Notes

“Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break”:

The industrial nations of the twentieth century were built around the idea that work was the organising principle of life. Catholic social teaching talked about the dignity of labour. Socialist movements sang about the worker as a hero. Protestant infused capitalism turned productivity into a route to salvation. Even the centrist stripe of postwar politics treated a job as the main vehicle through which adults were meant to find status, income and a place in the world. This hung around through the neoliberal years, even as manufacturing shrank and services expanded. You can hear it every time someone from any mainstream party talks about “hard working families”.

The result is that a lot of our institutions still act as if giving everyone a job is the primary goal, long after the underlying economic logic has started to drift.

There is a strange symmetry here. On one side you have firms quietly routing labour through screens and robots, and repeating that jobs will be fine on aggregate. On the other you have unions and politicians insisting that jobs must be preserved, even when that means attaching people to tasks that are technically obsolete. Neither camp really articulates what it would mean for work itself to shrink as a central organising story. They just fight over where the remaining jobs will be and who will do them.

“In What Sense Is Life Suffering?”:

[M]ental valence works like temperature.

[S]cientifically (according to the Buddhists) there’s only one kind of emotion: suffering. Apparent neutral is a fact about human perception with no objective significance. If you start at “very bad” and take away suffering, at some point your perception switches from “less suffering” to “more joyful”, but you’ve just been taking away suffering the whole time. The real “zero suffering” isn’t neutral / blah / just okay. It’s nirvana, which feels more blissful than we can possibly imagine.

“Plato and the Poets”:

Simplifying his more complex argument, Plato offers at least two main criticisms of poetry. Wrongful poets err by producing a third-order imitation, an image of an image of fundamental reality. They re-enact the actions of mortal souls and states that are themselves re-enactments of the ideal forms of city and soul. Plato, in contrast, provides a second-order imitation, an image at only one remove from the ideal polis and ideal soul. The problem is not poetic images, but the distance from fundamental reality of the images of images that wrongful poets offer. In addition, wrongful poets try to obscure how vacant their subject matter is by the rhythmic seduction of poetic meter. Plato, in contrast, will here speak exclusively in prose (or as Aristotle noted, something between poetry and prose).

“We Used to Read Things in This Country”:

But as interest in historical materialism surged after the global financial crisis of 2008, the left rediscovered the financial press as they searched for the rational kernel within the mystical shell. At first, the Financial Times was the center of attention. As Amber A’Lee Frost wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review, the FT “covers the world as it is—a global battle not of ideas or values, but of economic and political interests.”

[F]or most of human history, culture was exclusively oral. Knowledge was transmitted by speech, and what could be transmitted was what could be remembered. Oral culture was “aggregative rather than analytic”—full of redundancy, traditionalist in disposition, and embedded in the “human lifeworld,” rather than allowing abstract thought. Therefore, it was conservative and traditional, against innovation and any departure from the long-established norms of agricultural life. Repetition, cliché, and formulas are essential, as in Homer with his repeated phrases such as “swift ships” and “wine-dark sea.” With writing comes precision, analytical rigor, deliberate word choices, analytic remove from life, and abstract thought.

Then, with the emergence of electronic media, Ong sees society regressing/advancing into a “secondary orality,” which brings back many qualities of the first orality (note the supposedly permanent basis of writing)

Looking at social media, Weisenthal sees the return of oral values to dominance in the public square, like loud one-upmanship. Rather than the ideal of reasoned debate, social media sets the stage for constant jousting, rewarding those who can be viral and have memes ready in their memory, as today’s Homeric formula shifts both our political and neurological landscapes.

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@belligerentbarbies:

People are worried about AI psychosis. They’re worried about the amount of energy that AI uses. Fair. I’m worried that they put Copilot in Excel because Excel is the beast that drives our entire economy. 人们都担心 AI 精神病，都担心 AI 消耗的能源。担心得没错。但我担心的是他们把 Copilot 放进了 Excel，而 Excel 是驱动整个经济的巨兽。

And do you know who has tamed that beast? Brenda. Who is Brenda? She is a mid-level employee in every finance department, in every business across this stupid nation. And the Excel goddess herself descended from the heavens, kissed Brenda on her forehead, and the sweat from Brenda’s brow allows us to do capitalism. 你知道是谁驯服了这头巨兽吗？Brenda。Brenda 是谁？她是这个愚蠢国家每个金融部门、每个企业的中层员工。Excel 女神从天而降，亲吻 Brenda 的额头。是 Brenda 额头的汗水让资本主义得以运作。

Do you know what’s going to happen? Brenda is going to spend her time hatefully crafting a formula, because anyone who works that closely with Excel does not do anything lovingly. The more time you spend with Excel, the more you hate it. She’s going to birth that formula for a financial report, and then she’s going to send that financial report to a higher-up. 你知道会发生什么吗？Brenda 会花时间带着恨意精心制作公式，因为任何跟 Excel 这么亲近的人都不会带着爱去做事。你花在 Excel 上的时间越多，你就越恨它。她会为一份财务报告憋出那个公式，然后把报告发给一个上级。

And he’s going to need to make a change to the report. Normally he would have sent it back to Brenda. But he’s like, “Oh! I have AI, and AI is probably smarter than Brenda!” And then the AI is going to mess it up real bad, and he won’t be able to recognize it, because he doesn’t understand Excel and because AI hallucinates. You know who’s not hallucinating? Brenda. She hasn’t done acid in 20 years. 上级需要对报告做些修改。通常他会发回给 Brenda。但他会想，哦，我有 AI！AI 可能比 Brenda 更聪明！然后 AI 会彻底搞砸，他却看不出来。因为他不懂 Excel，因为 AI 会产生幻觉。你知道谁不会产生幻觉吗？Brenda。她已经 20 年没嗑药了。

And you might say, well, Excel is just math - clearly AI can’t mess up math, right? There are rules. First off, Excel spits on those rules. Excel is a fickle mistress. 你可能会说，呃，Excel 只是数学，AI 肯定不会搞砸数学，对吧？有规则在啊。但首先，Excel 蔑视规则。而且，Excel 就是个反复无常的小三。

Then he’s going to take that financial report into some kind of important shareholder meeting, and then an important company has its stocks tank, and that has some kind of knock-on effect that impacts the rest of the economy. Do you know who would never do that to us? Brenda. 然后上级会把那份财务报告带到某次重要的股东会议上，然后一家重要的公司股票暴跌，然后产生一些连锁反应，影响到经济的其他部分。你知道谁永远不会那样对待我们吗？Brenda。

“Asian Style Materialism”

Taiwan’s faith is a fundamentally different approach than Western religion, more aligned with earthly superficiality and materialism. The majority of temples, like the above one, are singular affairs, each a varying mash-up of Daoism, Buddhism, ancestor worship, and Chinese folk religion, all jammed with idols, icons, effigies, and other devotional objects. Faith is personal, malleable, and image-based, and most importantly, the connection between humans and their God(s) is very different6. Rather than humans seeking the transcendent Good by devotion to a powerful God, they believe in Gods that can be urged, nudged, and even bet on to satisfy their human wants and needs. Or, rather than building a City of Man to try and approximate the City of God, Chinese folk religions believe the City of Man can win over the City of God, with enough urging, offerings, and temples. That’s a very different relationship, devotional versus transactional, acceptance versus persuasive, even if sometimes the required “proper human behavior” overlaps.

I do believe there’s a direct connection between that lack of/different faith, and the intense Asian-style materialism I’ve now seen in Taiwan, Korea, China, and Hong Kong. In each I’ve seen/felt a pronounced spiritual emptiness, an unbound secular materialism that approaches pleasure-seeking narcissism, that has left me frustrated. The clichéd version of a cultural vapidness akin to gorging on cotton candy, and the collectible industry and its fetishization of the cute, is symptomatic of that.

[China] have a “just good enough” ethos that shows up most noticeably in their construction, where everything is less solid than it appears. This extends beyond the physical, and that “surface level is good enough” attitude makes China a simulacrum, so when you leave China, and land in Taipei, Seoul, or Hong Kong, you experience an unmistakable sensation of, “Ok. This is the genuine thing. It’s all more solid.”

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“Transitions”:

For weeks, I felt an impending loss: the precious fact of having a son was about to be taken away. I wasn’t hung up on dynastic issues. Yet I think there’s something raw, some product of the primitive brain, that makes a father identify with a son. You see yourself in this other, beloved being. I was afraid of losing that.

Of course, transformation works both ways. A change in the person you love changes you as well: a toddler’s newfound independence, a teen’s leaving home. There is a shift in what I can only call the emotional weather—air moister, light different, mornings oddly new. Part of you embraces the change. And part of you remains tethered to the past, stubbornly loyal to the older version of the person.

He had several trans students, he said—his best students. They were serious, precise in their language. “They’re the only students with whom I can have a conversation about the soul,” he insisted. “For the others, that’s a narrow religious concept.” For the trans students, it was an obvious way to talk about identity. They had already made the definitive discovery that the body was malleable, which suggested that some integral part of oneself was other than corporeal. “These people represent the next stage of evolution,” Ajay said, not entirely serious but not quite kidding, either.

In fact, as I was to learn from a subsequent conversation in Berlin, she had never felt herself to be a man at all. “I certainly was a boy,” she told me. “And, like many trans women, I had a protracted boyhood. You see this in gay men, too—the aging-twink syndrome. Anyway, it was when that started to end, and the horizon of manhood approached, that the dissonance became all too clear.”

“How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life”

Readers who prefer their self-help to come with a sheen of erudition can increasingly count on finding similar wisdom about human finitude dispensed in the philosophy section. Turning to philosophy to learn how to live is nothing new, of course. But the explicitly inspirational and instructional valence of much that appears today under that heading, even from academic presses, is striking — as is the apparent consensus that the central task of philosophy is to guide seekers to a greater acceptance of imperfection and insignificance. Sometimes these books focus on a particular school of philosophy, giving readers an “-ism” — existentialism, Buddhism, Taoism, and above all Stoicism, now practically a genre unto itself — with which to identify. Others staple together eclectic smatterings of received ideas into less partisan surveys on how to cope with failure and disillusionment.

At last we have managed to reify not merely social reality but the act of philosophizing itself, treating it, like our uncontrollable world, as a thing: a coping tool you might select, like an ice cream flavor, according to your personal taste.

At some point, however, I realized that I was spending more of my time thinking about my own despair than about the problems outside myself that were supposedly fueling it

While an exaggerated sense of our own importance is a recipe for both political and psychological disaster, it is also possible to overestimate our insignificance. Acceptance shades easily into excuse. With enough practice tolerating imperfection you can learn to forget what it is you’re failing to live up to.

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Henrik Karlsson on Dostoevsky:

If I think something, I don’t need to go through this big roundabout thing, where I “show” it and make it literary. I don’t need to make my writing ambiguous. If I just pay close enough attention to reality, the complexity of reality will seep into the writing and make it ambiguous and charged anyway. There is no need for me to be clever and artful and introduce mystery. Just “telling” it as I see it, if done with enough detail and care, is mysterious enough.

Dostoevsky, unlike most other authors, treats his character as a full individuals, as if they are too big to fit in his head: he isn’t using them as mouth pieces, but listening to them. His books are polyphonic: they are made up of a multitude of voices, each with their own inner logic and perspective, and there is no voice that stands above the others and knows the final truth. There are, of course, many books that have multiple voices in them, especially after Dostoevsky, but when I read these books, there is nearly always a subtle feeling that the characters are being used as dolls by the author, who is trying to get a view across; you can sense what the author thinks of everyone. But in Dostoevsky, each character is so strong and independent that they feel like authors in their own right.

Another thing I love about Dostoevsky is how he incorporates long essayistic segments in his novels, but he always makes sure to undermine the authority of the person expressing the ideas. You get these wonderful philosophical tracts about free will and the Russian church and utilitarianism and the nature of love, but you don’t know what to make of it, really, because the person saying it seems a bit deranged. This is closely connected to his deep respect for the individual: rhetorically convincing the reader of a perspective would undermine their autonomy. Compromising the characters forces the reader to stand alone, to borrow Kirkegaard’s phrase. Since there is no safe authority that you can submit to in Dostoevsky’s books, it is up to you to meet these hurting, strange voices with compassion, critical thinking, and curiosity; you have to evaluate if anything they say is valuable and true and applies to your life. As Ivan in The Brothers Karamazov says, there is nothing more painful to humans than our freedom, that we are responsible for everything we do, and so we long to submit to an authority. But Dostoevsky just won’t let us do that. He forces us to face our freedom.

“Baby Shoggoth Is Listening”:

PR people, always in search of influence, [] are developing a form of writing (press releases and influence campaigns are writing) that’s not so much search-engine-optimized as chatbot-optimized. It’s important, they say, to write with clear structure, to announce your intentions, and especially to include as many formatted sections and headings as you can. In other words, to get ChatGPT to pay attention, you must write more like ChatGPT.

The hour, in other words, is near, and, instead of being short-sighted or risk-averse, we should set to preparing. But for what? Again, for jumping into the AI mind, both to influence it and to hedge against human superfluousness. And how? The best way, Gwern thinks, for people who don’t work in AI at least, is to simply communicate in public to the AIs that already exist. “Much of the value of writing done recently or now is simply to get stuff into LLMs,” so as to teach them, he writes.

In an interview, he elaborated: “By writing, you are voting on the future of the shoggoth using some of the few currencies it acknowledges. If you aren’t writing, you’re kind of abdicating the future or your role in it.”

After all, you vote in elections even though you don’t expect to have a great effect on the result, because it’s important on some absolute moral level to send your wishes into the world. This sort of general moral thinking seems to me valuable here precisely because nobody knows what will happen, whether influence will compound or diminish over time. Turning to already formed instincts about how to interact with vast and complicated systems is a helpfully familiar way of not being paralyzed by weirdness and uncertainty. That sort of moral thinking is also crucial to mounting a case for human value even when compared to superintelligence.

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“Do piped programs run sequentially or in parallel?”:

Piped commands are run in parallel. They keep reading from the pipe until they are terminated, they finish their work, or they receive an end-of-file indicator. When a pipe (or the data read from a pipe) gets too large, the command is terminated to prevent the system from running out of RAM.

“Why Immanuel Kant Still Has More to Teach Us”:

“If a wind should rage in the guts, what matters is the direction it takes. If downwards, then the result is a fart; if upwards, an apparition or a heavenly inspiration.”

The central insight that these disparate thinkers took from Kant is that the world isn’t simply a thing, or a collection of things, given to us to perceive. Rather, our minds help create the reality we experience. In particular, Kant argued that time, space, and causality, which we ordinarily take for granted as the most basic aspects of the world, are better understood as forms imposed on the world by the human mind.

[I]t is impossible for us to ever know “things in themselves”—what Kant called “noumena.” We have access only to “phenomena”—the way things look to us, given the kind of mind we have. “What things may be in themselves, I know not and need not know, because a thing is never presented to me otherwise than as a phenomenon,” Kant insisted.

Ordinarily, we think of good will as a kind of emotion: a person of good will is happy when other people are happy. But, for Kant, emotion is irrelevant to morality. In fact, he believes that if you do the right thing because it makes you happy you don’t have a truly good will, because you are acting out of a kind of self-interest. The only thing that should determine how we act is a pure sense of duty. When a man “does [an] action without any inclination for the sake of duty alone, then for the first time his action has its genuine moral worth,” Kant writes.

“Big Tech’s Futile Attempt to Kill Death”:

The Silicon Valley immortalists, too, are Lockeans to a person. They do not want to be remembered; they want to be remembering. They are so certain that the matter of what a person is is so thoroughly settled that we can simply move on to other theoretical questions that confront us in our quest for immortality.

The commitment to substrate-neutrality is almost as widely accepted as Lockean personal identity, but not so widely as simply to be assumed true. A person, in this reigning metaphysics of Silicon Valley, is a special kind of substrate-neutral code that has the peculiar property of being aware of its own existence. Technology, they believe, can enable us to manipulate that code, to improve on it, and perhaps when the time comes, to transfer it out of a failing mortal coil and into a more robust vessel. Their idea of what a person is, and of what immortality might be, is entirely shaped and limited by the philosophy of liberal individualism: an opportunity to keep on “living one’s best life”, and if possible, of doing so in one’s own apartment.

[T]hose who can afford to be early adopters get to set the terms by privately trialling interventions, while public institutions are nudged to ratify a vision in which the extension of time becomes a status object.

Pursuant to 第 374 章《道路交通條例》 [Cap. 374 Road Traffic Ordinance] —

單車 (bicycle) 指經設計及構造為使用踏板驅動的兩輪車輛。 [bicycle (單車) means a vehicle with 2 wheels designed and constructed to be propelled by the use of pedals.]

Which means —

單車或三輪車基本上享有和汽車一樣的使用道路的權利。同樣地，單車或三輪車使用者在使用道路時也有適當相應的責任，並須遵守一切交通規則（例如遵守所有交通標誌、交通燈號及道路標記），猶如他/她是在駕駛汽車一樣。 [A bicycle or tricycle basically has the same right to use a road as a motor vehicle. Needless to say, the rider of a bicycle or tricycle also has the duty to exercise due care when using the road and to comply with all traffic regulations (e.g. to comply with all traffic signs, traffic lights and road markings) as if he/she is the driver of a motor vehicle.]

“與騎踏單車有關” [Related to cycling], Community Legal Information Centre.

See also “道路使用者守則” [Road Users’ Code] by the Transport Department of Hong Kong:

騎單車 [Cycling]

單車被視為車輛。在道路上，騎單車者有同樣責任遵守適用於駕駛人的規例和規則。 [A cycle is regarded as a vehicle. A cyclist has the same obligation to follow the rules and regulations applicable to drivers when cycling on the road.]

一般駕駛人須遵守的交通標誌、交通燈號、道路標記及交通規則，你也必須遵守。 [You must obey traffic signs, traffic signals, road markings and traffic rules that apply generally to vehicles.]

除非巴士線上豎立了標誌，禁止單車駛入，否則你可沿巴士線行駛。 [You may use bus lanes unless there are signs banning cyclists.]

在「綠色人像」過路處前，如紅燈亮着，你必須在「停車」線前停車等候。只有當綠燈亮起及前路無阻時，方可繼續前進。無論何時，都應讓路給仍在過路的行人。 [At ‘Green man’ crossings, you must stop and wait behind the ‘Stop’ line if the red light is showing. You may only go forward if the green light is showing and the way is clear. Give way to any pedestrians still on the crossing.]

單車徑 [Cycleways]

如道路上有單車線，或路旁有單車徑，你必須在該處行駛，不准使用其他路面。 [If there is a cycle lane, or an adjacent cycleway beside the roadway, you must ride on it and not on any other part of the roadway.]

如單車徑旁有行人徑，不准駛上行人徑。 [If there is a footpath and a cycleway side by side, you must ride on the cycleway only.]

須按照交通標誌及道路標記指示的方向騎單車。 [Ride only in the direction indicated by traffic signs and road markings.]

在雙程單車徑上，靠左行駛。 [On a two-way cycleway, keep to the left.]

「終止」交通標誌或道路標記示明單車徑的終止。你要駛入或回到一般道路，與其他車輛共用路面。 [An ‘End’ traffic sign or road marking may indicate the end of a cycleway. You have to join or return to the normal road and ride with other traffic.]

停泊車輛的規則和指示一般也適用於停泊單車。在設有街燈的道路上，只可在指定供單車停泊的地方停泊單車。然而，任何單車均不得於同一泊車處停泊超過 24 小時。 [The rules and advice for the parking of vehicles generally apply to cycles. On a road with street lighting, you may only park your cycle in a parking place designated for pedal cycles. However, no cycle should be continually parked at the same parking place for more than 24 hours.]

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“Microspeak: Turn Into a Pumpkin”:

In some fields, the idiom turn into a pumpkin means to regress to a previous level of performance after a period of marked (but perhaps inexplicable) improvement.

Wilhelm von Humboldt on “the individual man, and the highest ends of his existence” (via Henrik Karlsson):

The true end of Man, or that which is prescribed by the eternal and immutable dictates of reason, and not suggested by vague and transient desires, is the highest and most harmonious development of his powers to a complete and consistent whole. Freedom is the grand and indispensable condition which the possibility of such a development presupposes; but there is besides another essential,—intimately connected with freedom, it is true,—a variety of situations.

The efficiency of all such unions as instruments of cultivation, wholly depends on the degree in which the component members can succeed in combining their personal independence with the intimacy of the common bond; for whilst, without this intimacy, one individual cannot sufficiently possess himself, as it were, of the nature of the others, independence is no less essential, in order that the perceived be assimilated into the being of the perceiver.

[I]n the highest sense, that each still perceives the beauty and rich abundance of the outer world, in the exact measure in which he is conscious of their existence in his own soul.

Now, whatever man receives externally, is only as the grain of seed. It is his own active energy alone that can convert the germ of the fairest growth, into a full and precious blessing for himself. It leads to beneficial issues only when it is full of vital power and essentially individual. The highest ideal, therefore, of the co-existence of human beings, seems to me to consist in a union in which each strives to develope himself from his own inmost nature, and for his own sake.

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“You Aren’t In The DSM”:

In his 2013 essay “Book of Lamentations,” cultural critic Sam Kriss reviews the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as if it were a work of dystopian literature, a kind of nightmarish encyclopedia in the lineage of Borges. Kriss argues that the manual is a literary object with a deeply unreliable narrator, who writes with a coldly compulsive voice that cannot perceive its own madness. “As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.”

Kriss sees the DSM as a device of absurdity and detachment because he reads it as making assumptions that are not explicitly present in the book itself: that madness is internal, individual, and biologically determined. The DSM’s silence on these issues does little to dispel this interpretation.

Since its first edition in 1952, the DSM has gradually evolved from a slim document meant to standardize psychiatric recordkeeping into a sprawling classification system that shoulders a set of responsibilities it was never designed to bear. It is expected to guide clinical care, enable research, satisfy insurance companies, anchor epidemiological studies, shape patient self-understanding, and serve as a platform for public policy. Each of these demands pulls the manual in different directions.

In advance of the DSM-5, there were hopes for a “paradigm shift” which would incorporate findings from neuroscience and create a more dimensional, biologically based system.The neo-Kraepelinians had believed that with iterative research, biological validators would point towards the hidden disease entities, in much the same way that syphilis had been identified in the early 20th century as a cause of a then-common condition “general paralysis of the insane.” But by the 1990s, it was becoming obvious to scientists that validators of DSM categories did notconverge in any neat fashion.

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Wong, Sampson. Hong Kong Walkology [香港散步學]. White Paper, 2022.

我們常常會以「功能」來理解身邊城市中的一切：車站是用來乘車的、商場是用來購物的、郵局是用來寄信的。每一個地點，彷彿都有著既定功能，我們只是透過這些地點來做到這些功能。

只要一個人對跟城市空間相關的一切充滿熱情，他就是個 Urbanist。每座城市都有極其熱愛談論那座城市中各種各樣地方的人，而且談起來多是如數家珍般充滿激情，借用地理學家段義孚的說法，他們有種「對地方的愛」(Topophilia)，也有強烈的「場所感」（Sense of Place）。

第一種關懷，是練習出一種「Mode」，走在城市裡頭，有辦法「開眼」和打開所有威官，忽然金睛火眼，「見到」最多。這種「Mode」，我時常叫作「掂行掂過」的相反。

有說山、樓、海之壓縮與緊靠，是香港城市地景的最獨特之處，走在百福道，正正可烕受到這種「好香港」的魔幻城市臧。

無可置疑的是，[己連拿利天橋] 盡現香港城市設計和基建所產生的空間，其複雜性之極致，而更有趣是，這種道路規劃的複雜性，竟又好像顧及了行人的經驗，讓置身其中的人，可以享受不可思議的移動體驗。這套落成於一九七九年的天橋系統，充滿現代主義建築高峰期的烏托邦色彩（天橋還特意立了開幕碑）。好多人都把焦點放了在「環形隧道」這個「打卡位」但我帶朋友走到這兒時，最強調的是如何「窮盡」它生產出來的每一重 Layer，看看它可以讓行人走到什麼方位、何等高低，轉換多少視點。

雖說 [「風之塔」] 有少許怪，但並不是批評，在香港，難得有官方的公園可以容納這種「半公共藝術」、「半懷舊」、「半功能性設施」的亭樓（Pavilion），實是有點趣味。在世上許多城市，公共空間裡都有這種難以準確界定、純粹給人多點空間體驗的「微建築」°

香港只有兩條跨海大橋是容許行人走上去散步的（第三條是預計二零二二年峻工的將軍澳跨灣連接路），近年也多人知道了。這兩條大橋，一條是在荃灣與青衣之間的青荃橋，另一條正是鴨脷洲大橋。

這條香港仔避風塘堤壩之不可多得，在於香港大多近海的路都有圍欄，在這兒散步，那種讓人「浮在海中央」的自由之眾，在別處不易找到，可謂香港絕境（曾經在西區貨物裝卸區也可有近海的「無欄杆體驗」，但現在它已不對外開放）。黃昏時分到訪這兒，因為向西一面全無阻隔，日落景色無敵；到了晚上，此處自然也是首屈一指的浪漫之地。

這批市政大廈的設計，線條方正，有許多通道連接四周，看起來有點笨重，所有細節都是功能主導，但有種簡單得來、配合到其「功能上的野心」的簡潔美學。許多八、九十年代的市政大廈，都帶點那個時代日本動畫中機械人基地的味道。

可以是圍繞著彩虹邨走一圈，觀察它如何被幾條交通極繁忙的高速公路包圍著，同時亦有無數的地面路徑可以步進邨裡。從整體的空間佈局來看，每一「面」彩虹邨高樓都像圍牆，組成現代主義住宅的堡壘，像框出了這些板塊之間的生活空間。

[隱藏在彩虹道橋下的奇異微型公園] 一直在我珍藏的隱蔽公共空間清單上，它是香港典型利用剩餘空間造出來的雞肋環境，雖然不實用，亦未必有人鍾愛，但那種「怪雞」，對喜愛在城市尋幽探祕的人來說，就好比美食家眼中的羌婪「識欣賞就會好沉迷」。

而我一直很喜歡主教山，因為它是社區居民自發由下而上營造公共空間的典範，山上有各種街坊親自帶去的設備（包括乒乓球枱！），完全體現了「一人做啲」的精神，令整座小山有非常豐富的細節和自建空間的痕跡。

總覺得沿著九龍城道，在東九龍走廊下散步，有在台北一些地帶行走的況味。高速公路天橋遮蓋了這段路大部分面積，以致橋下氣氛有點陰沉，跟旁邊活躍的街道生活與街市買賣形成反差。我喜歡烈日當空時在有陰影與被太陽曬到的橋下空間之間交替行走，戚受兩邊的差異。

[將軍澳南] 這一帶也成為很好的提醒：雖然業權上和概念上，公與私的空間很分明，但私人的住屋空間建成後，必然產生出「共用」的社會空間，例如在香港，就有屋苑附帶的商場環境、天橋、連接通道等等。雖然這些地帶規矩分明，但不是百分百開放。同時，它們也決定了在附近居住的人，可以擁有怎樣的日常環境。

Nick Heer on Liquid Glass:

iOS’s system theme was not branded from when it was first shown in 2007.

[I]t is not the first time Apple has used the term [“Liquid.”] Since 2018, it has described high-resolution LCD displays with small bezels and non-zero corner radii — like the one on my MacBook Pro — as “Liquid Retina displays”.

Apple is emphasizing another defining characteristic of the Liquid Glass design language, which is that each part of the visual interface is, nominally, concentric with the bezel and corner radius of a device’s display.

[The Liquid Glass] is as much a reflection of the intent of Apple’s human interface designers as it is a contemporary engineering project, far more so than an interface today based on raster graphics. That it is able to achieve such complex material properties in real-time without noticeably impacting performance or, in my extremely passive observations, battery life, is striking.

Apple also tries to solve legibility by automatically flipping the colour of the glass depending on the material behind it. […] If Apple really wanted to improve the contrast of the toolbar, it would have done the opposite. […] It is Apple’s clever solution to a problem Apple created.

It seems Apple agrees [corner radius] is more appropriate in some apps than in others — app windows in System Information and Terminal have a much smaller corner radius.

Even on a device with four rounded display corners, this dedication to concentricity is not always executed correctly. My iPhone 15 Pro, for example, has corners with a slightly smaller radius than an iPhone 16 Pro. The bottom corners of the share sheet on my device are cramped, nearly touching the edge of the display at their apex.

[…] More

“When Is Better to Think Without Words?”

When we put words to a thought, we have to compress something that is like a web in our mind, filled with connections and associations going in all directions, turning that web into a sequential string of words; we have to compress what is high-dimensional into something low-dimensional.

[C]ompression is effortful. It takes intense concentration to find the right words (rather than the sloppy ones that first come to mind), and then to put them in the proper order.

If we can avoid the compression step, and do the manipulations directly in the high-dimensional, non-linguistic, conceptual space, we can move much faster. But this is a big if. Most people, myself included, have too weak mental models to do this kind of processing for complex problems, and so, our thoughts are riddled with contradictions and holes that we often don’t notice unless we try to write them down. We can move faster in wordless thought, but we’re moving at random. If, however, you have deep expertise in an area, like the mathematicians, it is possible to let go of the language compression and do a much faster search.

The insights arrived at wordlessly need to be submitted to the rigor of mathematical notation and logic, to test their validity. It is a sort of feedback mechanism: unless the intuition holds up on the page, it is a false intuition.

The written results also work as relay results. By writing something down and making sure it is solid, we can offload that thought from working memory and instead use it as a building block for the next step of the thought.

[…] More

About the Public Suffix List:

Software using the Public Suffix List will be able to determine cookie inheritance boundaries between domains, preventing cookies set on one domain from being accessible to other domains under the same public suffix. This protects users from cross-domain cookies setting while still allowing individual domains to set their own cookies.

As well as this, the Public Suffix List can also be used to support features such as site grouping in browsers.

“Art Must Act”:

Instead of delineating an artwork’s place in the unfolding of historical tendencies, or revealing its interest as a lens onto social problems, the critic must judge the artist’s action for how it reveals a life.

[E]xtremist ideologies of the Right and Left responded to the real problems of modern society by offering illusory collective identities and narratives that substituted for genuine action and an authentic self. Liberals who opposed these ideologies, they warned, were no less susceptible to such illusions.

In promoting a smug conformism disguised as free thinking, the little magazines, he warned, were drifting into dithering liberalism that substituted a cozy in-group identity for real possibilities of intellectual and political action.

Proponents of the ‘new painting’ responded to this situation by abandoning both politics and aesthetics – the goal of either changing society or of creating beautiful, interesting or otherwise significant objects. They sought instead, with ‘a desperate recognition of moral and intellectual exhaustion’, to ‘act’ through the creation of artworks ‘in the form of personal revolts’.

In referring to them as action, he stressed that these experiments should be judged for their effectiveness in changing the situation and character of those performing them.

He was sceptical whether the ‘personality-myth’ of the ‘lone artist’ was a true resource for resistance or a lure by which artists would let themselves be co-opted.

The only way to reconnect with the experience of the latter, Newman posited, was to use techniques of abstraction as a kind of ascetic purification bypassing art history, moving the spectator ‘beyond the aesthetic into an act of belief’, in a sublime without theology, ideology, ritual or creed.

[…] More

Qiu, Yuwei. Your Near Is My Far. Shandong Publishing House of Literature and Art, 2025 (translations mine):

Mainstream psychologies have reduced the issue of trauma from a social problem to an individual or bodily one. This shift has exacerbated adversarial dynamics between generations (mother–daughter), genders (male–female), and urban–rural divides, leading to such stereotypes as “East Asian mothers are control freaks,” “East Asian women aren’t relaxed enough,” or “rural women are ‘brothers’ subordinates.’” The intent here is not to deny the existence of certain social phenomena, but to point out that we often mistake consequences for causes, treating them as mere matters of personal choice while neglecting the historical and social conditions behind these behaviors.

Many Western psychologists in recent years have also begun to critique this concept of self, arguing that it alienates people and breeds isolation. It leaves individuals feeling lonely, anxious, and narcissistic. In my clinical work with older generations of women, I have come to see that their seemingly “ineffective” behaviors are not merely expressions of narcissistic traits but responses shaped by their own needs and the historical context they lived through.

Gradually, I realized that as a therapist, I must not only study mainstream psychological frameworks but also maintain a critical awareness of their underlying ideology, pursuing localized explorations of my own. To interpret trauma, one cannot stop at the dichotomy between individual and collective; one must place it within larger social contexts and complex power relations.

The process from “Why can’t she understand me?” to “This is something she simply cannot give me” is a journey of recognition.

[…] More

“Apple’s Liquid Glass Design Prioritizes Content Over Tools”:

Yes, many people are largely passive consumers of content, whether we’re talking about Web pages, podcasts, or streaming videos. For those people, there is little beyond content, and Liquid Glass’s deprecation of controls may allow them to continue their consumption with less distraction. But that’s not a lifestyle to aspire to, reminiscent as it is of the humans in WALL-E—perpetually reclined in floating chairs, mindlessly consuming entertainment.

For the most part, Apple has done a good job of making them highly usable and efficient, but at the same time, the company’s designers seem to want to pare away ever more of the physical instantiation. Bezels get smaller, keyboards get thinner, and ports disappear, all in the service of giving way to the content on the screen. But tools aren’t necessarily better for being smaller—function must dictate form, not the other way around.

Wikipedia editors on Signs of AI Writing:

When talking about biology (e.g., when asked to discuss a given animal or plant species), LLMs tend to put too much emphasis on the species' conservation status and the efforts to protect it, even if the status is unknown and no serious efforts exist, and may strain to derive symbolism from things like taxonomy.

While many of these words are strong AI tells on their own, an even stronger tell is when the subjects of these verbs are facts, events, or other inanimate things. A person, for example, can highlight or emphasize something, but a fact or event cannot. The "highlighting" or "underscoring" is not something that is actually happening; it is a claim by a disembodied narrator about what something means.

While human editors and writers often use em dashes (—), LLM output tends to use them more often than nonprofessional human-written text of the same genre, and uses them in places where humans are more likely to use commas, parentheses, colons, or (misused) hyphens (-). LLMs especially tend to use em dashes in a formulaic, pat way, often mimicking "punched up" sales-like writing by over-emphasizing clauses or parallelisms. LLMs overuse em dashes because they were trained (sometimes illegally) on novels, and novelists have always used em dashes more often than laypeople do.