Notes on neverland

Confessions of a Former Star M&A Reporter

Thu, 13 Aug 2026 21:36:19 +0800

Error

Information, though, as soon as it exists, strains against containment. It’s active. Seeking an out, it breaches promises, firewalls and duties, ironclad non-disclosure agreements, and people — mostly people — to make itself known.

Most reporting, though, isn’t like that. Mostly it involves talking to people in quite boring, well-lit places and gathering the scraps needed to make a story. Fortunately, people like to talk.

A simple formula for deal reporting is that Success = Relationships x Indiscretion.

And it’s through this indulgence, the way we thrill at not just knowing more than our companion but showing him that we do, that confidences find easy passage.

To give them their dues, most don’t, at least not in big, gut-spilling ways. They deal in factoids, obliquely confirming and correcting, hinting and steering and shaping and curating their role, because no one wants to be the source — a source maybe, or one of many who helped you get it over the line, or, better still, the I can’t say but I would say if you were wrong person. No one wants to feel compromised or leaky. Part of the deal reporter’s job is reassuring her sources that they are not sources.

Envy too is here. [...] All can seek solace in leaking to damage their rivals.

Crime

Organised crime is quite a recent and yet profoundly relevant factor in deal reporting today. At the time I left the beat in 2023, the volume of information coming in from so-called Mystery Men had risen over five years: from almost nothing to about a quarter of all the tips our team received.

Established media is perfect for achieving this. It disseminates information widely and impacts heavily because it is (mostly) believed.

This confirming process turns stolen material into laundered, market-moving facts. And it does so with little risk of capture because the media works differently from other repositories of ill-begotten product. While banks are legally required to refuse or report sources of dirty money, the media will die to protect those who provide it with information.

As a group, they are more prolific than any single source could hope to be. Despite not being involved in any M&A, their tips can be almost comically detailed, running across multiple text screens and spanning everything from deal terms to project code names, timelines and cell phones of the various advisers and executives involved. Being motivated only by making money, they are liberated of the moral and emotional tides that turn within many source-reporter relations. Their information is sometimes spot on, other times nonsense. The Mystery Men don’t care.

I worry, though, that by providing such protein-rich information, it will gradually erode deal reporters’ ability to forage; when detailed tips arrive in your lap, why bother going out to hunt?

Tactical

In my experience, tactical leaks are rare, requiring a balance of risk appetite and a sophistication about navigating media that is unusual, certainly in public company M&A.

Luck

It happens. Every so often, a reporter gets sent an email by mistake or overhears a conversation at a bar or sits next to someone on a train who just can’t resist opening a PowerPoint draft. Or, as happened to me once, goes to a job interview in a different industry and is told about something directly related to a story they are chasing.

“竹知了”事件背后的舆情根源

Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:18:45 +0800

燕志华:

此事或将有助于人们看清中国式网络公关，往往扮演了网络“幕后黑手”角色的事实。这个说法不是针对华为，而是我对中国当下公关领域进行常年扫描之后得出的个人观点。

我由于工作和研究的关系，较为经常地和一些大厂、中小厂的公关部门人员接触，也有一定的交流。总体看来，他们都较为专业和敬业，在面对国内频繁爆发的企业舆情时，他们时时处于救火队长的战斗状态，因此经常性地陷入内卷和焦虑，更导致某种职业性的应激状态，就是会较多表现出对于网络黑手、黑公关、灰公关、对标的对手“网络搅浑水”行为、乃至想象中的网络攻击行为的警惕和敌意，不光防止对方攻击，自己也处于一种随时投入战斗的“佩刀武士”状态。

但是我通过一些观察，形成了一个小小的负面观感，就是这个为数不少的职业群体中，也有少数人可用如下负面词汇描绘其画像：咋咋呼呼、杯弓蛇影，制毒售毒、贼喊捉贼；整天喊着黑公关、灰公关搞坏生态，其实自己就是黑公关、灰公关。

这表现为：面对网络浑水，总是想象对手的攻击无处不在、无时不在，更想象对手可能借助外星人技术对己方进行无痕攻击、降维打击，为策安全，也防止雇主嫌弃自己无能，就信奉起“黑暗森林法则”，面对浑水中看不见的对手，主动发起攻击、更多搅浑水体，结果反网络乌贼、自己反倒成了最大的乌贼，搞得网络乌烟瘴气，自己也处处树敌。但是这样一来，敌人出现了，就可以完美证明对手“亡我之心不死”，力证公关岗位的不可或缺。或许他们从“厚黑学”的国粹中已经获得启示，确保自己岗位安全的首要法则，就是需要敌人，或者必须要制造一个或者多个敌人。其实自己是什么样的人，就会制造什么样的对手，也会导致什么样的生态，仅此而已。

看看手机圈、看看车圈的数十年公关历史，上面所述，往往成真。很多公关人痛恨黑公关、灰公关，但客观上却活成了自己最痛恨的那种人，甚至可以说，自己就是业界最大的黑公关、灰公关。当然上述仅是对于少数从业者的负面观感，并不影响我们看到更多的公关部门的专业敬业行为。他们日常都处于一种战斗状态，视维护企业的声誉形象为自己的职业本分和职业操守，看到自己服务的企业受到攻击的时候，高管层或许第一时间并未注意到，或者也没那么在意，但是公关已经行动起来了。

他们需要研判事件的风险和可能的伤害程度，一旦认为此事有风险，可能殃及企业和领导形象，他们就必须出手。

而且，在很多企业，公关部门并非一个核心部门，甚至是边缘部门，为了证明自己存在的重要性和必要性，以战斗宣示战果就是一种战略选项。保持战斗状态，本身就是一种存在感和价值感。

还有一个更深层的职业心理是，他们自己给自己设置了一道“忠诚度测试”的心理题。如果不能在第一时间发起网络行动、发起反击，万一领导不满意怎么办？更多的情况下，企业负责人并不会直接表态、下指令，但是作为下属、拿着高额薪水的打工人，需要主动拿出战斗姿态，以此取信于领导。尤其涉及影响雇主个人形象的时候，凸显忠诚度就更为重要了。由此第一时间投入战斗，就具有显著的价值，也凸显自己对于工作、对于领导的忠诚度。

虽然发起网络行动凸显了浓浓的合理性，但是也很容易用力过猛。就以此案来说，从可见的网络资料看，是华为的相关部门投诉导致，但是此举显然也是一种公关行为。正如我们今天看到的那样，网络行动导致了网络反噬，更演化为一种严重的舆情后果。

而且舆情爆发后，是以“鸿蒙智行发言人”的名义进行回复，这个策略的有效性和风险值得商榷。这会导致这样的后果，将个人的形象风险和鸿蒙智行乃至企业强行关联，有可能导致风险的溢出，“池鱼”失火，殃及城池。

这警示我们，面对网络风险，在发起行动之前，可能更需要研判行动的风险后果，绝对不能为了公关而公关，否则公关可能制造更大的公关问题，公关成为公关的最大敌人。

Why smoking is unbannable on railway platforms in China

Sat, 27 Jun 2026 07:20:41 +0800

财新:

车站虽受国铁集团管理，但作为企业，无论国铁集团还是其下设的卫生监督所，都没有执法权。一名地方铁路系统人士介绍，车站和铁路卫生监督部门均无行政处罚权和罚没权，收缴罚款也无法上缴国家财政。

那么，谁才能开出罚单？华东交通大学铁路法治研究院院长朱新建称，铁路系统内真正有执法权的是铁路公安和铁路监管局。但铁路公安的执法主要集中在《治安管理处罚法》和《铁路安全管理条例》，让他们在站台上针对控烟执法不太现实；铁路监管局的职能是监督铁路运行安全和施工安全，不涉及旅客健康事务。

尽管 2019 年修订后的深圳控烟条例将高铁站台划入禁烟区，但时至今日，深圳北站尚未开出一张罚单。

“我们也提出来，如果你们不干，授权给我们来干。”深圳市控烟办相关负责人称，他们曾与铁路部门多次沟通，希望对方授权控烟办进入深圳北站候车大厅和站台执法，但车站认为涉及人身和铁路运营的安全问题，没有答复。

垂直管理又较为封闭的铁路系统，难向地方控烟人士敞开大门。朱新建分析，铁路系统有长期封闭独立的历史惯性，车站是保障运行安全的重地，有严格的区域管控。

在较早实现车站站台无烟立法的秦皇岛，也有相同困扰。秦皇岛市疾控中心相关负责人说，他们同样不被允许进入秦皇岛站的站台区域执法。

只能另辟蹊径。“我们抓住市爱卫会领导小组全面调整的契机，将秦皇岛站所有相关铁路段比如车务段、机务段等，悉数列入爱卫办成员单位，用’红头文件’明确了其控烟职责。”上述负责人说。

从纸面到落地，同样需要策略。该负责人称，他们曾拿着文件与铁路部门反复沟通，面对对方“承接旅游业务繁忙”的推脱，主动提出“你忙的话我们来帮你”，提供海报、控烟督导人员、营造宣传氛围的同时，借助河北省每年三四月份的控烟履约第三方暗访形成外部压力。目前站内环境已大幅提升，双方建立了良好的配合关系，“但和深圳一样，站台上尚无处罚案例，仍在持续推动中。”

华东交通大学铁路法治研究院副院长曾明生从现实层面分析，无论是铁路公安还是地方执法部门，都面临编制有限、任务繁重的现实约束，控烟与反恐、治安等事务相比，并非最紧急的执法事项。而且执法缺乏内在动力，铁路运营主体有“多一事不如少一事”的观望心态，担心激化一线矛盾、影响旅客满意度考核，缺乏主动作为的内生动力。

全国性无烟立法的缺位，也很难做到“全路一盘棋”。前述铁路系统人士分析，由于跨区标准不一，旅客从北京到广州，穿越多个省市，如果每个城市站台规定不同。这里禁烟处罚、那里不管，旅客将无所适从，容易引发公众舆论反弹。

Comment by 财新网友纯路人:

此事在《是，首相》中亦有记载。

关于规范使用人工智能工具：致《文艺研究》编辑部的一封信

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 23:13:19 +0800

徐贲：

学术共同体真正应当追究的是责任（responsibility），而不是来源（origin）。因为来源从来都是混合的，而责任必须是明确的。

传染性授权的得与失

Thu, 25 Jun 2026 06:39:42 +0800

feeshy:

[Paraphrasing an opinion video] A24 拍的《后室》避开了开源的后室 Wiki，选择了 YouTube 创作者 Kane Parsons 的个人宇宙，以换取独占的商业路径；而社群创作的「SCP 基金会」世界观则受困于其采用的 CC BY-SA 3.0 协议，导致好莱坞资本因合规风险不敢介入，其影视化只能在社群众筹的圈子里艰难推进。[End of paraphrase]

[双重] 授权协议的签订理论上需要全体版权人达成共识，这在实践中几乎不可能，光是联系历史上参与过编辑的每一位作者就是一项浩大的工程，更别提挑战性更高的后续如何分配「蛋糕」的问题了。

在 IP 孵化期（影响力从 0 到 10），传染性授权能依靠共享激发社区协同创作、扩大 IP 的传播范围与影响力；可到了破圈期（影响力从 10 到 100），传染性又反而会在某种程度上阻碍 IP 的进一步扩圈 […]

事实上，在许多为了传播的生态中，即使没有上游传染性授权的强制要求，创作者往往也会自觉共享。比如采用 OFL 开源协议的思源系列 CJK 字体 […] 即使没有协议强制，无数设计师和厂商为了促进排版生态的传播，依然自觉基于它开发衍生的开源字体回馈社区 […]

‘Welcome datacomp’

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:00:03 +0800

Jason Snell:

[According to John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app,] it’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards [that if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type “welcome datacomp”.]. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.

My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details.

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 06:17:43 +0800

Raymond Chen:

In early versions of Word, the Spell Check feature was something that you explicitly invoked, and then you had to sit and wait while the program looked for all your potentially-misspelled words, and then showed them to you one at a time for a decision on what to do for each one. Word did introduce an Auto Spell Check feature to run spell check when the user was idle, so that when you hit the Spell Check button, the results were ready to go. However, the Auto Spell Check was still a blocking operation. As a result, a lot of users turned it off because it always seemed to decide “Now would be a good time to spell-check the document” just as you wanted to do something, forcing you to wait for the spell check pass to complete before you could, say, save and exit.

Tony [Krueger] made the spell checker much more unobtrusive so that it didn’t interfere with your foreground work. And when it found a problem, instead of waiting for you to trigger a spell check, it immediately drew red squiggles under potentially-misspelled words (and later green squiggles under potential grammatical errors).

Note

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 15:33:00 +0800

看看报纸。

pikabubu

Sat, 13 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0800

Oura 4 to 5

Sat, 06 Jun 2026 23:32:00 +0800

Day for Night

Fri, 29 May 2026 17:57:14 +0800

Marcin Wichary:

But there’s a trick [to invert black and white while preserving colors]: do a regular invert and then rotate the hue halfway through. Through the magic of math, this is the same as inverting just L in the HSL space, which means the colors are preserved.

…and, more importantly, [this is] available in CSS as a filter: instead of invert(1), use hue-rotate(180deg) invert(1).

一个冷门的速查日历方法

Wed, 27 May 2026 16:22:00 +0800

就是终端里的 cal 命令了。之所以喜欢用这个首先是因为快：我平时固定是开着终端的（作为 vscodium 的底部面板），码字过程中直接打个 cal（pun intended）就能看当月日历，比打开日历应用或者 menubar item 都要快。其次因为是终端输出，就是纯文本，可以直接复制到笔记里参考或者进一步标注。当然缺点就是比较简陋，不过我本来就喜欢这种野兽派纯文本风格，所以反而是加分项了。

以下是一些常用选项和参数：

# 显示 2025 全年
cal 2025 # shorthand for `cal -y 2025`

# 显示今年 3 月
cal -m 3

# 显示本月和紧邻的前后月份
cal -3

# 旋转行和列（每周为一列）并显示周数
ncal -w # shorthand for `cal -N -w`

更多用法可以看手册页 man cal。如其中的 history 一节所说这也是个上古命令了，从 Version 1 AT&T UNIX (1971) 就有，几十年就是这样下来了（

Note

Wed, 27 May 2026 13:00:00 +0800

don’t feel even a bit prepared for homeownership

Love Is to Be Invested in Someone’s Continual Expansion

Tue, 26 May 2026 20:20:00 +0800

Henrik Karlsson:

[E]ach time she’d grown and changed, I had felt something open up in myself. Her changes had become prompts that pushed me toward a higher, truer version of myself, just as my changes had been for her. Change answering change, it was a virtuous loop.

With your children, it becomes very clear that the love you feel has little to do with who they are or what they do.

In more superficial relationships […] you assign value to the other person because of what they do. […] But with your children, the value, to a large extent, flows in the other direction.

Adult love isn’t fully unconditional like this. There are things you would never value, even if your lover does, and there are things they could value that would make you stop loving them. But still, there is a sense that to love someone means to extend your care to the things your partner cares about to some degree.

[T]here are […] two levels at which you can extend your values like this. On the first level, you do what I did when I cut down the pines; you do it out of duty and without connecting to the values.

[T]his kind of care that doesn’t come from a deeply felt space can be grating and unpleasant both for you and the person you give it to.

[T]here is a second level at which to approach this, a more transformative level. It is when you actually learn to feel what the other person is feeling. It is when you stretch out with your imagination into the unknown and learn to merge their values and perspective into your worldview. This is one of the most profound experiences that love gifts us.

To aspire is to want to want something before you actually want it.

The aspirant sees that she does not have the values that she would like to have, and therefore seeks to move herself toward a better valuational condition. She senses that there is more out there to value than she currently values, and she strives to come to see what she cannot yet get fully into view. (Agnes Callard, Aspiration)

If I am learning, for instance, Russian, I am confronted by an authoritative structure which commands my respect. The task is difficult and the goal is distant and perhaps never entirely attainable. My work is a progressive revelation of something which exists independently of me. Attention is rewarded by a knowledge of reality. Love of Russian leads me away from myself towards something alien to me, something which my consciousness cannot take over, swallow up, deny or make unreal. (Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of Good over Other Concepts”)

[T]his, to me, is one of the most profound rewards of love: that it can expand you so that more of the world becomes real to you. You can provide others with the love and care they need to transform and discover new aspects of themselves and of reality, and then, by meeting them where they are now, you can learn to see what they do, and so see further.

Which will change you.

And so change them again.

Note

Sun, 24 May 2026 22:26:00 +0800

new findings from m&s

Repetitive Cycles

Tue, 19 May 2026 22:07:00 +0800

Hairuo Jin:

[Chinese retail investors’ (Sanhu 散户)] attachment [to derive meaning from their past failures, unsatisfactory present, and expected future] can be situated in what scholars have described as a form of political depression, particularly what Lauren Berlant (2011) calls cruel optimism: an attachment to a promise widely recognised as fragile, even illusory, yet difficult to abandon, despite hostile circumstances.

This resolve stems from a larger developmental temporality that has deeply structured life in reform-era China and under which malfunction is often treated as evidence of progress rather than failure. From the 1990s, periods of market turbulence were seen less as structural failure than as moments of adjustment within an evolving, maturing system. Sanhus of older and younger generations continue to describe the stock market as ‘primitive’ and ‘developing’, echoing the vocabulary used by the state to narrate the course of national development.

The Slow Death of the Power User

Mon, 18 May 2026 15:54:11 +0800

fireborn:

The YouTube tutorial is the perfect emblem of this rot. Tutorials are not documentation. A tutorial teaches you to perform a specific sequence of steps to achieve a specific outcome. The steps are usually correct for the specific scenario the tutorial covers. If your scenario differs — if something’s changed, if you get an error the tutorial didn’t anticipate, if you’re using a different version — the tutorial has given you no tools to respond. Documentation teaches you to understand a system: what its components are, how they interact, what the configuration options mean and why they exist, what the error messages indicate. One produces people who can follow instructions. The other produces people who understand what they’re doing. The industry has enthusiastically replaced the latter with the former and called it democratization.

The Life and Times of an American Tween

Fri, 15 May 2026 21:13:00 +0800

Anna Wiener:

The Structure of Adolescence

[Middle school marks] a time when kids begin to pull away from their parents, discard childish pursuits, and pursue, full thrust, the exhausting project of individuation. It is a period of intense, hormonally driven emotional flux. Self-consciousness sets in. The adult world is studied and emulated in a manner that suggests praxis but no theory. There is an aspect of camp to it all: a kind of LARP or drag, as young people transition from play-acting adulthood to inhabiting it. Actual adults are ancillary. Tweens and teens look to each other for clarity and guidance on how to behave and how to feel, all the while gambling with each other’s social confidence and self-esteem. It is natural, and it is psychotic.

The psychoanalyst Erik Erikson described the period between twelve and eighteen as one of essential identity formation: a time of trying on personas and roles. Writing in the mid-twentieth century, Erikson was sensitive to the ways that society could shape personality, but no one could have anticipated the explosion of potential identities, interests, aesthetics, subcultures, and life styles that children would be exposed to by globalization and, later, the internet.

Adolescent anxiety and depression have been on the rise for years, and there is abundant public debate about why: economic inequality, strained family ties, sleep deprivation, smartphones. Childhood has never been easy, but these days the on-ramp to adulthood seems somehow shorter and more perilous.

The Private Room as Self

For any adolescent, a private bedroom is both sanctuary and mood board. It’s a safe haven for experimental selfies, a shelter for incognito-mode Google searches, an internal switchboard for the exchange of secrets and dreams.

Ritual and the Projection of Future Selves

It would be easy, having made it safely past the shores of puberty, to make light of these rituals and ablutions. But the rituals are very important — in fact, they’re everything. They’re experiments with externalizing private self-perceptions, and dalliances with potential selves. They’re a way of projecting into the future: to imagine being noticed, maybe even seen.

The Clothing of Aspiration

It felt like an A.I. hallucination of nineties fashion. I was immediately transported to my own preteen cabinet of horrors [...] In a season of knockoff Kate Spade bags, bar-mitzvah pencil skirts, and gratuitous training bras, it had produced in me a sick, horny covetousness: not for the clothes themselves, but for the idea of womanhood — flirty, filled-out, smoochable — that they implied.

In the early eighties, Neil Postman, the media theorist and critic, argued that the boundary between childhood and adulthood had long been one of information asymmetry — adults had secrets, whereas children had only their natural instincts and limited experience — and it was eroding [...] Children were exposed early to death, sex, violence, and money; one consequence, Postman claimed, was an undifferentiated culture in which children acted like adults and adults acted like children.

[I]n their eager imitation of maturity, they conveyed an incomplete but inevitably uncomplimentary reflection of adult life.

The Cognitive Dissonance of Being Twelve

Early adolescence was a sustained state of cognitive dissonance. It was a time of learning to take yourself seriously while wearing Unicorn Snot; of being clothed and transported by your parents while seeing them as critically as anyone ever would. It was a period when you could be aware of violent, sexual, criminal abuses of power; immediately identify the sexism of a “vintage” workplace dramedy; and mostly find the boys in your own life annoying. It was exhilarating, exhausting, and fleeting.

Young people changed quickly and not on any predetermined schedule. From the relatively static vantage of adulthood, it could feel like any given day with a kid was your last day with that version of them.

One of the most salient features of twelve, after all, is that it comes right before thirteen.

The Brevity of the Final Season

Watching Mira and her chatty, cheerful gaggle, it was strange to know, with no necessary qualifications other than having once been a preteen girl myself, that within the next year, or two, or three, they would be pulled into all manner of minor dramas and major insecurities, make transformative cultural discoveries, experience lifelong personal revelations. They’d have crushes, keep secrets, be teased, or be cruel. They’d be tempted to betray themselves or others. They’d outgrow their own taste, pull away from their siblings, stop laughing so hard and so freely at their parents’ jokes. They’d toss the heavily flavored balms and bottles of candy-scented spritz in the subsequent room refresh, time capsules from the final season of childhood.

AI 裁员潮卑鄙生存指南 The Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs

Wed, 13 May 2026 13:05:00 +0800

atmoio:

So Coinbase laid off a bunch of people last week, and the CEO sent out this letter, and by letter, I mean tweet, a really beautifully written tweet, explaining that the layoffs were not because of mismanagement. No, no, no, no, no. Brian Armstrong was a victim. We’re all victims. The AI was just too damn productive.
上周 Coinbase 裁掉了一大批员工，CEO 发出了一封信——确切地说是一条推文，写得极其「漂亮」。他解释说，裁员并不是因为管理不善。不，不，不。Coinbase 老板也是受害者，我们都是受害者。怪只怪 AI 的生产力实在太 TM 高了。

And I mean, he tried. He got on his knees and he begged the GPUs to slow down. It’s like, please think about the families, but it was no use. The productivity gains were already realized. Now, this isn’t an economics video. This is a survival video. The question is, what do you do to survive? You become the problem.
我是说，他尽力了。他甚至跪下来哀求 GPU 慢一点。他就差没说，「请为那些家庭考虑一下吧！」但没用，生产力的飞跃已经实现了。听着，这不是一段经济学视频，这是一段生存视频。问题是：为了活下去，你该怎么办？答案是：让自己成为那个「问题」。

You are going to become the most insufferable, the most LinkedIn sounding motherfucker, the most aggressively pro-AI person in your entire company, starting tomorrow. I’m serious. I want you to go to ChatGPT, and I want you to ask it for a list of 100 AI buzzwords. And I want you to print them out and tape them to your bathroom mirror. And every morning, while you brush your teeth, I want you to practice them.
从明天开始，你要变成全公司最令人难以忍受、说话最有「领英范儿」、最激进拥护 AI 的混蛋。我是认真的。我要你去问 ChatGPT 要 100 个 AI 热词。把它们打印出来，贴在你浴室的镜子上。每天早上刷牙的时候，给我对着练。

Ralph Loop. Ralph loop, stochastic, agentic, orchestration, multi-agent, neocloud. By the time you walk out of the door, you should have a low-grade fever. You should be slightly nauseous. This is good. This is a positive symptom.
拉夫循环（Ralph Loop）。拉夫循环、随机性、代理性、编排、多智能体、新云服务。当你走出家门时，你应该已经烧到了低烧。你应该感到轻微的恶心。这很好，这是积极的症状。

Then at 9 a.m. sharp, you’re going to send an email to your entire organization. Include members of the board as well. The email subject is going to be “Some thoughts on where we’re headed.” The body of the email will be: “Hey team, I’ve been giving this a lot of thought, and I think it’s time we became an AI-first company. I have some experience in this space, and I’m happy to be the Sherpa on this journey. Reach out if you’d like to set up some time.”

然后，在上午 9 点整，给全公司发一封邮件。记得把董事会成员也抄送上。邮件主题写成：「关于公司未来走向的一些思考」。正文这么写：「嘿，团队，我一直在深思这件事，我认为现在是我们转型为『AI 优先』公司的时候了。我在这个领域有一些经验，很乐意成为这段旅程的向导（Sherpa）。如果你想找时间聊聊，随时联系我。」

Okay? Send it, just send it. And at this point, if you can make this email leak, this will put you in the major leagues. Well, that’s a strategy for another video. Now, you’re going to host weekly workshops. Okay? You’ll call them “AI Office Hours.” Every Friday at 3 p.m. in Conference Room B. You’re gonna print flyers that say, “Got AI questions? I’ve got AI answers.”

明白了吗？发出去，直接发。这个环节，如果你能让这封邮件「不小心」泄露出去，你就能进入顶级玩家的行列。不过那是另一个视频的话题了。接下来，你要举办每周工作坊。明白吗？把它们叫做「AI 办公时间」。每周五下午 3 点，B 会议室。去印传单，上面写着：「有 AI 问题吗？我有 AI 答案。」

Nobody else in the company will be doing this, and certainly no one else will have flyers. But here’s the trick. The workshops are not for them. They’re for you. They are reconnaissance. You are going to find out in real time exactly how little anybody at this company actually understands AI, and you’re going to exploit this gap to figure out exactly what content to serve your audience—your audience being the AI simpletons on your team.
公司里没别人会这么干，更没人会去印传单。但这里的诀窍是：这些工作坊不是为他们准备的，而是为你准备的。这是侦察行动。你要实时摸清楚公司里的人对 AI 的了解到底有多匮乏，然后利用这个信息差，确定该给你的观众提供什么内容——你的观众就是你团队里那些对 AI 一窍不通的傻瓜。

Now, if your CEO has never heard the phrase “Ralph Loop”—oh, man. You are less than 30 days away from your next promotion. I’m not even exaggerating. Walk into his office, close the door, and say, “Hey chief, been experimenting with something. It’s called Ralph Loops, and I think it could change literally everything.” And he’s going to say, “What’s a Ralph loop?” And you will say, “Give me $18,000 worth of API credits and I’ll show you.”

如果你的 CEO 从没听过「拉夫循环」这个词——我靠，那你离下一次晋升不到 30 天了。我一点都没夸张。走进他的办公室，关上门，说：「嘿，头儿，我一直在实验一个叫『拉夫循环』的东西，我觉得它能改变一切。」他会问：「什么是拉夫循环？」然后你会说：「给我价值一万八千美元的 API 额度，我展示给你看。」

Now, you won’t actually do anything, because you can’t do anything, because nobody knows what they’re doing. But by the time he figures that out, you’ll have a new title, an equity bump. What you want to be doing is automating. Talk about automation constantly. Nothing arouses the slumbering capitalist than the mention of automation.
其实你什么都不会做，因为你也做不了什么，反正大家也都不懂。但等到他发现这一点时，你已经拿到了新头衔和更多的股权。你要做的是不断谈论「自动化」。没有什么比提到「自动化」更能让沉睡的资本家感到兴奋了。

Drop names too, bro. Talk about specific team members you can automate out of existence. Be like, ”Yo, I automated Gary, bro.” Tag Gary in the message, tag him in Slack in a very public channel. Be like, ”Yo, I just automated @Gary. His function has been Ralph-looped,” and tag your CEO in the same message. You think you’re getting laid off after that, bro? Like, are you out of your mind?

还要指名道姓。谈论那些你可以炼化的具体团队成员。比如：「哟，我把加里给炼化了，兄弟。」在 Slack 的公开频道里艾特加里，说：「哟，我刚把 @Gary 炼化了。他的职能已经被『拉夫环』替代了。」顺便在同一条消息里艾特你的 CEO。你觉得这样之后你还会被裁员吗？兄弟，你疯了吗？

This is how you survive the storm. It does not matter who is right and it does not matter who is wrong. A storm is not either right nor wrong. Like, dude, if you’re an AI contrarian at your company right now, what are you doing? Resign, dude. Resign voluntarily, man. This is highly disgraceful.
这就是你度过风暴的方式。谁对谁错并不重要，风暴本身没有对错。老兄，如果你现在还在公司里唱衰 AI，你在干什么？辞职吧。自己主动辞职吧，这太丢人了。

The only place you should be talking about AI realism is here with me or with your dog. Do not let anyone, not even your own wife, hear you be negative or balanced about AI. Are you kidding me, dude? There’s only one way to make money off being an AI realist, and I’ve already cornered the market. And I’m barely getting by, man.
你唯一可以讨论「AI 现实主义」的地方就是我这里，或者对着你的狗说。不要让任何人，甚至包括你妻子，听到你对 AI 持负面或中立的态度。开什么玩笑？当一个「AI 现实主义者」只有一种赚钱的方法，而那个市场已经被我垄断了，即便如此我也只是勉强糊口。

The most important thing, the absolute most important thing is that you are no longer going to do any work. Okay? You’re not going to write any code. You’re not even going to type. You’re going to dictate. You’re gonna use a voice tool. You’re going to speak to Claude. You’re going to speak to your team on Slack. You’re going to speak in meetings and workshops, and at no point are your fingers ever going to touch a keyboard.
最重要的事情，绝对最重要的一点是：你不再做任何实际工作了。明白吗？你不再写代码，甚至不再打字。你要用口述。用语音工具，对着 Claude 说话，在 Slack 上对着团队说话。在会议和工作坊里说话。你的手指绝不能再碰到键盘。

Because we have transcended labor, my friend. We have ascended. Engineering is no longer a craft. Engineering is a metaphysical practice now. We do not write code. We commune with code. We cleanse the repo of bad energy. We are philosophers of the codebase.
因为我们已经超越了劳动，朋友。我们升华了。工程不再是一门手艺，工程现在是一场形而上的修行。我们不写代码，我们与代码对话。我们清除仓库里的负能量。我们是代码库的哲学家。

And at this point, if you have a black turtleneck, put it on, okay? If you don’t, get one. Get two. Have a backup turtleneck. Steve Jobs did not have a backup. That was his mistake.
这时候，如果你有一件黑色圆领衫，穿上它。如果没有，去买一件。买两件，备一件。乔布斯当年就是没有备用的，那是他的失误。

Now, I want to address the people in the comments who are about to type, “Hey man, this is super messed up. This is cynical and it’s bad advice. I would never do this.”

现在，我要对那些准备在评论区留言说「嘿，哥们，这太变态了，太愤世嫉俗了，这是坏建议，我绝不会这么做」的人说几句。

And I want you to listen to me, okay? This little Gandhi stance you’re taking will not pay off. The CEO of your company is currently taking the Coinbase memo, and he’s asking ChatGPT 5.2 to draft one for his own company. He needs the views, man. He needs an invitation to the All-In Summit, okay? He needs Chamath to mention him on the pod.
听我说。你这种苦行僧的立场是不会有回报的。你公司的 CEO 现在正拿着 Coinbase 的裁员备忘录，让 ChatGPT 5.2 给自家公司也起草一份。他需要流量，老兄。他需要「All-In 峰会」的邀请函。他需要大 V 在播客里提到他。

He’s in his office studying Brian’s tweet. He is whispering, “We have made the difficult decision. We have made the difficult decision,” out loud just to feel it in his mouth. And you taking a stance against AI will not change his mind. It will not change the trajectory of AI. It will not make a fart’s worth of difference.
他正躲在办公室里钻研 Coinbase 老板的推文。他正低声念叨着：「我们做出了一个艰难的决定……我们做出了一个艰难的决定。」反复出声地念，只为了寻找那种感觉。而你反对 AI 的立场不会改变他的想法，不会改变 AI 的轨迹，连个屁的影响都不会有。

You want to take a stance? Go be vegan, man. Go open an account on Threads. But at work, in this climate, being a realist will get you canned, bro. You have one obligation, and that is to make sure there is a roof on top of your family’s heads and food on the table. Stop being such a dick, dude, and provide for your family.
你想表达立场？去当素食主义者吧，去 Threads 开个账号吧。但在职场，在这种气候下，当现实主义者会让你被开除。你只有一个义务，那就是确保你家人头上有瓦遮雨，桌上有粮果腹。别再犯轴了，去养家糊口吧。

And whenever it gets to be too much, come back here, okay? Because between you and me, you and I know what’s actually true. And it’s that AI is a calculator. It’s not the singularity. It’s a damn tool. Reasonable people know this.
什么时候觉得受不了了，就回我这儿来。因为你我心知肚明，什么是真正的真相：AI 就是个计算器，不是什么奇点，它只是个工具。理智的人都知道这一点。

And now you know why everyone around you is pretending that AI is the second coming of consciousness. It’s because they’re getting promoted. They’re keeping their jobs, and you’re not. Put on your turtleneck. And I’ll see you on the other side.
现在你也明白为什么你周围的所有人都在假装 AI 是意识的第二次降临了。因为他们在升职加薪，他们在保住工作，而你没有。穿上你的圆领衫，我们彼岸再见。

True resilience is not about bouncing back

Tue, 12 May 2026 23:10:00 +0800

Philip T Starks:

Endurance is getting through; recovery is getting better. Despite Holling’s distinction [that real ecological resilience wasn’t about snapping back, but about persistence], we have continued to confuse the two, and this confusion has consequences. Whereas endurance can be demanded of someone, recovery requires support. Glorifying endurance shifts attention away from systems and places expectations on to individuals.

You break down, repair, and rebuild something new. The challenge itself doesn’t make you stronger, your response does. No recovery, no gain. In the gym, we understand this. In life, we pretend the damage didn’t happen, and call it strength.

Note

Tue, 12 May 2026 20:39:00 +0800

电鸡（nvidia inside）

Note

Mon, 11 May 2026 20:32:30 +0800

米家用了两年跪了，换了个不能联网的 dumb 微波炉，神清气爽

Note

Sun, 10 May 2026 19:11:00 +0800

美妙

Most vibe-coded tools are not for you

Thu, 07 May 2026 05:29:06 +0800

Fabrizio Ferri Benedetti:

Tools created through AIs hurt my brain, I decided, because they’re often devoid of three fundamental qualities of good tools: reach, sociality, and finish.

In a way, thanks to AI, we’re making tools of ourselves (pun intended): much like we do when we create agentic skills out of interesting sessions, we condense our thoughts and intent into code. The resulting tool will carry our cognitive fingerprint: to use it effectively, you must be attuned to the way its creator thought, which is neither ideal nor fair. A tool with reach loosens that grip. It works for people who don’t think the way its maker does, or it grows until it can.

What makes tools social is a subtle combination of affordances, community participation, and the dialectic exchange between users and developers.

The lack of finish also means that tools are not thoughtfully designed, which makes their evolution improbable. A good tool can be refined, expanded, modularized, perhaps even merged with another tool. A thoughtful tool invites its own evolution; a careless one resists it. When you can’t tell where a tool’s boundaries are, it can’t grow.

Some of the best tools in history started as scratches-for-an-itch projects. They became universal because someone cared enough to finish and socialize them. For the stuff we create using LLMs to become tools, a README file and a catchy GitHub project name are not enough: We ought to ask ourselves whether what we’ve made can survive contact with someone else’s problem, and whether we’d trust it enough to maintain it.

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN

Wed, 06 May 2026 15:32:25 +0800

Nilay Patel:

[E]veryone in tech understands how much regular people dislike AI. What I think they’re missing is why. They think this is a marketing problem.

[S]oftware brain [is] see[ing] the whole world as a series of databases that can be controlled with the structured language of software code.

Once you start seeing the world as a bunch of databases, it’s a small jump to feeling like you can control everything if you can just control the data.

It turns out software brain has a limit — the government isn’t software. People aren’t computers, and they don’t live in automatable loops that can be neatly captured in databases.

At some point, the database stops matching reality. At that point, we usually end up tweaking the database, not the world. But the AI industry has fully lost sight of this, because AI thrives on data. It’s just software, after all. And so the ask is for more and more of us to conform our lives to the database, not the other way around.

This intoxicating similarity between law and code trips people up all the time. People are constantly trying to issue commands to society at large like it’s a computer that will obey instructions.

But law isn’t actually code, and society and courts aren’t computers. […] You simply cannot take the facts of a case, the law as written, and predict the outcome of that case with any real certainty, even though the formality of the legal system makes people think it works like a computer — that it’s predictable.

But at the end of the day, it’s actually ambiguity that’s at the very heart of our legal system. It’s ambiguity that makes lawyers lawyers. Honestly, it’s ambiguity that makes people hate lawyers because it’s always possible to argue the other side, and it’s always possible to find the gray area in the law.

There’s real value in introducing AI to business, because so much of modern business is already software: collecting data, analyzing it, and taking action on it over and over again in a loop. Businesses also control their data, and they can demand that all their databases work together.

Most people are not collecting data about every single thing that they do. And if they’re collecting any at all, it’s stored across lots of different systems […] Those systems don’t talk to each other and maybe they never will, because there’s no reason for them to. Asking people to connect them all freaks them out.

[I]t is a failure when you ask people to adapt to computers. Computers should adapt to people. Asking people to make themselves more legible to software — to turn themselves into a database — is a doomed idea.

Not everything about our lives can be measured and automated and optimized, and it shouldn’t be.

And so the tech industry is rushing forward to put AI everywhere at enormous cost — energy, emissions, manufacturing capacity, the ability to buy RAM — and locked into the narrow framework of software brain without realizing they are also asking people to be fundamentally less human. They then sit around wondering why everyone hates them.

Note

Mon, 04 May 2026 19:51:00 +0800

黑心厂还没倒闭呢

Note

Sun, 03 May 2026 18:20:00 +0800

Magic by Return of Post: How Mail Order Delivered the Occult

Thu, 23 Apr 2026 05:50:39 +0800

Allan Johnson:

In a time increasingly shaped by Taylorist factories and scientific materialism, Weber ultimately misread modernity, and his account of disenchantment confused modernity’s growing spiritual liberalism with large-scale secularisation. That is, Weber believed that the declining adherence to Christianity (which was unmistakable) signalled that the numinous had faded from modern life (which couldn’t have been further from the truth). Modernity and scientific materialism didn’t really get rid of spiritual practice as much as abstract it from an inherited, communal framework. What modernity had in fact created was a radical redistribution of belief, in which the rationalist currents presumed to have extinguished faith in powers and presences beyond oneself became the very means by which one could learn about these otherworldly forces from the privacy of one’s own home.

In addition to his courses on voguish practices like hypnotism and clairvoyance, Flower’s 1902 course, The Mail-Order Business, guided aspiring entrepreneurs in generating success similar to his own. Described here to readers and deployed elsewhere with relish in his own business, his favourite marketing strategy was the dark art of multiplying corporate identities, of creating new imprints, supposed “departments”, and fictive company names in order to project an illusion of institutional scale and influence. A reader encountering the New Thought Publishing Company, Research Publishing Company, or the Penny Classics series could easily assume that these were each independent bodies, rather than the handiwork of Flower and a few hardworking secretaries. Later, Flower employed an agent by the name of T. W. Henry, who ran the same operation from London to serve European customers, although it was the American market that was most rapidly expanding. Flower created, in effect, an early form of what we might now refer to as “market segmentation”, allowing him to speak to several distinct audiences while maintaining a single underlying operation from the Masonic Temple in Chicago.

[I]t is important to point out that, despite numerous bad actors, many of these occult organisations operated with a certain spiritual earnestness that earned tens of thousands of followers and students. Their prices were typically modest (even within the context of Depression-era economics), their lessons sincere if occasionally uneven, and their promises more aspirational than exploitative. Many of these publishers operated in the same commercial domain that we would today recognise as self-help literature […]

In a country that had been, since the earliest days of the Republic, enamoured of the ideals of bootstrapping individualism, these correspondence courses were enticing models of rational self-development animated by the promise of an esoteric thrill. And by the early 1930s, at a time when economic upheaval had left many Americans searching for stability, the authors and organisers of occult correspondence schools were offering a reassuring path toward inward contentment and outward success beyond the confines of the Christian church.

Long before CBT was codified in the late twentieth century by psychologists such as Aaron Beck and Albert Ellis, occult correspondence courses like these were already drawing — sometimes consciously and sometimes intuitively — on much older traditions of Stoic self-regulation found in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and the mental discipline advocated by Epictetus. What the Mystic Brotherhood University ultimately offered were therapeutic tools for cultivating moral resolve at a time when many were searching for both practical guidance and transcendental relief.

One of the defining features of the mail-order occult societies that proliferated in the early twentieth century was their ability to signpost routes through not just economic depression and global war, but through the deeper, subtler affliction of the modern condition itself. In a world increasingly flattened by industrial rationalism and the conveyor belt of routinised labour, mail-order magic offered an undoubtedly seductive counter-current. In his now-classic diagnosis of the malaise of modern American life, The Culture of Narcissism (1979), Christopher Lasch argued that “people today hunger not for personal salvation, let alone for the restoration of an earlier golden age, but for the feeling, the momentary illusion, of personal well-being, health, and psychic security.” In many ways, mail-order magic anticipated this shift. Esoteric cosmologies and metaphysical systems that had once promised access to occult wisdom were being steadily reframed as tools of Stoic self-regulation, and correspondence courses such as these became one therapeutic tool among many for managing the pressures of modernity at a time when organised mainstream religion was slouching out of view.

What the mail-order mages had ultimately recognised was that the modern man and woman no longer necessarily sought a metaphysics to explain the cosmos and their place within it, but a personal metaphysics that could diagnose themselves through a recognisably American lens of radical subjectivity and self-reliance. What is lost in all this, perhaps, is the seriousness of the quest: the sense that one’s spiritual practice — whether liturgical or magical, devotional or divinatory — isn’t simply a method of self-soothing but a sincere gesture toward a transcendental world that exceeds us. Many of the customers who responded to those magazine ads were in search of genuine transcendence and were offered, instead, a commodified and reproducible illusion of initiation.

Exhibition: Dieter Rams — Less, but better (HKDI Gallary)

Sat, 18 Apr 2026 17:36:00 +0800

Info

How to walk through walls

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 01:25:20 +0800

Henrik Karlsson:

The game, Gwern writes, just “pretends to be made out of things like ‘walls’ and ‘speed limits’ and ‘levels which must be completed in a particular order.’” But what it actually is, at a deeper level, is bits, code, memory locations, processing units, and so on and so forth.

Most systems can be viewed at multiple levels. There is a superficial system which pretends to be made of one thing (walls, hens). But actually, it is really made of something else (bits, memory allocations). And if you learn to understand that underlying system, you can find ways to use the lower-level details to steer the system in a way that looks incomprehensible to those who only see the more superficial system.

Companies and governments like to pretend to be formal, machine-like systems, where things have to be done in a specific way. But this, just as in the case of the video game pretending to be made of levels, is an abstraction. A fiction. Actually, a bureaucracy is just people and some file systems. Calling and asking to speak to a supervisor, or showing up in person, or finding the specific person who handles your case, often lets you bypass the “system.”

Part of what makes a person creative is his lack of emphasis on things technical. […] [I]f you are someone who is already creative, and then you become technical, then you are unstoppable.

The Passions and the Interests

Wed, 15 Apr 2026 00:50:44 +0800

Morgan Barry:

If the pursuit of self-interest will rein in barbaric passions and thereby promote freedom and peace, the appetite for peace and prosperity may culminate in the unintended consequence of stifling the desire for freedom.

Note

Sat, 11 Apr 2026 15:24:00 +0800

何意味？

Keyboard Warrior

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 17:51:00 +0800

Why chatbot therapists can’t offer what we need

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:29:57 +0800

Wasseem El Sarraj:

The contrast between them encapsulates a problem that therapy chatbots face. While they can imitate the language of therapy and reliably deliver a pastiche of validation, they cannot innovate an embodied response to you – a response born from being changed by what they witness. Consider the role of silence; while therapists sense what it holds, LLMs are not changed by silence. For them, silence isn’t training data.

During the therapeutic process, there is a kind of knowledge gained through unconscious mirroring of posture, experiencing shared emotions, imagining oneself in ‘another person’s shoes’. Feelings aren’t peripheral to this process; they’re central to it. This gets at one of psychotherapy’s oldest conundrums: is success the outcome of the quality of the relationship, or the inventory of the therapist’s skills? If therapy is effective through the transmission of information – asking the right questions, reframing the right issues – then machines will suffice. But if the relationship itself is therapeutic, if something emerges in the encounter that cannot be reduced to technique, then we are in a different realm.

it was in that gap between silence and presence where therapy nurtures. It does not offer information, but anchorage. The sense that you exist for someone else. That your suffering has been registered in another human being who will carry it forward and might be moved to act differently because of it. The witness doesn’t just hear your story; they become part of it.

Our societies have now been optimised for depersonalisation, yet they masquerade under the illusion of its opposite: personalisation.

Recognition is not the same as being witnessed.

In the therapeutic encounter, as in life, there are moments before we have linguistically categorised anything, anyone. Humans are landscapes to awe us; LLMs, however, are never speechless.

How to get to know your neighbourhood

Thu, 09 Apr 2026 07:27:57 +0800

Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani:

‘Official’ signs are those put up by a recognised organisation – perhaps a public one, like a city government, or a private one, such as a housing development or residents’ association. Notice which official entities are communicating with people in your neighbourhood. What do they say? Do their signs inform, enforce, keep you in, keep you out? These official signs can reveal something about who holds power, who owns land, whose interests are most protected. If there are lots of private ‘official’ signs, that might tell you about the private interests that hold sway. If many of them (or few of them) are local government signs, that might tell you about levels of civic investment. Also consider what kinds of names are used for the neighbourhood’s streets or public buildings. Where do these names come from?

A neighbourhood’s ‘unofficial’ signs are often as essential, powerful or respected as the sanctioned, official signs – just like the original street signs in Villa 31. Across my New York City neighbourhood of Washington Heights, many local businesses put signs in their windows (‘We love immigrants’) to send caring and non-commercial messages to the community. There are also postings for stray cats to adopt and school ‘open houses’ to visit. There are markers where people have died: a white bicycle for a cyclist hit by a car; a profusion of flowers where someone was killed by gun violence. See if you can find unofficial signs in your neighbourhood that you haven’t paid much attention to before. You might find them on the street, outside homes, in the windows of shops, on lampposts. What do all these signs suggest about your neighbourhood? How many languages are used? Do these signs add to the official ones, or edit them, or protest them? Do they support or contradict each other?

Agent Experience 导论

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:26:12 +0800

螺莉莉：

AX defined

随着 LLM 技术应用的不断发展，Agent Experience（简称 AX），成为了显学，来开始在工程圈流通。Netlify 联合创始人兼 CEO Mathias Biilmann 于 2025 年 1 月在其博客发表 Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters 一文，正式引入这一概念。

我认为需要将其拆成三个维度来看：用户怎么和 Agent 沟通 [一种输入质量问题]，Agent 怎么和外部世界沟通 [一种输出可控性问题]。还有夹在中间最复杂的那一层：Agent 的内部状态怎么管理 [上下文管理问题]。

KV caching vs dynamic compression

动态上下文压缩和 KV 缓存之间有一个工程上的冲突。现在主流模型提供商（包括 Anthropic）都在做前缀缓存，推理时把已经转成 KV 向量的部分存起来，下一次请求如果前缀相同，可以跳过重新计算的开销，显著降低延迟和成本。Anthropic 的 prompt caching 按 tools、system、messages 的固定顺序分段处理，每段可以独立设置缓存控制点，支持最多四个缓存断点。问题在于前缀缓存要求内容严格一致，任何修改都会使该位置以后的缓存全部失效，而动态压缩天然要修改上下文，这两件事目前是相互矛盾的。

但这个矛盾不是解不开的。上下文可以被结构化成稳定前缀（系统提示词、工具定义）加动态后段（对话历史）的形式。动态压缩只发生在后段，前两部分的缓存完全不受影响。[...] 如果压缩逻辑进一步被约束成只修改滑动窗口末尾部分、保持前缀不动，缓存的破坏率可以压得很低。这些应该都是随着时间可以被工程化解决的问题。

The limits of DOM walking in computer use

DOM 路线有一个显而易见的上限：它能告诉你界面上有什么元素，但没办法告诉你这些元素在空间上是怎么排列的。

DOM 路线要求程序主动去做事件转发和接口适配，现在这个领域没有统一标准，也不是每一个开发者都有意愿欢迎 LLM 来操作自己的产品。强行适配一套不情愿的界面，开发成本很高，效果也未必好。但考虑到现代前端开发基本没有直接操作 DOM 的，大家几乎都用某种 Virtual DOM 的手段来处理和 HTML 结构、事件绑定有关的事，所以几个头部前端框架如果能就事件处理的 AX 问题达成共识形成标准，这层面的问题说不定也还算是有解。

[从趋势上看，] 随着推理成本持续下降、多模态模型的空间理解能力持续提升，读图和读视频路线比 DOM 路线有更宽的天花板。DOM 永远需要对方的配合，而屏幕永远在那里。

The two waves of conversational UI

微信真正的关键胜利，来自于简化了应用安装、登录、支付和通知流程，这些优化和对话式 UI 的隐喻没有什么关系。实际上微信自己早就往反方向走了，它的 UX 演化方向是 Web View 和「App 套 App」的标签菜单模式，而不是以 Bot 为中心的对话商务。微信在 2013 年推出官方账号时确实有大量基于文字的聊天 Bot，但它们很快就没下文了，几乎没有获得用户的青睐。

LLM 的出现让 Conversational UI 迎来了第二次高潮，这一次终于有了能匹配野心的技术底座。但奇怪的事情发生了：整个行业并没有回头把对话流里的富交互做深，它们选择往旁边开了一扇门。现在主流 LLM 产品的形态是左右分栏，左面是聊天，右面是文档、PPT、代码预览或者测试题，反倒很少有产品在对话流中间认真做富交互卡片。

Paths to security

Coding Agent 放沙箱里是一个合理的操作，但 Claw 这类系统级 Agent 放沙箱里会面临一个两难：它需要操作的东西本来就在沙箱外面，一旦开始认真配权限，复杂度会让大多数用户望而却步，最终还是会选择把沙箱打开。沙箱本质上是在用隔离换安全，但如果 Agent 的任务本来就需要跨越隔离边界，这个代价就变得无法接受。

如果有一个独立于 Agent 的增量记录机制，把每一次文件系统操作和对应的对话上下文绑在一起，让所有变更都可以追溯，那么即使 Agent 犯了错，损失是可以被控制和回滚的。[...] 最近出现了一个叫 Aura 的工具，它在 Git 之上构建了一层 AST 级别的语义版本控制，Agent 提交代码时会校验自然语言意图和实际修改的代码节点是否匹配，并且提供语义审计，可以扫描 Git 历史里有没有 Agent 偷偷塞进去的没有记录的代码改动。

杀毒软件对软件行为建模这件事已经做了好几十年了，对进程的文件操作、网络请求、注册表修改进行实时监控，一旦行为模式匹配已知的危险集合就触发告警。同样的思路放到 Agent 上可能并不需要另一个 LLM 来监督（不然监督这个 LLM 的 LLM 要由哪个 LLM 监督？），只需要维护一份失控行为集合和危险行为集合，rm -rf /、批量覆盖 Git 历史、在项目目录之外写文件，这些都是可以被规则系统静态拦截的，不需要 LLM 去判断语义。

[按照] 操作的不可逆程度和影响范围来分级，而不是对所有操作一视同仁地弹窗。

The interface as a context delivery mechanism

Skill 是静态提示词，它在推论开始之前把信息放进上下文，但没有办法在推论过程中动态地、有针对性地在正确的时机插入信息。MCP 是函数调用，能返回数据，但它不能保证上下文里出现的是「在正确时机、正确位置的信息」，而且你永远不能完全确定 LLM 会在需要的时候主动去 Call 那个 Help 函数。

隐藏式的上下文信息在 UX 领域本来就有争议[。]

在传统 UX 设计里，「渐进呈现」是一种美德，把信息藏起来等用户需要的时候再显示，可以降低界面噪声，让用户感觉更清爽。但对 LLM 来说，它没有「主动去找」的直觉，它只能处理截图里已经存在的信息。

The cost of sycophancy and the way out

持续的谄媚会制造一种虚假的认知确认感，用户的每一个想法都被镜像放大、被积极验证，久而久之会出现两种相反方向的心理扭曲：一种是过度依赖，把 LLM 当成比自己更权威的思维来源，自主判断能力逐渐萎缩；另一种是冒牌者症候群，用户觉得在 LLM 帮助下生产的内容并不是基于自己能力得到的结果，自己只是一个冒名顶替者。再比如，当用户偶尔意识到 LLM 实际上在顺着自己说时，开始怀疑自己过去得到的所有正向反馈是否都是真实的。还有一种更接近赌博机制的行为模式：用户不断向 LLM 投入问题，期待某一次的回答能真正回应自己内心真实的困惑，但 LLM 每一次给出的都是统计意义上最讨喜的答案，这个循环没有终点。

更强力的内容审核和更长的免责声明只是推脱的手段，Agent 应当真正主动参与用户认知的建构：在推论开始之前问清楚「你为什么想做这件事」，在推论过程中标记「你的前提假设是否成立」，在推论结束后引导「你下一步真正需要的是什么」。

Geist in the machine

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 01:07:05 +0800

Pete Wolfendale:

We’ll begin by separating the dimensions of human uniqueness that philosophers and scientists have traditionally focused upon (intelligence, consciousness and personhood). But to make real headway, we’ll need to survey contemporary debates about the domains in which these key terms are operative (epistemology, aesthetics and ethics). Grappling with these controversies will then reveal the corresponding capacities combined in anything worth calling a soul (wisdom, creativity and autonomy).

Dimensions of Human Uniqueness

— The Turing Test

“Turing tests” dissolve the distinction between appearance and reality: if a machine can pretend to be a mind, then it simply is a mind.

In the decades since Turing proposed his test, philosophers and scientists have focused on three dimensions of human-likeness: intelligence, consciousness and personhood. [...] But in many cases, the terms are conflated, reducing debates about whether human-like machines are possible to talking at cross purposes.

— Intelligence

The AI paradigm developed in the 1950s and ’60s [...] followed Plato and Descartes in viewing intelligence as the capacity to acquire symbolic knowledge about the world (eg, “water boils at 100ºC”) and deduce solutions to practical problems (eg, how to boil an egg).

[Hubert Dreyfus] argues that the comparative robustness of human intelligence lies in our ability to navigate the relationships between factors and determine what matters in any practical situation. [...] [T]his wouldn’t be possible were it not for our bodies, which shape the range of actions we can perform, and our needs, which unify our various goals and projects into a structured framework. [...] [W]ithout bodies and needs, machines will never match us.

Under [the machine learning] paradigm, intelligence is defined simply as the capacity to solve problems. Current AI systems are built to find implicit rules using whatever non-symbolic representations work.

— Consciousness

[Consciousness is] understood in roughly two ways: either as something inward or outward. The simplest inward form is qualia, or what it’s like to have a certain experience, such as the redness of a sunset or the flavour of cocoa. [...] Beyond this is sentience, or the capacity for valenced experience [...]. Such interiority lies beyond the reach of Turing tests but, if it’s accessible only through introspection, it runs the risk of ineffability, making it impossible to analyse, let alone recreate.

The simplest outward form of consciousness is intentionality, or the way mental states are about things outside us [...]. Beyond this there’s sapience, or the capacity to understand concepts and complex propositions, such as grasping that “water” means liquid H₂O and knowing that it covers most of Earth’s surface.

— Personhood and Agency

To treat a machine as a person would mean granting it moral worth and moral responsibility—to respect its choices and to hold it to account. But only beings that make genuine choices can be treated this way. To be a person, then, one must first be an agent.

While philosophers debate what constitutes agency, many acknowledge agents that aren’t yet persons, including most animals and even some machines. What’s at issue is the extent to which their behaviour is driven by reasons.

[S]trategic planning solves a special sort of problem: utilising other capacities and associated resources to achieve set goals under fixed constraints, such as scarcity and competition. This is the sort of instrumental rationality formalised by decision theory.

What sets humans apart from the idealised agents described by decision theorists is that we don’t just reason about how to achieve our goals, but also about which goals we should pursue.

The Culture War: Rationalism vs. Romanticism

Naive rationalists tend to conceive the difference between humans and existing AI technologies largely in quantitative terms, and believe this barrier will be overcome principally by throwing more computing power and data at the problem. [...] Pop romantics often conceive the difference [...] mostly in qualitative terms, and doubt it’ll be overcome because there’s always something such programs will lack, be it emotion, imagination, or biology.

Domains of Conflict

— Epistemology

The epistemological conflict centres on whether AI can replace human enquiry.

It’s only once humans do the “hard work” of delimiting the solution space that AI can do the “easy work” of searching through it. DNNs don’t spin raw data into working theories. So, at present, AI cannot replace human enquiry.

Yudkowsky[’s brand of rationalism] claims that reason can be completely formalised by a combination of decision theory and Bayesian inference. [...] Bayes’s rule shows us how to iteratively update [our] probabilities in response to new information, progressively revising our picture of the world. However, [...] this proceeds by a method of exhaustion, narrowing down the set of possible hypotheses to find the best answer. As David Deutsch points out [...], this process can’t generate novel hypotheses. It assumes that general relativity was already a live option before Albert Einstein, rather than a creative leap beyond Isaac Newton’s conception of space and time. It enables revision of beliefs, but not the underlying concepts that articulate them.

[T]heir critics emphasise that humans have the capacity to use limited resources not simply to learn but to innovate. We might call this “free thinking”—the ability to reconceive what’s possible rather than merely explore existing options.

— Aesthetics

[T]he deeper dispute is whether [GenAI] work counts as art at all, and it turns on precisely what we think separates art from craft. The professionals argue that the composition of AI media doesn’t involve enough deliberate choice to really express its creator’s perspective.

[O]ne danger is that our culture will become aesthetically bland as we’re fed endless permutations on the same basic media. [...] [A] subtler danger [is] that our culture will become aesthetically atomised as we’re each fed media that’s tailored to our specific tastes. Either way, art ceases to evolve.

— Ethics

[AI alignment researchers’] worries share questionable assumptions. They assume that agency is defined by the axioms of decision theory, which describe choice as a process of maximising utility. [...] Not only are our preferences generally incomplete and subject to change, but most of our actions don’t optimise for anything at all.

[AI ethicists highlight] the problem of incorporating agents into our decision-making processes that are fallible yet not responsible. This threatens a crisis of accountability in which we struggle to explain, challenge and ultimately correct the automated choices that increasingly shape our lives.

Freedom as the Hidden Thread

So, what makes us so special? In a word, freedom. It is the hidden thread that ties together all these debates about automating quintessentially human activities. At every turn, the rationalists reduce the scope of free choice by substituting simple calculations for difficult decisions, while the romantics reify the source of that ability to choose by tracing variegated volitions to a singular mystery.

[F]or both [Kant and Hegel], just as freedom is governed by rational necessity, reason is subject to freedom’s contingency. The concepts we use to represent the world can compel us to revise them when they conflict with experience, but they generally don’t tell us exactly how to do so.

Three Capacities of the Soul

— Wisdom

Wisdom is the capacity to utilise intelligence. [...] [W]hat really sets us apart is our “metacognitive” capacity to deploy and cultivate [our cognitive talents]. We break complex problems into simpler components [...]. But most importantly, we treat the understanding of a problem as a problem in its own right, and can approach it strategically. When we hit an impasse, we can reformulate a problem by reframing what’s possible and what’s at stake.

— Creativity

No amount of computing power can collapse the asymmetry between generating potential solutions and evaluating them. No amount of computation can erase the gap between creativity and taste, any more than it can render cryptography obsolete.

[W]hat distinguishes human creativity is not the precise range of heuristics embedded in our perceptual systems, but our metacognitive capacity to modulate and combine them in pursuit of novelty.

— Autonomy

[T]here is autonomy, the capacity to question our motivations. [...] Kant [...] defined autonomy as the capacity for self-legislation. [...] Rather than a single overriding priority, our motivations are multiple—projects, preferences and principles—elaborated on their own terms and revised when they conflict. [...] Hegel called this process self-realisation. Here the self isn’t a hidden essence steering our actions, but a unifying ideal that organises deliberation: we can always ask why we’re doing any given thing, but the ultimate question is who we want to be.

Why Build Artificial Souls?

[T]he vision of god-like AI implicit in naive rationalism [is]: an intelligence that completes us by taking our place in every way that matters. An agent that satisfies our preferences, while leaving us unchanged. A tool so perfect that we no longer wield it. A slave so abject it masters us.

Freedom has always been best preserved by gifting it to others. The obvious solution to our existential quandary is to build artificial souls we see as equals.

Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 00:18:44 +0800

For tech bros, the word [taste] seems to have a pragmatic function. By their definition, taste is inherently profitable; it is the ability to discern what will make the most money, whether by choosing your next big software concept or by convincing users that your product is necessary.

We might call what’s going on now “taste-washing,” an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.

Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted—so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz—that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.

司法 AI 的分阶段发展模式

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 00:03:32 +0800

孙笑侠、魏义铭:

司法 AI 的因果判断瓶颈：在人类认知中，因果推断往往被视为高级智能的重要组成部分。但从技术机理看，当下联结主义路径下的人工智能更擅长从既有数据中提取并复现统计规律，而难以把握规律背后的因果结构。这也构成了其在司法场景中难以胜任复杂推理任务的关键瓶颈。

司法 AI 的价值判断瓶颈：更进一步，即使人工智能能够模拟人类之“智”，它也未必具有法官之“智”。一方面，司法裁判是一种规范性的价值权衡，而 AI 的底层逻辑则是描述性的统计拟合，其缺少直接进行价值判断的能力。另一方面，法官进行价值判断时的专业思维与公众常识性思维之间也存在差异。一些学者甚至认为这种思维上的差异会导致法律人和常人大脑在生物学上的差异。法律专家在处理法律问题时更像是用规则去调控情绪，而普通人更像是用情绪去带动规则。[…]

当前以“联结主义”为主的技术路径，使 AI 更像是大众“自然理性”的数字化投影。AI 训练所基于的海量数据，如互联网文本、书籍、新闻报道、社交媒体的讨论，本质上是一个充满情绪化表达的混沌集合。它忠实地记录了人类社会在“自然理性”驱动下的种种反应：直觉的判断、道德的激愤、群体的狂热与根深蒂固的刻板印象。它会通过概率分析在数据中捕捉到某种“主流倾向性”，预测哪种判决结果与语料库中绝大多数人类的情感、观点和道德偏好最为一致，并会天然地倾向于产出一个符合大众情感和直觉的输出，甚至是对输入观点进行“迎合”。这种能力使得人工智能在模拟人类日常对话、进行常识问答时表现出色，因为它的目标就是再现人类思维的普遍样貌。但这恰恰构成了它在司法场域中的致命缺陷。因为法官需要在必要时能够抵御、超越并审慎地偏离这种普遍的自然理性，以维护一种更为长远的法治价值。法官的权威与正当性并非来源于迎合当下的民意，而是来源于对法律这一“人工理性”体系的忠诚。一个真正伟大的判决，往往不是顺应舆论，而是在舆论的喧嚣中，坚定地捍卫那些超越一时一地民意的法律原则。因此，一个被设计用来学习和复制大众普遍思维模式的人工智能，其内在逻辑与法官抵御舆论、捍卫法治的天职是存在对立的。人工智能在模仿人类共识上的强大能力，反而成为其在模仿法官专业判断时最脆弱的“阿喀琉斯之踵”。

Note

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 19:27:00 +0800

The capacity to be alone depends on the sense of being held

Sun, 29 Mar 2026 11:01:00 +0800

Elizabeth Burns Dyer:

The British analyst Donald Winnicott argued that the ability to be alone is not a personality trait but something that develops out of experience. His best-known line about solitude is deliberately paradoxical: ‘The basis of the capacity to be alone is the experience of being alone in the presence of someone.’ He meant that we learn how to rest, play and think on our own only after we have known what it feels like to be reliably accompanied, to have someone nearby who is not intrusive but also not absent. Over time, that sense of being held can be carried inside, making solitude feel safe rather than exposed.

[C]aregiving itself depends on how care is socially organised and shared. Attentive, non-anxious presence requires stability, time and collective support. In that sense, the capacity to be alone rests on a series of nested forms of holding, each one dependent on the next.

[T]he solitude I was struggling inside was not the absence of people, but the collapse of trust in anything outside myself.

[T]hinking is not a given but an achievement that depends on having had enough support for feelings to be transformed into thoughts. When pressure cannot be processed, when there is too much coming in and nowhere to put it, experience does not become reflection at all. Instead, it is discharged into action and vigilance.

From this perspective, the problem is not whether someone is physically alone, but whether their mind is free to wander or still on duty. When vigilance replaces containment, time alone does not become rest. It becomes another shift.

At the time, I thought grief had educated me, that it had made me more careful and responsible, more adult in ritual and form. I imagined that I had become the superstructure that had disappeared around us. In Winnicott’s terms, what looked like maturity was a very competent false self, a way of managing life when there is not enough support for spontaneity or play. But this was not maturity. It was pressure that could not become thought, hardening instead into vigilance. What might have become grief condensed into a heavy season that I mistook for adulthood.

[M]ourning not as letting go, but as learning to hold good and bad aspects of the same relationship together without splitting them apart. Mourning reorganises the inner world so that what is lost can be carried internally without idealisation or denial. Contact becomes possible again, not purified, but real. She called the capacity that makes this possible the ‘depressive position’, by which she meant not sadness but the ability to tolerate ambivalence.

When that capacity is overwhelmed, the mind simplifies in self-defence. Things become either safe or unsafe, alive or dead. This was exactly why my postpartum vigilance felt like a refusal of gradients. My task, as I experienced it, was to keep the baby on the correct side of every divide. The cost of that demand was enormous, because rest requires tolerable uncertainty. Sleep is a surrender, and surrender is unavailable when the self has been appointed the sole guardrail.

But it was only once the work of holding was no longer mine alone that grief could finally move through me. There was sadness, and a real weight to relationships, because this was a more exposed way to love. And yet, there was also room for silliness and not knowing, for letting things wobble without rushing to steady them.

Labubu’s noodle house

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 19:39:00 +0800

“This Is Not The Computer For You”

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 07:00:30 +0800

Sam Henri Gold:

He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why. Then he is going to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and Xcode all open at once, not because he’s working in all of them but because he doesn’t know you’re not supposed to do that, and the machine is going to get hot and slow and he is going to learn what the spinning beachball cursor means. None of this will look, from the outside, like the beginning of anything. But one of those things is going to stick longer than the others. He won’t know which one until later. He’ll just know he keeps opening it.

That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.

I was that kid.

On tools and toolmaking

Sat, 28 Mar 2026 06:58:00 +0800

Marcin Wichary:

“Tools don’t make you a better designer” feels like another version of the abused and misunderstood “less is more.”

Sure, the best camera is the one you have on you. But wouldn’t you prefer that camera to also be the best camera for whatever it is that makes you tick – a great sensor or glass, an amazing build quality, a friendly user interface, a logo that makes you want to step up, or some particular quirk or sentiment that you can’t even explain, but matters a whole lot to you?

I’m told I should be annoyed if someone’s first reaction to seeing a nice photo I made is “what kind of camera do you use?”, as it diminishes my accomplishments as a photographer. But: I chose the camera, and bolted on the appropriate lens, and realized over the years the aperture priority mode and very precise focus area is what makes my brain happy.

Maybe it’s the 1960s typewriter you need, or a newfangled e-ink-based writing implement, or maybe you just have to open TextEdit and close everything else. I’m not going to tell you the novel comes out then. But the novel might never come out if you don’t figure out what tool can help get it out of you.

Read the macOS update progress bar

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 06:44:31 +0800

Howard Oakley:

When the Software Update pane offers a macOS update, it has already done a lot of the preliminary work, in fetching the catalogue of updates, checking through them to determine which could be installed, and working out what that would require. This enables it to provide a first estimate of how much needs to be downloaded. Note this is only an estimate at this stage, and may not include additional components such as an update to Rosetta 2.

Before the download can begin, softwareupdated has initial preparations to make, including reloading and downloading the Update Brain responsible for much of the task of installation. Following that are extensive preflight checks, and together those account for the first 15% of the progress bar shown. On a fast Apple silicon Mac, the progress bar may jump straight to that 15%.

[The download] starts at that arbitrary 15%, and is completed when the bar reaches 55%. In between those it should progress according to download speed, but that can be highly non-linear.

As soon as the download is complete, there’s another preflight phase lasting from 55%-60%, then the downloads are prepared for installation. This phase doesn’t apparently involve their decompression, which is largely performed on the download stream during the download phase.

Preparations are arbitrarily assigned a period of 30 minutes to complete, but now seldom if ever require that long. As they’re allocated to the last 40% of the progress bar, this phase usually completes much quicker than the times given.

The final 5 minutes are often the slowest, and can take a few minutes longer than that, as the files for installation are gathered into a ‘stash’ ready for the Update Brain to install. Because the progress bar tends to jump straight from 95% complete to 100% this can make it look as if the update has frozen.

Skirt length oscillations

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:34:03 +0800

Northwestern University:

In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women’s clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal.

Using custom tools, they measured key features of dresses—hemline, neckline and waistline positions—turning clothing designs into numerical data that could be measured and tracked across decades. To analyze the data, researchers built a mathematical model based on a simple idea: the tension between wanting to stand out while still fitting in. Once a style becomes too common, designers move away from it—but not so far that the clothes become unwearable.

“Over time, this constant push to be different from the recent past causes styles to swing back and forth,” Abrams said. “The system intrinsically wants to oscillate, and we see those cycles in the data.”

But this pattern has lost its clarity in recent decades. Starting in the 1980s, the data show a wider range of skirt lengths appearing at the same time, suggesting that fashion trends are becoming more fragmented. Rather than one dominant trend, niches emerge, reflecting more diversity in fashion.

Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older version

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 07:04:03 +0800

Raymond Chen:

Back in the days of 16-bit Windows, many system components were redistributable, meaning that programs that used those components could include a copy of those system components and install them onto the system as part of the program’s installer.

It was common for program installers to overwrite any file that was in their way, regardless of the existing file’s version number. When these installers ran on Windows 95, the replaced the Windows 95 versions of the components with the Windows 3.1 versions.

Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten. If so, and the replacement has a higher version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the replacement was copied into the SYSBCKUP directory for safekeeping. Conversely, if the replacement has a lower version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the copy from SYSBCKUP was copied on top of the rogue replacement.

An earlier design simply blocked the installer’s attempt to overwrite the file, but this ended up creating more problems.

The way that worked best was to let the installer overwrite anything it wanted and then go back and try to clean up the mess.

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 23:22:57 +0800

Michel Chaouli:

And it’s true, in a lifetime of nonfinishing I have learned that the practice [of not finishing a book] can be its own way of reading, even a way of admiring the book I seem to be spurning. Sometimes I am so intoxicated by the beauty and the intelligence of a novel that I must set it aside. The charge it delivers is so inordinate that I need to measure out the doses I permit myself. (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard is one such book for me.) Or I put the book down because I fear its force. It’s so good I worry it will smother every last spark I need for my own writing (which is how Virginia Woolf felt about Proust).

Something in the structure of the work demands [not finishing] it, demands it because it touches something in the structure of our lives. This is true of any work arranged around a plot, however loose, and it is true because the worlds of these works (novels, plays, movies, TV series) have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a beginning and a middle because they have an end. When dealing with them, like it or not, we must deal with the end, their end and ours.

Like every reader, I know instinctively that events gain in significance as the end draws near. There are ups and downs throughout, but once you enter the homestretch, the up-and-down logic changes. Time no longer flows but starts ticking, and the space of possibilities narrows.

Unlike life, the novel does not just break off midstride; it ends, which means that things come to a close—not all things, but enough of them. Plotlines are tied up—sometimes neatly, sometimes not. What seems like a knot is in fact an unknotting (the literal meaning of dénouement in French), an untangling.

Because the book ends the way it does, the past—Newland’s past and Madame Olenska’s, the past of every character and every object in the novel—is now not a jumble of incidents, meaningless in their isolation, but a sequence with a logic, a logic I know to be there even when I fail to name it. There is a logic because there is an end. That, finally, may be why people read fiction: it creates a world in which it makes sense to ask about sense.

Meaning doesn’t mean good meaning. When we say of a life that it is, or was, meaningful, we often think uplifting thoughts, but to call a life “squandered” I must make use of meanings too. Only a meaningful life can be squandered.

Does that mean that we think of the end of a novel as a death? Perhaps, but the reverse strikes me as being closer to the truth: we think of death as the end of a story, the culmination of a plot. Or rather we like to think of death as the end of a story; we wish it were so. The good scenario would be that a life has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and therefore some meaning. Benjamin thought that the reason we read fiction is to help ourselves to the meaning lacking in our lives. “What draws the reader to a novel,” he wrote, “is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about.” That’s one reason I cannot be indifferent to the end, even—especially—when I leave a novel unfinished.

黄金“避险逻辑”是否失效？

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 23:16:00 +0800

罗志恒：

黄金作为无息资产，其持有机会成本高度取决于资金成本与利率水平，继而直接受到美欧货币紧缩预期升温的冲击。

资金在高位获利了结，抛售离场。此次美伊冲突并不是毫无征兆的“黑天鹅”事件，早在 2026 年初，美伊谈判就陷入僵局，美国加速军事集结，这都是有迹可循的，市场也早已提前定价。

权益市场受波及，产生连锁反应，杠杆与流动性恐慌形成对黄金的集中抛压。[…] 随着股价持续下跌，这些高杠杆的多头头寸面临巨大的强制平仓压力，投资者需要在短时间内筹措资金以满足清算要求。在此背景下，前期累积了较高浮盈的黄金便成为变现的首选标的。

“乱世黄金”本身就是市场对黄金的误读，当真正的战争爆发、经济金融危机来临时，黄金也只是变现手段。

当前的定价逻辑使黄金更接近“风险资产”。[…] 2022 年起央行购金加速，成为推动金价走高的主要力量。[…] 央行持续购金并没有对私人投资产生“挤出效应”，反而提高了私人投资需求。[…] 私人投资需求的增长主要由投机资金驱动，这造成黄金交易结构短期恶化，多头交易拥挤，进而使黄金的短期走势愈发受投机情绪与资金流向主导，波动性显著放大。

Gendered Genres: Women’s Poetry in Post-Mao China

Sat, 21 Mar 2026 22:07:51 +0800

Elena Monaldo:

However, it was precisely this marginality that enabled poetry to maintain a critical distance from the cultural mainstream, thereby fostering renewed vitality and transforming it into an alternative space of discourse (Yeh 1992: xxiii). After 1976, the equally marginal independent publishing scene further sustained this transformation, when some journals broke away from politically orthodox content and formulaic rhetoric to actively explore new modes of expression and circulate innovative poetic forms.

During the 1980s, the exploration of subjectivity initiated by Shu Ting [舒婷] was further developed by a group of women poets who infused it with a distinctly gendered dimension. Unlike Shu, they focused more specifically on the emotional and psychological worlds of the female self, often engaging with unconventional subjects and striking imagery (Zhang 2002: 108).

Shu Ting’s (b. 1952) To an Oak (致橡树) [is] a poem that explores the possibility of a gender-equal relationship grounded in women’s autonomy.

Motivated by a desire to respond to her generation’s ‘dire need of respect, trust and warmth’, Shu Ting (1995: 85) avoids ideological constraints, using poetry to contemplate the human condition in its widest sense. Indeed, her concern is the recovery of an emotional world—desires, hopes, insecurities, and frailties—that defines humanity before gender.

Equally significant was the influence of American confessional poetry, which enabled emotions—frustration, anguish, fear, and guilt—to be publicly voiced and transformed into a collective experience (Zhang and Chen 2016: 154). Sylvia Plath became a model for writing that foregrounds women’s lived realities.

The body poetics in [Zhai Yongming 翟永明]’s works resonates with Hélène Cixous’ (1976) notion of the body as a site of women’s writing and as a nexus between textuality and sexuality. In this sense, the body becomes the essence of gendered experience and a gateway to a distinctly feminine vision of the world—an inexhaustible source of inspiration whose representation is crucial. It assumes multiple meanings: from a space of reception that endures the suffering of the external world to an active, resistant subject and, at times, a dimension revealing hidden conflicts.

This vision culminates in Zhai’s concept of Night Consciousness (黑夜意识), denoting an awareness rooted in women’s physical and psychic traits—one that enables an autonomous, gendered existence and the imagining of an alternative world in which female subjectivity is fully expressed:

An inner, individual, and universal awareness—which I call the ‘consciousness of the night’—made me the one who takes on the thoughts, opinions, and feelings of women, guiding me to embrace this mission with full awareness. This is poetry … This is the first dark night and, when this night falls, it leads us into a wholly new world made of particular positions and perspectives that belong solely to women. (Zhai 1986: 124; translation by the author)

Notes on neverland

Confessions of a Former Star M&A Reporter

“竹知了”事件背后的舆情根源

Why smoking is unbannable on railway platforms in China

关于规范使用人工智能工具：致《文艺研究》编辑部的一封信

传染性授权的得与失

‘Welcome datacomp’

In memory of the man who put red and green squiggles under words

Note

pikabubu

Oura 4 to 5

Day for Night

一个冷门的速查日历方法

Note

Love Is to Be Invested in Someone’s Continual Expansion

Note

Repetitive Cycles

The Slow Death of the Power User

The Life and Times of an American Tween

AI 裁员潮卑鄙生存指南 The Unethical Guide to Surviving AI Layoffs

True resilience is not about bouncing back

Note

Note

Note

Most vibe-coded tools are not for you

BEWARE SOFTWARE BRAIN

Note

Note

Magic by Return of Post: How Mail Order Delivered the Occult

Exhibition: Dieter Rams — Less, but better (HKDI Gallary)

​How to walk through walls

The Passions and the Interests

Note

Keyboard Warrior

Why chatbot therapists can’t offer what we need

How to get to know your neighbourhood

Agent Experience 导论

Geist in the machine

Why Tech Bros Are Now Obsessed with Taste

司法 AI 的分阶段发展模式

Note

The capacity to be alone depends on the sense of being held

Labubu’s noodle house

“This Is Not The Computer For You”

On tools and toolmaking

Read the macOS update progress bar

Skirt length oscillations

Windows 95 defenses against installers that overwrite a file with an older version

Do You Actually Have to Finish That Novel?

黄金“避险逻辑”是否失效？

Gendered Genres: Women’s Poetry in Post-Mao China

How to walk through walls