Notes

applesque

“Why Does A.I. Write Like … That?”:

Every day, another major corporation or elected official or distant family member is choosing to speak to you in this particular voice. This is just what the world sounds like now. This is how everything has chosen to speak. Mixed metaphors and empty sincerity. Impersonal and overwrought. We are unearthing the echo of loneliness. We are unfolding the brushstrokes of regret. We are saying the words that mean meaning. We are weaving a coffee outlet into our daily rhythm.

《當〈房思琪的初戀樂園〉被稱爲「豔屍文學」》：

「豔屍文學」這個說法本身，我不認爲是一個僞命題。文學與藝術創作史中，大量創作者致力於創造出美麗的女性死亡的畫面。這裏的「美麗」，首先是這個死去的女性外貌必須美麗，她不可能是垂垂老矣，也不可能身材臃腫。在準備死亡的時候，她必定妝容完美，神情優雅；死亡發生的那一刻，這個女性甚至會帶上一絲仙氣。倘若是上吊死的，必定是一滴清淚一抹白綾，吊在繩上容色如初；倘若是高空墜亡，那衣服大概會仙氣飄飄，跌落之後姿勢優美，最好是紅色盛裝躺在雪地裏，映襯出最醒目的亮色。

德國比較文學學者 Elisabeth Bronfen 的 1992 年著作《Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic》，把西方創作中美麗女性的死亡作爲一個母題，分析對象包括維多利亞時代的繪畫、哥特小說、波德萊爾、普魯斯特、荷里活電影等，奧菲莉亞之死便是其中一個引述的重要例子。該作認爲，男性創作者面對死亡焦慮時，通過把死亡投射到女性身上，凝視女性的死亡，達致把死亡變成一種可控、可理解、可凝視的事物；女性死亡不只是死亡，而是被刻意美化的，是美麗、純潔、寧靜、具有象徵性，體現了文化對秩序、美、與控制的渴望。

魯迅在《幫閒法發引》一文中，這樣描述一個幫閒打諢的人如何描寫女性之死：「死的是女人呢，那就更好了，名之曰『豔屍』，或介紹她的日記。如果是暗殺，他就來講死者的生前的故事，戀愛呀，遺聞呀……而這位打諢的腳色，卻變成了文學者。」

若要下一個定義，我認為「豔屍文學」是指文藝創作中，作者對美麗女性死亡的奇觀式想像。它和東亞十分瞭解的死亡美學有一定共通之處，但又不完全一樣。這個年輕美麗的女性死亡場面，是對浪漫、青春乃至情色的寄情，甚至是在死亡那一刻賦予的某種神性；但唯獨不是死亡本身。唯獨不是面臨死亡時的痛苦、靈魂的熄滅和肉體的衰敗，唯獨不是一個鮮活人生本該發生的無限可能未來被攔腰斬斷，唯獨不是當威脅降臨時，一個人類本着求生欲和死神堂堂正正地搏鬥，最後遺憾但有尊嚴地輸掉這場比賽。

然而，當下網絡討論中用「弱女敘事」乃至「豔屍文學」批評《房思琪的初戀樂園》（以下簡稱《房》）一書，我認爲是不成立的。[…]《房》一書的刻劃，基本與豔屍圖景期望的目的背道而馳：整個故事慘烈邪惡，施暴者的畫面醜陋，當事人的痛苦真實，沒有人會讚美這樣的圖景，沒有人會嚮往這樣的死亡。

倘若「豔屍文學」概念本身還能溯源一二，所謂「弱女文學/敘事」我認爲幾乎是個僞概念。[…] 文學應當是平等的，或者說，虛構作品刻劃不同人的精神世界這件事，應當是平等的。沒有哪一種人是不值得被文學書寫的。文學的作用也不是「振奮人心」，如果是的話，我們只需要不停重寫各個版本的《基督山伯爵》就好了。

《房》一作以及其後世影響，最大的功績之一，就是使得一個犯罪現象被命名和看見。[…] 當有人可能不幸面臨類似處境，卻又無法釐清自己的困惑時；當有人想要控訴，卻很難說清自己的遭遇時——如今只要簡單地說出這個名字，我們就明白了。

“The Word ‘Religion’ Resists Definition but Remains Necessary”:

[The Romans’] notion of religio once meant something like scruples or exactingness, and then came to refer, among other things, to a scrupulous observance of rules or prohibitions, extending to worship practices. It was about doing the right thing in the right way.

To arrive at the modern category of religion, scholars now tend to think, you needed a complementary ‘secular’ sphere: a sphere that wasn’t, well, religious. That’s why the word’s modern, comparative sense wasn’t firmly established until the 17th century – Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis Christianae (1627) is one touchstone – at a time when European Christendom was both splintering and confronting unfamiliar worlds through exploration and conquest. Even as religion could be conceived as a special domain that might be isolated from law and politics, the traffic with ancient and non-European cultures forced reflection on what counted as ‘true religion’. It’s just that, when Europeans looked at India, Africa, China or the ancient Mediterranean, they sifted for Christian-like (and often Protestant-like) elements: a sacred text to anchor authority, a prophetic founder to narrate origins, a set of theological doctrines to sort out orthodoxy and heresy, and perhaps duties that offered a path to salvation. If a tradition didn’t provide these, scholars might helpfully supply them.

[T]he biblical writers do not stand before the universe feeling compelled to develop a worldview; they stand within a covenantal drama, entwining law, story and communal identity.

True, where science posited impersonal forces, traditional thought posited personal ones. But the underlying move from observed regularities to theoretical constructs was similar; what Europeans wanted to call religion was a pragmatic explanatory framework, reasonable given the available evidence, and part of the same conceptual space as folk biology, folk psychology and everyday causal reasoning.

[…] More

“On Citations, AI, and ‘Not Reading’”:

[T]he problematic way in which we use referencing as a signaling mechanism rather than purely as an epistemological phenomenon.

There is more to read in the contemporary world than can be read within a single lifetime. Therefore, all reading is subject to a type of economic decision making that rests on time as the unit of currency that is to be spent by an individual.

karpathy reviews LLMs’ year of 2025:

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) emerged as the de facto new major stage to add to this mix. By training LLMs against automatically verifiable rewards across a number of environments (e.g. think math/code puzzles), the LLMs spontaneously develop strategies that look like “reasoning” to humans - they learn to break down problem solving into intermediate calculations and they learn a number of problem solving strategies for going back and forth to figure things out (see DeepSeek R1 paper for examples). These strategies would have been very difficult to achieve in the previous paradigms because it’s not clear what the optimal reasoning traces and recoveries look like for the LLM - it has to find what works for it, via the optimization against rewards.

Unlike the SFT [supervised finetuning] and RLHF stage, which are both relatively thin/short stages (minor finetunes computationally), RLVR involves training against objective (non-gameable) reward functions which allows for a lot longer optimization. Running RLVR turned out to offer high capability/$, which gobbled up the compute that was originally intended for pretraining. Therefore, most of the capability progress of 2025 was defined by the LLM labs chewing through the overhang of this new stage and overall we saw ~similar sized LLMs but a lot longer RL runs. Also unique to this new stage, we got a whole new knob (and and associated scaling law) to control capability as a function of test time compute by generating longer reasoning traces and increasing “thinking time”. OpenAI o1 (late 2024) was the very first demonstration of an RLVR model, but the o3 release (early 2025) was the obvious point of inflection where you could intuitively feel the difference.

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“People Are Too Big to Fit Inside Our Heads”:

As long as we’re alive, we never completely coincide with ourselves. We’re free to go beyond what we’ve been and change. To treat someone as an object that you can understand and predict, therefore, is a bit like killing them, as Bakhtin writes. It’s to deny what’s most deeply human in us.

“Why the World Should Worry About Stablecoins”:

“For the rest of the world, including Europe, wide adoption of US dollar stablecoins for payment purposes would be equivalent to the privatization of seigniorage by global actors.” This then would be yet another predatory move by the superpower.

Yet the [Bank for International Settlements] is also concerned that stablecoins will fail to meet “the three key tests of singleness, elasticity and integrity”. What does this mean? Singleness describes the need for all forms of a given money to be exchangeable with one another at par, at all times. This is the foundation of trust in money. Elasticity means the ability to deliver payments of all sizes without gridlock. Integrity means the ability to curb financial crime and other illicit activities. A central role in all this is played by central banks and other regulators.

《當偶像突然變成系統敏感詞》：

即使追星和國家敘事表面上都有情緒、儀式、象徵物，即使有人會問：它們難道不是同一種情緒動員機制嗎？但它們的本質恰恰相反。

那是因為，國家的儀式、口號、循環播放的聲音，是排他的、單向的、要求一致性的：它把人組織成一個「必須相同」的整體，你必須相信、必須感動、必須站立、必須沉默。

而我們在演唱會里感受到的，卻是完全不同的東西：它是非強制的、開放的、自願的；它允許每個人帶着自己的傷口、自己的故事、自己的目光進入這個共同體。

比起在古拉格相關的文本中尋找可以譴責古拉格的點，更重要的是，詢問這些文本如何使得古拉格成為可能，（這些文本）可能至今仍在自圓其說，讓難以忍受的真理直到今天仍被廣泛接受。關於古拉格的問題，提出的角度不應是做錯了什麼（把問題降至理論的維度），而應該把古拉格作為一個存在着的現實來討論。

“I am a Stranger” [我是陌生人] by Xiang Biao [项飙], as an introduction to the book Hello Stranger [你好，陌生人], CITIC Press (2025).

Translated (with abbreviation) by David Ownby; supplemental translations and emphases mine.

[I]t was only in modern times that “stranger” became a relatively stable concept, after a long period in which the idea occupied a prolonged intermediate status somewhere in between.

只有到了现代，“陌生人”成为一个相对稳定的概念，他们长期处于既不是敌人也不是客人的中间状态。

In fact, the realization that there are many people in the world that we don’t know—and that these people might at the same time be connected to us—is itself a modern phenomenon.

意识到世界上有很多我不认识的人，而且这些人可能和我有关，这本身是一个现代现象。

If one of the defining features of the modern era is that people came to understand that distant strangers might be related to them, today the reverse seems to be occurring: we are starting to feel that people we know are unfamiliar to us. Ultimately, this kind of alienation also means that we become strangers to ourselves, unable to recognize who we truly are and what we really want.

如果说，在经典的现代状态下人们意识到陌生人是跟自己有关的，那么在今天，人们感到认识的人和自己无关。到最后，“陌生化”也意味着自己成了自己的陌生人。自己不能够认得自己究竟是谁，不知道自己要什么。

Strangers remain strangers, never becoming friends, enemies, or guests, never communicating ambiguity, surprises, shadows, or highlights.

一个个陌生人就是一个个清晰的陌生人，他们不会转变成朋友、敌人、客人，不会带来暧昧、惊喜、阴影、高光。

Life has become transparent yet impermeable, part of the abstraction of the public sphere. Transparency clearly implies the notion of public—a space where everyone is fully exposed and has no place to hide—but this public is not constructed through our mutual interactions. Instead, it is shaped by third-party systems that permeate every aspect of our lives. These third parties define all individuals, dictate their behavior, and hold them directly accountable. A public sphere formed through horizontal interactions between individuals is not transparent but rather porous; the public sphere established by a unified third party is abstract and transparent.

生活变得透明而不透气，是和公共的抽象化联系在一起的。透明显然意味着公共——大家在这里一览无余甚至无处遁形，但这个公共不是由无数个体通过互动搭建出来的，而是靠一个全面贯穿我们生活的第三方系统捏合而成的。这个第三方定义所有的个体，规定所有个体的行为，所有的个体都直接对第三方负责。通过个体间横向互动而形成的公共是不透明的，而是透气的；通过一个统一的第三方建立的公共是抽象的也是透明的。

[…] More

“Reading Lolita in the Barracks”:

A bugle call jolts you awake, bringing the dislocation of waking up in a strange place. You’re expected to spring up and fold your sleeping pad. If there's a straggler, the entire platoon must hold a punishing pose resembling a downward dog, often for a full hour. To this day, you still don’t understand why people pay to do yoga.

While I was sad to leave the friendships I'd forged in that blitz, I was suspicious of this orchestrated intimacy — one that must be reliably reproducible in Nonsan, under the engineered conditions of shared misery and resentment toward our drill sergeants. Was this kind of ready-made camaraderie the particular fiction that underwrites the enterprise of war? In the end, I’d never see most of them again. Perhaps friendship is what’s born of shared sensibilities, and we reserve the word camaraderie for what’s born of shared hatred.

Yongsan Garrison is the strangest place I’ve ever been. Having lassoed a prime stretch of land in the now-fashionable Itaewon district, it occupied more than half the area of Central Park, right in the heart of Seoul. But on Google Maps — coordinates (37.54, 126.98) — you’ll find a conspicuous blank space where it should be.

To put legions of young men on the cusp of manhood together is to create a petri dish of male ego. The military can serve as, to steal a phrase from D. W. Winnicott, a permanent alternative to puberty.

Even within the same rank, your month of enlistment mattered. An August recruit (me) was forever junior to a July recruit of the same year; it was common to call someone by their enlistment month. I was, for a time, simply “August.”

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“Escape Artists”:

Romantasy’s protagonists tend not to bear the burden of personhood too heavily: they are perfectly plastic creations, stiff to the touch but moldable as needed.

Romantasy sex scenes function not as spicy interludes between events but as critical moments of world-building and character formation, much like song-and-dance sequences in musical theater.

The adjectives “primal” and “feral” appear frequently in romantasy, most notably in the work of Maas, who has made something of an art of using them as much as possible.

Series such as Twilight and Harry Potter “molded generations of young readers who have grown up but still crave big fantasy novels — now with a dose of erotica,”

At the highest level of abstraction, this kind of remixing carries a whiff of what the critic Jason Farago termed, in 2023, the “glacially slow Ferris wheel” of contemporary culture, “cycling through remakes and pastiches with nowhere to go but around,” although down in the trenches of fan culture it is a sign of the genre at work.

Romance and fantasy are each dominated by distinct tropes, but romantasy takes this feature and turbocharges it. The internet, and TikTok in particular, has made it easier than ever for the selection of tropes to precede the acts of reading and writing. In January, Katy Waldman reported for The New Yorker that trope-oriented hashtags allow romantasy “authors to tune their creative process to the story elements that are getting the most attention online,” just as readers can use them to sort through the digital muck and locate the stories most to their liking, be they “broody protector,” “shadow daddy,” “morally gray,” “secret stalker,” “star-crossed lovers,” “opposites attract,” “Hades and Persephone,” “magic academy,” “virgin,” “dark elves,” or, among many others, “I can fix him.”

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“LLMs Make Legal Advice Lossy”:

It is a totally normal part of a functioning lawyer’s day to mentally scale levels of abstraction like this, picking and choosing where to stand the client, what to point at, and what to leave out.

Getting good at neither coddling nor firehosing clients is a significant part of the difference between being a good law student and being a good lawyer. If you learn all the rules, exceptions, and citations and stop there, you are at best fully qualified to practice law badly. Practicing law is often partly teaching law, but unless the job is law professor, rarely are we called upon to teach anybody everything on any particular point. Hiring a lawyer is not attending law school secondhand in installments.

To summarize a summary is not just to compress an already compressed explanation, but also, often, to reword it. Choice of words can be important in what I do. Not inevitably in the cartoonish way those with little experience of the law tend to suppose, where failing to say exactly the right thing makes no magic. In a more serious way affecting how much advice my clients need, longer-term.

When a client uses a chatbot to effectively rewrite my guidance, I lose control of how worthwhile terms get introduced. I lose control of how they’re sprinkled through the text later, to develop fluency. Both content and presentation end up on invisible autopilot. There is no bright line between those in the law.

I need to keep pushing myself, and setting clients up to push me, toward plainer, shorter, better organized writing. We also need to stay on the level. If clients are in positions that drive them to interpose chatbots between us, whether out of verve for the tech or simply under time crunch, I should be making it clear that’s something they should unhesitatingly tell me. I should be prompting them to say so.

“Sam Altman’s Dirty DRAM Deal”:

[T]he shock wasn’t that OpenAI made a big deal, no, it was that they made two massive deals this big, at the same time, with Samsung and SK Hynix simultaneously.

Had Samsung known SK Hynix was about to commit a similar chunk of supply — or vice-versa — the pricing and terms would have likely been different. It’s entirely conceivable they wouldn’t have both agreed to supply such a substantial part of global supply if they had known more.

[I]t sure seems like a primary goal of these deals was to deprive the market.

Normally, the DRAM market has buffers: warehouses of emergency stock, excess wafer starts, older DRAM manufacturing machinery being sold off to budget brands while the big brands upgrade their production lines…but not in 2025.

Companies had deliberately reduced how much DRAM they ordered for their safety stock over the summer of 2025 because tariffs were changing almost weekly.

Because of the hesitancy to purchase as much safety stock as usual, RAM prices were also genuinely falling over time.

Korean memory firms have been terrified that reselling old equipment to China-adjacent OEMs might trigger U.S. retaliation.

Caixin on Global Central Bank Gold Purchases Hit 2025 High:

2022 年以来，黄金市场发生了一些结构性变化，包括私人、官方部门的需求显著增加，黄金不再是短期的避险工具，而是被越来越多视为长期战略资产和资产配置的核心。这个变化降低了黄金对传统驱动因素，比如美元、实际利率的敏感度，同时增加了市场的韧性。

大部分非发达国家的黄金储备是很低的，但正是这些官方机构的配置需求让传统的黄金定价模型失效。[…] 传统分析框架中，金价主要受实际利率、通胀及美元指数等周期性因素驱动，央行购金被视为这些因素导致的“结果”；而现在反而像“鸡生蛋、蛋生鸡”，去美元化的进程和金价的涨幅呈现非常显著的正相关，官方机构正在结构性增持黄金。

cycling is at the same time the most useful and useless skill i picked up in the past year

Li, Yiyun. The Book of Goose. Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2022).

America and fame: they are equally useful if you want freedom from your mother.

美国和名气：如果你想摆脱你的母亲、获得自由，这两者均有用。

The secrets inside me have not left much space for a fetus to grow.

我内心的秘密让可供胎儿成长的空间所剩无几。

If dead people had no choice but to become ghosts, Fabienne’s ghost would only scoff at the usual tricks that other ghosts take pride in. Her ghost would do something entirely different.

如果死去的人别无选择，仅可变成鬼魂，法比耶娜的鬼魂只会嘲笑这些其他鬼魂引以为傲的寻常把戏。她的鬼魂会做出一些截然不同的事。

Well-proportioned children are a rare happenstance. War guarantees disproportion, but during peacetime other things go wrong. I have not met a child who is not lopsided in some way. And when children grow up, they become lopsided adults.

身心均衡的儿童是难得的。由于战争，失衡成为必然，可在和平时期，其他方面出现问题。我没见过一个一切正常、没有偏差的小孩。而当小孩长大后，他们变成畸形的大人。

We were almost one person. I do not imagine that the half of an orange facing south would have to tell the other half how warm the sunlight is.

我们简直等于一个人。我猜，朝南的半个橙子无须告诉另外一半阳光有多暖和。

Most adults struck us as peripheral, some more annoying than others. But we liked the ceremony, the grave of a recently dead woman strewn with the more recently dead flowers.

大多数成年人在我们眼里无关大局，有些比其他更讨厌，但我们喜欢这仪式，把才刚死去的花铺在一位刚死去不久的妇人的坟上。

How do I measure Fabienne’s presence in my life—by the years we were together, or by the years we have been apart, her shadow elongating as time goes by, always touching me?

我怎么计量法比耶娜在我人生中的存在——用我们在一起的岁月，或用我们分开的岁月？在分开的岁月里，她的影子随时光的流逝而拉长，始终触及我。

Fabienne believed that we must always test the limits of our bodies. Not drinking until thirst scratched our throats like sand. Not eating until our heads were lightened by hunger.

法比耶娜认为，我们应该时时测试我们身体的极限。渴到喉咙像被沙子擦痛时才喝水。饿得头晕眼花才吃东西。

Time corrupts. And we pay a price for everything corruptible: food, roof beams, souls.

时间使东西变质。我们为一切易变质的东西付出代价：食物、顶梁、灵魂。

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“Just and Loving Seeing”:

It was a dual, almost paradoxical experience of both feeling that something I already know was getting articulated with a level of detail that I am myself incapable of—a level of detail I wasn’t even aware was possible—while also feeling provoked by it.

It is interesting how something can both feel like a clearer picture of what you already know and also a provocation. When an idea that I have had comes back to me in higher resolution, I notice that a lot of the details of how I’ve thought about it fail to add up. I recognize these as my thoughts, but also I see that they show me to be confused.

[W]e can imagine there is a limit where our actions can’t be further improved, and that limit is the Good.

The world has endless detail, variety, and nuance. Any attempt to define the right thing to do in the abstract (saying, for instance, that we should aim for human flourishing) will fail to take reality’s details into account. But when Murdoch says that the aim is to move toward the Good, she isn’t proposing an abstract goal; she’s saying that our aim should be to see reality as clearly as possible. If we can just see reality clearly, we will know what is Good in this specific situation.

[A]s Jane Psmith puts it, “the ‘authentic you’ is an incoherent half-formed ball of mutually contradictory desires and lizard-brain instinct.” (Murdoch calls the authentic you “a tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams.”)

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“Why you need your whole body – from head to toes – to think”:

But why are we so reluctant to consider the brain as just another part of the body? There’s no evidence that the brain is made of a different kind of ‘physical stuff’ from the rest of the body.

We need to start with the cells that compose our humble toes before zooming into the mystery of the brain. Why? Because our cells solve the biggest and most urgent problem of this great and mysterious adventure called life without a brain, and before we had a brain: how to stay alive.

[B]ecause our body is a living system governed by the basic law of self-preservation, this means that all our experiences are necessarily embodied self-experiences. In perceiving and experiencing the world, we ‘smuggle in’ our own fundamental self-survival goals.

A growing body of evidence from neurobiology and biochemistry suggests that cognitive categories such as ‘sensing’, ‘memory’ and ‘learning’ can be applied non-metaphorically to the behaviour of simple organisms such as bacteria.

[A]ll bodily cells and their complex interconnections [are] fundamental for cognition, not just neurons. Among our cells, the immune system plays a very special role, working in tandem with the neural system to help us build the ‘self’.

To put it bluntly: one can experience without thinking, but one cannot think without experiencing. Experiences come to the surface of being through the body, and not through the minds, or some sort of homunculus sitting in our heads, trying to ‘make sense’ of a world he doesn’t see, because the world is hidden in the black box of the scalp. We don’t perceive the world through some sort of inner solitary lens situated in our heads. We perceive the world through every single cell of our body.

[…] More

“A Tale of Two College Towns”:

For Wikipedia, the college town is one where an institution of higher learning “pervades” the life of the place. Good enough. I like this verb, “pervade.” In cities or towns that have enough other things going on—places we wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, call “college towns”—it’s rather the place that pervades the school.

At its best, the small college in a small college town functions this way for the nonstudent residents, as a slightly mysterious world within the world that, while pursuing its own ends, expands everyone’s sense of what is possible.

For this to happen at all, the college has to be its own distinct place, present and familiar but in some ways opaque.

The otherworldly character of the liberal-arts college’s mission is obvious enough here: young Puritan theocrats studying, among others, older Puritan theocrats so that they can responsibly govern a Puritan theocracy. We are talking about shining cities on hills here. The SLAC makes up one component in a uniquely American fusion of utopianism as a tool of social reform, education as a tool of social mobility, and free real estate.

Horowitz rather diplomatically describes the reaction of the “college men” to this incursion:

They have perceived the especially diligent student as the “grind” and the student seeking faculty friendship as the “fisherman” or “brownnose.” Such terms of derogation have been necessary because college life has always had to contend with a significant number of students who have wanted no part of it—the outsiders. To the early colleges came some men for whom higher education was intended, those studying for the ministry.

[…] More

“Everything Is Not Fine in the Art World”:

Auction houses rely on this sleight of hand. Their job is not to measure value. Their job is to perform it. Sarah Thornton wrote about this clearly in Seven Days in the Art World (2009), where she describes auctions as rituals rather than markets, spaces where belief is manufactured through choreography. Reading her work changed how I saw these rooms. The scripts, the coded gestures, the artificial suspense, the carefully timed applause, the way the room breathes in unison. None of it reflects the truth of what art is worth or what artists need. It reflects the truth of what the ritual requires. In that sense, last week’s evening sales looked exactly the way they meant to look: The paddles, the rhythm, the polished certainty. Everything was arranged to reassure the public that the system still works, that art still circulates as a luxury investment, cultural currency, and global status symbol.

Scarcity, visibility, community, and narrative are all tools that shape value. Artists do not need to mimic these strategies. They only need to understand how these tools are used and how they circulate.

《大埔火災，用「誤殺罪」追責的侷限》：

樓宇火災鮮少是單一失誤引發的「意外」，而更常是多重系統性故障的惡性連鎖，可能是設計的先天隱患，亦可能是日常維護的疏漏，以至緊急應變的失效。這些環節往往橫跨企業的層層部門與多位人員，難以鎖定單一「元兇」。這種分散性不僅模糊了因果鏈條，更讓傳統的個人化追責模式顯得力不從心。

一些法律觀點曾探索「聚合模式（aggregation approach）」的可能，即透過彙集多名員工的個別作為或疏忽，累積形成公司的整體犯罪意圖與行為。這一模式旨在捕捉公司失能的分散本質：單一員工的疏忽或許微不足道，但多重瑣碎失誤的疊加，可能構成系統性嚴重疏忽。然而，這創新想法在 R v HM Coroner for East Kent, ex parte Spooner (1989) 88 Cr App R 10 一案中遭明確否定。法院堅持，誤殺罪的證明要素必須針對「被告本人」獨立成立，而不能透過「拼湊」多人的零散證據來「合成」公司罪責。

此中諷刺，正如法律學者 James Gobert 於 1994 年《公司犯罪性：四種過錯模式》（Corporate Criminality: Four Models of Fault）一文所論，「人格化原則」正於無需要之處發揮最佳效用：在小型企業中，高管通常親身參與營運，輕易滿足該原則的要件，但此時他們自身已可能承擔個人刑事責任，對公司層面的追究則顯得多餘，所以阻嚇功能反而微弱。反之，於最需追責之巨型企業，高層往往透過遙距指揮、鮮少親涉基層日常運作，導致該原則難以適用，從而使公司整體的系統性失責得以逍遙法外。

為更有效回應現代公司治理的複雜性與多維度挑戰，香港或可借鏡英國於 2007 年生效的專門立法——《公司誤殺罪及公司過失致死法（Corporate Manslaughter and Corporate Homicide Act 2007）》。

它明確將機構或公司在特定業務領域（如建築業）的安全謹慎責任轉化成法定管理義務，變相強調企業必須履行預防性義務，主動設計並實施全面的安全管理系統，以確保施工現場等高風險環境的安全。企業無法再簡單以「個別員工疏忽」作為推諉藉口逃避整體問責；相反，法律要求其檢視任何結構性缺失，例如管理流程的設計、資源分配的不足，或安全協議的執行不力。

《公司殺人罪及公司過失致死法》另一項創新體現於第 8 條，並罕見地將傳統上由審判法官在引導陪審團時口頭闡述的責任標準，直接以立法形式明文化。

第 8 條還提醒陪審團「可以」進一步考慮機構的內部文化與慣例，以捕捉更深層的組織動態 […]

《被推上火線的竹棚：大埔火災後的資訊失真和焦點錯位》：

作為一項古老技藝，竹棚在其他地區越來越少見。近年來大陸多數城市已禁止用竹棚，2021 年住建部要求全面淘汰竹腳手架，香港和澳門成為為數不多讓竹棚存續的陣地。但今年 3 月，香港政府以安全為由，要求 50% 以上的公共項目必須使用金屬棚架，同時表示未打算完全淘汰竹棚，對此民間反對和支持聲並存。

香港建築業界使用大量竹棚有其重要理由。香港樓間距小、巷道窄，相比標準化的金屬架，竹棚能更靈活地適應不同施工環境。何炳德解釋，香港有許多樓齡超過 50 年的老樓，若搭建金屬棚架，需採取螺絲磚牆等更多設備、材料，住戶未必能接受。相較之下，竹枝重量輕，搭棚工人用「一把刀仔」就能工作，搭建速度快也靈活，作業空間需求小。

另有業內文章指出，面對香港常見的強風天氣，品質好的毛竹具有彈性但不易斷裂，這讓竹棚在大風中能適度搖擺而不塌，金屬棚架雖剛性強，但可能因局部失效而整體傾覆。在酷暑天，竹棚也不如金屬容易導熱發燙。

通常來說，建新樓或拆樓時用金屬棚架更好， 若是在舊樓中維修冷氣機等情況，使用竹的懸空棚架更為合理，兩者可以是互相補充而非取代的關係。

竹棚一邊組成大陸網民對「香港已經落後」的敘事想象，另一邊承載港人對身份認同焦慮的投射。大陸知名經濟評論人「西西弗評論」就指出，爭論的本質在於「這次災難是因為香港不像大陸導致的，還是因為香港變得更像大陸導致的」。

令許多人擔憂、憤怒之處在於，竹棚或在變成轉移焦點的「替罪羊」。