Musings

It’s hard not to become an idealist in your 20s. It is equally hard not to become a cynic in your 30s.

In the end of the day, we are what we consume. To be original you need to be careful at choosing the building blocks of your “information reality”. Be vigilant about what you say, oftentimes we are saying the words that come from reading or watching other’s content, dig a little deeper, maybe you are accepting bullshits without even noticing. Make it a routine everyday to train yourself to think random things without using other people’s words....

This show is really hard to watch. Jump to around 50 minutes to watch Zhou Shen’s performance if you want to skip the other train wreck ones. and : How he stands out among all other singers in China. The quote from the host is “He is the only singer in the whole show”. I think there will be Zhou Shen level programmers out there, maybe John Carmack? maybe Peter Norvig?...

Life is too short to waste on things that are ephemeral. Technologies come and go, you should really be picky about what you invest your time in. Skills that are worth your time need to be both spatially and temporally scalable, in the sense that they are transferable to other domains and can survive a long time. The lindy effect states that the life expectancy of a technology or an idea is proportional to their current age, so if something has lived 30 years, it has a high probability continue to do so....

All political views are simply different answers to this question: why some kid only wish to go to disneyland, while others can go there anytime they want.

One thing I get coming from the covid pandemic, (other than the virus of course 😀), is that we seem to have lost any common ground to discuss anything at all. Even if putting on a face mask is good or not to prevent or even to some degree lower your risk of getting infected, is becoming a political issue. At some point, if you were to remind other people to wash hands for more than 5 seconds before having lunch, you won’t be perceived as a person with good hygiene, rather just another victim being manipulated by the conspiracy, “Don’t be a sheep man!...

Casey Muratori(@cmuratori) tweeted his several failed attempts to install linux on his local machine. Before he finally got the fedora 40 installed, he struggled with debian stable and then the freshly released Ubuntu 24.04, both installations ended up with total failures. I am a linux distro hopper myself, for the last few years, I have tried Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, Debian, then Arch and fedora, and back to Ubuntu again. I think I have witnessed a fair amount of linux’s installation quirkiness....

Since started my programming journey, I have been constantly learning new stuff. sometimes it feels extremely over-whelming, especially when I have to deal with a new domain of which I have little background knowledge in. Over time I find out that I am most engaged in a topic when I have a very concrete necessity to grasp it. If you find a concept you are having trouble to wrap your head around, try take a step back, ask this question: why is this thing created in the first place?...

Tsoding’s short youtube video commenting on educational system is pretty much dead-on. youtube I feel like that this especially rings true in a Chinese context, where conformity and alignment is much more favorable than uniqueness and ingenuity. 枪打出头鸟, every kid in china was told this sentence early on, which roughly translates to “the first bird gets shot first”. Sometimes it depresses me to think I can do nothing about this.

Can you name one person who got rich by selling (only) salad? But I know a few who got filthy rich by selling sugar water. Any product want to be relevent in the market will need to tap into the fundamental weakness of humanity. That’s why healthy diet doesn’t scale. It simply demands too much from the consumer. A giant baby would be the most ideal candidate for consumer in a capitalists’ world....