Notes

NitpickLawyer, in response to Anthropic’s allegation that several Chinese AI labs has been “distilling,” i.e., massively and abusively learning from the Claude’s outputs:

Anthropic have been the loudest in pushing for regulatory capture, often citing “muh security” as FUD. People should care what they write on this topic, because they’re not writing for us, they’re writing for “the regulators”. Member when the usgov placed a dude in solitary confinement because they thought he could launch nukes with a whistle? Yeah... Let’s hope they don’t do some cray cray stuff with open LLMs.

Anthropic make amazing coding models, kudos for that. But they should be mocked for any communication like the one linked. Boo-hoo. Deal with it, or don’t, I don’t care. No one will feel for you. What goes around, comes around. Etc.

bigyabai, concurring:

Administratively, Anthropic seems to misunderstand politics. You don’t get to wear the “people’s champion” and “government sweetheart” hats at the same time, when push comes to shove you’ll be forced to pick a lane. We saw it with Microsoft, we saw it with Apple and Google, and now we’re seeing it with OpenAI too. You can’t drive down both paths at the same time.

As a member of the target audience for Claude, their messaging just leaves me confused. Are you a renegade success, or do you need the government’s help? Are you a populist juggernaut, or do you hide from competition? OpenAI, for all their myriad issues, understood this from the start and stuck to the blithely profitable federal ass-kisser route.

“Child’s Play,” sarcarstically:

The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men.

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张潇雨, in 《得意忘形》Ep. 70 (edited for clarity):

我们的基因设定就是要在生活中寻找缺的东西，否则就难受，觉得这跟死了一样。当你没有欲望的时候，很多人第一反应是恐惧，害怕自己变成没有欲望的人。这不仅仅是被社会抛弃的问题，而是接近于「死」本身。我们需要靠不断追求东西来维持「活着」的想象。脑中有念头、有动力、去追求、去补足，才觉得这是生的表现。所以刚才你说「不断完善自己」，我没纠正你，但我可以告诉你：没有什么东西可完善。当你去完善的时候，永远没法完善。是谁告诉你不够的？是同一个声音告诉你不够，又告诉你去完善。当你把这声音拿掉，你就是完整的，就是幸福本身。

我这一两年在练习一个东西，叫「无我的行动」。我们回到一个特别基础的问题。举个例子，比如你晚上吃饭，点好外卖后有两个选择：歇会儿睡觉等外卖，或者刷个 B 站。后来你选了其中一个。外卖来了你吃饭。这是非常正常的人类日常行为。是谁在进行这些选择？

许哲, in 《得意忘形》Ep. 69 (edited for clarity):

这个世界的本质就是无常（anitya）。所以你追求秩序，本质上是跟在这个世界为敌，没有任何意义。你要做的事情是在这个无常的世界中，你怎么去面对无常，而不是试图把这个世界变得「有常」。

无常、无我是世界的基本属性，这不是你能改变的。我们能做的事情，只能是改变自己面对它的心态。佛陀教导的 yathabhuta 就是如实地看见它，nana dassana 就是真实地去看见它。首先你得有一个理念，就是这个世界是 anatta（无我）的，不是「我的」。它是苦、空、无常的，不受你控制。它是此有故彼有、此无故彼无的，是由因果链条决定的。其实这件事情发生是因为有它的因，所以才有它的果。它是你没有办法预测的，是一直在变化的。你的认知只是这个宇宙变化的一小部分，所以你要说「哎，我让这个东西变得有 order」，这是妄想，是 avijja（无明）。

“Addicted to Love? The Trendy Diagnosis Is Changing Our Idea of Romance.”:

People weren’t just using the notion of love addiction to talk about destructive, obsessive romantic patterns. They were using it to mount a fascinating rebellion against the narrative that love is the pinnacle of human experience.

On a website for Love Addicts Anonymous […], you can find “40 Statements” with which you might identify. No. 37 [is] “Love is the most important thing in the world to you.” This one strikes me as a question about values. If I say that love is the most important thing in the world for me — that I value it above all else — have I inched further down a spectrum of addiction? Or have I just decided to value something that countless poets and prophets all said was the noblest human experience?

[S]elf-diagnosis has its pitfalls, especially when it comes to love, which is not inherently harmful and can’t be quantified the way cocktails can. There’s an element of contagion: People can read online posts, recognize something of themselves and feel they’ve discovered exactly what is wrong.

Often, these patterns and experiences seem like the ordinary messiness of romance, the pain and yearning and confusion that have, over the centuries, been seen as part of love’s power. Looking at them through the lens of addiction means pathologizing them, treating them as symptoms of a disorder. As we do so, we redefine love itself. It is no longer something that should remake us or endure “even to the edge of doom”; that would be unhealthy. Much of what we’ve been led to expect from love, this point of view suggests, is in fact toxic or deluded.

But if we did away with old visions of romantic love, what would replace them? This is in some sense the question the man on the forum was asking about his wife: If what he experienced in marriage was toxic, then what came next?

“For Argument’s Sake”:

But the main thing we learned from debate was that there is a foundational grammar, a skeleton of syntax beneath the superficies of semantics. Debate was the first place, if I may be forgiven for thinking of it as a kind of terrain, where I discovered not only the satisfaction but also the sanctity of a game with rules that remained invariant. I would go so far as to say that debate afforded me my first intimation of justice.

But another effect of the invention of jargon is ossification. When Hannah Arendt writes that the purpose of thinking is to “unfreeze” concepts that have been hardened into familiarity, part of what she means is that to grasp them is to break through the lacquer of familiar rhetoric and into the oozing center, to eschew the shortcut in favor of the longer, more tortuous route.

when people tell me they don’t miss any part of high school—don’t miss the gorgeously guileless little idiots they were when they were sixteen and unashamed to love embarrassments like debate—I do not believe them. Things were as fresh then as if they had been cut out of bright paper, sharp against the hazy future. Episodes in my adult life, even the seemingly major ones, seem dull in comparison. Now there is a sheaf of hesitance interposed between me and everything else, and no doubt this layer of remove is what makes me bearable, to the extent that I am bearable. But there was no barrier then, and even trivialities had a kind of solidity or vitality to them of which they have since been drained.

Certainly when I was debating I often succumbed to a somatic force, though it was somatic in that special way that running or sex or, I imagine, bodily mortification is somatic—so excruciatingly and exquisitely physical that its physicality dissolves into spirituality, like sugar into water.

“Python Package Managers: Uv vs Pixi?”:

Python is a special language where it’s extremely popular to write libraries of code in compiled languages like C, C++, Fortran or Rust and bind them into Python. While Python is a relatively slow language it can call into these fast compiled dependencies and use them in the same way it can use Python dependencies. Many languages can do this, but this practice has taken off hugely in the Python community because it allows users to trade off performant code with a friendly and flexible programming language and often get the best of both worlds.

One big problem with pip in the early days was that it only handled source distributions. This means it could download a gzip file of source code and put it in the right place, call some hooks that was it.

The conda package manager handles a different kind of package. While you can still put pure Python code into a conda package you can also include pre-compiled binaries. When you build a conda package you run the compiler for all the common operating systems you expect it to run on, Windows, Linux, macOS and the common CPU architectures like x86 and ARM. This is a lot more work for the developers to build all these packages, but it hugely simplifies things for the end user as conda can just download the right binaries for their system without needing to compile anything.

Another thing conda does differently is it can look at your computer and find things that have been installed by other means through virtual packages. Nearly all compiled code depends on core libraries like glibc or musl which are included with the operating system, conda can figure out what versions of these packages you have and then include that in it’s package dependency solve. This has been especially useful in the CUDA Python ecosystem where all Python CUDA packages depend on specific NVIDIA GPU driver and CUDA versions.

《比特城里的陌生人》（2007）：

美国文学批评家莱昂内尔·特里林认为，到十九世纪末叶，人们经历了从诚挚性（sincerity）到本真性（authenticity）的变化。诚挚性，说的是对个人的一种期待：他和别人交往时应该避免表里不一，在公开场合所暴露的东西要同私下里感受到的东西相一致，但并不是把什么东西都拿出来公布。而本真性则意味着，不是对别人诚实而是对自己诚实。在这种情况下，人们可以向陌生人坦白内心最隐秘的想法，而不必为此感到内疚。前者要求，披露的事情必须是真的；后者要求，只要是自身的深切感受，什么事情都可以披露。

“裸露的人”（naked man）第一次出现了。如果说，诚挚性的年代的座右铭来自德尔斐神庙：认识你自己，那么，本真性的年代的座右铭来自心理治疗师：成为你自己。

“The Case for Software Criticism”:

But software criticism is not the same as technology criticism. A work of software criticism is to Nicholas Carr’s “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” what a New York Times book review is to Virginia Woolf’s “Modern Fiction.” The latter is a more synoptic assessment of the field while the former—in theory, at least, if it existed—is a focused interrogation of a single work.

But perhaps that’s why software criticism is needed more than ever in the midst of the brinkmanship between the two worlds. Software criticism may be one of the ways to inch toward an armistice. In the demonology of some media outlets, “software engineer” occupies the same rank as “investment banker,” and in certain circles in the Bay Area, the word “journalist” is uttered like a slur. But that both sides are engaged in a shady enterprise is a corrosive belief.

And surely we can use some exciting prose! Burn that copy of On Writing Well and help yourself with some Nabokov soup. Exorcize the kind of homogenizing language that abound in the rationalist blogosphere written by Scott Alexander wannabes and avoid sounding as if the text were generated by a language model trained on VC tweets. Self-medicate with William H. Gass, luxuriate in Lydia Davis, mainline on Martin Amis, hallucinate with Geoff Dyer, get drunk on Peter Schjeldahl, and detoxify with the sobering yet adrenalizing prose of Parul Sehgal. Anything goes. Well, everything except the Zinsser-ized, over-sanitized—hence sterilized—technical prose, because we aren’t writing a damn README here.

So if grape juice and cars and buildings merit critical analysis for their complexity and design, shouldn’t a piece of modern software qualify as an object of criticism too?

The critic will anatomize the subject from several angles. Befitting the hybrid artifact that is software, the critic will adopt disciplinary anarchy, toggling between the commonsensical to the technical to the historical to the philosophical.

「当你不再仅仅限于文字和静止图片时，网上生活会丰富多彩得多。即使是个因特网新手，你也许也听说过在线式多媒体——听音乐、看动画片和录像，甚至玩三维游戏。声音和活动画面使信息变得活灵活现。」

瑞幸审美最正常的一次

sometimes you just find yourself having bought a ticket to a weird show despite obvious red flags and decide to squeeze your eyes shut and make the best of it.

what did i do to deserve this

Hampton, Mark. Hong Kong and British Culture, 1945–97. Hong Kong University Press, 2024.

香港的回歸，反而為英國提供了一個展示國家成就的機會：包括在香港建立法治、市場經濟以及高效率和無貪腐的政府——這些成就甚至被延伸為整個英國帝國成就的象徵。

The Handover, rather, provided an occasion to reflect upon British accomplishment in establishing markets; rule of law; and effective, corruption-free government: properties that could be extended rhetorically to the entire British Empire.

英國在香港直到 1980 年代初才真正受到挑戰的持續管治，卻為所謂英國的德治提供了一個正面的展示。

Britain’s continuing management of Hong Kong, decisively challenged only in the early 1980s, offered a site in which supposed British virtues could be more positively showcased.

戰後早期曾有這樣的論點：儘管中國可以隨時收回香港，但卻似乎不太會在短期內有此舉動。而這觀點在 1980 年代與 1990 年代也得到迴響：就是雖然中國最終也會收回香港，但出於利益的考慮，中國是不會對香港進行激烈變革的。

Despite my unhealthy rewatch count for 5 Centimeters per Second, I find it a difficult recommendation, primarily due to the utter lack of conventional drama. There is no confrontation, no villain, no reckoning, just a linear collage of mundane events driven by unavoidable departures and unspoken feelings that are arguably lamentable, but in no way tragic. One is left to decide whether this restraint is the point — the capacity of the everyday to wound — or a limitation of the storytelling itself.

There is a serendipitous symmetry in having first watched the anime at the protagonists’ age at the story’s beginning, and now rewatching this adaptation at their age at the end. I couldn’t help but wonder what I had felt watching the original anime in my early teens, and why I was so impressed that I felt almost compelled to go see this adaptation. Remember I could not. Maybe it’s just rose-colored nostalgia. Or maybe, as the protagonist herself suggests, that’s the formative residue of an early age at work.

The adaptation expands and rearranges the original material with mixed results. Some additions feel thin, and the newly introduced coincidences strain credibility more than they enrich the narrative. The story may simply be too spare to bear expansion. Yet the reconstructed scenes still evoke the memory of watching and rewatching the same file on a portable player, a video that once took hours to download and felt worth every minute of waiting.

Jennette McCurdy:

I don’t even want to expel [anger]. I love anger. I’m so grateful for anger. I think it’s led me to make every strong, good decision in my life that I’ve made.

I’m too fucking mad. I’m going to figure out how to do it right and how to do it better. I’m going to heal the parts that need healing so that I don’t recreate these patterns. And it’s hard work, but anger is so mobilizing that it can get you through, I think, any amount of work. Like, thank God for anger. I think sadness can really keep me stuck in the trenches. And anxiety can keep me kind of debilitated and unable to make a decision. But, my God, anger will get me off the chair, making some decisions, moving forward and doing the work.

when you chase the bus with the camera on

“Intimacy as a Lens on Work and Migration”:

Intimacy as a lens means starting from people’s emotions, sense of self, and relationships with other people, and using these micro-scale negotiations as a starting point to advance social inquiry.

One hesitation I had about using ‘intersectionality’ is that the boundaries between different social positionings are not always stable and unchanging. Some scholars call this ‘intra-categorisation’ to problematise the categories and the boundaries that are used to inscribe them (McCall 2005). These unsettled boundaries are particularly salient in my project, as I discuss how being an ethnic minority is not a given fact, but something people must constantly practise and negotiate with.

One example is the ambivalence many informants feel when they talk about whether they are ‘authentic’ ethnic minorities. That means they are officially registered as coming from a minority background, yet they feel ambivalent about this identity—and sometimes do not even feel a strong sense of belonging linked to it. This sometimes also leads them to feel guilty. They feel they should know more about their ethnic culture, yet, as the younger generation who has grown up under the twin influences of the state’s ‘Han assimilation’ approach and globalisation, they are gradually losing touch with this aspect of their identity.

Even though emotions are often theorised in relation to people’s private lives (such as their family lives and intimate relationships), I find it helpful to understand emotions in social spheres that are often assumed to be unemotional. In this book, I wrote about migrants’ emotional encounters with the migration regime (that is, the hukou system), and how these encounters are highly emotional and therefore require them to exercise their ‘emotional reflexivity’ (Holmes 2010; Burkitt 2012)—that is, the ability to draw on one’s own and other people’s emotions to navigate a complicated situation that lacks a specific ‘feeling rule’ (Hochschild 1979). Migrants’ emotions when encountering an opaque migration regime also have much to tell in terms of revealing the mechanisms of mobility inequalities and an overall ‘emotional regime’ existing at the broader societal level. In the field of psychology, emotions are often regarded as ‘signals’ and can inform us about a person’s mental state. This ‘signal’ function of emotions can also be useful in sociology, as emotions are often revealing of the structural inequalities in which people find themselves, and they are valuable in revealing the ways power works in producing and maintaining inequality.

“The Japanese Ethics of ‘Ningen’ Dethrones the Western Self”:

The basic methodology of modern, Western philosophy is the same, according to Watsuji: a philosopher from a specific cultural and historical background reflects upon how they conceive of the structure of their mind, and declares that what we might call their ‘self-referential abstraction’ is the universal model that theoretically applies to every sentient being across all space and time.

What makes the modern conception of the subject that commits this ‘self-referential abstraction’ so problematic, according Watsuji, is that it had to come up with a supra-individual self that aims at the happiness of society or the welfare of mankind, in order to cloak the foundational problem of individualistic self-centredness. What is worse, Watsuji argues, is that, despite this move towards intersubjective consciousness, the conception of the modern subject creates conflict between human subject as the source of ethical values, and the objective world or nature as meaningless ‘thereness’. Nature, in this case, is conceived of as a heteronomous other – a threat to human autonomy, an irrational outside entity that needs to be conquered through the self-determining intelligibility of ‘I think.’

The Japanese conception of human being (ningen sonzai, 人間存在) in the larger context of East Asian philosophies is radically different from the Western conception of humanity. What makes us human (ningen) is not the ontological structure made by the first principle or divine transcendence. Nor is it reason, spirit, nor even the metaethical structure of meaning that provides a theoretical ground for our ethical values, but rather the ‘concrete practice of betweenness’ or ‘in-betweenness of act connections’ that constitute our humanity (ningen-sei, 人間性). And this practice of betweenness always already comes with the practical self-awareness of emptiness.

“The New Yorker offered him a deal”:

All my life, I’ve heard about this thing, “the New Yorker story”. I hadn’t investigated this term in depth, but I understood it to mean “a short story that is meandering, plotless, and slight—full of middle-class people discussing their relentlessly banal problems”.

Not only were these stories similar to each other, but they also seemed quite different from other literary stories. These stories were mostly marked by their extreme restraint. They didn’t just eschew plot, they also eschewed lyricism, symbolism, surrealism, or any other devices that would call attention to themselves. Their plotlessness made them seem highbrow, but their unadorned style made them highly accessible.

If you’ve ever seen a New Yorker cartoon, you understand this early style of New Yorker humor. It’s not meant to be laugh-out-loud funny. Instead it’s mordant, dry, and slightly obscure. The journal assumes the reader will understand whatever is supposed to be funny.

The editors of the journal encouraged prospective writers to use this style.

This [] requirement [to decline ‘dizzy’ stories, i.e., those with a more florid, maximalist style, or lots of figurative language,] was in part necessitated by the editor, Harold Ross, who absolutely refused to print any story that he couldn’t understand. Ross also hated any discussion of sex or immorality. Even adultery could only be hinted at or alluded to. His magazine couldn’t contain anything that might give bad ideas to a child.

The New Yorker story was defined by three things: the first was Katherine’s determination to print something very different from what you’d see in other journals; the second was Ross’s mandate that all stories be perfectly clear and comprehensible and clean; and the third was the literary ambitions of The New Yorker’s stable of contributors.

By 1940, the New Yorker’s fiction had already gotten a reputation for slight, insubstantial, and concerned primarily with the quotidian problems of middle-class people.

“How I Estimate Work as a Staff Software Engineer”:

[S]oftware engineering projects are not dominated by the known work, but by the unknown work, which always takes 90% of the time. However, only the known work can be accurately estimated. It’s therefore impossible to accurately estimate software projects in advance.

In other words, I don’t “break down the work to determine how long it will take”. My management chain already knows how long they want it to take. My job is to figure out the set of software approaches that match that estimate.

If you refuse to estimate, you’re forcing someone less technical to estimate for you.