Notes

“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.]

“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.

It is, on the other hand, undeniable that, whereas physical variety has so vastly declined, it has been succeeded by an infinitely richer and more satisfying intellectual and moral variety, and that our superior refinement can recognize more delicate differences and gradations, and our disciplined and susceptible character, if not so firmly consolidated as that of the ancients, can transfer them into the practical conduct of life […]

“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.

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。

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.

In a column view in Finder, for example, there is a hard vertical edge below the rounded corner of the ostensibly floating sidebar. I am sure there are legibility reasons to do this but, again, it is a solution to a problem Apple created.

“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.

When writing, there are all sorts of details that need to be specified for our paragraphs to make sense, and if we don’t know what should go into a sentence, it is all too easy to fill in the uncertain parts with guesses. At least my brain has the most miraculous autocomplete function and supplies me with credible endings to any sentence I start—often credible nonsense. But when the nonsense is there on the page, next to thoughts I’ve settled through hard work, it looks respectable! It often takes considerable work to realize I’ve fooled myself.

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.

If both the pose of the isolated, marginal creator defying social conventions and that of the freethinking intellectual rejecting mass society had become deceptive guises for a failing liberal order, then perhaps the solution, after all, was to work out paths for action from within, and not outside of, the structures that seemed to thwart it.

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.

I came to see that empathy rests on two pillars: psychological energy and the understanding capacity. The former depends on inner maturity, the latter on our ability to revisit the past with the client and re-experience their feelings of that time. Both are indispensable. For a long while, I thought understanding mattered most, but later I saw that without sufficient psychological energy, it is nearly impossible to transcend one’s own perspective and truly understand another, especially someone who has hurt you. A colleague once remarked: “When my psychological energy is low, my imagination traps me in deep unease.” Empathy cannot be forced. An emotional flow beyond the self, it arises naturally after one has worked through a great deal of grief and developed the internal strength to hold it.

“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.

Chris Arnade in “Walking Hong Kong (Kowloon, really)”:

The only way to cross that eight-lane fenced-in road, the one with monstrous semis pulling shipping containers, or buses whose center of gravity seems too high for the speed it takes the curves, is to go into the Hoi Tat Estate’s mall, up to the second floor, next to the Fairwoods diner (more on those later), then across the long bridge to the adjacent mall, where you can weave your way three floors down through a series of zigzagging escalators to the food court, where the four-block-long underground passageway to where you want to go is, assuming you take the passageway branching off at three o’clock on the compass face, not eleven, six, or nine.

Being a pedestrian in a city shouldn’t be the equivalent of a mouse in a maze, or a Super Mario Bros-style series of levels to complete, but in Hong Kong it is, which coupled with the density, heat, noise, and general sense of barely contained clamorous mayhem, makes it a punishing city to be in, one that’s aggressive, intense, and exhausting, one you feel you’re constantly battling2.

So while I stand by my opening statement that Hong Kong is not walkable, that doesn’t mean it’s not a singular and fascinating city, a humid gem in an ocean of global uniformity, and one that is ultimately rewarding as a pedestrian.

在华强北看到 Gaga 心想开在这是要给谁吃。

最后吃了 Gaga。

“Intimacy” (fiction):

I could not help feeling bored by the accounts whenever I encountered them—how granular they were, how tedious. How often they repeated the same material facts: the little clammy hands, the sleeplessness, the lack of time, the mess and splintered focus, the wonder of new speech and its ingenious formations. The problem, I thought, was that these descriptions never reached beyond themselves, beyond the concrete reality of the situation. But what was the purpose of their repetition? Was it just that we yearned to be heard? Was there a genuine need within this yearning, as basic as nourishment?

[T]he writer started talking about a book he had read in his youth which he had recently come across by chance. At one time, he had included this book among the titles that made up his formative reading, but now he could remember nothing about it. Rereading it, he found it confusing. In fact, he had no idea what it was about.

“What I can’t figure out,” the author said, “is whether I was smarter back then or just pretending to understand what I read. That wouldn’t be unusual, you know. One is in such a hurry to get an education, to have read it all.”

Ayşegül Savaş, the author, discussing the story:

We meet the narrator at a moment when her identity is in flux. She is holding on to an idea of what a writer should be, even though this model no longer seems authentic to her. At the same time, she is not very comfortable in her identity as a mother, or, rather, how this identity has merged with her life as a writer—that is to say, with her imagination. It’s easier for her to keep these two parts of herself separate, but it also means that her identity as a writer is not true to who she really is.

nothing constitutes an offense in a party where the music may stop at anytime

Kindle 中国拾遗

而在这块萎缩的领地里，各家出版社的电子出版业务，已经从几年前被寄予厚望的“全村的希望”，迅速沦落为食之无味、弃之可惜的“路边一条”。朋友半开玩笑地告诉我，现在社里的共识是，对于那些有点畅销潜质的爆款书，电子版“能不上就不上，能晚上就晚上”。

在 Kindle 业务的最后几年，一个显著的变化是电子书的价格越来越贵。一本实体书定价 60 块，它的 Kindle 版就敢卖到 50 块，甚至更高。当时不少读者对此怨声载道，认为亚马逊吃相难看。但正是这种被读者诟病的“高价策略”，催生了一个短暂却极具想象空间的“黄金时代”。

Kindle 之后，国内再也没有一个电子书平台，有能力或者有意愿，去复制这样的高价单本销售模式。以微信读书为代表的“优等生”们，选择了另一条道路：低价包月。

One dies twice, I see it clearly:
To cease to love and to be lovable,
It’s an unbearable death:
To cease to live is nothing.

Chris Arnade:

I began, somewhere in my forth year of grad school, when I was finally exposed to the current cutting edge of physics, to believe that the whole construct of modern physics, while great at advancing technology, maybe wasn’t so great at answering those fundamental questions.

Physics, during the early 1900s, had gone from using math to construct toy models of the known physical world, to forcing reality to agree to the math. From letting reality drive the math, to letting math drive reality.

I wanted to understand the universe at a level that when I try to explain it to someone at a McDonald’s, I’m not laughed at. Or not reported to the cops as an escaped inmate. Not because I think normies have a lock on what’s true, but that I think the truth shouldn’t be so odd that it doesn’t pass the sniff test. Or, to put it another way, the truth is a very human thing, and it shouldn’t be instinctively off putting to other humans.

I also began to think a little differently about religion that last year of grad school, not as a route to the truth, but as a low bar that science hadn’t managed to clear, provoking my physicist friends over beers by telling them that the Big Bang was only Genesis dressed up in fancy Math. Something I more firmly believe now.

There was a sense in the air that we were approaching a nirvana on earth, the payoff for centuries of scientific and rational thought. We had found the correct mixture of free markets, good governance, and smart technology, all available because of a dedication to a lucid intellectualism unchained to emotion. The 90s was a combination coming out victory dance for the technocratic class, and we were cocky, including me.

Sorries Seem to Have the Harder Words:

People use longer words when apologizing and interpret apologies with longer words as more apologetic.

Iconicity in language is the non-arbitrary relationship between form and meaning.

The type of iconicity that is investigated in this paper, however, is context-dependent and will be referred to as dynamic iconicity. It is not between a word's form and its meaning but between a word's form and the meaning or attitude that the speaker would like to express in that context, not necessarily via the semantics of the word.

Dynamic iconicity, in contrast, examines whether the form of words that are semantically unrelated to effort (e.g. genuinely) can signal effort, and are even produced in order to signal effort, in certain contexts.

While prior studies focused on the cost that accompanied the message, it is possible that making the message itself costlier, that is, requiring more effort to produce, can also increase its perceived sincerity.

Prior work in pragmatics lends support to the claim that the effort one puts into communicating a message influences message interpretation. A general assumption is that both speakers and listeners aim to minimize their effort. Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson, 1995) further proposes that speakers produce messages that they believe are relevant, that is, that the cognitive effects that they would bring about in the listener are worth the cognitive effort of processing them. Similarly, Gricean Maxims (Grice, 1975) assume that communication is cooperative, and that, among others, speakers adhere to the maxim of manner, namely, to be clear. Deviations from the clearest formulation should thus give rise to a conversational implicature.

Ann Goldstein on Translating Elena Ferrante’s “Neapolitan Quartet”:

I feel that’s the way I get closer to the writer is just by staying close to the text; by not trying too hard; not inserting myself. If you’re a copy editor or an editor, I think that’s part of your job in a way, right? We used to talk about this at the New Yorker, sometimes: the goal is to make a writer sound as much like him or herself as possible. Not like you. I feel like that’s a good standard, at least for me, for translation.

You shouldn’t feel like you’re reading something in English, but you also shouldn’t feel like you’re struggling over the grammar or over the structure. You should be able to read. So there’s something in-between, something like that.

Then starting with the third book, actually I didn’t even read it. I just translated it. I read it when I was working on it, but I have never read the four novels altogether.

When the TV show came out, they did speak in dialect, but it was subtitled in Italian as well as in English, so that’s the level.

One other thing I think is big is that Italian has the ability to add suffixes to words that give them a nuance that English doesn’t have. One of the obvious ones that everybody would know would be like Fortissimo: if you say Forte is “strong,” and Fortissimo is very strong.

A lot of Italians write run-on sentences; I think I heard somebody say once it was a paratactic language, which I think is true—that the clauses just lie there beside each other, and you have to sometimes put the relationship in.

apparently it’s just beyond the capacity of my brain to manage more than two phones

“Queer Unintelligibility in China”:

Homosexuality in China was never technically criminalised or pathologised in the same way. Rather than targeting homosexuals for persecution, the Chinese State—from the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911) through the Republican era (1911–49) and into the People’s Republic of China (PRC, 1949–present)—has largely rendered them invisible through systemic denial of their existence.

Pointing out that in the Qing archives there is not ‘a single case of consensual sodomy being punished in the absence of other, more serious crimes’, Sommer (2000: 116) argues that what bothered Qing lawmakers was not the sexual orientation of the partners but homosexual rape.

one of the most striking cases occurred in 1991, when a man named Lin Jiabao in Anhui filed an official complaint against his daughter and her same-sex partner, accusing them of crimes of ‘tongxinglian’ and demanding their arrest. Unsure how to respond, the local authorities forwarded the case to the Public Security Department, which eventually issued a statement that became the first instance of a juridical interpretation of tongxinglian in Chinese law. According to the statement, tongxinglian had no legal definition in Chinese law and therefore the reported incident had no merit. In his analysis of the proceedings, Chinese legal scholar Zhou Dan (2009) argues that the significance of the Lin case lies less in what it reveals about the treatment of homosexuals than in what it demonstrates about law as a continual process of rhetorical suturing and articulation.

生成式 AI 最不擅长的可能是生成:

前者 [ 评估 ] 追求的是对数据分布的深刻理解，希望达到全局上的客观综摄。后者 [ 输出 ] 追求的则是在这个分布里试图获得一个不平凡的结果，换句话说，是对这个分布的一个抵抗而非服从。

也就是说，评估需要的是理解分布，而创造追求的是打破分布，或者说，是在另一个自己内心的理想分布中做采样。