February 2026 Thought Notes

February 2026 Thought Notes

2026 February Thought Notes 363 notes this month | recorded from 2026-02-01 to 2026-02-28 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 85 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 63 · AI and Agent Systems 63 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 61 · Travel, Places and Cities 41 · Business, Investing and Career 19 · Content, Craft and Recording 14 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 13 · Body, Health and Daily Life 4 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

February 28, 2026 · 304 min · 64682 words · Xinwei Xiong

December 2025 Thought Notes

2025 December Thought Notes 374 notes this month | recorded from 2025-12-01 to 2025-12-31 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 93 · Travel, Places and Cities 55 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 51 · AI and Agent Systems 48 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 47 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 31 · Business, Investing and Career 25 · Body, Health and Daily Life 17 · Content, Craft and Recording 7 Everything from the month is kept here, filed by theme, each entry carrying its original timestamp. ...

December 31, 2025 · 272 min · 57792 words · Xinwei Xiong

November 2025 Thought Notes: Ideas and History, Daily Life, Cities

2025 November Thought Notes 309 notes this month | recorded from 2025-11-03 to 2025-11-26 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 63 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 59 · Travel, Places and Cities 48 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 41 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 32 · AI and Agent Systems 32 · Content, Craft and Recording 12 · Business, Investing and Career 12 · Body, Health and Daily Life 10 ...

November 30, 2025 · 225 min · 47773 words · Xinwei Xiong

October 2025 Thought Notes: Ideas and History, Daily Life, Self-Knowledge

2025 October Thought Notes 441 notes this month | recorded from 2025-10-02 to 2025-10-31 Themes: Reading, Ideas and History 94 · Daily Notes and Everything Else 83 · Self-Knowledge and Psychology 82 · AI and Agent Systems 60 · Content, Craft and Recording 46 · Product, Engineering and Open Source 38 · Travel, Places and Cities 18 · Business, Investing and Career 10 · Body, Health and Daily Life 10 ...

October 31, 2025 · 256 min · 54479 words · Xinwei Xiong
A six-part AI task card connecting an open direction to a verifiable result

Give AI Tasks, Not Just Direction: Define Done First

After Three Hours, What Is Left on the Table? I have had evenings that began with a modest intention: settle the angle of an essay. Soon I was discussing titles with AI, then business models, then the meaning of work. The conversation flowed beautifully. When I closed the window, the page was still blank. That does not make the conversation worthless. It reveals that exploration and execution are different kinds of work. ...

July 11, 2026 · 8 min · 1526 words · Xinwei Xiong

How I Learned to Observe My Own Thinking: A Four-Month Metacognitive Shift

I once thought metacognition meant thinking more deeply about an experience and explaining an emotion more completely. Over four months, I recorded hundreds of fragments: why anxiety appears, why travel quiets the mind, why I become more sensitive after drinking, how AI might change engineering, and what it means for a product to respect the person using it. The notes multiplied, and my explanations became increasingly refined. Yet the number of ideas was not what changed me. The shift came when I began to see how a thought appears in the body, how emotion amplifies it, how I turn it into a story about myself, and how that story quietly makes decisions on my behalf. ...

June 2, 2025 · 11 min · 2315 words · Xinwei Xiong
A research notebook connecting source pages, citations, and synthesized outputs

Gemini Notebook (Formerly NotebookLM): A Source-Grounded Research Workflow

On July 16, 2026, Google renamed NotebookLM to Gemini Notebook. The old name will remain in search results, screenshots, and habits for a while, but the product did not disappear. Google describes it as the same standalone research tool, now connected more closely to the Gemini app and, eventually, Google Search. The rename also marks a larger change: notebooks are becoming places where software can not only read sources, but also run analysis against them. ...

April 21, 2025 · 18 min · 3787 words · Xinwei Xiong

Brain-Friendly English Learning Strategies

After researching a large amount of information, we summarized the methods of memorizing words and learning spoken English. A problem student in the eyes of teachers since childhood, and a stupid child in the eyes of parents. For a class teacher whose eyes are full of excellent students, there is no room for an undistinguished student like me in his eyes. I have been on the road to understanding and redeeming myself, constantly exploring why others memorize words so quickly, why all online learning methods fail for me, and why everyone thinks it is my problem… ...

February 16, 2024 · 24 min · 5067 words · Xinwei Xiong