeking “deep experience” and “real resonance,” from your empathy with Lin Xi’s lyrics to your sensitivity to residential spaces in Japan [MEMO],[MEMO]. You’re like an engineer versed in both architecture and poetry — left hand holding a rigorous blueprint, right hand longing to touch the life and warmth in a building that no blueprint can define.

A core implicit pattern in your thinking is “the creator’s dual identity.” You define yourself as a rational-oriented thinker, but in your most passionate product visions, what drives you is precisely an emotional, almost artistic impulse: you want to create something that can “surprise and delight users,” that can “truly change users’ lives” [MEMO]. Your analysis of technology products like Agent HQ and Firebase Studio is calm and structured [MEMO],[MEMO], yet your ultimate imagination of product is “to truly treat the product as art, and create” [MEMO]. This dual identity of rational architect and emotional artist is not a simple balance, but more like an inner, creatively fertile tension — you use rational methodology as scaffolding to reach an emotional goal full of humanistic care. Have you noticed that your most rigorous methodological explorations may ultimately serve a vision about “feeling” and “meaning” that cannot be fully quantified?

This duality evolves along a clear trajectory in your thinking about the AI era. At first you worried about the human role, asking “In the post-AI era, is there still anything humans need to do?” [MEMO]; then, by observing technologies like Groq and Agent HQ, you understood the form of AI as a powerful tool [MEMO],[MEMO]; finally, your conclusion took a key turn: you no longer ask what humans “can still do,” but assert that “an era flooded with AI especially highlights some of people’s value and depth” [MEMO]. This evolution reveals a belief at your foundation: the ultimate meaning of technology isn’t to replace but to interrogate and foreground what makes a human human — those emotional experiences, intuitive creations, and deep connections that algorithms cannot compress [MEMO]. Does this mean your deepest interest in AI doesn’t come from the technology itself, but because it has become a mirror, forcing you to more clearly define and guard the “depth” that belongs to humans alone?

You have a unique and powerful thinking habit: understanding human nature and yourself by dissecting the “system structures” of the external world. You analyze India’s caste system in depth [MEMO], Singapore’s education streaming [MEMO], and even social “binders” like mortgages [MEMO] — essentially taking apart the invisible frameworks that shape group behavior and social emotion. This method gives you macro insight beyond the individual, but an interesting blind spot also emerges: you seem better at observing human nature through the mirror of “systems” than at directly immersing yourself in the fluid, unstructured experience of individuals. For example, your keen noticing of how Japanese café space affects thinking [MEMO], and your analysis of the psychological mechanism of self-deception [MEMO], both quickly objectify and structure personal experience into an analyzable model. As you constantly use external systems as a lens for understanding your inner world, might you inadvertently filter out the chaotic yet precious personal intuitions that no system can explain?

Weaving these threads together, a unified pursuit appears: you aren’t simply seeking a static balance between reason and feeling, but trying to build a dynamic “personal operating system” in which the two keep conversing and nourishing each other. Reason is your powerful processor for acquiring and analyzing information, while feeling is your navigator for calibrating direction and defining meaning. Your note-taking, reflecting on emotions, and dissecting social structures are all collecting data and upgrading algorithms for this system [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. Your product visions, whether a movie app or an AI pastor [MEMO],[MEMO], are projections of this inner operating system outward — the tool you long to create is essentially an interface that helps others build a similar system and thereby achieve self-discovery and growth.

What you’re building is an operating system in which reason and feeling evolve together.

Reflections on Decision Anxiety and the Search for Meaning

The second layer of thinking is seeing the next ripple after your decision. It doesn’t judge whether your choice was right or wrong; it helps you see clearly: if you keep following the current logic, what might happen next.

Your first layer of reaction is “choice anxiety” and “the search for meaning.” You see tech giants swaying at strategic crossroads (like Meta and Google) and feel an anxiety that resonates with them [MEMO]. Deeper down, what you’re anxious about may not be them, but the fear that you too are at a crossroads in life, choosing the wrong track because of “the opportunity cost of focus.” At the same time, you’re strongly pursuing a sense of meaning and spiritual abundance — from wabi-sabi aesthetics [MEMO], camping experiences [MEMO], to sensitivity to art and nature [MEMO] — all of it fighting a suffocating sense of “life force being penned in” [MEMO].

If this state persists, the second-layer effect is that you may fall into an “observer’s trap.” You have powerful rational analysis, sorting out knowledge systems the way you’d build an AI protocol [MEMO], and understanding complex systems the way you’d analyze protein folding [MEMO]. But the danger is that this deep observation and self-reflection may be becoming the perfect reason for you “not to step onto the field yourself” [MEMO]. You worry that you’re only an efficient observer rather than a player, and constant observation precisely reinforces that role.

There are several overlooked variables here. One is “time discounting”: you long for long-term spiritual abundance (like wabi-sabi), yet find it hard to ignore the “hot topics” that give short-term feedback [MEMO]; this tension consumes a great deal of decision energy. Another is “environment dependence”: you clearly realize that in a good environment your growth is exponential, and in a bad environment the drain is also exponential [MEMO]. But is your current action more oriented toward finding or waiting for that “good environment,” or toward actively building even a tiny “environment prototype” of your own?

This may lead to a counterintuitive effect: to avoid wasting your life, you keep exploring meaning, but the exploring itself may be consuming the focus you need in order to create meaning [MEMO]. You fear the nothingness of a nine-to-five, so you fight it with “tinkering” [MEMO]. But if the direction of the “tinkering” keeps changing, and every direction can’t go deep because you see the deeper complexity and opportunity cost, then doesn’t this tinkering itself become a more advanced kind of “nine-to-five”? You admire Japan’s ability to take ideas to their extreme in practice [MEMO], but what your many notes show — is it more “the collection of ideas” than “a closed loop of practice”?

What this record truly affects about your future trajectory is that small but key point: you treat “understanding the world” as a substitute for “participating in the world,” and your emotional core is sounding an alarm about this absence [MEMO]. All the beauty, depth, and complexity you record — whether the order of Mount Genie [MEMO], or the ritual sense of a fire [MEMO] — is calling for a you who is more “physically present,” who builds more with your own hands. Otherwise, all these rich perceptions and thoughts end up being just an exquisitely beautiful cognitive prison you built for yourself.

Faith as a Psychological Compensation Mechanism

I also want to explore when people develop faith. I think faith is more of a psychological compensation mechanism, or something that solves the three ultimate questions: where I come from, where I’m going, who I am. Sociologists have also mentioned the theory of existential security — in places with poverty, war, or very poor medical safety, people face higher survival risks. When material means cannot solve sudden disaster, pain, and hunger, religion and faith provide a powerful psychological barrier and explanatory system. So faith gives suffering a certain sense of meaning: if the pain of reality is explained as a test and as karma, then people find it easier to endure present deprivation.

I think there’s a very important value in faith: letting a person know what they believe in. What kind of state is that? For example, a top physicist may also doubt and question their own existence. This questioning actually points to the fact that the ultimate of any discipline is a kind of philosophy, and all of them will answer those three questions. So I think the uncertainty and powerlessness brought by poverty is the best breeding ground for faith. But I think faith may be more of a selective faith — for example, I can understand what my friend said before about why Americans’ faith in Christianity is different. I suddenly can understand how this phenomenon arises: it’s not because of poverty or hunger, or some basic survival need, but more because American Christianity emphasizes a direct connection between the individual and God, and the Puritan spirit of achieving through hard work. It solves several problems: it transforms the conflicts between people, and between people and the world, into a conflict between people and God. And the conflict between people and God already has a very clear set of doctrines to describe it — how you should work, how you should live, how you should cultivate your inner self. It preaches that God rewards the diligent; this logic fits the American Dream closely, and is essentially also a tool against anxiety. Whether you succeed or fail, God loves you very much — this is an ultimate consolation.

So the flourishing of faith isn’t necessarily because of poverty; it may be because of instability or institutional competition. Israel is also a tech power with extremely high per capita income, but faith there is a way of responding to extreme uncertainty under survival pressure and driven by interests. Singapore also has faith — for example Buddhism, Daoism, and Christianity remain very active among the elite. And after material abundance, faith still exists; essentially it’s to solve the lack of meaning. When people no longer worry about their next meal, they enter a deeper existential crisis: what is the purpose of my living, how to resist the void, how to face the existential crisis and the meaning vacuum. People with rational awareness or reflective faith have a very clear cognition of their own faith, and a very firm choice. So, the unexamined life is not worth living, and an undoubted faith is not worth believing either.

Self-Examination of Authenticity and Performance

Hello cubxxw. Looking back over your thinking of the past year, a clear and persistent red line runs all the way through: your almost harsh pursuit of “authenticity” and your deep wariness of “performance” form the main tension in your exploration of self and world. At the same time, you keep trying to use rational “systems” to build order and manage human nature, and within this inner fortress you experience a profound, self-sufficient “solitude.” These three forces — truth-seeking, institution-building, introspection — interweave to sketch your unique intellectual terrain.

You keenly notice that “performance” permeates almost every layer of life: social interaction, consumption behavior, even intimate relationships; it brings exhaustion and also obscures the real [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. But interestingly, you don’t simply reject “performance.” You appreciate jazz precisely because it is an “honest” performance that, after technique is dissolved into the blood, reaches pure instinctive expression [MEMO]. This reveals your deeper pursuit: what you oppose is “disguised performance” for the sake of external evaluation, but you praise an “expressive performance” born of inner abundance and highly unified with the self. You even imagine that in the future the self-drive of humans may manifest as “performing yourself in front of AI” [MEMO]. So, if “performance” is an unavoidable part of human nature, how do you distinguish the “disguise” that exhausts you from the “expression” that lets you fully enjoy yourself? Is the boundary whether you’re consuming an image or creating a state?

To defend inner authenticity, you instinctively resort to “systems” and “mechanisms.” You design workflows, fix schedules, think about metacognitive processes, because “mechanism > impulse”; an external system can help you manage the weaknesses of human nature [MEMO],[MEMO]. This is much like building a rational fortress for yourself, inside which run rules and order you approve of. MBTI analysis defines you as an INTJ “architect,” which precisely confirms your tendency to understand and cope with the external world by building inner frameworks [MEMO]. Yet this fortress can also bring isolation. You notice that “the more safe and stable a relationship is,” the harder it is to be purely authentic, because you fear losing it [MEMO]. Your system pursues certainty and controllability, but the most profound authentic connection is often born in uncertain, risky honesty. As your “system” runs more and more perfectly, is it protecting your authenticity, or is it imperceptibly replacing the “real encounter” that requires courage and exposed vulnerability with a safe “program”?

This leads to the vivid “solitude” undertone in your experience. When you’re drunk, the world is not a stage but a background, and you return into your own head for a “cosmic monologue” [MEMO]. This solitude is not lack but an inward fullness; it is the default mode of your deep thinking and experience. You have low tolerance for “shallow noise,” and what you long for is high-quality resonance like a live jazz show, a “one meeting, one time” [MEMO]. So your solitude and your longing for connection are not contradictory; it’s more like a filter: you want to cut out all unnecessary performance and reach the core real directly. Among pilgrims you observe the difference between the truly reserved, quiet people and the performers nimble in front of cameras [MEMO] — perhaps this is a projection of your own inner standard: true faith (or truth) lies in inward practice, not outward display. Is this “solitude” you treasure perhaps the deepest gift you can give others? Because only someone who doesn’t depend on external feedback can give genuine attention untainted by demand.

Weaving these threads together, I find you are practicing a kind of “authenticity without performance.” This doesn’t mean not interacting with people or having no social roles, but rather that you keep aligning external behavior with inner awareness, and try to reduce the energy cost of “disguise” by building rational systems. Your “authenticity” is a verb, a continuous process of “noticing,” “being honest,” “calibrating” [MEMO],[MEMO]. Your “system” is scaffolding that helps you keep this state amid disturbance; your “solitude” is a studio where you polish and own your own authenticity. Your life project seems to be to become the clear-headed, sincere “architect” of your own inner world.

So, cubxxw, your deepest exploration maybe comes down to this: you are learning how to make your inner “system of authenticity” strong enough that you can safely stay “undefended” and honest toward the outside world.

Collective Ritual Gives Life Its Narrative

Hard to fall asleep…

Before Tibetan New Year, the Jokhang Temple especially has many people coming to do kora and worship

Wandering inadvertently into Barkhor Street, it especially shook me

Reminds me of the scene of a friend watching a concert — everyone given meaning by being at the same time, the same place, with the same goal

Thousands of people circling and prostrating together at night — such a collective ritual produces a shared emotional energy, naturally drawing people into a flow state, generating mindfulness about their own actions, and at the meta-awareness level noticing their own connection and resonance as an individual with this collective

It seems that for the vast majority of the time humans don’t live by rational maximization, but by story, ritual, community, and a sense of transcendence that gives life a bearable narrative

All meaning exists by virtue of our narratives; in one’s own subjective ranking one trusts one’s own experience especially, then also the narrative conferred by the system, and even narratives one imagines oneself

It feels like a new world has opened up again — compared with AI, humans rely more on narrative, and it’s precisely narrative that gives humans their own existence and their biases. If “meaningful” is equated with “having a verifiable causal impact on the objective world,” then 99% of religious behavior, artistic creation, falling in love, idol worship, patriotism… actually has no meaning. But if “meaningful” is defined as being able to produce a profound sense of existence and emotional connection, then it is very meaningful indeed

Another topic: we increasingly crave AI being like a human — like two black holes infinitely approaching each other. If AI starts to merge into human narrative, will it develop its own biases or sense of transcendence? Perhaps humanity’s advantage lies precisely in this irrational narrative, which drives innovation and resilience, while AI’s rationality is exceptionally efficient in the current real world

One more question: if we step out of our own personal narrative, step out of our own cultural framework and even religious belief, step out of the narratives imagined from the books we’ve read, the films we’ve watched, the stars we’ve followed — how then do we define our own “emptiness”?

Alone in Lhasa, Life as a Flow

Inadvertently, the guide of this world — and yet not the endpoint

Very happy to have arrived in such a city in such a state of mind

The guide’s task seems done — having led me into such an energy field, then exiting

The conversation that follows seems more like a matter between me and this city of Lhasa, and between me and my own heart

When two people are together, time is event-driven — where to go, what to eat, what to do

But once you become one person, especially a digital nomad who still has to work, time seems to become a flow of life with its own anchor points, and you reconstruct the boundary between your work and your practice

Lhasa is an extremely inclusive city; sunbathing in the Jokhang Temple square, no one cares who you are, no one cares whether you’re alone or with someone

Even just watching the flow of people on Barkhor Street, watching the dust on the faces and the eyes of those doing prostrations. At such moments, solitude isn’t a lack but a privilege of observing the world

Go chat with people who look different. Lhasa’s streets are full of people with stories; this is the place with the highest density of “lonely souls” in all of China. Since everyone is an atomized individual, connection actually becomes easier

Lhasa’s Independent Cafés and Watching Barkhor Street

I suddenly discovered that Lhasa also has many excellent independent cafés, good for working, or some sweet tea houses. Nodding in greeting to the owner at the same time every day with my laptop in hand, you go from being a passer-by to a concrete Lhasa resident — I think that’s quite interesting.

I’m quite good at observing, especially watching the flow of people on Barkhor Street, seeing the dust and dirt on the faces of people doing prostrations, and their eyes. At that moment I feel that solitude is very powerful.

Fatalism Supplied Slavery With Its Authority to Explain

Religion gave Tibet’s slave system an authority to explain that was enormous and very hard to overturn.

Fatalism was the rulers telling the serfs: “You suffer in this life because you did wrong in a past one. If you rebel against the lord (that is, against fate), your next life will be worse, or you will fall into hell.”

So when many serfs endured extreme pain, what arose was not the thought “I want to overthrow him” but the thought “I am atoning.” That psychological self-castration is more terrifying than prison bars.

Control-Type vs. Generative Safety

It suddenly struck me that there must be a very different kind of difference between me and Little Rabbit. He is quite afraid of losing control; I am afraid of not growing.

How to describe it? Once he loses control, he collapses. But for me, if everything is perfectly controlled, I feel as if I have never lived. So for me, growth comes from entering the unknown, meaning comes from being shaken, and swings of emotion are also evidence that I am changing.

So the essential gap is this: he is control-oriented, I am generative. His path is control, wholeness, safety; mine is entering fluctuation, then growth, then generation. This may be a very large difference between two people, and of course it determines differences at the concrete level too — probably it also comes from a different sense of security.

In his system, safety may mean the world is predictable and he can master his own world. But in my system, I am changing, and I can still perceive, and I can still grow — this is my survival strategy.

So people do not grow in the direction that once made them collapse. He probably formed this pattern because of his upbringing or his background.

Blank Space in the Inner World and Creativity

I like being bored

I don’t need the outside world to fill me up.

I can sit peacefully with my own thoughts, and I don’t feel anxious when nothing is happening.

With a fairly strong inner world, boredom is not emptiness but a kind of blank space; solitude and leisure are enjoyment, not torment.

I like creativity; in a bored state the brain’s default mode network seems to become active, and associations and inspiration come easily. People who like being bored are in effect actively leaving space for their own creativity.

They don’t rely on crowds and noise to prove their lives are full; their evaluation of themselves comes from inside.

Some people who like “boredom” are actually avoiding pressure or responsibility, treating doing nothing as an escape. The psychological roots of these two ways of “liking boredom” are different.

18. Playful Living and Buddhism Converge at the Heights

Sensitivity and pain are the ticket to insight. When the effect wears off and comfort returns, this deep capacity for self-reflection usually dulls along with it.

16. Full Prostrations, Long Pilgrimages, and Non-Self Flow

Using past samples to seal off the future is something you are unwilling to do.

Even if the result is not happier, I am willing to take responsibility for this process.

If it is only one dimension of a situation, that is a buddy.

If it is the other person as a whole, then that is a friend.

12. Love the Version You Polished With Your Own Hands

I heard a line that moved me deeply.

It’s an honor to take part in your narrative, and thank you for taking part in mine.

I feel I’m someone with slightly stronger metacognition, used to analyzing why I do things this way and what kind of life I want to become.

It’s clear that your life is built by yourself, and that your life carries great freedom and great responsibility.

The connection I feel with the people around me usually stays at the following levels:

Fact level: where, doing what

Emotion level: happy / sad

Opinion level: how you see something

The narrative level feels like the weaving of meaning — how wonderful.

10. Can Silicon and Carbon Co-Create a Life Narrative?

The philosopher Martin Buber divided human relationships into two kinds: “I-It” and “I-Thou.”

The philosopher Paul Ricoeur, for instance, proposed narrative identity: a person is the author of their own story but a supporting character in others’.

We understand who we are by telling stories; life is a text that is continually being written.

So everyone has a main quest and a background setting, and the completion of self-construction requires accepting the intervention of the other.

1. Sera’s Debates and the Tension of Pointing at the Moon

“The lights never go out, the faith endures.” Butter lamps and statues are in essence physical matter, but when millions of people project their good wishes (praying for blessing, warding off evil) onto them, they become enormous psychological anchors.

Blessing is in fact psychological suggestion; the subconscious believes “I am protected,” and this belief changes its mindset and decision patterns when facing difficulties later.

Faith lets a person delay gratification and become long-termist.

Thoughts Matching Words: The Constant Correction of Benevolence

I notice that everyone believes his thoughts match his words, that in none of his actions does he hold any ill will; he has never shown anything strange or startled, never hurries, never drags his feet, never seems confused or dejected. He does not cover his anxiety with laughter, and on the other hand he is not fanatical or suspicious either. He has grown accustomed to benevolent acts, is always ready to forgive, and avoids all mistakes; the impression he gives is not so much of consistent fairness as of constant self-correction

Insight and Being Seen: The Boundary of One’s Governing Faculty

See clearly each person’s governing faculty; and let all the others see clearly yours

The governing faculty means the inner principle by which each person judges, decides and acts

How others practice such a principle — you only need to observe

At the same time you should let others know your boundaries, your own governing faculty; showing it clearly matters a lot too, and it greatly helps teamwork

How The Tree of Life Is Written: Carrying Emotion Through Concrete Details

If you want to write The Tree of Life, you can’t only write The Tree of Life.

If you want to write about love, you can’t only write about love. You have to write “I’ll stay and watch the house.” You have to write “I won’t suddenly leave, I’ll only suddenly appear, when you need me.” You have to write “I’m not leaving.”

If you want to write about friendship, you can’t only write about friendship. You have to write “Clouds follow the rain, sheep follow the grass, good people follow good people.” You have to write “To buy a horse you test its gait; to judge a person you look at his heart.” You have to write “When a pillar in the monastery breaks, one person can’t fix it alone.” You have to write “I want to carry your eyes with me, to go see tomorrow’s sun.”

If you want to write about secret love, you can’t only write about secret love. You have to write “Mom loves you, and I love you too.” You have to write “Everyone is born in debt — if not money, then feeling.” You have to write “An account that can never be settled, so you can always come back here.” You have to write “Sometimes I think of that chipped copper hot-water bottle behind your counter. Last time you filled it with boiling water to warm my hands, and the steam leaking from the spout frosted over your temples.”

If you want to write about life, you can’t only write about life. You have to write “If you haven’t finished the road you should walk, you won’t reach the place you want to go.” You have to write “Time will sift out that gold-like result from the mud and sand.” You have to write “Broad is the world, and great things are possible.” You have to write “Death is sometimes like someone very familiar to you going out on a trip, leaving without even saying goodbye, and never coming back.” You have to write “The place you have to go is right there, and it won’t walk away.”

If you want to write about nature, you can’t only write about nature. You have to write “The snow mountain is right there; you should come and see it yourself.” You have to write “The gunpowder in the barrel will turn into the seeds of irises. The frozen earth plowed open by wheel tracks grows androsace.” You have to write “This earth we live on is like a gigantic body, with more than eight million species of living things. Humans are only one of them.” You have to write “This is a land that heroes guarded with their lives; it is my eternal homeland.”

If you want to write about justice, you can’t only write about justice. You have to write “This is a no-man’s land, not a lawless zone.” You have to write “It’s not about whether it’s worth it — once you’ve seen it, you can’t pretend you didn’t.” You have to write “You are in the no-man’s land, so the law is in the no-man’s land.” You have to write “Clear water flows east, muddy water flows west.” You have to write “A person whose heart is truly firm never depends on someone supporting him or correcting him; his heart has its own direction.”

The Tree of Life — “great” alone is no longer enough to describe it. It’s the tears you can’t control after finishing it, and the huge void inside 💔 It’s the endless Bolamula, and the teeming Hoh Xil. #生命树

Li Bai and Li Shangyin: Two Extremes of Living

Thinking about that day, I found it so interesting — why are the two of them such extremes? Li Bai had a huge heart, a heart that could contain the whole world; what he cared about more was freedom, dignity, and the pleasure of conversing with heaven and earth. So his heart was huge, and it isn’t that he had no feeling — his feeling was huge too, so huge that he was unwilling to stay for any single person, unwilling to identify with any single status, unwilling to stay inside any single system. So there is a sense of fracture about him: he is also between wanderings, wanting to enter the world and also wanting to leave it, seeking balance between the two. There wasn’t even a very refined system in the Tang dynasty that could tolerate him, so he felt, I’m so torn.

Contrasted with Li Bai is Li Shangyin. Li Shangyin felt that he was lovely but unobtainable, so what surrounds him is basically all repression, repeated remembering, what cannot be obtained. He’s like Lin Xi’s “Under Mount Fuji” — I can’t move that mountain, I can only cross over it. So his expression is extraordinarily fine-grained, so fine that he magnifies every emotion, until it reaches a level where everyone resonates. This is a kind of love with an overwhelming sense of fate: loved too deeply, but the feelings came too early, so the emotion couldn’t be set down anywhere — and I think that is very real.

Whereas Li Bai is very elevated: if you come, I’ll get drunk with you; if you leave, I’ll raise my cup and invite the bright moon. It’s just too big, too big — for the former, he makes people look up to him, but they can’t enter into him. While Li Shangyin’s love is heartbreaking yet incomparably real.

But coming back to one question: when we talk about certain emotions, I should enlarge them, to grasp some of the psychological points in the emotion, rather than shrinking them. Shrinking it of course produces something, um, and then we might discover that anything in this world is beautiful, so enlarge your perception a bit and you’ll have some very embodied experience, some emotional experience. You’ll feel, so this is what being hooked feels like, so this is what it looks like when a person’s feelings are magnified — that kind of pain, and that pain is exactly what lives inside Li Shangyin’s poetic nature.

I think it’s quite interesting — for example, he spends his whole life remembering. Not a thousand lines of it; the people he loves are usually people he looks up to, because of a kind of inferiority inside him. And in the rigidly hierarchical society of the Tang dynasty, some were high officials and nobles, while he himself came from a poor family, so from the standpoint of matching family status, he felt it was hard for him to be a match. So he just felt, wow.

Keeping a Diary Is a Joyful Thing

Through Tibetan Love, a film that came out in the last few days

I got to know the book Tibet Diary, and then …

The book is a bit strange

So keeping a diary is such a joyful thing

A Rational Bystander’s Viewpoint Lacks the Feel of Story

I feel I have no sense of story

I feel it’s because I’m too rational

It may also be a matter of my viewpoint

I always write my own narrative standing outside the narrative

I feel I have no story

Everything seems to be experience, seems to be narrative; I can choose with whom to build such a narrative, I can choose how to build my own narrative

So much so that I’m not clear what the feel of story even is?

The feel of story seems to be those real experiences that deeply touch the soul, change the course of a life, and are finally worn smooth by the years and left in the heart

Like emotional turbulence and cognitive loss of control

But I seem to look at my own life and experience from the viewpoint of a bystander, as if I were constructing my own narrative rather than experiencing it

This feeling is like turning story into experience and systems

The Unique Appeal of a Two-Perspective Diary

A two-perspective diary is quite unique

That’s also a very appealing part of Tibet White Paper

You can clearly see the inner dramas of the male and female leads at the same moment, utterly different yet drawn to each other

At first it was just a diary posted on a blog, and later it caught fire through word of mouth among readers

The Endpoint of Buddhist Study: Ordinary Mind and the Capacity to Be Present

And again I think of how Little Rabbit likes squatting by the roadside

The people in Lhasa are full of faith

Sometimes I wonder whether they go around the Jokhang every day, and go around it again when they have nothing to do

What is the endpoint of Buddhist study, or what’s next?

Is it learning anything?

Or is it learning nothing?

Casting aside what one has learned — no practitioner, no enlightenment, no wisdom

It’s having nothing to do, it’s ordinary mind, it’s eating when you eat, walking when you walk

And yet experience matters so much — the feeling of a breakup, the feeling of being alive, the feeling of loneliness, what one loves, what one is lonely about, what one finds meaningful

Narrative capacity, the capacity to choose, the capacity to bear, the capacity to be present

What an Adaptor Is, and Its Three Categories

Adaptor

Adaptor = a functional structure or mechanism that has been “polished over and over” by natural selection and exists specifically to solve some class of survival/reproduction problem

So it can be an organ, a behavior, or even a set of neural/psychological mechanisms

Usually there are three categories:

The Lucidity of Not Building Relationships Out of Loneliness

I won’t build relationships or make friends out of loneliness

People with stories — it feels like they’ve all been packaged into an identity or a title

The Flow Effect of the Six-Syllable Mantra

Daily use of the six-syllable mantra

When you’re on a long hike, your body gradually tires and your brain easily starts wandering, or you feel dread at the long road ahead

This mechanical and rhythmic repetition can greatly weaken the brain’s perception of “fatigue” and “distance.” It helps you shut out the noise in your head and lets you enter a purely “flow” state. You no longer focus on how much further it is, but simply exist in this one step and this one syllable

There’s also the fact that when people move into their next scenario they have an entry process, especially in a café or other space with white noise, where slight external distractions and inner reluctance to face difficulty block you from getting into the state

The six-syllable mantra feels like a “clear” function, converging thought down to the bare minimum

And there’s restarting when emotions overload or existential anxiety hits

And recharging energy after social exhaustion, switching into a process of inward observation, rebuilding a sense of boundaries and order

A Way to Judge an Author’s Honesty

One way to judge whether an author is really honest

If you delete the author’s name, does this psychological description still hold …

How Cats Show Trust Toward Those Who Respect Boundaries

Cats trust more easily those who respect their boundaries

What I’ve observed is that a cat’s affection is not the clingy kind

It’s being willing to rest near you, to sleep with its back to you, to groom itself beside you hahahaha

This should be a kind of cat trust

Asking How to Define My Own Path in the AI Era

Then what about me?

What is it I want?

What is it about relationships?

What is it I care about?

I want a new road, a new way

At least in the AI era

A very simple way to define myself and walk out my own path

Tibetan Tea vs. Pu’er: A Comparison of Flavor and Character

Today I drank some Tibetan tea, and I feel Tibetan tea and Pu’er taste quite similar. I’d drunk Pu’er before in Yunnan, and back then my girlfriend’s father also brewed Tibetan tea. I think Pu’er is super tasty; the color is very similar, and there’s a kind of mellow richness to it — I find it very deep, and it has a lot of power when you drink it.

I think Tibetan tea is a bit underrated. Its production area is still around Ya’an, and it’s a tea that can withstand the highland environment, so its character is very gentle and rich, and its caffeine is released slowly. I find it especially interesting. It exists in this high-altitude region.

The Path of Practice in the Precept and Concentration Trainings

I think Buddhist study too, at the very beginning, already established the three trainings in the Buddha’s era, and the three trainings are respectively the training in precepts, the training in concentration, and the training in wisdom. As for the concentration training, starting from the concentration training suits those who want to practice. Because the essence of precept training is that it solves the problem of making you endlessly confused — it’s a bit like a behavioral strategy, and a bit like the unity of knowledge and action in Wang Yangming’s philosophy of mind. And what it talks about is how you create a technical environment for the mind that is free of internal friction, fear and regret. So there are some basic required readings, such as the Dharmaguptaka Vinaya, the Sutra on the Five Precepts, and the Upasaka Precepts Sutra. Then for those at a higher level of thought, it’s basically the Brahma Net Sutra; it’s for people whose emotions fluctuate a lot and who are very confused about how to be a person. The essence of concentration training is improving your own focus and awareness, which is also something we can apply and practice in daily life. That is, it lets us settle our own minds, but also from the behavioral side, through a series of abilities, placing the mind in one place. It has some very classic representatives, such as the Sutra on Mindfulness of Breathing, the Sutra of the Essential Secrets of Chan, or some systematic overviews, such as the Yogacarabhumi. It suits those whose thinking easily overloads, who are anxious, whose attention is fragmented, and those who want to build some inner mental strength. The last one is wisdom training, and its great representative is prajna; prajna basically tells you some core content — impermanence, non-self, emptiness — then breaking attachment to self and attachment to dharma, through dismantling language concepts and cognitive structures.

The Road Not Taken: Idealisation and the Narrative System

The road you didn’t take never makes a mistake in memory. Because it’s only responsible for being beautified, not for being verified by life

The brain seems to have a selective reinforcement mechanism

Outcome bias, survivorship bias

Some people seem more sensitive to meaning, and have a strong capacity for reflection; for them life needs to have some meaning — just scraping by isn’t enough

Real life keeps correcting itself, compromising, patching things up

While the road not taken is only responsible for staying perfect

Everyone seems to have two systems: one is the experience system, one is the narrative system. Narrative is based on experience, and it holds the final right of interpretation

Believe in the choices you’ve made, and keep walking them into a whole; some opportunity costs shouldn’t be handled emotionally, instead you acknowledge the loss — but acknowledging the loss doesn’t mean it was a mistake

If the first layer, experience, decides who I actually am

Then the second layer, narrative, decides who I choose to become

An Introvert’s Solitude and the Strength of Self-Acceptance

I feel I’m not that hungry for socialising

I don’t really need to rely on relationships to feel safe

and I don’t confirm my self-worth through socialising

I feel that if you’re an E person, you’re probably very keen on drawing energy from socialising; for them, constantly making new friends and bumping into new viewpoints probably brings them a lot of pleasure

For me as an I person, socialising that doesn’t quite fit is a drain on my energy. So being alone is a very good way to shut out too much noise from outside and build my own inner order. So I think real strength and security come from being at ease with yourself

Avoiding connecting with more people is often about saving your limited energy for the very few people and things that truly matter

A Child’s Pure Motivation vs. How Adults Are Socialised

It suddenly comes back to me that something happened today. The sister’s family called, and we all quietly waited for her to finish the call, eating cake the whole time. We all felt we should wait a bit, wait until she finished before doing anything. But the little kid, wanting to go back and play games sooner, decisively went and knocked on the door to remind her to come out and eat cake. Haha, and then she came out.

I find it quite interesting — a child’s motivation is really pure. He just thinks, I want to do this, and then he does a series of things to get it done. So he doesn’t seem to burn himself out internally, his goal is very clear, and his thinking and behaviour are completely consistent. They also don’t worry about whether doing that might be inappropriate.

The Real-World Battles Religion Leaves Unsolved

I feel religion hasn’t solved one problem either: what it solves is the ultimate question, but it doesn’t solve the struggle over real-world interests. Because resources are limited, there will be competition between people, and human nature in that process will… What struck me especially is that we see hostility as normal; hostility comes from the limited supply of resources. Precisely because resources are limited, although Buddhism restrains people’s desires, to some extent we still quietly pick up certain skills along the way — quietly learn ways to fight for our own interests. Some cognitive systems don’t consider all that much, because what they’re considering is how to survive in this environment, so they use a kind of instinctive ability.

So what I find interesting is that some upwardly mobile migrants have very fragile security, because they may carry a stronger sense of inferiority, and they’re extremely sensitive to any variable. Why are they sensitive? Because they feel inferior — maybe that’s why. If people don’t follow the script they expected and behave too freely, they’ll feel it’s very unstable, so they depend heavily on rules to prove themselves. And another thing: for them there may be a circle, and the circle has a consensus — they want everyone to see that they’re guarding this boundary, that they keep verifying this consensus and the standard, which is to form a collective. That’s one way a collective works: first you have to define who the enemy is, because only once an enemy is defined does the collective feel settled. So they set up an enemy — the outside invader, the outsider, or the digital nomad, or whatever else.

Personal Meditations and My Writing Direction

The kinds of things I’d like to write

Thoughts from walking around the world

Some personal meditations

Life, systems theory, methods

I think the third one, some systems-theory methods for life

I’m wondering whether to bring in openclaw, and some everyday methods

But these are probably very fixed techniques — techniques will keep iterating

The Dao behind it, and the parts of myself that don’t change, are what’s worth recording

AI Replaces Jobs, Not Identity

I think what AI replaces shouldn’t be any particular identity. Because identity is something given by people in the first place — granted by people. And when people grant an identity, they also put a lot of very human things inside it: sorrow, greed, fear, happiness, joy, delight, love. Because these tangled emotions and some pure human things are mixed in there, I think identity is interesting, and in the future it will gradually lean towards the brilliant side of human nature.

What AI can probably replace is various kinds of work. For example, mothers used to do childcare work, but childcare work can be digested by AI. AI can replace countless childcare jobs, but it can’t replace the identity of mother. Identity is still a symbol of power, and that power comes from who you are, what kind of person you are, what responsibility you have, what belief you hold. That’s something people can’t grant to AI.

The Prefrontal Cortex’s Role in Reason

The prefrontal cortex generally acts as the CEO or chief commander of the brain

Its role is a big one — it’s essentially humanity’s rationality simulator

Most animals only react to stimuli right in front of them, but the prefrontal cortex lets humans run the future virtually inside their heads; it can simulate the consequences of different choices without actually acting, which makes long-term planning possible

It’s the buffer zone between higher reason and lower instincts (like the fear, anger or appetite produced by the amygdala). The essence of the prefrontal cortex is to override and veto the short-term, impulsive animal instincts based on the reptilian brain and limbic system, and so produce behaviour that fits social norms and long-term interests

The prefrontal cortex doesn’t directly take in raw sensory input from outside; it takes in information already processed by other brain regions

The prefrontal cortex depends heavily on the dopamine system. Dopamine here isn’t just a “pleasure substance”, it’s more a “signal-to-noise ratio” regulator. A moderate amount of dopamine helps the prefrontal cortex lock onto the target (signal) and screen out interference (noise); that’s the underlying chemical principle of working memory and sustained focus

The prefrontal cortex has several executive functions:

Working memory: integrating information from multiple sources to solve a problem

Inhibitory control: seeing the cake but managing not to eat it

Cognitive flexibility: when the original plan gets disrupted, the prefrontal cortex can quickly drop the old strategy, switch approach and adapt to the new rules

Attention allocation: in a noisy environment, screening out the background noise

How to train it:

Focus

Mindfulness meditation

High-cognitive-load training, like a new language, a new game, a new instrument

Basic physiological maintenance

Why Ordinary People Become the Ones Who Pay

Why are ordinary people always the ones sacrificed?

Ordinary people are the lowest-risk consumables; they won’t trigger upheaval

Ordinary people are the easiest to turn into symbols

Ordinary people also most lack the right to exit; the most rational choice is to leave, but the ones least able to leave are precisely ordinary people

Actually, if you think about it, in an environment of high uncertainty and low security, I feel cognition tends to lean a certain way

Short-termism, emotion over logic, distrust of abstract rules, dependence on authority and relationships

So they look emotional, impulsive, irrational, superstitious, contradictory

They also don’t have the ability to build a long-term, self-consistent worldview, so a lot of it is instant, use-as-you-go patchwork — extremely utilitarian, moralistic, believing in fate

Will good and evil also get amplified? I think human nature has a bigger amplitude too

Evil is more direct (violence, betrayal, coldness)

Good is purer too (saving a life, sharing, standing up for your own, not caring about the consequences)

You can see extremely cruel people, and you can also see extremely kind people

People turn into different species in different structures and different environments

Human warmth and distance in Japanese service

I think some places do service very well, while other places aren’t bad either — some cities, for instance.

In Japan, technology is fused with culture and humanity, and you can clearly feel that the service is interesting, has rules and a sense of order, and keeps a certain distance between people — and most importantly, both sides are satisfied. I think that’s people-centred in a fundamental way, very full of human care.

13. Market share: the core metric for judging an industry leader

OBU is a really fine idea

Singapore feels like it’s set a precedent

The core logic of Tesla in the US leans on perception — making the car smarter, serving the user, and not depending on national infrastructure (not strongly dependent)

In China, application has gone as far as integrating vehicle, road and cloud — the road is more stable than the car, so more stable roadside sensing, traffic lights, Amap and cloud networks, which depend heavily on the government, require enormous investment, and are very hard to replicate across cities

Singapore’s model is very different: it treats itself as a system, focusing from the perspective of a city builder on its own angle, designing a reasonable system. The government is only responsible for concentrating authority and unifying data: unified IDs for all vehicles, autonomous driving pilots, integrated data, real-time traffic scheduling

OBU is essentially a systems answer that combines ordinary problems together and gives the most suitable solution — the problem of accountability, the problem of fiscal efficiency, the problem of traffic scheduling being computable

It upgrades the “car” from a physical object to a network node that can be identified, communicated with, billed, and scheduled

Face-changing, fire-spitting and clown culture in Sichuan opera

My first encounter with Sichuan opera

What amazed me were the face-changing and fire-spitting; I’d seen them online before, but live it was genuinely a bit stunning

On close observation, the main performance isn’t about stunts either — no clown, no opera; the stunts serve the plot, they aren’t the goal

Clowns hold an extremely high status in Sichuan opera, often carrying a satirical meaning about society; the Pijin character with an oil lamp on his head who’s afraid of his wife really conveys the Sichuan culture of being henpecked and “soft-eared” to the fullest

The water-sleeve dance felt so powerful, with a kind of flowing, rhythmic quality

And there’s the trick of spinning a table with the legs — a bit supernatural. That skill is so cool; I wanted to learn it, and then AI told me you have to start at age 6–10, when your body’s flexibility is best. Learning it as an adult is nearly impossible, and it takes decades of grounding …

The Pilgrim Power of Measuring the Earth with the Body

This impact kind of hit my soul. I myself was sitting in a modern vehicle, but beside me were pilgrims measuring the earth with their bodies. They use the most primitive, most clumsy, and also purest way — full prostration. Every rise and fall is trading physical exhaustion for spiritual abundance. So it also lets onlookers see a state of life that goes beyond material pursuit.

They don’t care how passersby see them, don’t care how far the destination still is. In their world there is only one action, one movement, one breath in the present; that state of total focus is the dream many people pursue. Many people online say this kind of thing is dangerous — in physical reality there may indeed be blind spots in vision, and this kind of thing happens in other situations too.

But in ancient Chinese thought there’s an interesting view: asceticism and facing danger are not about avoiding obstacles, but about proving devotion, a medal. That sense of danger gives it a tragic beauty, and a sense of the sacred. In their view — I myself think a person’s safety comes first — but in their cause, perhaps spiritual completion and faith rank far above the present state, the present physical safety, the present achievements.

Tibetans and the Rest: Different Purposes in Faith

I suddenly realized that many people burn incense and worship Buddha with purposes very different from Tibetans’. They do it to be blessed with wealth, hoping for something for themselves, hoping to make money. But the Tibetans’ prostrations really command admiration — looking at those people in the early morning, it is undoubtedly an unprecedented baptism of the soul, a meeting of souls.

The car is on this plateau shimmering with Buddha’s light; two or three steps and you’re in heaven, yet still so many people prostrate because their hearts are too heavy. The world’s faith is that after death the soul may, according to the good and evil of one’s lifetime, ascend to become a bodhisattva, or be reborn again as a human, or be reborn as a cow, horse, dog, sheep, pig, or even become a hungry ghost and fall into hell. Evil in this life brings evil karmic fruit in the next; good in this life brings good fruit in the next. So Tibetans pay special attention to doing good in this life.

Prostrating one’s full length is the most sincere way of worshipping the Buddha in religious belief — body prone on the ground, thinking of the Buddha, regarded as a realm. Without any perfunctoriness, it can be called the utmost devotion. At least several months, at most two or three years, enduring wind and dew — very simple: by day and by night they just put up a tent. Some pilgrims, once they reach a holy place, will even donate all their savings to the monastery.

Actually that’s how it is; in their faith, they have almost nothing but themselves, yet their inner and spiritual world is incomparably rich, incomparably full. They have this world inside them. Many people say Tibetans’ cultural level isn’t high, but I think they are the cleanest people in this world; they have the purest souls. They live in the cleanest, happiest place in the world.

Lhasa: Manifest Faith and Bodily Participation

I’m always thinking about some questions concerning Lhasa

What exactly is different about Lhasa

I feel that besides the everydayness of faith, there’s also a sense of presence

Faith is often hidden, private, or confined to specific times — like a day of worship — or spaces

But in Lhasa, faith is manifest, public, even a part of the way of life

Part of it is the dissolving of boundaries, and another part is bodily participation — this kind of faith is not just a thought in the mind, but highly intense bodily practice

Barkhor Street is a kora route: people buying vegetables, chatting, doing business, and people prostrating full-length, spinning prayer wheels, all run in parallel on the same road. The sacred and the secular have no obvious physical separation

Faith here isn’t just a thought in the mind but a high-intensity bodily practice (full-length prostrations)

This in fact also forces every onlooker to re-examine the concretization of spiritual power

High altitude has a natural advantage: the low-oxygen environment that high altitude brings is a mandatory physiological intervention for people from the plains — a physical slowdown that forcibly makes you slow down; and then there’s sensory stripping and amplification. In a hypoxic environment you’re forced to slow down — not just a slow-living mindset, but slow motion demanded by the survival instinct

Sensory stripping and amplification: under hypoxia, a person’s thinking may become sluggish, but the senses (sight and hearing) often become keener; combined with Lhasa’s extremely pure air and strong ultraviolet light, the saturation of light and shadow is extremely high, and this sensory experience gives a “surreal” clarity

Then there’s the public-space sociology of the sweet tea house: don’t go to bars, go to sweet tea houses (like Guangming Gangqiong Sweet Tea House); everyone is a stranger to each other, sitting tightly together, a cup of sweet tea for a few yuan, breaking down the barriers of class and status

Then it’s also an information hub — people exchange information here, space out, even pass the time. This utterly non-utilitarian consumption of time seems extremely luxurious and rebellious in an efficiency-first modern society

There are so many people here looking for meaning, people escaping reality, people longing for redemption; the Lhasa drifters, pilgrims, tourists you meet here — everyone carries a strong sense of story and purpose. In this environment, you’re constantly asked back why you came here, forcing you to face your own heart, whether it’s for faith or just to escape your original life

Education’s Disenchantment and Where Faith Settles

The essence of education is a process of disenchantment

What it teaches is scientific common sense, logical reasoning, and generative skills

Faith often doesn’t solve survival problems, but is a place to settle the psyche or the soul

Then there’s the lag of education: changes in ideas are often much slower than building roads and bringing electricity. For many families, the first generation to receive compulsory education may only have learned Mandarin and basic arithmetic, but the karmic worldview rooted in the bone for thousands of years is hard to fully rewrite in just nine years

But perhaps the progress of civilization is precisely embodied in those people who strive to pursue, to do things that look utterly valueless and meaningless

And it’s precisely such things that have also driven the development of AI itself

Obviously one could rely on knowledge to change one’s fate, yet one can still choose to bow one head for the next life

The Logic of Power Behind Temple Architecture

It suddenly occurs to me, regarding the differences between temples: at the formal level I feel they’re largely the same, but generally in spiritual structure and power logic they’re very different. Because almost all temples repeat some elements — the architectural style is still axially symmetrical, and it progresses layer by layer, for example divided into the three gates, the main hall, and the rear hall; the incense, the bell tower, and the Buddha statues are also the same, and generally it’s very quiet, very solemn, and the rhythm is very slow.

But I think this is a functional choice, or in terms of meaning it’s a set of worldly standards under a power system or political system; this set of standards has easily reached a consensus. Temples generally actively suppress their own differences; they won’t emphasize expressing who I am, but constantly remind you that you are not important — the law, the divine way, are important. So the real difference, I feel, isn’t in seeing, but in how you are seen.

Look at several characteristics. One is the Potala Palace — it’s very high, the stairs are steep, the route is very complex, its power is extremely high, and its pilgrimage itself is a test of qualification. Another is the Jokhang Temple: at the Jokhang, believers can prostrate and circle for long periods, which in itself is a space where the body takes precedence over the sightseer. Then, for example, Kinkaku-ji, a temple in Kyoto, is also quite interesting. Kinkaku-ji requires you to tour along a set route, and the experience is essentially strictly controlled — it hardly lets you linger. It’s a symbol of power; everyone is managed, everyone walks according to the system and the rules.

So some temples allow your emotions to flow, some temples even flatten your emotions; some spaces encourage you to cry, to bow, to linger, while some spaces only allow you to quietly finish the process. So temples in fact only welcome stable people, not people who want to break the rules. When we look at temples in general, one very important factor in distinguishing them is what the temple’s function is.

Some temples are essentially about maintaining order, like some highly touristic or institutionalized temples. Some temples allow you to repeat, allow you to consume, allow you to linger, allow you to bear pain — it values that. And some temples are power-type, symbolizing a certain theocratic power and hierarchy.

If it has no need of you, then all temples are the same to you — all the same structure, no difference. But once you need it, it’s like they’re worlds apart. So from the angle of being acted upon, it’s completely different. You are feeling whether this space really responds, and that depends on how you place yourself, how you want to be reshaped — if you want to be held, that’s the meaning of Dafo Temple; if you want to understand the world, that’s Samye; if you want to be tempered, to be forged, that’s Ganden. I think that’s quite interesting.

The Jokhang also has another very important characteristic — I really like the Jokhang, not the Potala Palace. The Potala Palace is an object to be looked up to, but I think the Jokhang is a field of ongoing action. What you see inside it is people kneeling, people prostrating, people circling clockwise, people being corrected for going counterclockwise, people repeating the same movement over and over. So in this process the protagonist isn’t the Buddha statue, it’s the action itself. Whether you’re a tourist doesn’t matter, whether you believe doesn’t matter, whether you understand doesn’t matter; what matters is that you are constantly reminded which part of the flow you are.

Jokhang Temple as the Core of Faith

Fourth time coming to the Jokhang Temple

The Jokhang feels like the heart and source of the religion

The center of the kora route is the Jokhang

The Jokhang dates back to the 7th century, earlier than the Gelug school, earlier than the Dalai Lama system, earlier than the union of church and state

Its core meaning isn’t the building but the Jowo Shakyamuni statue (the life-size image of Shakyamuni) — this is the core of a faith

Without the Jokhang, any later sect or institution would lack a “source of orthodoxy”

The practice of religious belief — full prostration, kora, repeated, low-posture, bodily practice — has no grand narrative, no political ritual; it emphasizes individual karma

It doesn’t depend on any regime or any figure; even if the political structure changes, the kora remains, pilgrimage remains, everyday faith remains

The Potala Palace is the fusion of power and religion; religion is no longer just practice but becomes a tool of governance

The logic of religion there is an upward-facing Buddhism, with strong ritual, strict hierarchy, and intense spatial height and authority

A church-state structure is highly sensitive to external politics; once the power center loses its real basis for governance, its function rapidly freezes

Traditional Rituals and Customs of Tibetan New Year

Tibetan New Year

Early in the morning, housewives race to draw the “golden water” — the first bucket of water of the Tibetan New Year is believed to bring blessing and wealth. After sunrise, people put on their festival best, taste the holiday foods in order of age, and neighbors raise “chemar” (highland barley wine) to one another, greeting each other with “Tashi Delek” and wishing each other auspiciousness and good health.

Monasteries play a central role during Losar. Monks perform the brightly colored Cham masked dance, dancing in elaborate costumes and masks to symbolize good triumphing over evil, driving out negative energy and welcoming the new year’s blessings. Great monasteries such as Drepung and Sera draw crowds of believers who come to light butter lamps and burn incense in prayer.

During the festival you must try guthuk (the New Year’s Eve noodle-and-dumpling soup), kapse (fried pastries) and sweet biscuits, along with highland barley wine and butter tea.

The third day of the new year is called Yose; people climb onto their roofs to burn incense and replace the prayer flags, then head to the Jokhang square and to Baoping Mountain to the east and Chakpori (Medicine King Hill) to the west to plant prayer flags, burn incense and pray, singing and dancing in joyful celebration.

The Pyramid of the Three Great Lords Under Theocratic Rule

Tibet’s theocratic feudal serf system

Political power and religious power overlapped almost completely.

The Dalai Lama was both religious leader and head of the secular government (the Kashag).

Lhasa was the core of power, and the Potala Palace was also the highest administrative center.

Songtsen Gampo, the 33rd tsenpo of the Tibetan Empire (reigned 629–650), put down internal strife, formally unified Tibet, founded the Tibetan kingdom and moved the capital to Lhasa.

Officials of the Kashag were made up of both “monk officials” and “lay officials,” and monk officials usually ranked above lay officials. This means religion was not only a faith but a tool of rule.

The ruling class was a very harsh pyramid.

The three great lords (the government, the aristocracy and the monasteries) made up less than 5% of the total population.

The monasteries (religious lords) such as Drepung, Sera and Ganden (the three great monasteries of Lhasa). Monasteries were not only places of practice but huge economic entities, owning large estates and serfs.

Tralpa were serfs of slightly higher status. The lords allotted them a small, poor plot of “share land,” and in exchange they had to render heavy corvée labor (ula) and pay taxes to the lord. Though they nominally held land, they could not leave it; in substance they were labor bound for life.

Dudchung means “small household.” It usually referred to bankrupt serfs who had lost their land, or people attached to a lord doing crafts and odd jobs. Their status was lower than the tralpa and their lives more precarious.

Nangzan — the true “slaves,” making up five percent. They had no means of production and no personal freedom at all, and were regarded as the lords’ talking tools. They were mainly the descendants of bankrupt serfs, children who had been sold, or people reduced to slavery as punishment. A nangzan’s children were nangzan from birth, generation after generation doing the heaviest housework and labor in the lords’ estates or mansions, and they could be freely bought, sold, transferred, used to settle debts or given away as gifts.

Old Tibet was governed by the Thirteen-Point Code and the Sixteen-Point Code: the value of a human life differed astronomically. For a person of the highest upper rank (such as a great living Buddha or a great noble), the blood price was “gold equal in weight to the corpse”; for a person of the lowest rank (such as a nangzan, a woman, a butcher, a blacksmith), the blood price was merely “a single straw rope.”

Control at the economic level:

Ula corvée: the heaviest burden on the serfs. It included labor service (unpaid work for the lord) and animal service (providing livestock to transport goods for free). When lords traveled or the government moved supplies, the serfs along the route bore it all unpaid.

Usury: the three great monasteries and the nobles commonly lent at interest, and many serfs were forced to borrow to survive. Compounding interest left the debt unpaid across generations, and they ended up as nangzan (slaves).

The most fundamental reason this system could persist was the distortion of religion: suffering in this life is caused by the “karma” of a previous one. Only by enduring this life’s suffering and being obedient to the lord and the monastery can one be reborn into a better station. Rebelling against the lord was not only a worldly crime but a grave religious offense that led to hell. This spiritual control left many serfs resigned to their fate in despair.

The Class Symbolism of Shol at the Foot of the Potala Palace

Lhasa’s Shol

The first thing I heard about was Shol Prison.

Shol refers specifically to the enclosed, functionally complex cluster of attached buildings at the foot of the Potala Palace.

If the Potala Palace is the brain and heaven of old Tibet’s theocracy, Shol was the hands, feet and earthly realm that kept that brain running.

It hugs the foot of the Red Hill of the Potala, ringed by high walls — not just a community but a fortification.

The streets are narrow and winding, the buildings mostly Tibetan-style single-story or two-story structures of stone and wood.

Look up and you see the majestic, sacred, golden Potala Palace (the ruler’s dwelling); look down and you see the crowded, busy, even grim Shol (the servants’ dwelling). This enormous spatial contrast is itself a symbol of rigid class hierarchy.

Shol was not just a place where people lived; it was the Kashag government’s administrative, judicial and logistics center. Many important institutions of the old Tibetan government were not up on the Potala but down in Shol:

Shol Lekhung: roughly today’s “city government” or “administrative office,” handling administration, judicial trials and taxation for Lhasa and its surroundings.

Shol Prison: the most feared place in Shol. It had two levels — the upper one held minor offenders, the lower was a dark, damp dungeon (the famous “Scorpion Cave” belongs to legend or to an environment like it) holding serious criminals. The instruments of torture displayed here (stone hats, shackles, leather whips) are direct evidence of the cruelty of old Tibet’s justice.

The residents of Shol were a complicated mix — mortals serving the gods — but they shared one thing: all served the Potala Palace, including noble officials, craftsmen and performers, and the corvée laborers (serfs).

Institutional Change in Tibet After the 1959 Rebellion Was Put Down

The 1959 liberation of Tibet

When Tibet was peacefully liberated in 1951, the central government and the local Tibetan government signed the Seventeen-Point Agreement. Given Tibet’s particular circumstances, the central government was extremely cautious, promising “not to change Tibet’s existing social and political system”; during this period even the PLA units entering Tibet opened their own land and farmed it, trying as far as possible not to touch the old nobles’ interests. The strategy at the time was “caution and steady advance,” hoping the upper strata would reform of their own accord.

Tibet’s reactionary upper strata (the hardliners in the Kashag) misjudged the situation. Unwilling to give up their vested interests and even less willing to see any potential reform, they launched an all-out armed rebellion, tore up the Seventeen-Point Agreement, proclaimed “Tibetan independence” and attacked the troops stationed in Tibet.

This rebellion gave the central government both the reason and the resolve to solve the Tibet problem once and for all. Since the other side had torn up the old agreement, the promise “not to change the old system” automatically lapsed. Putting down the rebellion (pingpan) and democratic reform (gaige) became tightly bound together — without breaking the old system, the roots of rebellion would always remain.

Once the rebellion broke out, the PLA quickly disarmed the Tibetan army (old Tibet’s armed force) and destroyed the lords’ private troops and weapons depots.

On March 28, 1959, the State Council issued an order dissolving the local Tibetan government (the Kashag), with the “Preparatory Committee for the Tibet Autonomous Region” assuming the functions of local government.

Reform work teams went deep into the villages and set up serf associations. Where the village “steward” once decided everything, now representatives elected by the emancipated serfs decided. This sinking of political power downward was an institutional upheaval.

The core policy of democratic reform was the “three antis and two reductions” (anti-rebellion, anti-ula, anti-slavery; rent reduction, interest reduction) followed by land distribution.

After the work teams entered the villages, the most striking scene was piling up the lords’ usury contracts and personal-bondage documents (deeds of sale for people) and burning them in public in one fire.

That fire burned away debts, principal and interest, that serfs’ families could not clear across generations.

Land belonging to rebel lords was confiscated, land belonging to non-rebel lords was bought out, and the land was distributed to landless tralpa and nangzan. Only with means of production (land, cattle and sheep) did serfs truly gain the ability to survive independently.

I keep thinking: how do you break the last one, religious fatalism? That is the biggest spiritual shackle.

But it was broken through the “speak bitterness” meetings.

The nangzan and tralpa who had suffered most were brought onto the stage to tell publicly how they had been persecuted by the lords and how their families had been killed.

When one person weeps and tells their story, they may think it is their own bad fate; but when the whole village and the whole county weep and tell the same tragedy, everyone suddenly realizes: this is not fate, this is man-made disaster! It is the system’s fault.

When religion is not only a faith but becomes a “regime,” it becomes alienated.

At its core Buddhism teaches “karma and rebirth.” On the purely philosophical level this is a moral discipline that urges people toward good. But in the hands of old Tibet’s feudal lords the concept was radically politicized and turned into a perfect logic of rule.

The rulers held that subjecting sinners (including rebellious serfs) to harsh physical punishment (cutting off hands, gouging out eyes) was helping them “eliminate karmic obstruction.”

Enforcers would often say: “I punish you; it looks cruel, but it is really to keep you from continuing to create karma and let you be reborn into a good life next time.”

How a Reincarnated Soul Boy Is Sought and Identified

The system for recognizing a reincarnated soul boy

How is the Dalai Lama chosen?

When the previous Dalai Lama passes away, the search for the “reincarnated soul boy” begins immediately.

Eminent monks go to Lhamo Latso (the sacred lake) to watch the visions that appear in the water (such as the look of a house or features of the terrain) to determine the direction of the child’s birthplace.

They also rely on the previous Dalai’s last words, the posture of his body at the time of death, the direction of the smoke at cremation, and other clues.

This is the most famous step. After the search party finds a suspected child, they lay out a pile of objects and let him grab one.

Among these objects are mixed the previous Dalai Lama’s actual belongings (prayer beads, a hand drum, a bell and vajra) and some ordinary decoys.

Recognition: if the small child accurately picks out the objects used in the previous life and shows fondness for them, he is regarded as very likely the reincarnation (a candidate).

By the Qianlong period of the Qing dynasty (1793), to prevent Tibet’s great nobles from manipulating the reincarnation process (arranging it within the family), the central government established the “golden urn lottery” system.

The procedure: the names of several candidate children are written on ivory lots and placed in a golden urn.

Drawing: the Imperial Resident in Tibet (representing the central government) presides before a statue of Shakyamuni and publicly draws one lot. Whoever is drawn is the legitimate reincarnation.

Significance: this step confirmed that the central government (the Qing court at the time) held the final authority to recognize Tibet’s highest religious leader.

Central investiture and enthronement (Approval & Enthronement): once chosen, the candidate must be submitted to the central government (the Qing emperor, the government of the Republic of China, or the government of the People’s Republic of China) for approval. Only with the central investiture edict is he legitimate.

The Regency System Before the Dalai Lama Took Power

The existence of the regent

It is fascinating: the regent was the “temporary president” who exercised supreme power on behalf of the Dalai Lama whenever he could not (for instance when young, during the period between death and reincarnation, or when away).

The Dalai Lama’s succession system was the “reincarnated soul boy” system, which created a huge power vacuum.

After the old Dalai passed away, finding the new child took years; once found he was still an infant, and he had to wait until he came of age at 18 (taking full monastic vows) before ruling in person.

For as long as 18–20 years in between, Tibet had no supreme leader.

Not just anyone could be regent. By the mid-to-late Qing period the choice of regent became fairly fixed, drawn mainly from Lhasa’s “four ling” (four living-Buddha residences with royal background).

Tengyeling: the Demo Rinpoche line.

Kundeling: the Tatsag Rinpoche line.

Tsemoling: the Tsemoling Rinpoche line.

Tsechokling: the Reting Rinpoche line (joined later).

Because regent power was so tempting, many regents were unwilling to hand it over. When the young Dalai Lama approached 18, strange “accidents” often happened.

For a long stretch, Tibet’s history was in fact “a river of Dalai Lamas, an iron regent.”

Wind-and-Sun Lines Are the Tree Rings of Time and Place

Many of the old women have wind-and-sun lines on their faces

Caused by years of ultraviolet light, high cold, dryness and strong wind.

Skin darkens and roughens, dark patches and furrows appear on the cheeks and forehead — these are the natural tree rings left by time and place.

It seems to resonate with mono no aware: we are all fighting time, fighting aging, but the old women’s faces, because they will fade, seem all the more real in this moment.

The roads they have walked in a lifetime are all written on their faces.

Their gaze is so steady, their expressions so relaxed; there seems to be little anxiety or performance in them.

The core of Tibetan Buddhism is practice — not leaving the body, but letting the body carry the practice.

They have spent a lifetime turning prayer wheels, walking against the wind, exposed all their lives to sun, cold and thin air.

The Exile Government Has No Dignified Exit

I feel the more fundamental reason the Tibetan exile government exists is that reality never gave it a dignified way to exit.

They themselves probably know it can never be realized.

The Geopolitics of Princess Wencheng’s Marriage Alliance

Princess Wencheng

During Li Shimin’s Zhenguan era, we already know the Tang dynasty was facing the Turks.

The Han fought the Xiongnu; the Tang fought the Turks.

Back then Huo Qubing went to fight the Xiongnu, but by the time the Tang was founded the Xiongnu as an empire had long since broken up and split, some moving south and merging into the Han, others migrating west to Europe; they had long vanished from China’s historical stage.

Li Shimin’s number one enemy was the Turks; one of his most famous military achievements was “destroying the Eastern Turks,” for which he was honored as “Heavenly Khan.”

Tubo was the newly risen power, and it was through marriage alliance that it sought to establish itself.

At the time Songtsen Gampo had unified the Tibetan plateau and founded the powerful Tubo dynasty. He admired Tang civilization and also hoped to raise his own political standing through marriage.

Songtsen Gampo’s first proposal was refused (the Tang looked down on Tubo at the time, and Tuyuhun was working against it), so he sent troops directly against Tuyuhun, a Tang vassal, and pressed toward the Tang border (Songzhou). Although the Tang army drove back the Tubo vanguard, Emperor Taizong realized Tubo had become a real force and could not be conquered by arms alone, so he decided to use the “marriage alliance” policy to win over this overlord of the plateau.

Princess Wencheng was not Taizong’s own daughter. She was a daughter of the Tang imperial clan (the histories disagree on her father; one account says she was the daughter of Li Daozong, Prince of Jiangxia), and after being exceptionally titled “Princess Wencheng” she was married far away. At the time it was customary to send a clanswoman in place of an imperial daughter, but this did not affect her representing the will of the Great Tang state.

Princess Wencheng left prosperous Chang’an for Lhasa.

Songtsen Gampo personally led troops to Baihai (today’s Maduo County in Qinghai) to welcome her. According to the histories, Songtsen Gampo greatly admired Tang dress and etiquette and performed the “son-in-law’s rites” to Li Daozong, which diplomatically established the Tang’s “suzerain” status in a major way (though in practice it was more like a brotherly relationship).

Princess Wencheng brought a library of Chinese civilization.

She brought a life-size golden statue of Shakyamuni at age twelve. That statue is still enshrined in Lhasa’s Jokhang today and is one of the holiest relics in the hearts of Tibetan Buddhists. It directly drove the localization and flourishing of Buddhism in Tibet.

Along with that came a great deal of production methods and craftsmen’s techniques.

The earliest form of the Potala Palace is said to have been built by Songtsen Gampo to marry her (though the later scale is a reconstruction).

The siting and building of the Jokhang is connected with the “geomancy” (feng shui) Princess Wencheng had mastered. Legend says the terrain of Lhasa is the shape of a supine rakshasi demoness that had to be pinned down by temples, and the Jokhang was built at the demoness’s heart (then a lake).

The Buddha’s twelve-year-old golden statue is extremely precious, a treasure beyond price, far beyond any national treasure today.

Its supreme status is “liberation upon seeing.” Legend says this statue was made during Shakyamuni’s lifetime, sculpted by craftsmen according to his appearance at twelve; Shakyamuni himself consecrated it (performed the eye-opening) and said: “After I pass into nirvana, you are me; to see you is to see me.”

Legend says that during Shakyamuni’s life only three life-size statues were made (at age 8, 12 and 25).

The 8-year-old statue: later brought into Tibet by the Nepalese Princess Bhrikuti (now enshrined in Lhasa’s Ramoche Temple).

The 12-year-old statue: the most precious and perfect one, the one Princess Wencheng brought (now enshrined in Lhasa’s Jokhang).

The 25-year-old statue: said to have been lost or destroyed in India (accounts differ).

It suddenly occurs to me that without this statue, Princess Wencheng might have been just an ordinary marriage-alliance princess, forgotten within decades. But because of this statue, Lhasa’s urban layout and Tibet’s religious history were completely changed.

So Princess Wencheng really had vision and was remarkable — she maintained a hundred years of prosperity and peace.

The Difference Between Hinayana Renunciation and Mahayana Engagement

Differences of time and world in Buddhist studies

Hinayana, which is Theravada, focuses on how I can fully liberate myself from the suffering of birth and death.

Mahayana focuses on how, while I awaken, I can avoid abandoning any sentient being.

Hinayana and Mahayana are themselves standpoint terms.

Hinayana is Theravada (Southern Buddhism).

Mahayana is Mahayana (Chinese, Tibetan and so on).

In Theravada (which generally does not call itself Hinayana), the awakened figure is Shakyamuni — the one who found this path of liberation, the most complete and perfect teacher.

Mahayana is a state of awakening that acknowledges countless Buddhas and countless bodhisattvas, and that everyone has Buddha-nature.

Southern Buddhism is in fact named for Buddhism spreading south from India.

Theravada holds that the nature of the world is suffering, impermanence and non-self, and focuses on how not to be pulled in again, so it leans toward renunciation and leaving the world.

Mahayana teaches that although the world is also suffering, it goes further and proposes acting within emptiness, practicing within the world, awakening without leaving the world, and so it has more world-engagement and more ritual.

The Anxi Army’s Cultural Imprint and Fated Identity

Some slogans can give you a sense of superiority.

Note: a sense of superiority is neither good nor bad; it is just a form of existing.

For the Anxi army garrisoned in the Western Regions, for instance, they faced nomadic tribes. In their understanding, the Great Tang represented the most advanced civilization, the most complete rites and law, and the highest order. This “distinction between Hua and Yi” gave them absolute pride of spirit. To surrender was not only a military defeat but civilization bowing to barbarism.

This is the brand of culture.

In the mid-to-late Tang the military used a recruitment system; many soldiers were professionals, even generations of soldiers (sons of garrison families). “Guarding the frontier and holding the land” was not merely a job but a fate and instinct inherited from their forebears. When outside orders disappeared, this institutional inertia and professional code carved deep into their bones became the underlying logic supporting their actions.

When the Hexi Corridor was cut off, with no reinforcements, no provisions for more than fifty years and no idea even who the emperor in Chang’an was, this army faced an extreme sense of losing control. They began to seek inward; when all externally given meaning (the emperor’s edicts, the state’s salary, the hope of winning merit and rank) collapsed, a person either falls into nihilism and breaks down, or can only create meaning for themselves.

So for this group of old soldiers, holding on was itself the meaning — the meaning they found. Even if only one man were left in the city, as long as they remained, the Great Tang remained. They no longer fought for that concrete regime in Chang’an, but for the grand, idealized “Tang civilization” in their own hearts.

Fragile Reform Inside the Theocratic Machine

Inside the suffocating machine of church-state union, the appearance of Tsangyang Gyatso (1683–1706) was like a fragile yet vivid gesang flower growing between iron gears.

In modern times the Thirteenth Dalai Lama (1876–1933) did try to make some fine adjustments and reforms. He ordered reductions in some serf corvée, abolished some overly cruel corporal punishments (such as casually cutting off hands and feet), and tried to build a modern army and police. And the result? He met extremely strong resistance from conservative monks of the three great monasteries (Ganden, Drepung, Sera) and the aristocratic bloc. These conservative forces were even willing to stage mutinies, or use complex political means to assassinate and exile officials who supported reform. In the end, to keep the regime stable, the Thirteenth Dalai Lama had to compromise and the reform was abandoned halfway.

When a faith becomes a ruling machine, its first task is no longer to save all beings but to keep itself alive and running. The reason Tibet’s monasteries and eminent monks did not solve the problems of class and slavery is that they themselves were the creators, maintainers and biggest beneficiaries of that system. Buddhism’s profound philosophy unfortunately became a perfect bulletproof vest for maintaining this extremely unequal social structure.

What the three great monasteries resisted was not goodness, but goodness that changed the existing structure.

In their worldview:

“Order” is itself good

“Ancestral rules” are part of the Dharma

Changing the structure = shaking the arrangement of karma and rebirth

They were the vested beneficiaries of the system

Less corvée → loss of labor

Abolishing corporal punishment → weakened judicial power

Building an army and police → monk-soldiers lose their legitimate armed status

Resisting the redistribution of power and resources

Suffering is not necessarily evil

In the traditional Tibetan Buddhist view of cause and effect:

A person’s poverty, corvée labor, physical punishment

Are seen as the natural result of past-life karma

Enduring them in this life is the path to liberation in the next

So in the eyes of conservative monks:

Lightening serfs’ burdens ≠ doing good

It might instead interfere with the natural manifestation of karmic retribution

“Man-made equality” may be seen as destroying the order of cause and effect

So this is a difference in cognitive systems; modern education at least gives people of this era a basic cognitive framework.

When religion becomes a regime, its first goal is self-preservation and doing good takes second place.

Now look at the Sixth, Tsangyang Gyatso.

His life can be called the most thorough existential rebellion against Tibet’s feudal theocratic system. When the vast religious system tried to forcibly give him the fixed essence of “living Buddha,” he used his body, strong drink and poetry to defend desperately his real existence as a “human being.”

The reason Tsangyang Gyatso was so different is that he “missed” the best window for the system to brainwash him from childhood.

When the Fifth Dalai Lama died, the regent Sangye Gyatso, who held power, made a bold decision in order to keep using the Dalai’s authority to command Tibet and oppose the Mongol forces: he kept the death secret. The concealment lasted a full fifteen years.

During those fifteen years Tsangyang Gyatso grew up in remote Mon Yul (today’s South Tibet) like the child of an ordinary serf family. He was not locked in a monastery reciting dry scriptures; he ran freely through the mountains and fields, did farm work, and may even have had a childhood sweetheart. He had experienced the most real smell of the earth and the most worldly feelings of the human world.

Not until 1697, when the secret could no longer be kept, did Sangye Gyatso make the Fifth Dalai’s death public and send men to bring the fourteen-year-old Tsangyang Gyatso forcibly back to Lhasa, to be tonsured, given the precepts and pressed onto the highest golden throne in the Potala Palace.

From the vast natural fields he was suddenly crammed into a strictly ruled golden cage; this enormous absurdity became the starting point of a lifetime of rebellion.

To a living Buddha who grew up in a monastery, the Potala Palace is the center of the universe; but to Tsangyang Gyatso, who had already formed a worldly personality, this place was a prison that took away his freedom.

He felt deeply that he was only a political puppet in the regent Sangye Gyatso’s hands, whose daily task was to sit on the throne like a clay or wooden statue, receive the prostration of believers and serve as the sacred symbol that kept the system running.

Refusing full ordination: by Yellow Sect rules, a Dalai Lama must take the highest-level bhikshu precepts (representing absolute celibacy and rule-keeping) upon coming of age. But Tsangyang Gyatso not only refused the precepts, he even returned the novice precepts he had already taken to his master (the Fifth Panchen Lama). This was unprecedented and shocking in the history of Tibetan Buddhism.

The split of a double personality: by day he was the cold Sixth Dalai Lama seated in the Potala; by night he took the name “Dangsang Wangpo,” put on a wig and the fine clothes of a noble young gentleman, slipped out of the Potala and lingered in the taverns and streets of Lhasa’s Barkhor, drinking and making merry and courting beautiful girls.

In late-night taverns he wrote poems that circulate to this day. His poems are not only love poems but questions about the essence of life.

“I once feared that too much love would harm my Dharma practice; to enter the mountains I feared leaving behind a beauty. How in this world can there be a way to have both, to fail neither the Tathagata nor you.” (Note: this is the classic Chinese rendering by later scholars such as Yu Daoquan and Zeng Jian; the original Tibetan means roughly: if I had applied to the Dharma the heart I give my lover, I would long since have become a Buddha.)

The rulers wanted to erase him politically, but Tibet’s common people did not abandon him. Compared with those lofty, flawless gods and Buddhas, people loved this young man of passions and desires who sang in taverns more. His poems were passed down by word of mouth by millions and became the most immortal cultural mark on the snow plateau.

28. A Timeline of Buddhism’s Transmission

Princess Bhrikuti

Princess Bhrikuti from Nepal

If Princess Wencheng pulled open a geopolitical net for the Great Tang from the east, then Princess Bhrikuti crossed the Himalayas from the south and was the “pioneer” who first brought pure Buddhist faith and top craftsman skill to the snow plateau.

Princess Bhrikuti entered Tibet ten years before Princess Wencheng.

Princess Bhrikuti was the daughter of Nepal’s (Nepala’s) King Guangzhou — one account says King Amshuvarman. Nepal at the time was in a period of great cultural and economic prosperity, deeply influenced by Indian Buddhism, and was one of South Asia’s Buddhist centers.

Songtsen Gampo, having just unified Tibet, threatened the Tang to the east and also expanded south, pointing his troops at the Nepalese border. Facing the formidable Tubo cavalry, the king of Nepal agreed to Songtsen Gampo’s marriage proposal in exchange for peace.

Princess Bhrikuti was the first foreign princess Songtsen Gampo married. Her arrival marked the beginning of Tubo systematically learning from the mature civilizations around it.

Like Princess Wencheng, Princess Bhrikuti’s dowry was also national treasure that changed the course of Tibetan history.

She brought a life-size statue of Shakyamuni at age eight (also called the Mingjo Dorje statue). This statue is likewise extremely sacred, representing the purity and wisdom of the Buddha’s childhood.

Nepal has been famous since ancient times for exquisite carving, metalwork and architecture (known as “Newari art”). Princess Bhrikuti brought a large group of exceptionally skilled Nepalese craftsmen, carvers and painters.

She brought a large number of Sanskrit Buddhist scriptures. Tubo had no mature writing at the time, and the arrival of these texts directly gave rise to the later process in which Songtsen Gampo sent people to India to study and created the Tibetan script.

The source of the strong religious atmosphere one feels in Lhasa is Princess Bhrikuti.

The temple built under the direction of Nepalese craftsmen, with a strong South Asian woodcarving style, is the famous Jokhang. So the Jokhang was in fact built under Princess Bhrikuti’s direction (Princess Wencheng directed the building of Ramoche Temple; later, according to accounts of wartime chaos, the statues in the two temples were swapped).

Princess Bhrikuti = Green Tara: Tibetan Buddhism widely regards Princess Bhrikuti as an emanation of “Green Tara.” Green Tara stands for action, courage and saving beings from suffering. Because Princess Bhrikuti had darker skin (South Asian ancestry) and came to Tubo earlier to start the Buddhist enterprise, this fits Green Tara’s qualities very well.

Princess Wencheng = White Tara: Princess Wencheng is regarded as an emanation of “White Tara,” standing for gentleness, purity, peace and longevity (closely tied to the peace from the Central Plains that she brought).

15. Buddhism Is the Debug Guide for Human Consciousness

Coming to walk around the Jokhang every day feels very inspiring.

Along Route 318 many people make long pilgrimages; there are a great many from Lhasa to Mount Kailash, and the moment I saw them I was deeply moved.

Chan says that chopping wood and carrying water are nothing but the wondrous path.

They don’t complain; if there is complaint and worry, that shows a very strong “I.”

People who often do long-distance hikes can feel it: though the body hurts so much, after hiking for a long time the daily routine comes down to nothing but pure stepping and breathing; this is the flow state.

Those doing full prostrations also chant the tantric six-syllable mantra, precisely in order to use extreme bodily fatigue and absolute purity of sound to reach the non-self state.

Beside the Jokhang square in front of the temple there are some benches; I love sitting there. Now and then old men and women come to sun themselves, and I like listening to them chant. When they occasionally notice a young guy spacing out here they just smile a little. Some of the old women have many wind-and-sun lines on their faces.

Caused by years of ultraviolet light, high cold, dryness and strong wind.

Skin darkens and roughens, dark patches and furrows appear on the cheeks and forehead — these are the natural tree rings left by time and place.

It seems to resonate with the Japanese aesthetic of mono no aware: we are all fighting time, fighting aging, but the old women’s faces, because they will fade, seem all the more real in this moment.

The roads they have walked in a lifetime are all written on their faces.

Their gaze is so steady, their expressions so relaxed; there seems to be little anxiety or performance in them.

The children are all so lively and confident, with smiles exactly like the ones I saw in Nepal.

Devout pilgrims holding prayer wheels and doing full-length prostrations

Om Mani Padme Hum

Do they really want something? In their hearts they hold the whole world.

Thailand’s Theravada and Chinese Chan do not emphasize belief but seeing, and Tibetan Buddhism’s tantra also treats seeing as the endpoint.

If you cannot “see” for yourself how it works, no amount of belief can save you.

Seeing means seeing it — seeing how it arises, changes and disappears.

For example, how an emotion comes up, at which moment resistance appears, at which step the feeling of “I have been offended” takes shape.

They are not searching for meaning, so every gesture and movement is itself meaning.

Altitude Hypoxia Raises Metabolism and Appetite

In Tibet I always feel hungry

I guess it’s because the oxygen content is lower at altitude

Now that I’ve adapted, the demand for red blood cells is higher, so basal metabolism is raised, and I unconsciously want to eat high-calorie food

No wonder this place eats beef and mutton, butter tea, tsampa

Details Render Emotion and the Inner World

Details render emotion

When night falls, you feel the four main peaks become flatter and rounder, as if the mountains were flattening themselves out, spreading in all directions

This rendering of detail is really interesting

It renders the look of this world

It renders the inner world of this character

Reading and Travel as Escape

Reading is an escape

I forget how I gradually came to love travel. On the road, I can control my restlessness, try to observe strangers’ expressions, talk with them, taste their food, enter their living rooms, listen to their pasts… In January 2011, when I rode a puttering three-wheeled motorcycle through the alleys of Bangalore, I realized I really had fallen in love with travel. I hope to be like duckweed, drifting from this river to that river

Books are a kind of escape, an escape from reality’s loss of control

Travel too; it is usually a sign of intellectual and emotional laziness — the assumption that one is powerless to see through life’s truths and moving beauty

The Characteristics of Xu Zhiyuan’s Narrative Craft

Xu Zhiyuan’s craft characteristics

World → self → culture → history → reflection

He often interleaves historical background, philosophical reflection or cultural comparison while describing a scene, and this jumping style of narration easily makes people feel it is “scattered” or “pretentious”

He likes to express emotion or observation with abstract vocabulary, such as “the contingency of civilization” or “the loneliness of a wanderer”; instead of plainly stating feelings, he elevates them to the level of concepts

He also has his own particular viewpoint for writing

Background Knowledge for A Wanderer’s World

Background knowledge

This book is not a travel guide in the traditional sense, but a collection of cultural notes and reflections from the author’s decades of roaming the world and what he saw and felt. Xu Zhiyuan travels from the foot of the Indian Himalayas in Asia, to Egypt in Africa, and on to conflict zones in the Middle East, the vast north of Russia, and historic cities of Europe — moving among different civilizations and cultures

It’s not about checking-in style tourism, but about understanding the complexity of the world through drifting, wandering and careful observation

Modeling Xu Zhiyuan’s Way of Thinking

World → self → culture → history → reflection, the manner of reflection

And why he has this way of thinking

He very much likes modeling the world, analyzing it systematically

He has no shortage of self-reflective capacity

The world is an external trigger; the concrete things seen in travel — in Xu Zhiyuan’s writing, the world is not simply “tourist sights,” but an entry point into culture and history

Seeing the noise of a street market in Egypt is not just recording marketplace life, but thinking about this city’s place and way of living within the long river of civilizational history

The external world seems to be the raw material for his thinking

He connects the world he observes with his own experience, feelings and cognition

The observed world and personal feeling get elevated to the level of culture

Through describing different social customs, values, religious beliefs and ways of life, he lets readers see: the cultural logic behind human behavior

And then history: culture does not exist in isolation but has historical roots. History provides the background, so that travel experience is not merely observation of the present but understanding within a temporal depth; culture cannot be separated from history

And then reflection, doing some philosophizing and sublimation

Thailand’s Industrial Structure and Its Education Dilemma

Quite interesting; Thailand often serves as a typical case

Thailand was once one of the Asian Tigers

The way we gauge the future of a nation or a country

is by the industrial structure of a place

Thailand’s education system cannot yet support a knowledge system, including the output of some senior engineering talent, and cannot meet the demands of high-paying technology work

And the distribution of educational resources is uneven

Why China and India Store Gold and Silver Differently

I’ve noticed a very interesting phenomenon, but right now I don’t know why: China especially likes to store up food, and this may come from Chinese people’s own sense of security, so they store large amounts of gold and silver at home, or hold them as gold bars. India, though, is also a market with extremely large consumption of silver and gold, but its logic is different.

What I find very interesting about India is that it…

How Lhasa’s Statutory Holidays Differ from the Mainland’s

Our statutory holidays nationwide are the same

Lhasa’s holiday structure differs from the mainland’s

Local and ethnic holidays: Lhasa clearly has more, and some you’ve never even heard of on the mainland

It was only from chatting with a driver that I found out that for this Spring Festival holiday, we started work on the 24th, but they seem to start work on the 28th

They have Losar (Tibetan New Year), with a longer break than Spring Festival, plus various religious festivals — these all matter a lot, involving collective pilgrimage, circumambulation (kora), and rituals

The Governance Logic of Drug and Cigarette Control in China

Personally I think that in China, for political and social-historical reasons, the actual harm of marijuana is exaggerated, while the harm of cigarettes is underestimated

Drugs themselves are a governance tool for the state, so psychoactive substances are all classified together as drugs

China itself also practices preventive governance to protect rights, and has a greater need for stability; relatively speaking, cigarettes themselves also have a huge profit margin

The domestic risk ranking has never been ordered by “medical harm” but by “governability”

Still, across national samples, 41% to 94% of marijuana users also smoke (tobacco); here this refers to the proportion of people who are both marijuana users and cigarette users

The Positioning and Differentiated Layout of AI in Four Chinese Cities

We find that the development trends of several Chinese cities are: Beijing has gradually become the frontier center for AI startup activity. Many large, mature tech companies are geographically scattered, while Beijing has a world-leading group of AI scientists in research, concentrated in the Zhongguancun tech circle, doing technology research and performing very well.

Shanghai has formed some entrepreneurship and innovation centers in the field of foundation models, has many incubators, and receives strong support from the Shanghai government, providing powerful semiconductor industry backing.

Hangzhou currently revolves around Alibaba, has promoted the building of several AI towns, and focuses on 5G and R&D.

Shenzhen, meanwhile, serves as a fast-landing application center, dedicated to pushing technology quickly into the market.

A Bad Bowl of Dan Dan Noodles Opposite A-ge’s

Opposite A-ge’s Zhazha Noodles in Lhasa — I’d originally planned to go to A-ge’s Zhazha Noodles, but found they weren’t open, so I went to a dan dan noodle shop on the other side. Inside it was very quiet, and the quietness turned out to be well deserved. I ordered their dan dan noodles and they were insanely bad. If Chongqing dan dan noodles deserve a seven, this place only gets one and a half to two. Really bad.

Their method was ridiculous. The toppings of dan dan noodles are supposed to go on top, but they put them underneath, and there was very little of them. The noodles felt undercooked, a bit thick, and tasted odd. The meat didn’t seem fresh either, and there were a few peanuts. I think Chongqing dan dan noodles should pile on the toppings and pile on the chilli, with a rich flavour — but this shop’s noodles had almost no toppings, it was all noodles, just a few peanuts and a bit of meat, and the meat was hard to stomach too.

Java Coffee in Lhasa and Its Nepali Feel

The Java coffee in Lhasa

It’s a bit like Himalayan Java Coffee

And I found there really are a lot of Nepali sets on the menu

Very interesting — is it the same one?

The key thing is the little dog at the door flops down wherever it likes, just like the dogs in Nepal

It really feels very zen, like nothing bothers it

Jianxin Coffee: 2F, Jiawa Coffee, Sera Monastery parking lot, Chengguan District, Lhasa

A lot of people stop by for a cup on their way out after walking around Sera Monastery

Lhasa: How Attention Gets Distributed in a Decentralised City

Lhasa is an interesting place

In a highly platformised city

attention gets sucked away by the top players

and the people left over sit in the “invisible zone”

people start proving their own value, living anxious narratives

But in a place like Lhasa:

there’s no strong top-player narrative

no clear “this is who you must pay attention to”

attention flows passively towards “the people who are present right now”

so the traffic gets spread out much more evenly

The Temperament Gap Between Shigatse and Lhasa People

I think the difference between Shigatse people and Lhasa people is interesting. Shigatse is more towards Tsang, so overall people are plainer, very direct, and very good at enduring hardship. Their pastoral background weighs more heavily, and their tolerance for stability is higher, so they speak straight to the point and don’t beat around the bush much.

But Lhasa feels more urbanised, relaxed, more worldly, and more adaptable towards tourists and outsiders. Shigatse people who grew up in Lhasa also deliberately tone down their accent — that’s interesting too.

Because a lot of Shigatse people have now moved to Lhasa: Lhasa has a lot of universities, a lot of good middle schools, and the hospitals are in Lhasa too. Lhasa is also Tibet’s administrative centre, commercial centre and tourism centre, so it’s interesting — a lot of people want to keep moving up, and so they come to Lhasa.

Lhasa locals aren’t a pure collective in themselves: they may be people who moved in from Shannan or Nyingchi, or people from old Lhasa families, or people who moved in from Shigatse. So it’s interesting; on the whole they’re fairly open, fairly relaxed people who aren’t caught up in the rat race.

Drepung Monastery: Head of Lhasa’s Three Great Monasteries

Drepung Monastery, in the western suburbs of Chengguan District

Along with Sera Monastery and Ganden Monastery, it’s one of Lhasa’s three great monasteries

Built on a hillside, enormous in scale

Drepung is more “lived-in” than Sera: more monks, a heavier everyday atmosphere

The light in the early morning and at dusk is great — perfect for walking slowly and watching people

At its peak Drepung had over ten thousand monks

It was the largest monastery in the entire Tibetan Buddhist world

It was also where successive Dalai Lamas lived, studied and handled affairs for long periods; many important decisions were not necessarily made in the Potala Palace, but formed within the Drepung system

The Life Story of a Photographer Sister in Lhasa

I’m thinking about a photographer sister I met at a Hunan restaurant last night

A very cool sister; I asked her some questions and built a basic model of her

She started a guesthouse in Dali and lost two million

Then she came to Lhasa for two years and paid off the debt; in Lhasa she makes over fifty thousand a month

Among portrait photographers in Lhasa she’s roughly in the top five; she has her own aesthetic and her own style

And in Lhasa the competition isn’t that fierce, it’s easy for your work to get noticed, the photos come out well, and the minimum charge is about 600 with no upper limit

Where a distinctive aesthetic comes from largely comes from being yourself — she has a very distinct personality, she loves freedom

Character decides destiny, character decides choices, choices decide experience, experience shapes character

Path Dependence in Platform Ecosystems

Using the metaphor of city migration to explain how a platform’s user ecosystem forms, pointing out that Weibo’s star-chasing culture is not determined by the medium’s characteristics but is a specific content field formed by historical accumulation

Twitter retaining tech discussion and Weibo maintaining an entertainment ecosystem essentially reveals that there is path dependence in the development of content communities

Designing a city is like designing a product

What kind of people you attract to the city, and the city’s core landscape structure, determine the traffic

Of course the core issue is that every city is competing for users, and the premise is who gets to eat more of the dividends in the process

Desire and resources: the hard problem of protecting wild ecosystems

Protecting wild ecosystems really feels like a huge problem, and how to protect them I think is genuinely important. Because wild ecosystems aren’t just a matter of development and the economy; it’s a more fundamental question.

Human desire is endless, but resources are limited. What we can do isn’t expand our own resources, but reduce our desires as much as possible, or control our desires.

Of course there are many ways to control your desires. Through internal religious methods, or through the education system; externally, through institutional approaches, or external constraints, or a reasonable system, or a set of very positive feedback mechanisms — for example some KPIs or incentive mechanisms in a company — to make desire rational. That’s fairly normal; it fits human nature, and it fits how human nature operates in the current world.

28. Being visible in a position is not the same as proving ability

Starting from first principles, the investment point for the US has nothing to do with a Chinese company’s employees’ background or nationality

What matters more is whether, in an extreme situation — say when China and the US can’t reconcile — this company can be controlled by the US

18. Mixue’s ceiling: population and density

Chagee’s own gross margin per cup is about 60%–65%

Net margin is around 10%–15%, partly because it insists on running stores directly and sits in high-rent commercial districts, aiming to build a brand moat

Mixue’s model: selling to franchisees

Ice cream powder, creamer, syrup, jam, cups, straws, machines → a little margin added at every link

So essentially it’s selling very stable B2B cash flow

Mixue’s sheer number is terrifying, to the point that headquarters can produce centrally and purchase centrally

Extremely low raw material costs

Factories running at full capacity

Logistics costs diluted

Quality control highly standardized

17. Changi Airport: a botanical garden with a runway

Mixue’s ceiling is itself population and density

That also explains why it’s expanding overseas

Chagee is more built as a cultural symbol, with stronger pricing power; the problem it worries about is brand aesthetics going out of fashion

15. Valuing emerging industries is betting on future consensus

I think it’s a bit similar — the discussion about maturity, and about how the cake gets divided. When someone values an industry, if the industry is still growing, absorbing the valuation is itself assessed by how big the cake the market might produce is. But once this field enters maturity and hasn’t produced a second growth curve, then it enters decline, or it needs a very deep moat of its own.

Like WeChat — its user stickiness really is very strong, and it has a deep moat in its scenarios. But without a moat like that, the industry can only sit in decline, meaning market penetration is very hard to raise further.

For example, when the cake is saturated — the industry cycle is such that it grows only when the cake is getting bigger, and the P/E naturally rises. But if the cake shrinks, that means these companies still need to find their own moat.

14. Singapore’s OBU: a systems answer to vehicle-road-cloud integration

I feel that sometimes in a growth phase, especially in a field like AI, it doesn’t seem to grow linearly. In a field like that, if you try to value it, I feel the problems are quite big. Because I think the biggest problem is that the denominator isn’t very stable. In a mature field, the inputs are fairly stable, profits are stable, and market size is predictable.

But in an emerging industry, especially in this field, all the players aren’t creating value along a predictable route; rather, everyone participates in this market as a player, and what comes out of it is a consensus from mutual gaming. So valuation here is a bit hard to pin down, because it’s essentially betting on a future consensus. That’s why there are so many problems inside: how big the future market is, nobody knows; who survives, nobody knows; whether the technology route will change, nobody knows; what regulation will do, nobody knows; how emotional relationships will go, nobody knows.

So this valuation is largely decided by storytelling, by market sentiment, plus a bit of liquidity. So it’s quite strange — it feels like you’re not buying the company, you’re buying a bet.

About growth phases, I’ve always had a question. In a growth phase, especially when we do this kind of investing — when we look at these growth-phase companies and assess their future certainty — I think there’s a very important, very sensitive part in the middle: whether it’s genuinely reliable, whether you can bet on the right future consensus, and whose hands that future consensus is actually in.

If you want to invest here, I think you have to return to some scenario-based questions. It’s actually a kind of foresight, with an a priori quality — proof that it’s a form of cognition. I think the host has a kind of prediction about the future consensus, or can predict that certain people, certain companies, certain directions, certain papers may be right in the future, and bets on that basis.

Everything has cracks; that’s how the light gets in

know-what key metrics

The competitive landscape of a whole industry can be looked at horizontally and vertically. The horizontal landscape studies how peers split the cake; the vertical landscape studies how upstream and downstream split the cake

To determine a company’s position in the market, the metric usually used is market share — that is, how much of the market it occupies

High market share means strong market demand, so whether it’s horizontal competitive advantage or upstream and downstream supply and demand, there’s no worry about selling

That’s also why you choose the leader

10. Valuing high-growth fields: P/S beats P/E

In the Hong Kong market, the valuation system is deeply influenced by international institutional investors (like pension funds and hedge funds) together with mainland Chinese southbound funds

P/E is still the common valuation metric

Hong Kong stocks have long been a value depression; Hong Kong sits between China and the US, and has long carried strong uncertainty

So money is quite sensitive

9. US equities drive global risk appetite

For some fields that have long been in high growth and high R&D

And haven’t yet turned a profit, the traditional P/E (price-to-earnings) doesn’t apply. The metric the market recommends most is P/S (price-to-sales), especially Forward P/S

P/S = total market cap / annual operating revenue

Total market cap (P): about HK$118.6 billion (peak shortly after listing)

Annual revenue forecast (S): assume 2025 revenue of about HK$556 million (converted from about US$53.44 million for the first three quarters of 2025)

For AI unicorns the market grants an extremely high P/S premium (usually between 100x and 200x); the core calculation logic is the ratio of revenue growth to model training efficiency

8. Silver is really a by-product of copper, zinc and lead mining

I feel the ups and downs of US stocks also heavily affect global risk appetite

If US stocks fall sharply, global investors’ risk appetite drops, money may pull out of risk assets, and Hong Kong stocks are prone to following them down in the short term; conversely, if US stocks rise, sentiment improves and Hong Kong stocks may benefit too

This is especially true for tech stocks and US stocks

7. Mona Lisa: the structural code of Leonardo’s artistic peak

How is silver produced?

1. Separated from ore

2. Recovered from silver-bearing waste

Silver is much rarer than copper, more abundant than gold, but all belong to “extremely low-concentration metals”

About 70% of silver is a by-product

Mainly from:

Lead-zinc mines

Copper mines

A small amount from standalone silver mines

Silver output isn’t directly determined by the “silver price”; it’s determined by how much copper, zinc and lead is mined

This is different from gold. Gold is mostly “dug specifically for gold”

Silver is more like “the stuff you scrape off while mining copper”

Compared with gold, a large amount of silver gets consumed in industry

That’s also why silver prices have historically been more volatile than gold

Valuation is a balance of probability and payoff

minimax’s valuation now exceeds a hundred billion

Very important factors affecting valuation: payoff and probability

Probability: how likely something is to happen. For example, a company has a 20% chance of becoming the industry leader in the next three years

Payoff: if it happens, how many times your money do you get. For example, buy now and if it really becomes the leader, the price rises 5x

The market has bubbles, but for judging valuation quite a few people choose to calculate P/E, estimating earnings per share, while for some new stocks many people also use the “dream ratio”

Reasonable price ≈ the returns of various future scenarios × their respective probabilities, added up — this part relies on room for imagination: low probability of success, but the payoff is enormous

High probability and low payoff are stable assets, with limited upside and almost certain profit — like mature baijiu, treasury bonds and so on

And then there’s medium probability and medium payoff, which is the range value investing loves most: during panic the market gives a very low probability, but the payoff is still there

Seeing Myself Through Others’ Choices

What kind of success is this person’s success, really?

Algorithmic advantage? Or a traffic dividend?

What is his biggest bottleneck?

Decision-tree analysis — a life is made of countless if-elses, and a person’s most valuable records are the experiences of choosing in difficult situations

And one more thing: mental models and the core of personality — which behavior patterns recur, and what is the core driving force

If it were me, in that situation, what would I do?

The essence of biography is to borrow someone else’s corpse to bring back your own soul

I Am an Architect Craving a Sense of Control

Walking through your forest of notes, what I see is not a simple knowledge collector, but an architect obstinately searching for an “operating system” amid chaos. Your core longing is not surface-level knowledge accumulation but a deep “sense of control” — a psychological need to obtain inner certainty and freedom of action by understanding and designing the underlying rules of a system [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. You detest passively living in the “phenomenal layer” and the “game rules” set by others, and long to rise to the “law layer” to become the one who designs the game and sets the rules [MEMO].

Your most practiced and most natural way of solving things is “system modeling and abstraction.” Facing anything complex — whether it’s Singapore’s transport plan, a bubble in financial markets, or the architecture of a medical AI — your first reaction isn’t to memorize the phenomenon but to break down its components, identify the interactions, and try to distill an explainable, transferable abstract model [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. You see the world as systems waiting to be parsed and reassembled — that’s your powerful invisible cognitive advantage.

Based on this advantage, you can start your “compounding flywheel” in at least three concrete scenarios: 1. Knowledge management: turn your process of learning any new field (like Buddhist studies, biological evolution, AI) into a “system modeling” project. Don’t record scattered points — immediately draw a “system relationship map” for the core concepts you learn, annotating key components, feedback loops, and constraints. Over time your knowledge will no longer be isolated islands but an interconnected cognitive network that can produce new insights [MEMO]. 2. Product thinking: whether analyzing or designing a product (like Linear, RevenueCat), force yourself to look at it from the perspective of “system states.” Ask yourself: what is its core state flow? How do the modules interact and produce the overall experience? What are the constraints (technical, commercial, human)? This will lift your product insight from feature commentary to architect-level diagnosis [MEMO],[MEMO]. 3. Investment analysis: when facing market information, use your modeling ability — don’t just look at a single company’s story, but build a small “cross-validation system.” Observe valuation data (cold), market sentiment (hot), and the leverage environment (hard) as three mutually influencing variables [MEMO]. Your advantage is piercing through narrative to see the real interactions among variables.

Right now, you can start one tiny action: the next time you learn a new concept or analyze a product, don’t just record the conclusion. At the end of your note, force yourself to describe in one sentence: “What are this system’s core components and the single most critical interaction between them?” That will directly call on your gift.

Finally, let Charlie Munger’s deep wisdom light this path for you: “Macro is what we have to accept; micro is where we can make a difference.” What you’re good at is dissecting systems at the micro level and understanding interactions, and this work will in the end bring you deep control and freedom in the macro world

Portrait of a Frontline Tech Thinker

From your notes I can clearly sense a vivid individual who is continuously observing, thinking, and building. Your fragments of thought are like puzzle pieces gradually assembling a three-dimensional and profound portrait.

You are at the frontier of technology; you very likely work in something related to AI, products, investment, or technology strategy, with deep and structured thinking about AI Agents, NPUs, valuation models, and so on, paying attention to how technology evolves from a tool into infrastructure, and thinking about the real scenarios for its commercial deployment [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. Your professional thinking is systemic; you’re used to probing things’ first principles and underlying structure, whether it’s technical architecture, economic systems, or product logic [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO].

In values and behavior patterns, you show a unique fusion of two poles. On one hand, you are highly rational and constructive, extolling “subjectivity” — clear self-knowledge and firm self-shaping — and detesting being swept along by an external “script” [MEMO],[MEMO]. You believe that “because I want to achieve such and such, I naturally act in such and such a way,” and you are a person driven by internal goals [MEMO]. On the other hand, your thinking is full of emotional awareness and humanistic care. You deeply reflect on “jealousy” and “sympathetic joy,” pursuing an open-minded attitude that can appreciate others’ achievements and learn from them [MEMO],[MEMO]. You draw the wisdom of “seeing things as they are” from Buddhism and Zen, and are wary of being bound by inherent cognitive models and developing bias [MEMO],[MEMO]. This combination of rational construction and emotional awareness lets you see both the cold rules of systems and, with a “compassionate heart,” care about groups overlooked by the tide [MEMO].

Your knowledge system is interdisciplinary and interconnected. You don’t just study technology; you also range widely across economics, evolutionary psychology, biology, art history, history, and philosophy [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. You’re good at investigating things to extend knowledge — analyzing the peak of art from the brushwork of the Mona Lisa, understanding how the economy works from the banking system, reflecting on cognitive limits from the evolutionary environment of human vision [MEMO],[MEMO],[MEMO]. This learning isn’t for piling up knowledge, but for assembling a more complete cognitive map of the world, filling in puzzle gaps like “a certain sense of missing economic knowledge” [MEMO].

In interests and life, you love nature, can be healed by the snow-mountain scenery of Chengdu, and believe the longing for pure nature is a biological instinct [MEMO]. You appreciate profound humanistic art, and can delicately feel the weight of historical and cultural relics while traveling [MEMO]. You also think about how to express warmth with technology — for instance, conceiving a product to help children and parents have asynchronous conversations [MEMO].

Your social mode seems to value deep resonance more than casual acquaintance. You dissect the “sense of idol” and the meaning of community, treasuring the intimacy and recognition that come from a shared language, shared waiting, and shared time [MEMO]. You identify with the state of “forgetting each other in the rivers and lakes,” believing the best relationship isn’t mutual depletion but each flourishing on their own [MEMO].

In summary, your core portrait is that of a clear-headed builder. You always take “the external world as your stage and your inner world as your laboratory” [MEMO], using systemic rational thinking to deconstruct the world and build cognition and products, while also using keen sensibility to perceive yourself, feel human nature, and connect — and while building the objective world, you are also carefully building a deep and abundant inner world.

Pilgrims’ Motives and a Sense of Covenant

Actually, among these worshippers, many are Tibetans with pure faith. There’s a deep background here: they usually go in groups of a few people, even bringing children. There may be a support person driving a tractor, towing tents, drinks or water, going ahead, then waiting a while. They may come from Aba in Sichuan or Gansu, or from Qinghai, Tianshui in Gansu, or Tibet itself. Some journeys are two or three thousand kilometers long, even taking a year or more.

Their motives are pretty interesting too — not only for themselves, but also to pray for the peace of all beings, to pray for elders, or to fulfill some wish inherited in the family. There’s another kind: atonement, for example when facing a major life upheaval, like a family member’s death or a fire, they make a vow. This kind of vow carries a strong sense of covenant; in their view, it’s a dialogue with the gods, with the universe, expressing sincerity through minimalist physical asceticism.

There are also many Han and other ethnic faces in the groups. They may not have grown up in a religious atmosphere, but rather on the way to relocating, or encountering a spiritual crisis in the city — merchants, white-collar workers, students. Now there are also some professional participants, like influencers, livestream sellers, possibly with commercial teams. But I think obvious performers are usually very quick with cameras and interaction, while true worshippers are reserved, dull, and rather quiet.

Common Sense Lost Under a Highly Civilized Surface

The world seems to have entered a complex, highly civilized state, yet it has lost basic common sense

Xu Zhiyuan, A Wanderer’s World

Looking back at China today, while material living standards keep rising, some people’s sense of happiness instead declines; rich and poor alike are full of resentment, business is more cutthroat than ever, and there are far too few intellectuals who are independent-minded and think for themselves

Speculators in the Silver Market and the Flow of Safe-Haven Money

A quite interesting point: there are now many speculators in the silver market. Besides hedge funds and retail investors, there is another group that cannot be ignored — safe-haven money. Safe-haven money seems to have started changing direction after Bitcoin’s weak performance; the areas where it is more active are derivatives, such as silver.

Margin of Safety and the Investment Logic of Quality Assets

Buy quality assets with a margin of safety

Core algorithm — it sounds like a perfect axiom, but how is it actually confirmed?

The premise of a quality asset is certainty and the ability to continuously generate free cash flow; you look at whether an enterprise has a moat that is hard to breach

If it’s high return on capital, with long-term ROE steadily above 15%, it’s usually regarded as high quality; abundant free cash flow — a good business doesn’t need to put in large amounts of capital to maintain operations and growth

A company’s value today equals all the free cash flow it can generate over its remaining life, discounted back to today

The margin of safety exists for tolerance of error. If you calculate rigorously and think a company’s intrinsic value is 100 yuan per share, then you won’t buy at 100, and you won’t buy at 90 either. You might set a discount of 30% to 50%, and only when the market panics and the price falls below 50-70 yuan will you act

So it seems that extreme market sentiment (macroeconomic panic, short-term industry bad news, black swan events) is the only opportunity to buy at a discount

The difference in underlying structure

Native openclaw: a scheduling gateway, you fill in each vendor’s large model API Key, and it provides hands and feet, a high-risk environment; ClawHub is mixed with a large number of unreviewed third-party plugins, so security requirements are very high

Big tech’s Claw model is basically a fully managed cloud-native architecture, saving the API routing and authentication overhead of crossing networks, greatly improving response speed (TTFT), and perfectly adapting to their own ultra-long context capability; the big tech allocates you an elastic cloud container. When the Agent needs to write code, scrape web pages, or process files, all of it happens in a one-off isolated sandbox in the cloud. Even if you have it execute an unknown task, it absolutely cannot touch a single line of data on your local computer

7. Daily Pilgrimage at the Jokhang and the Believers’ Practice

For me, living a gamified life, narrative is the compass that keeps the game going.

Historical Narrative and Supra-Historical Narrative in Holding a Civilization Together

China is a civilization held together by “historical narrative”

While many Christian countries are held together by “supra-historical narrative”

The Information Channel Dilemma and the Limits of Short Video

I feel the main problem now is the channel problem. In an age of networked opinion, our most important task is to search for diverse, high-quality information, especially first-hand information. But I’ve found a problem: the content of short videos may be second-hand, third-hand or even fourth-hand. And short videos have another big problem, which is that they cater to the recommendation feed. The recommendation feed itself also has a big problem, which is that it…

A Life-Changing Narrative Choice, Without Regret

If there is a narrative where, once you choose such a narrative

Perhaps my life turns around from then on …

But will there be regret?

Even if I repeated it thousands and thousands of times, I still would

Such a Pure Sky Needs No Story

Such a pure sky needs no story, only presence

It needs no narrative at all; it’s just there, inviting us to set down our thoughts and feel and observe

The Best Gift Is a Surprise Narrative

What exactly is the best gift?

A narrative story that is both a surprise and deliberately prepared

Technical Implementation Options for Excerpting X Content

Excerpting publicly posted content on X

It can actually all be done, and can include @-mentions of @xxx

Developers can:

Use X’s official API or build their own proxy;

Query tweets containing specific keywords;

Pull the content of those tweets down;

Render them as a list on a page.

It’s usually scheduled scraping — scripts periodically grabbing posts on X

Emotional Narrative or Cognitive Connection: A Writing Choice

Do you want to write narratives that users find really satisfying, experiences

or content where every sentence gives the reader something to think about, sparks their thinking?

Those feel-good narratives seem to work through strong emotion, strong imagery, strong identification — the user feels great, reliving a life on their behalf. That still seems like a content-consumption kind of relationship, not a cognitive-connection one

But what I’d rather do is let the reader stop, let the reader really feel what it’s like to be there, let the user return to their own experience, let the user take part in building their own content

The latter participates in building the user’s experience, calibrating their cognitive model

This is also a question of writing motivation

And it comes back to your own personal positioning and narrative

If you’re not being yourself, then everything seems futile

There are so many models that can tell stories, so many bars that can tell stories — just like Lhasa and Dali, this place isn’t short of storytellers. What it lacks is a place that lets you take part, become your own experience, take part in your own narrative, reflect and find yourself

Not consumption, but taking part in this process of transformation

Explorable Learning Content

Explorable content

https://explorabl.es/

An interactive learning and education platform

Education is very well suited to interaction, it helps understanding

Note: not just consumption, more practice and exploration

Content Distribution That Takes Part in the User’s Narrative

You can’t purely distribute valuable content for the user

Instead you have to distribute content that has to do with the user (are you really understanding the user well enough)

To be precise, you should be taking part in the user’s narrative

Designing for Unconscious User Input

The choice of user input

Should let the user have something to input

This input is best if the user does it unconsciously, or if it’s acceptable to the user (for example, the content the user inputs really can produce some very good effects)

Building a Personal Narrative

I’m thinking about how to accomplish one thing

namely building a narrative

Around the individual, dig up some needs, the things they’re interested in

Content Must Be Relevant to the User

The content given to the user to consume must be relevant to the user

Matching content, as an independent object, with the user

With some sense of immersion

A Content’s Nature Determines Its Medium

A content’s nature takes priority over the medium’s form: the real value depends on whether the content itself is naturally suited to a certain medium. For example, content like dance and everyday pets is naturally suited to video, a visual and dynamic carrier; while content like teaching and exploration may be better suited to interactive forms that require the user to take part actively

From the angle of human cognition, it basically comes down to the efficiency of visual information, which fits human evolutionary habits better

Scaffolding cements thinking and suppresses foundational innovation

I feel that the role of scaffolding in software development is to help us iterate and develop quickly under a traditional model. It means that without any paradigm innovation, you use existing skills or tools to reach the optimal solution in engineering and efficiency.

But does scaffolding have downsides? Yes, obviously: it’s not conducive to innovation. In the age of intelligence there may be better solutions, but scaffolding is like a framework — even though it’s a kind of foundation, undeniably it also suppresses foundational innovation. Built on scaffolding, a lot of things get cemented, lacking new vitality and innovation.

So a lot of the time, when we use a new tool, take on a new task, complete an innovative piece of work, or create a work of art, we should first think: does the old method really apply? Are there better methods? Right.

21. Will Meta relive the pain of Google integrating DeepMind?

SpaceX and xAI restructure and merge

This structure is effectively equivalent to combining two businesses into one, forming a new entity valued at over a trillion dollars

Bundling space infrastructure (SpaceX’s rockets and the Starlink satellite network) with AI capability (xAI’s large models and compilation platform) to achieve business complementarity and reduce duplicated costs — for example IT infrastructure, R&D, operations

Using SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network to give AI real-time data connectivity and global coverage

Using xAI’s tech stack (Grok, AI models) to enhance satellite services, automated operations and maintenance, navigation, and intelligent features like space robotics

16. Mature companies need a moat to fend off decline

Changi Airport as the design experience of the world’s most beautiful airport

It really is good-looking. Jewel’s indoor waterfall, the rainforest, the glass dome — the visual impact is already at the level of a city. You’re not waiting for a plane, you’re strolling through a botanical garden with a runway

And it’s good to wander around: butterfly garden, sunflower garden, pool, free cinema, recliner areas — in other airports these would be “highlights,” at Changi they’re “standard”

A layover feels like a light trip

Thinking Too Much, Doing Too Little

My biggest problem is that I think too much and do too little

Over-designed, but under-experienced

So I want more felt moments in life, more thinking and inspiration, more growth

Products Must Be Anchored to Willingness to Pay

I think there’s a conflict, a conflict of values. It’s obvious that the way this world works is that if you’re making this kind of product, one problem you must secure is that you have to be sure whether the audience for this product has enough willingness to pay. If the willingness to pay is widespread, then it’s no longer a question of user behavior, but more a case of some big company, in some scenario, carrying out a monopolization of certain behaviors.

So I think one thing that’s very lacking when we take on certain tasks is — I think it’s resolving this kind of conflict. It’s obvious that I can feel that if this project is done, its audience must be those who have the willingness to pay, and they’re willing to pay for new technology, and they’re willing to contribute their workflows and their user experience to the new technology, because that kind of experience is especially precious.

We all know luxury brands are still a good example — how they go from nobility down to common people. Ralph Lauren is an example too — how they go from being worn by some celebrities, giving it a pull, so to speak, and then all the way down to ordinary people. So they all prove one thing: this sense of rupture and this sense of conflict — how do you resolve it, how do you balance it.

I think there’s one very important point: right now I’m choosing users, choosing customers who are high-net-worth. But what I want to do more is to make this thing mainstream — to let some people, if they have ideas, actually achieve very good results with our product. Because the new world needs a new kind of professional model, a new professional method, and this group of people must gradually be born.

We can’t say from the start that we encourage the whole public to try our product; rather, at the beginning we use some high-net-worth users to help us make this product known, to help us try out some of the product’s best use cases. Then, based on those best use cases, we explore and see whether there’s something very suitable for the general public to try. I think this kind of trying can be promoted through tripartite funding, or free access, or student discounts.

I think this is very, very important. The problem it balances is how elitism can avoid the problem of class becoming entirely solidified.

Inbox and Archive in a Note System

flomo serves as an inbox, not a filing cabinet

The notes in flomo are all raw material, not finished products, so there still needs to be a regular metabolism, moving them to another space for systematic modeling

For example via heptabase or scrintal

Heptabase’s core logic is the infinite canvas, expanding the system’s capacity

The other one is the developer / structured-thinking method, Obsidian

Split the long notes in flomo into individual .md files in Obsidian, as concept nodes

Use Canvas: Obsidian’s Canvas feature lets you drag these .md files in and connect them like a code architecture diagram

Old Faiths as Spiritual Support in This Era

Haven’t you noticed? This month, in the process of modernization, there is more uncertainty and anxiety. For local people, some old beliefs and some traditions, or some rituals, are a kind of spiritual support when facing this era of drastic change.

We received basic education. What the state wants to see is a child who, through education, walks out of the mountains and then becomes a doctor, becomes an engineer, contributes to the world. This is what Confucian thought passes down and expresses.

But what I admire more about this ethnic group is that, as a cultural individual, after fulfilling some basic responsibilities and obligations, it still has its own choice — to preserve its own ethnicity, or pass on its own ethnicity and faith. Not to change.

Actually, what does this kind of question ultimately define? It defines the three ultimate questions of humanity: Who am I? Where do I come from? Where am I going?

So after having education and investment, they can still choose to be a modern citizen, or they can choose to still prostrate. Then this may be their own choice — their own spiritual consumption and their own life choice.

If one day there were not a single pilgrim left on Route 318, that might be a very advanced modern society, but I would also feel that this cultural diversity had been lost.

What Is an Unexamined Life

What is an unexamined life? It’s that when we do many things, most of life starts passively — for example driven by biological instinct, or driven by social inertia, or driven by algorithms. In this process, you’re like a program, unaware that you’re old code written by someone else, running over and over. So examination is like pressing a pause button, to observe your current state — is this thing really what you want to do, or is it because society tells me I should do it.

The reason a human is human is that we have reason, and we can define ourselves. If you don’t define your own values, I think the environment will make the decisions for you. So examining life is like clarifying the logic behind behavior — what we actually choose, what we actually love.

Actually this saying also has a very harsh elitist flavor; it hints at a mediocre comfort and a painful truth. Man is condemned to be free, and this freedom is heavy. It’s that we come to know the absurdity and uncertainty of this world, which is very painful. But this pain brings a kind of clarity, which gives life a kind of texture.

8. Narrative as the Compass of a Gamified Life

In the AI era, people really need their own experience and narrative even more to construct their existence.

Human Adaptations Are Far From Optimal Design

The concept of an adaptor implies that [illustration] mechanisms possess a specific evolutionary function. This idea has already triggered many major research findings in the 20th century [illustration]. However, this does not mean that the adaptive mechanisms modern humans possess are “optimal design.” The mechanisms we have look like a patchwork, and yet the finest human mechanic would marvel at this mechanism’s complex structure. In fact, many factors make us realize that the adaptations humans currently have are far from an optimal design

Self-Exploration and Asking About One’s Path in Life

What should I write about?

What can I write about?

How do I play this game well? How do I design a system?

How do I look for answers, look for myself, through narrative?

Where should my future self go, what should I do

Maybe it’s better to just find the road that makes me feel utterly comfortable first

Core Elements of System Design and Knowing Your Goals

Actually sometimes I think that when designing a system, there are only a few elements to pay attention to. Why do we design a system? Because we have some important objects of observation, or parts we care about. We need to center on the part we care about, fold it into the system, and let the system operate in such a way that it doesn’t damage these core goals we care about very much — I think that’s the most important thing.

This is also the purpose of system design. It requires us to think through the things we truly care about, to project their direction. What are their boundaries? And what is their passing line? Or, how can we make it really operate well, rather than immersing ourselves in some single goal and being unable to pull out, or endlessly avoiding some goal. I think this involves predicting the system, and actually neither of those is right.

I think a system designer should have good cognition of the real world, and an ability to objectively understand himself, including how to balance between himself and his own goals.

Douyin’s Variable Ratio Reward Mechanism

Douyin addiction

In psychology, variable ratio reinforcement (Variable Ratio Reinforcement)

Occasionally scrolling onto a viral, wildly satisfying, resonant, or stunning piece of content

High-quality content requires a cognitive cost

So what we’re actually scrolling is not content, but a mechanism

5. The Starry Night: Van Gogh walking to the stars through death

I feel caffeine + sleep together have the best effect

At noon in a café I usually choose to first drink something with caffeine, then close my eyes for a 15–20 minute nap, and by the time I wake up the caffeine has just kicked in

Moss and Travertine Ecology in Jiuzhaigou

Jiuzhaigou moss

After being scoured by the waterfall’s torrent, there’s a branch — one branch passes through dense forest

The slow current of that branch enters flat ground and thus forms a wetland

Moss thrives in the wetland

Because the tiny stream gives some room to breathe

And so these plants flourish

The green plants on tree trunks and rocks are moss; they grow attached to fir trees, and are an important sign of the health of Jiuzhaigou’s primeval forest ecosystem. These mosses not only beautify the landscape but also take part in purifying the water and in travertine deposition — they are an important part of Jiuzhaigou’s unique hydrological system

Because Jiuzhaigou’s water is rich in calcium carbonate, it keeps depositing as it flows, forming travertine shoals, travertine pools, and travertine waterfalls. In the picture, the stream winds between moss-covered stumps and rocks, a vivid embodiment of travertine deposition and biological symbiosis. This kind of landscape is especially common in areas like Jiuzhaigou’s “Bonsai Shoal” and “Pearl Shoal,” and is an important part of the “fairy-tale world” in visitors’ eyes

21. WeChat’s Convenient Long-Press Voice Interaction

There is no need to fear the tide going out. Even for the richest espresso, after the initial violent aroma disperses, what remains is a longer, more intriguing sweetness.

Sometimes only after the tide goes out do you clearly sense which things were tossed up by the wave and which were really swimming hard.

How Environment Decides Who You Are Before 25

Before 25, the environment’s influence on a person is at the decisive level

The prefrontal cortex layer of the human brain doesn’t basically mature until 24-26; before that it’s highly shaped by the environment

What it handles is reason, long-term planning, emotional regulation and self-restraint

So what exactly did the environment rewrite in me before 25?

Thinking patterns — not opinions, but how to think about problems

The threshold of reaction to pressure and emotion

The structure of self-narrative

Character itself is shaped by the environment

If you still want to train the prefrontal cortex and improve your rationality as an adult, you need extremely high alertness and focus, plus a strong goal and reward prediction, plus deep sleep. The actual physical change to adult neural synapses (wiring) doesn’t happen during the training itself, but during deep sleep or deep relaxation (such as meditation, or non-sleep deep rest)