Preface
This is a record and reflection of my life from 2023-02-07 to 2023-02-12.
This week saw little progress in work, yet the time after the New Year seemed to pass particularly quickly. Though it felt like I hadn’t accomplished much of value, I found myself in a state of busyness. I finally started investing considerable time in handling additional projects, which deviated from my original expectations and brought some anxiety, which I’m slowly working through.
This week, at the request of the company’s operations team, I wrote an article about Cosmos. The writing and publishing process sparked some realizations about my attitude, leading to reflections on my original writing motivation and humility towards technology.
Over the weekend, I attended a concert at the National Centre for the Performing Arts. I had long wanted to listen to a symphony orchestra but rarely had the opportunity, so I finally discovered a new weekend destination. I also chatted with Randy, the creator of my current comment system Cusdis (and reported a few bugs). He struck me as a pure technologist, and I hope to contribute to the development of Cusdis v2. There were many other interesting events as well.
Open Source Budget
In Randy’s article “I Set Myself a $20 Monthly Open Source Donation Budget”, I saw his philosophy and attitude towards open source projects, which I found intriguing and inspired me to establish a similar open source budget for myself.
My current plan is to set aside at least $20 (about 130 RMB) or an equivalent value budget per month, flexibly choosing based on my daily use and tech stack. I will select the following projects for donation:
- Independent bloggers and developers who have inspired me
- Projects that I frequently use in my side projects and have solved concrete problems
- Interesting open source tools and services that I use frequently
Currently, the projects I’m donating to are:
- Reorx, a developer I greatly admire. His independent blog, attitude towards tools and exploration, and some of the projects he’s developed have been immensely beneficial to me. My “Yu’s Life” channel is forked from his “Reorx’s Footprints”, which has reshaped my information input and output flow over the past six months. His recently released “GitHub - jsoncv” also came in handy when I was restructuring my resume.
- immersive-translate, an immersive translation plugin led by owen. It’s an interesting tool, and owen is diligently developing the v2 version. I joined the team early on and am now taking on some development requirements. When I learned during team discussions that some servers were needed, I provided two.
You can see which projects and individuals I’ve donated to on GitHub Sponsor.
Writing Motivation
I’ve always enjoyed writing, especially in the past six months when my output has reached a decent frequency and quality. Through long-term blogging, I’ve made many friends and occasionally received some good opportunities. But as my writing skills have improved with accumulation and I’ve often received positive feedback, I seem to have fallen into a writing trap at times. A recent incident gave me a wake-up call.
The company’s media operations team commissioned an article from me before the New Year, with no restriction on the theme as long as it was related to the company’s business technology. I agreed at the time because I had plenty of time, but I put it aside during the New Year holiday. When I was urged to submit after returning to work in Beijing, I remembered but didn’t want to do a perfunctory job. So I chose a major theme of Cosmos underlying chain and consensus analysis, and spent an evening writing it.
There wasn’t much to it when I submitted the draft, as most of the knowledge points were derived from summarizing and organizing a book. I thought there might only be some minor adjustments to details. However, when it was handed over to a leader well-versed in underlying chains for review, the following dialogue ensued.
Upon checking the shared link used for proofreading, I found that he had made very detailed annotations on some questionable details in my article, many parts with papers and citations.
At first, I just wondered if I had been too blindly trusting of the books I read and knowledge points, lacking the spirit of doubt and verification that I should have had.
Reflecting further on the entire process of this incident, I realized that my mindset had undergone some subtle changes. I seem to have always been quite adept at wielding words, sometimes organizing and summarizing knowledge points and presenting them in an easily readable and interesting way, sometimes expressing and presenting some of my own ideas and thoughts through words.
Words seem to have become my habitual mode of expression, and because of the considerable positive feedback, I seem to have lost sight of my original purpose somewhat. Writing itself stems from the exploration and presentation of life and some things and technologies, and secondarily from sharing and creating value for others. I seem to have gradually made sharing an end in itself.
There’s a saying in the Analects of Confucius:
“When substance prevails over form, we have rusticity; when form prevails over substance, we have pedantry. Only when substance and form are properly blended do we have the superior man.” — Analects of Confucius, Chapter 6
This is quite applicable to writing. When substance (the meat of the content in writing) is too much and form (literary flair/technique) is too little, it lacks the pleasure of drawing people in to keep reading and loses the charm of writing; when form exceeds substance, it tends to be hollow, lacking substantive content, and loses the meaning of writing. Only when form and substance are well-balanced can we say it’s a good article.
I think I may be more or less worried about tilting towards form over substance, but fortunately, this incident served as a timely warning. In the future, I will be more cautious with my words.
Humility Towards Technology
This actually relates to a quite discussable topic, namely, the humility towards technology.
I think people in this industry can more or less realize the boundlessness of technology. Getting started with programming or making it a profession is just the beginning; there are too many people worthy of admiration and too many interesting technologies.
I actually entered this industry with a filter. When I was still an English major undergraduate, I had too many fantasies and expectations for this industry and profession. Therefore, after I got into development work as I wished, I often reminded myself to always have a humble heart towards technology.
Because I’ve seen too many full-stack open-source masters calling themselves “front-end developers who can write a bit of back-end” or “making little things that people like”, I really like this attitude. Technology itself is a means of fun and realizing one’s ideas, not a tool that needs to be shown off. Only by holding such a concept towards technology can one continuously learn and grow.
Interesting Things
Software
I used to use Apple Music a lot, but some of its operational logic is really frustrating. The playlist function is practically useless, and due to some closed nature of the interface, it’s difficult to access your own data. Therefore, even though my Telegram channel was originally configured to automatically sync liked songs from Spotify, each time I would hear a good song on Apple Music, I would go to Spotify to search for it. And due to the ads in the free version and the limitations on skipping songs during trials, it was very troublesome, so I rarely synced my songs.
Recently, Ni, Zhan, and I are migrating our iCloud Family to escape Cloud on Guizhou. After stopping the original service and comparing prices in the Hong Kong region, we found it’s better to just migrate to Spotify. So I happily got Spotify Premium, which is much more comfortable to use. Plus, after watching the “The Playlist” series earlier, there’s always a strange sense of participation!
Along with the Netflix family membership that Zhan got from his Hong Kong broadband subscription, the audio-visual entertainment aspect now has a seamless experience!
Input
Although most interesting inputs are automatically synced to the “Yu’s Life” Telegram channel, I still select some to list here, which feels more like a newsletter.
Articles
- Hackers and Customers: Can Open Source Software Be Commercialized? | Tison’s Book
- ChatGPT is a blurry JPEG of the web
- My View on ChatGPT: Why Google Lost Hundreds of Billions of Dollars | CoolShell
- The 4 Levels of Personal Knowledge Management - Forte Labs
- The latest gossip on BFT consensus - Tendermint
- HotStuff: BFT Consensus in the Lens of Blockchain
Podcasts
Here are some podcasts I’ve been listening to:
Videos
Similarly, I’ve also recorded some interesting videos I’ve watched:
- Your Understanding of AI Might Be Fundamentally Wrong [Some Meta Questions About AI]
- Does a Merit-Based Society Produce Depressed and World-Weary Individuals?
- Publicly Calling for Unfollowing?! One Video Sweeps the Nation, Is Yige Caixiang’s Rise to Fame Really Accidental?
- Did My Music Competition Bring Out So Many Big Names? [Just for Fun Works PICK]
- How Many Steps Does It Take to Restart a 20-Year-Old Sony Monitor and Game Console?
Output
Blog
Personal Life Snapshots
Life
I spent most of this week at the company, so I was especially looking forward to the weekend.
On Saturday, I went to the National Centre for the Performing Arts with senior Bo Yi to listen to a Beethoven concert. Previously, I often went to the Philharmonic Light Music Orchestra in Sanlitun to listen to some small-scale themed performances, such as Hayao Miyazaki, La La Land, and Century Classics. The small space had a great atmosphere, but I also wanted to experience the grandeur of a symphony orchestra, and finally, my wish came true!
Interestingly, after the concert, I bought a Mozart brooch (because he’s cuter) and made the following playful comment.
Today’s whimsical thought: “Just after listening to a Beethoven concert, I turned around and bought a Mozart brooch. I wonder if he would be sad?”
After posting this tweet, I coincidentally met a Twitter friend, Noy, who was also at the National Centre for the Performing Arts at the same time. I found out that he’s also involved in web3 development and likes to watch plays and concerts on weekends. We arranged to meet, and we can go watch together in the future!
There was another small surprise when we were walking to our seats at the theater. We passed by a handsome foreign guy who said, “I love his hair.” It’s always nice to receive kindness from strangers. Now with my blue long hair, I’m becoming more and more anime-like, with a 300% turn-around rate.
Nie Nie
Nie Nie Waking Me Up
Nie Nie climbing onto the blanket and giving me a punch because I wouldn’t get up to open her can of food.
Coquettish Nie Nie
Recently, Nie Nie has been particularly good at being coquettish, often tilting her head on the desk.
After sharing with friends, Nie Nie single-handedly raised the standard for other people’s kittens eating cat food, haha.
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