Weekly 11 - I'm lazy, but also busy.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Given that I repeatedly mentioned feeling "so lost" in my previous few weeklies, along with my dad's miraculous omniscience regarding my daily life and thoughts, I've started suspecting whether he saw my blog while surfing the internet, or if it was just some quirky recommendation algorithm. Plus, I previously discovered that my dad had an AI make a specific skill in the openclaw environment I set up for him, designed to monitor my blog! That scared me so much I almost didn't dare to publish my daily life weeklies anymore.
However, many friends from all corners of the world have also found me here. Compared to dry technical content, it seems most people (mainly myself) prefer reading about "what this person's life looks like." It reads like interesting prose or a short story, and it's easy to digest.
But I still have a bunch of miscellaneous thoughts I've wanted to write down for a long time, which have been sitting quietly in my memos without seeing the light of day. I might as well organize them all at once. It feels like finally throwing out a massive pile of delivery boxes I've been hoarding for a month...
Besides, doing this makes me seem like a deep thinker 😁, and it helps dodge those weird AI summaries. So, for now, I'll hold off on writing about daily life.
I plan to secretly delete that skill when I go home; the feeling of "Big Father is watching you" is just too terrifying.
I'm lazy
When I wrote my last weekly, I said, "I don't know what I should do."
Then, during the Chinese New Year, my dad suddenly turned to me in the passenger seat and said, if you feel lost, just follow what your heart desires; focusing on doing one thing well is enough.
I nodded, then opened the AI and asked it: "What should I study?" Looking at a huge pile of things to do, I was full of ambition. But a few days into the new semester, I got lazy again.
At that time, I was reflecting in confusion: what on earth should I study? I couldn't find an answer.
So, during those few days before the semester started, my mental state every day was belike:
- Recently I found that maybe I should trace back to the source and study my favorite, Network Engineering.
I want to implement some network protocols or network communication stuff. I find myself very interested in it. How wonderful would it be if I could implement my own exclusive network communication method!- But what's the use? Let's ask the AI. Wow, it can increase my intrinsic value, and it's very interesting too!
- When I first started, choosing a language, choosing a protocol... It's so hard 🤯! I still want to do the CSAPP lab for my coursework, I still have to learn a new language, Rust, and I still have to finish playing my game!
- Oh, it's late. Time to take a shower... I should really go take a shower. Time to sleep... I should really go to sleep!
Then a month passed, and today it turned into this:
- What should I do? We need to have a meeting after the holidays, but my project hasn't had any activity since the last meeting. What do I do? I feel like that model doesn't work well, I should change it! But it hasn't been integrated or tested yet, and I'm being pushed... I'm so nervous, I better start doing it immediately...
- Wait, this assignment is due for review right after the holidays?! Why is it so hard?! AI generating...
- Suddenly I'm told that the product needs to be submitted the week after next, and I need to write a business plan and fill out an application form? I need to deal with this quickly...
- Oh, the sun is out today. I guess I'll go bask in the sun.
- Basking in the sun is so nice.
- Just hurriedly finished dinner... Ah, I still have a weekly post that I've dragged out for a month... Let's write it down...
- If only I could turn into multiple agents to do the work for me, I'm so lazy.
It's almost exactly the same state as a certain young man back in the day.
I'm busy, but also lazy. What an interesting quote, perfectly suited as a blog title. But in my case, it should probably be reversed into I'm lazy, but also busy. Let me write down some lazy reflections.
Miscellaneous Thoughts
My ramblings from a month ago...
Where did the "Chat" in ChatGPT go?
"Isn't it great that the AI industry is differentiating itself? Ecological niches won't overlap, and every company can smoothly get a piece of the pie..."
This was a casual remark I made while chatting about AI with a friend. While it seems naive now, it's a question I've continuously struggled to understand.
ChatGPT used to be unmatchable in emotional narrative just like the old 4o, Gemini aggregated the Google ecosystem to create an ecological AI, Claude specialized in coding and writing... I often raise an idealist's doubt: Why are all AIs now fiercely competing over multimodal capabilities and coding skills? Why does everyone want a piece of the same track?
Ever since GPT-5 came out, I really can't stand its inquiry style—"Do you want me to give you..."—which is hardcoded into its prompt. But given its excellence in mathematics and image recognition, I still gritted my teeth and paid for a $20/month Plus membership once. Later, it was replaced by ChatGPT Team, it's just not worth me spending 150 RMB every month.
Now, the way GPT-5.3 speaks doesn't sound at all like an LLM trained on normal human language. That emotional empathy of 4o has completely disappeared. The "chat" in ChatGPT has truly been abandoned without a trace. OpenAI even started implanting ads for free users on ChatGPT, prioritizing advertisers' products when the AI recommended items. Couple that with OpenAI's recent announcement of signing an agreement with the US military...
Many of the people investing in technology are young idealists, pure-hearted individuals truly harboring great dreams of changing the world.
Being tainted with politics always feels like being tainted with profit, with deceit, with confrontation, and with war.
Perhaps we are experiencing a sort of Oppenheimer-esque helplessness.
Are we all experiencing a taming of thoughts?
The so-called shaping of a worldview and values always feels a bit creepy to me. The way we evaluate what is good or bad is entirely the result of our minds being tamed by societal views. This includes large language models; we feed them corpora of existing societal views, which then react back upon the taming of our own minds. I feel a bit absurd that, since childhood, I seem to have been instilled with a fixed idea that "this is good, and that is bad." And the earlier I hear an evaluation, even if my brain retains a shred of doubt, the more firmly it becomes imprinted as a mental stamp.
"Your first thought is often what society, family, and genetics have taught you; your second thought is your true self."
I suddenly came across the Survival Manual of Shanghai Jiao Tong University. When I first entered college, almost all my seniors said this was a good manual that exposed the truth about university.
After personally experiencing a few years of college, looking at some of the evaluations in the book again, I suddenly thought: My ongoing assessment of it is simply, "Seniors say it's good, so I think it's very good too."
But my reading of it was merely superficial—I skimmed it for 10 minutes once.
Why do we think this book is good? Is it because it indeed "rebelliously" shattered our long-held illusions about the beauty of college youth, and resonated with the reality of university within our inner hearts?
Or did this book actually teach me something or help me in any way?
I reflected on myself. After finishing this book, it seems I only found a validation of my rebellious psychology, rather than truly gaining cognitive insight...
I just went back and read the motivation chapter again.
Many of the ideas in there did indeed resonate with me again. On the things I hesitated over, they explicitly told me: "Your doubts are reasonable. We are telling you that what you feel is wrong is indeed wrong."
It revealed many "truths," but more importantly, it wasn't an inspiration. It was a sense of validation—a confirmation of my own cognition. It reminded me of this excerpt I saw before:
In a massive, long-standing system filled with authority (school systems, traditional societal expectations), acting as an individual to generate doubts is an extremely lonely and self-exhausting endeavor.
Reading the Survival Manual of Shanghai Jiao Tong University often gives people a sense of "validation." But the trap of validation is also obvious:
- It might leave you stuck in the comfort zone of "I knew it all along."
Criticizing feels great, but criticism itself doesn't produce any value. You know the courses are watered down, GPAs are meaningless, and an exam-oriented mindset is toxic—but then what?- It provides "what is wrong," rather than "what is right."
The book talks a lot about what to oppose, but what specifically should be built? What are your own goals? It can't answer that for you.- Verification easily evolves into identity recognition.
Being part of "the awake ones" becomes a label in itself, a new kind of conformity.
It suddenly occurred to me that large language models are the same. LLMs are essentially the amalgamation of humanity's "first thoughts." If everyone only relies on the AI's answers, or only relies on the "Survival Manuals" summarized by predecessors, everyone will simply be forever parroting someone else's "first thoughts." A person's ability to think actively and arrive at new conclusions is too precious.
Has AI replaced our thinking?
Because of this, I increasingly feel that lazily "tossing my thinking and answering over to generative LLM responses" is unsettling and worth panicking over. Looking around at the assignments submitted by everyone in Computer Networks, the panic deepens, as I sense this is increasingly becoming the new norm for the future era.
I feel like an idiot feeding coins into a slot machine, putting in one coin after another, waiting for a result, then testing it, then tossing in another coin, and waiting for another result.
I increasingly feel that shifting this rare act of thinking over to LLMs is like tossing a stone into a deep pool, never to hear an echo.
I have always believed that human thinking capability is the true competitive edge of the future. "Discovering that AI is 'back-feeding' into our rigid minds"—that is something worth panicking over...
Different environments in which people grow up birth different values; we all have our own Hamlet.
But thinking about it, if humanity's underlying tone is just being lazy, it suddenly all becomes understandable. Overthinking it all, in the end, is really nothing more than trying to remind oneself to be busy again.
I'm lazy, but also busy.
I've been writing this article for a month, and today is already April 1st.
Senior Ziyi reminded me during the last meeting that I should do the things I need to do in advance, but unfortunately, I'm still too lazy.
And the more I write, the more I feel this article is like my left brain attacking my right brain compared to "Why Not Just Let Myself Sink?" . Outwardly, I was encouraging a positive downward spiral before... but actually, my underlying tone of being lazy hasn't changed. However, my actionability is just a V-shaped curve, or maybe a W shape, or even a Z flipped and rotated 90 degrees...
Many scattered thoughts are really too fragmented, and I still haven't combined them into a cohesive literary tone. Narrative ramblings have long been gathered on my memos page. A month ago, I was thinking about writing something in a melancholic style, but once I got busy, I felt like I didn't have time to be melancholic. Let me just focus on the things in front of me first.
I'm still lazy, but getting busy is still useful.
I just happened to be reading Teacher Airing's blog recently. While reading his recent essays, I accidentally stumbled upon this passage, which inspired me a bit (and also prompted me to continue being busy; without this passage, this blog post probably wouldn't exist). I'll put it at the very end.
Learning requires purpose and interest, especially programming. However, don't take as many detours as I did. Just focus on one language or one direction (I always mock myself as a full-stack engineer who knows nothing). If someone can guide you, that's even better (feel free to contact me~).
Don't learn too much or go too far and forget why you set out in the first place. I feel like a lost little lamb, having walked down every fork in the road, forgetting why I originally wanted to learn programming or why I took software engineering as a second major. Thinking back now, it's probably still out of interest. However, that interest is really not as strong as it used to be.
Write blogs diligently to record your problems and moods. Always remember: we don't live for the sake of knowledge, but we learn knowledge for the sake of living. So, live well, live happily, and live wonderfully. Let bugs not bother you; if you really encounter a difficult problem, just leave it there for a while!
Master knowledge outside of programming. Not to cater to the "Internet+" strategy, but for yourself. Preferably some humanities and social sciences knowledge. Learn a bit more; don't let your brain revolve solely around computer logic. Remember, we are human beings, complex human beings.
Don't enjoy being lonely. Cherish the people in front of you and learn to live. Communicate more with others and participate more in extracurricular activities. Love yourself, but also love others.
However, given that throughout the whole text I've been saying we should have our own thoughts, this article is also just chaotically rambling... Thinking is inherently a product derived from other thoughts, and when a lazy person gets busy, they will also have lazy thoughts. Thinking about it slyly, agreeing with others' thoughts should probably count as one's own thought too, right?