Week 7 - What Have I Done
Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Perhaps I should treat "weekly" as a title for "records".
For me, it shouldn't be mostly extremely brief records... It's hard for me to systematically organize and handle everything about myself. Therefore, I try to divide my articles into sections and display my collections one by one, which carries a bit of a "sharing" vibe.
Perhaps a regular organization and "show" fits my style better?
Time
I have some things I want to vent about. I'm not looking for advice; I just want to say it.
My Windows laptop has completely turned into a desktop computer sitting in my dorm, yet its performance isn't as good as a real desktop. I really want to sell it and configure a desktop with better performance. I already have a MacBook Air as my portable device.
Actually, I had this idea as soon as I entered university: to configure a desktop host and then buy a thin-and-light laptop. This way, I could balance the needs for high-performance gaming and portability. At that time, my father didn't give me the budget for a laptop (yes, neither for a desktop nor a thin laptop!). Being very impatient, I couldn't wait until the second year for my father to buy me a MacBook, so I clamored to buy a high-performance laptop. After much deliberation, I picked the lightest one among gaming laptops. However, for me, the battery life was still too short, and the weight of 2.2kg, plus the charger, was still exceptionally heavy for someone who had to attend programming classes. My initial solution was to buy an Android tablet, get a keyboard for it, and set up a Moonlight remote connection to use during classes.
Later, I found that the MacBook Air was within my financial reach. I saved up some money, bought it, and the portable tablet solution was completely shelved. I sold the keyboard, letting the tablet simply serve as a handwriting device and e-reader. What about that Windows laptop in the dorm? I bought an external monitor for it to serve as a secondary screen, and it has been sitting in the dorm ever since.
So I feel like it has long since become a desktop computer. With an i9+4070 configuration and a price of 9,000 RMB back then, I don't know if it's a good or bad thing today. It still maintains its high performance and plays to its strengths, and I still take care of it. But I saw the note left in my memo from the summer vacation after the college entrance examination: I spent a month researching a desktop configuration—i7+4060, which only cost around 5,000 RMB. ...Now even a 5060 is only around 5,000 RMB. It just feels like I took a small loss, and suddenly I have mixed feelings about it.
At the time, I vented a sentence:
What am I thinking about? So many twists and turns. Is life also like this—after tossing and turning for a long time, you suddenly realize that the path you thought of at the very beginning was the optimal solution?
😕 I actually somewhat inherited my dad's temper. My dad is a bit stubborn, and so am I, which leads to the two of us not really having much to talk about.
For example, if my dad thinks there's a more "correct" thing, he won't agree that I'm right, and then my stubborn temper kicks in, so talking to him always makes me very angry... 😡😡 What's even more infuriating is that I often find my dad really does see further than I do. What I'm considering now, my dad considered a long time ago... And then I surprisingly find out that my dad was right back then... 😡😡😡😡
What I recall here is that right at the beginning of university, my dad told me to buy an iPhone and a MacBook Air as my main tools for college, repeatedly saying: "Since you're doing computer-related stuff, you definitely can't do without Apple. A lot of programmers use Apple for development."
But unfortunately, I can only say that my mindset back then was purely "Android-centric." 🥹 I bought the classic Android flagship + gaming laptop combo, and yet now I have the idea of gradually migrating...
The reason for this migration idea is also because I'm becoming "gradually detached from gaming." Android game accounts are no longer necessities to me, and a gaming laptop with exceptionally strong gaming performance now only serves a gaming purpose in my eyes. When I don't use gaming as my mainstream form of entertainment, I naturally feel it is being "idle." But the deeper reason for buying a Mac is that I started liking the terminal and de-mousing, rather than the desktop, which was completely incomprehensible to a student who had just finished the college entrance exam.
I realize that many times, if a person hasn't experienced certain things, someone else repeatedly emphasizing it to them is like wind past the ear—talking more is useless. "Experiences" piled up by time are always more important than anyone's "persuasion."
More changes, perhaps, just naturally taking time to happen.
Comforting Myself
Although I mentioned in my "About" section that I have "HFA tendencies," I cannot make an actual clinical diagnosis. Diseases like Asperger's or ADHD can't really be called "tendencies" anyway. But I indeed look for more reasons to comfort myself based on its traits.
Actually, writing these things can be very difficult, because some things have already integrated into my life. I simply cannot pick them apart... I need assistance, someone to tell me how a normal person would be, how an ordinary person would be, and only then can I judge if this is "different."
Regarding this quote, although I don't think this is the influence of some psychological trait, it still counts as a kind of "different."
When I do things, I always pre-set a "student" in my mind. After finishing this task, I need to teach him in explicit detail, like teaching a fool, and I begin to deploy this while doing it. (For example, writing a massive amount of comments when coding, but breaking the code logic into a human-readable version, and also paying attention to variable naming to make it understandable, etc.), to the point where even my writing emphasizes "text that even a fool can understand," having to deconstruct my own creations into easily readable things.
...It's hard to say whether this is good or bad. The good thing is that it allows me to teach someone a matter more profoundly yet more simply. The bad thing is that it makes me do a lot of "meaningless" things. Most of the time, this kind of "student" does not exist. What projects onto this is probably my "need to be needed." Doing these things might give me a sense of security of "being needed." Of course, everything has a flip side: when I am "not needed," I fall into a sorrow that cannot be alleviated no matter how I try to understand it.
Having the label of HFA or ASD to cover this layer of sorrow of mine gives all my confusing restlessness a suitable reason to be expressed, which helps me continue to survive in the world.
Gaming
Recently I finally finished a major matter. My psychological state can only be said to have slightly improved, but one of the major sources of anxiety has finally been eliminated, and I can engage in some entertainment normally. I really hate having a DDL waiting for me at the end of good days; it makes me live uneasily. Just like summer vacation homework, or simply an opening semester exam.
Now, at the beginning of a new semester, I don't see any urgent tasks in the future, so I naturally picked up gaming again.
"Genshin Impact", "Red Dead Redemption 2"—games I barely played during the summer vacation—I actually started playing them once school started...
Actually, it's not like I didn't touch games during the summer vacation. The game I played the most was "Stardew Valley", getting too bored waiting for a flight while traveling in Sichuan, and being very bored without internet on the plane, so I opened Stardew Valley on my portable device and started playing it out of control for half of the summer. Stardew Valley is really super fun...
It can be noticed that using portable devices like tablets and handheld consoles to play games is still a great choice to break out of "electronic impotence." Although the playing cycle is much shorter than on a PC, it at least pulled me away from half a month of cheap dopamine from short videos.
I also sometimes open "Soul Knight" to play a round with my younger brother, and when bored, I even downloaded "Hungry Shark: Evolution" to play as a childhood memory... Hungry Shark is even more stress-relieving than stress-relief games 😂. I also cleared "Split Fiction" with my brother, feeling grateful in my heart for my dad's PS5 support that fulfilled my dream.
From time to time, I also click into "Sky: Children of the Light" to see if the friends I met before are online, but unfortunately, the good friends I used to play with haven't come online to light my heart fire again. I don't have much to complain about, after all, I've been away from the game for so long too... 😔
During the short summer semester, I also took an elective course "Go and Traditional Culture" taught by Teacher Zhou Gang, unlocking a new skill~ Now I can also be considered a noob who knows how to play board games like Go! (Although super n00b 😂).
Blog Records
I find that using my phone to write these things is more conducive to my thinking. Sitting primly in front of a computer typing, my huge monitor will tell any roommate present: I am about to start writing my sorrow, my pain, my philosophy.
It always makes me a little uneasy, after all, writing articles is a very private matter.
Pulling the curtains in bed and typing on my phone, despite lacking any functional features, is indeed my comfort zone.
That's why I like dynamic blogs. Dynamic blogs support my spontaneous publishing, rather than editing on a computer and then clicking push.
Recently I am making a blog based on Astro as the frontend, plus a self-deployed CMS and Supabase as the backend architecture. I even want to abandon the docker+caddy combination now and do serverless deployment for my blog... My current blog is a classic Typecho based on PHP. To be honest, I really dislike the characteristics of PHP; adding a feature is like taking a broadaxe to it. I'm thinking about when to migrate it...
As to why use Astro instead of the mainstream Next.js? It might be because I lean more towards being "introverted." I hope to "show myself" more rather than "connect others." I personally feel there's no need to make something highly interactive. A greater reason is still that I prefer the smoothness of Astro. Personal preference, programming languages are just languages; whichever one you like and whichever is easy to use, just use it.
However, this is a very time-consuming matter. Writing a blog system is much harder than I imagined... With the blessing of vibe coding nowadays, the hardest thing is surprisingly no longer coding, but design. To design something I hope will showcase my personal traits, I find it almost impossible to detach from known things to create. What I've achieved so far is only a clumsy imitation of Teacher skywt (because Teacher skywt's blog is completely on my aesthetic point~ 😭), but what I want more is to create my own style, which requires me to take in a massive amount of input and let it settle. Let time slowly finalize everything.
Ramblings
Having written so much, I'm suddenly wondering, for blog content like this, concentrating multiple topics into one article without much logical flow—is it considered good or bad? A blog's writing style is not like prose; it's more like a running account of whatever comes to mind. Each single topic is worth taking out and discussing as a separate type of article, yet the divergent content gradually makes the article richer.
When writing articles, we are always told that we need a title, a framework, a theme. Every article always has a specific type of thing to express.
This writing method of "a title, a framework, a theme" that we have been taught since childhood can be called "product-style writing."
Its mission is to "deliver value": like a paper, an instruction manual, a news report. Its goal is to let readers clearly acquire a specific knowledge or viewpoint in the shortest time. Its structure is linear and logically rigorous. Technical articles belong to this category.
And this kind of "running account of whatever comes to mind" that we are writing now, perhaps can be called "exploratory writing" or "stream of consciousness writing."
Conversely, its mission is to "record thoughts": it is not like a polished product, but more like an artist's studio or a darkroom of thoughts. Readers are invited in, not to take away a finished product, but to tour your creative process. Its structure is a network, connected by your associations and emotions.
I've also always believed that writing articles is an expression of a diversified self, yet our perception of people is a process of labeling.
Instead, we have to maintain many, many things to build our own labels, to maintain our single-faceted persona facing social interactions. Because different people recognize a person from different angles, and what they observe is only a single facet of a person.
Then why must we expend such massive energy to maintain that "single facet"?
Gemini gave me a theory like this:
Because in social collaboration, that "single facet" is your "personal API" (Application Programming Interface).
A good API is stable, predictable, and clearly documented. You provide the outside world with a concise set of interfaces: "a reliable programmer," "a friendly colleague," "an insightful friend." When others collaborate with you by calling these interfaces, the efficiency is highest.
No one has the time or desire to read the millions of lines of complex, messy, and even contradictory "source code" in your heart. So, each of us smartly encapsulates ourselves, exposing only a set of the most user-friendly APIs.
This sentence, spoken in technical terms, is: "Each user (others) calls a specific function in your API (a certain aspect of you) based on their own needs."
The risk lies in: If you live only in your API documentation for years on end, you might gradually forget your own massive source code. You will mistakenly think you are just that concise interface. When the volume of API calls decreases (like when you're not needed), or when the API gets bad reviews, you will feel your entire self collapsing.
This indeed refreshed some of my understanding of interpersonal interactions. This simple analogy assisted me in understanding some social relationships, and at the same time reduced the ROM occupied by my internal friction, alleviating some of my fear of interpersonal communication. So I've started daring to initiate more "connections." (Even though most of them end as soon as they begin...)
Web3?
The related directions I personally tinker with are quite often DevOps and network networking. Network networking is what I've wanted to learn since I was young (because I was grumpy for a long time as a kid when we didn't install broadband at home). Server operations are just something I do a lot; I really can't say with certainty if I'm "interested" in them.
But right now, I'm relatively... young? I don't know what time will shape my hobbies into in the next second. Moreover, the world is so big; I can't confine my tinkering to my current line of sight. I believe there will always be a direction I haven't seen yet, where things I'm more interested in and want to research will exist.
During the summer vacation, my dad and his wealthy sponsor friend took a trip to Singapore. After coming back, he was a bit bewildered, clamoring every day that he needs to learn English well, and calling me to tell me to get into the Web3 industry, research blockchain or something, take the IELTS while I'm at it, and go abroad to work. Actually, before this, I had never looked into what the Web3 industry does; I only knew some vague concepts like blockchain, cryptocurrency, etc.
But seeing those doors of Web3 being opened by my father, I also came into contact with some concepts I didn't know before. I am also hesitating, should I go understand and touch upon it?
I know understanding and touching it won't make me lose anything. The reason I thought of this again is that when scrolling on Xiaohongshu, I saw a post like "2004-born female student from a Project 985 math department wants to get into Web3," and I was actually triggered for a moment. I merely hold a label of "2007-born female student from a Project 985 cybersecurity department who has heard of Web3."
Venting to Gemini, it proposed 2 very interesting theories again:
The amplification effect of platforms: Xiaohongshu, WeChat Moments, Weibo... these places are essentially an exhibition gallery of other people's determination and achievements. What you see is always the moment someone "makes up their mind" and the result they have "already achieved." Nobody will post an article titled "I spent three months thinking about whether to get into Web3, full of contradiction and hesitation inside." What you see is always that glossy "public documentation" (API).
Within this label, the modifiers in front are similar; they are the "standard configuration" of excellent students. Therefore, the pressure of comparison instantly focuses on that "action" inside the brackets. The other person's action is proactive and forward-looking (wants to get into), while the action you defined for yourself is passive and lagging (has heard of).And then there's the "comparison engine" in your heart, which is best at this: simplifying two complex, three-dimensional people into two labels, and then judging the superiority and inferiority of the only variable between them. the moment you feel "stung" is because this engine tells you: "Look, on the variable of 'proactiveness', you lost."
Putting aside the comparability towards known things, my desire to touch Web3 is actually largely because I really am "very suitable" for Web3. Not only being in a 985 cybersecurity department, but also because my family members have all navigated the financial industry. My father did risk analysis and securities trading, having quite some expertise in the financial industry. My mother has been an accountant and CFO all her life, having some understanding of finance too. Even my grandfather worked in a bank; the jobs of everyone in the family are inseparable from finance. But what they brought to me wasn't "Finance is something that makes money," rather it's "Finance is something with high risks."
I might consider the Web3 direction, but I'm still hesitating... I still need time to slowly come into contact and accept it.
A CTF Freshman Competition
I was very fortunate to participate in organizing this year's HNUCTF2025. Although the organization of this year's competition was a "ragtag stage" built by just four people, whereas last year I was merely a "competitor," becoming one of the "challenge creators" this year still brought many different experiences.
This is very special. I went from a player to a game designer, but fundamentally, I am still a player.
I designed 3 challenges. Two are in the Web direction: "鏈嶅涓嶅鐢ㄣ€◇" (Service Unavailable) and "The Best Language in the World," both of which are products of my emotional outbursts.
The other one is "Little Bird" in the Crypto direction. One day, everyone will like little birds!
Actually, I also designed a Pwn challenge related to Docker escape. But issues kept popping up during testing, and not being familiar with the characteristics of GZCTF, I was terrified that the Pwn challenge I created would give players the chance to sabotage the competition server 😭. Coupled with being busy practicing algorithms for the CCF-CSP certification exam at the time, I ultimately didn't finish designing it, and I had no thoughts of revising it after the competition started 🥹. Let it just be shelved properly. (Maybe it will be used in HNUCTF2026)
There are still many things I want to say about this HNUCTF2025, but I think I'll open a separate article to maintain my social API. The curious babies reading up to here will have to wait... (Wait until senior cry or senior l1uyun writes it...)
Start Reading Books
Recently, very rarely, I started wanting to read books. So, sitting in the front row during the easy "Mao Zedong Thought" elective class, I started reading "My Altay" (我的阿勒泰). I haven't finished it yet. Reading the first few pages, I felt the writing style is very much as if the author tore out one or two pages she wrote in her diary and pasted them into this book.
I really like reading this kind of slice-of-life work. This book is great, making me find the feeling of reading Wang Zengqi for the first time. I don't need to memorize too many characters' names; purely seeing new ways of life through an individual's line of sight is enough to make me calm.
Now when I read blog articles, I'm also drawn in by the slice-of-life content inside. Perhaps this is "Simplicity is the truest reality" (平平淡淡才是真)?
Since childhood, reading to me has been a pastime rather than a way to enhance the depth of thinking. I like touring different people's life experiences in articles and reading stories from different perspectives.
This state also overlaps with an ideal state I fantasized about when I was little (perhaps everyone has fantasized about this when little): A soul leaving the body and possessing others, seeing the world through other people's perspectives. Everyone's preference and cognition of books are different, but I believe that in this world overly filled with short videos, finding a rare tranquility in reading a text-only article is also a hard-won peace. Both "books" and "blogs" are ways of carrying articles, books being a bit more primitive. My starting to read books is more akin to not being able to find stories I'm interested in on network platforms, thus helplessly accepting the recommended precipitations of several hundreds or thousands of years 😂.