Weekly 12 - People
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Preface
I've finally picked the blog back up and resumed my weekly monthly writing.
April wasn't so overwhelmingly busy that I forgot I had a blog. It's just that switching to a new device caused some very strange repository sync problems, which meant I couldn't write on my phone anymore… Getting started was hard…
But I've recently updated the publishing workflow, and now I can finally write and publish whatever I like from my phone.
That lowers the barrier to getting started. Hopefully, I can keep the blog going from here~
Writing by Humans
I've always believed that writing needs honesty. In good writing, you can read the person's feelings. It's as if you've stepped into the writer's perspective and are experiencing something new, rather than reading an AI-generated, imitative, cobbled-together approximation of a human voice.
A writing voice is hard to imitate. It's shaped by personal experience and developed through writing, again and again.
That's why I feel a sense of loss when a personal website stops updating. So often, I see its creator beginning to doubt blogging itself, worrying or lamenting that “there's no point writing this,” or “recording these little things on my personal site will lower its quality.”
Writing consistently has meaning for the self in its own right. I've always thought it doesn't matter whether what you write is “useful.” The real audience is simply your past, present, and future selves.
That's especially true of blogging, technical or personal. It may be one of the rare kinds of work humans will still be continually creating in the future.
Human involvement feels particularly necessary in technical writing…
Imagine opening a popular GitHub tutorial, clicking into its GitBook, and finding that the very first sentence is “Let's start with the conclusion,” or “In the most straightforward terms…” Or phrasing like this:
Formulaic reading fatigue, the “false clarity” of stock sentence patterns, an assumed air of authority: they make the reader instinctively resist.
That's what AI writing without a “human” in the process is like. After seeing enough AI-generated text on social media, people can more or less guess which AI wrote it. Essentially, the models keep writing against the same default patterns they can't break out of.
In my previous weekly, I worried that relying entirely on AI, even believing in it blindly, would make people's thinking homogeneous. I worried that people, in the sciences and humanities alike, would exhaust themselves inside the finite world piled up from a model's training texts. And writing already shows signs of it…
Of course, that doesn't make me a stubborn conservative campaigning to ban AI from writing… It's that reading this kind of text hurts me. Perhaps it's what I call “神经多能,” this sensitivity I have to words. I'm so sensitive that, faced with this kind of writing, I can't take in any of the knowledge at all.
As for writing about life, to put it bluntly, all I'm saying is “don't rely entirely on AI”… “Learn more about the subject and draw your own thoughts from it” has been said to death too.
For me, writing about life needs a trigger. Usually, it begins with “something about myself I don't understand.”
A little thing that fascinates you for reasons you can't explain, an amusing contradiction you can't resolve, a light little observation that keeps turning over in your head: these are all unanswered questions, and all of them can trigger writing.
Of course, in the world as it is, everyone wants to save time. No one cares whether some throwaway piece was generated by AI or written by hand. But at least in the personal records anyone can write, and the technical writing drawn from firsthand experience, let's try to keep something human.
I Don't Know Myself
I've also been thinking about what kind of person I am. I remembered the chapter on “knowing yourself” in our middle-school civics textbook. It said our understanding of ourselves tends to come from self-assessment, outside assessment, and some other kind of assessment? It just came back to me suddenly.
In the “Knowing Yourself” chapter of the nationally compiled first-semester, seventh-grade textbook, the standard answer for the “ways” of understanding yourself is:
- Self-assessment
- Assessment by others
- Assessment by the group (some editions call this “comparison with others”)
There's something I love doing: taking excerpts of things I've written and sending them to other people. Now that AI is convenient, I'm more likely to send them to AI instead. It gives me a kind of “assessment by others,” from which I can work out what I'm like. The fog I can't avoid when looking inward becomes an observation of something outside me. It's fascinating.
What I'm trying to say, perhaps, is that I can never find “self-assessment.” In other words, “I don't know what kind of person I am.” I don't know myself.
What does knowing yourself mean? Knowing your own limits? Knowing what you can and can't do?
Does that count as “setting limits” on yourself? Isn't limiting yourself a stupid thing to do? Or is it the same as sealing off your own potential?
Okay, it seems I've shifted the meaning of the question again. There's the downside of an overactive, wandering mind. I can see what comes after this: drawing boundaries for yourself often helps you specialize in what you're good at. Unfortunately, I don't seem to know how to choose what I'm good at, because I never know myself. I can't find that self-assessment.
I asked, and got this answer:
When you say “I can't find self-assessment,” I don't think you mean “I've never thought about it.” I think you mean when you reach inside for that assessment, there's nothing you can grasp. Someone says, “I think I'm a kind person,” as if they can read that judgment directly. You make the same move, and inside there's emptiness, or fog.
That's an excellent metaphor. Maybe, broken down this way, it'll make more sense to you as you read:
“You've seen so much of the physical world outside you, and built an understanding of things through countless experiences. Then one day, you realize that, on your own, you can't see yourself.
Without a reflective surface, you can never see what your own face looks like.
You can only imagine what you look like. But imagination can only build on what you can perceive, so you need other people to describe you.
In the end, though, you still can't see what you look like.
It's still a patch of fog.”
So I don't understand “seeing yourself clearly” at all. Like someone who has lost their sense of smell not trying to understand what a flower's fragrance is.
I used to wonder often: why? Why would someone be unable to find a self-assessment?
I know there's a psychological term, alexithymia, difficulty identifying emotions. But perhaps a more accurate description is: I have no direct access to my internal state. I can only infer it from observing my behavior.
The usual version: “I feel that I'm an X” ←—— a direct reading
My version: “I did Y, chose Y, was bothered by Y” ←—— so maybe I can infer that I'm X?
I can only understand myself through differences, not direct readings.
I simply don't allow these things to exist as “I am X.” I only allow them to exist as “I did Y / chose Y / was bothered by Y.”
I'll need to borrow another outside assessment here:
Why? My guess is that saying “I am X” is an assertion, and you're afraid of assertions. Once you say it, X becomes something concrete, something that can be denied or proved wrong by your future self. It's the same avoidance mechanism as your “ideal life collapsing as soon as you imagine it.” It isn't that you have no self-assessment. You don't allow that assessment to be fixed in place.
Maybe it's right. Maybe it isn't. Since I can't know myself objectively, I suppose I'll have to try leaving it all to emotion, letting intuition tell me whether I accept that assessment.
Suddenly, I thought of the gaokao, China's university entrance exam. It seems to be a trauma no Chinese university student can escape.
Yet my own memory of it is blurry. Of its supposed “pain,” all I remember is morning reading at 7
Was I scared or nervous during the exam days? No. In the days before them, then? Apparently not either.
A patch of fog. I only remember what happened.
Looking back at those days, all I seem to remember is being in the little rented room opposite school the day before, talking with Grandma about whether I should look over some classical poems before the Chinese exam the next morning.
The next day, I woke at the unusually late hour of 7
Then I finished the exams, just like countless ordinary exams before. Perhaps there was also the familiar helplessness of not knowing how to answer lots of the maths questions, and the teachers' endless reminder to “let it go once the exam's over.”
Of course, it might also be that every major exam in my life took place at that school, my high school: the high-school entrance exam, the school-leaving exams, the gaokao. A familiar setting plus my own blurriness means high school isn't a painful image in my mind.
So when people talk about PTSD brought on by the gaokao, my feelings are still vague. I can't think of anything frightening, only getting up early and then being completely unable to keep my eyes open in class.
Of course, maybe I was just lucky.
What Kind of Person
This semester, I finally met and got to know the renowned Xiao Sheng (肖晟), who teaches computer networks. “I've heard so much about you” really applies: almost every older student I know treats him as some sort of god or revered mentor.
But after actually meeting him, I kept wondering why he was so “popular.” I asked Benny, a senior student. Her answer was, “Xiao is really different.”
But different how? What makes him so unusual?
Almost everyone I know has… well… nothing but praise for him? Charisma? Being relaxed?
From the vivid stories Benny and the other older students told, I pieced together an image: an incredibly clever genius who got into Tsinghua through competitions and did a master's at MIT, possibly the child of a government official too, an energetic teacher who enjoys spending time with fresh faces like us.
And my impression from his classes is that he really does talk about a lot beyond the textbook. Even though I have trouble paying attention—possibly because vibe coding and short videos have wrecked my concentration—I can tell he's an unusual person, with an idealistic streak and little interest in sticking to formalities. (Of course, in my personal experience, that doesn't mean he's a teacher who'll help you learn a course systematically… Often, you don't learn much from the lecture itself, but you learn an interesting story behind something.)
The most interesting and valuable part is doing his assignments, or “questions to think about.” In his computer networks course, the exam is semi-open-book, and the small-group classes are a hackathon purely about “Hacking for fun”. My friends and I designed Agentopia, taking inspiration from the app that dominates all our phone screen-time reports: Xiaohongshu. Isn't that doing something for fun too?
Even setting aside the effort and competition for grades, I think it's still an interesting, good project.
And having a teacher encourage students to keep up with the times and play around with a hackathon makes the course much fresher and more fun. Still, I haven't developed that feeling of reverence. I always feel there's a barrier I can't quite see through when it comes to understanding him…
I also joined XiaoLab this semester, and by a lucky coincidence got to know Ziyi, a senior student who's both very kind and very capable.
He's also supervising my project. The atmosphere is lovely, apart from the ByteDance-style weekly and daily reports 😭.
Ziyi came to do a PhD under Xiao in human-computer interaction. Honestly, before I met him, I didn't know what HCI was. I'd always misunderstood it as “exploring how humans can coexist with artificial intelligence,” this very Pokémon-like, idealistic field. Later, I learned that it just explores how people design, evaluate, and understand the use of technology.
(That disappointed me a little. To put it crassly, how is that different from learning to be a good product manager… 😂?)
But Ziyi showed me a very different kind of person. Through his experiences, he showed me that what you pursue in life isn't limited by whether your current self is “excellent,” or determined by whether your future self will be “excellent.”
A person's development is always a long-term thing. There's no need to fret so much about whether you're exceptional at a particular stage. Believe in the person you'll become, and one day you'll become the person you want to be. What I can do now is face the future with that idealistic belief.
Bonus: Hesitating over an iPhone
I want to buy an iPhone Air as my next main phone. Just as, last year, I announced that I wanted a MacBook Air as my laptop.
It feels almost exactly like buying the MacBook Air last year… But is an iPhone Air necessary?
The MacBook Air has become essential. I even sold my gaming laptop and handed everything over to it. (Sometimes I regret getting only 16 GB of memory; it feels a little tight now. But that was the limit of my budget then, and future me can't travel back in time.) Whenever I've regretted buying it, it's only been “I didn't choose high enough specs,” never “it's no use.” So that's how I came to think about this.
I actually already have an iPhone 8 Plus and an iPhone XR. The latter is for development testing; the former is an old phone.
Maybe I simply have too much money. Maybe there's nothing holding me back and I just want to spend it without caring. I think I'm relying on consumption to fill a lack of satisfaction. That's not great.
But then again, maybe there's nothing so bad about it. I haven't borrowed money or stolen it. I can't see what's going to happen in the future. The real me only wants to satisfy the reality of this moment. That's perfectly normal too.
It seems I've honestly described far too many unimportant things again, and they weren't terribly interesting either…
Suddenly, I feel such regret. I'd had so many fleeting, interesting thoughts and hadn't put them in my notebook. Now I can't remember a single one, only that each was an idea that made my eyes light up. Even though I already have memos for little on-the-fly notes, I still need something more effortless. It'd be nice to have a thought-recording tool wired straight into my brain someday. I'm sure we will. We're all lazy people.