“Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” – John Stuart Mill
free and empower someone else
My holy of holies is the human body, health, intelligence, talent, inspiration, love and the most absolute freedom imaginable, freedom from violence and lies, no matter what form the latter to take. – Anton Chekhov I tell my students, “When you get these jobs that you have been so brilliantly trained for, just remember that your real job is that if you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else. This is not just a grab-bag candy game.” – Toni Morrison (1931-2019) ...
Human beings suffer, they torture one another.
“I think we all wear armor. I think those who don’t are fools, risking the pain of being wounded by the sharp edges of the world, over and over again. But if I’ve learned anything from those fools, it is that to be vulnerable is a strength most of us fear. It takes courage to let down your armor, to welcome people to see you as you are.” – Rebecca Ross, Divine Rivals ...
回顾总是今不如昔
To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering. – Friedrich Nietzsche To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. – Oscar Wilde The deepest form of slavery is the hunger for being understood. - Fyodor Dostoevsky 人们最爱用这一种思想来欺骗自己；往往当我们因为自己行为不慎而遭逢不幸的时候，我们就会把我们的灾祸归怨于日月星辰，好像我们做恶人也是命中注定，做傻瓜也是出于上天的旨意，做无赖，做盗贼，做叛徒，都是受到天体运行的影响，酗酒，造谣，奸淫，都有一颗什么星在那儿主持操纵，我们无论干什么罪恶的行为，全都是因为有一种超自然的力量在冥冥之中驱策着我们。– 李尔王 第一幕 第二场 EDMUND: This is the excellent foppery of the world that when we are sick in fortune — often the surfeit of our own behavior — we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars, as if we were villains by necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion, knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical predominance, drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforced obedience of planetary influence, and all that we are evil in by a divine thrusting-on. An admirable evasion of whoremaster man, to lay his goatish disposition to the charge of a star! My father compounded with my mother under the dragon’s tail and my nativity was under Ursa Major, so that it follows I am rough and lecherous. Fut, I should have been that I am, had the maidenliest star in the firmament twinkled on my bastardizing. ...
Carpe Diem, life is too short
ogni lasciata è persa. One life, live it. or Opportunity seldom knocks twice. – Italian proverb Donald Knuth: “programming is the art of telling another human being what one wants the computer to do.” (for vibe coding, it’s just a tool. if you are using it to confuse other programmers and make it hard for people to understand the code, then it is not programming.) None of us is as smart as all of us. (this is talking about the market.) ...
黔驴技穷
a healthy oil company has a geologist in charge, a mature one has an engineer in charge, a declining one has an accountant in charge, and a dying one has a lawyer in charge. – Oil industry proverb “The mightiest of Americans were, for a brief time, revealed as human beings.” – John Kenneth Galbraith on the Great Crash of 1929 20260524: Today’s the day Arsenal get their hands on the Premier League trophy in 22 years. The victory is a testament to never giving up, to believing you can do the impossible, to knowing that hope is perpetually justified, and most importantly to never ever accepting that something is done. ...
塞翁失馬
塞翁失马，焉知非福 欲望的尽头总是无法满足。好奇的尽头可能是知晓领悟也可能迷惘困惑。 西汉·刘安《淮南子·人间训·塞翁失马》 近塞上之人有善术者，马无故亡而入胡。人皆吊之，其父曰：“此何遽不为福乎？”居数月，其马将胡骏马而归。人皆贺之，其父曰：“此何遽不能为祸乎？”家富良马，其子好骑，堕而折其髀。人皆吊之，其父曰：“此何遽不为福乎？”居一年，胡人大入塞，丁壮者引弦而战。近塞之人，死者十九。此独以跛之故，父子相保。故福之为祸，祸之为福，化不可极深不可测也。 investment and market gold The price of gold has an inverse correlation with US dollar. When the dollar is strong, the price of gold falls. It has something to do with the interest too because gold has no interest. So if the interest is going to rise, then the price of gold might drop. When the inflation is rising, the interest rate may go up. Then the price of gold may drop. In the event of war and other disasters, the price of gold may go up. ...
A Change Is Gonna Come
Discipline is liberation. – Martha Graham (1894-1991) “Human reason has a peculiar fate in one kind of its cognitions: it is troubled by questions that it cannot dismiss, because they are posed to it by the nature of reason itself, but that it also cannot answer, because they surpass human reason’s every ability.” – Kant (1724-1804), Critique of Pure Reason, p5 旧城有着长长的历史，还留有四四方方的城墙，近些年来修葺一新。新城在落基山脚下，有一条弯弯的河自此转向东流，南冲北突从来没停过。 2026 Canvas security incident In early May 2026, Instructure disclosed that it was investigating a cybersecurity incident involving certain user data, including names, email addresses, student ID numbers, and messages among users. on May 7, Canvas was hacked again; its login page was replaced with a ransomware message by ShinyHunters. It is unprecedent because it affected 8,809 universities, educational ministries, and other institutions worldwide. ...
20260424
失意莫灰心，得意不忘形。 不怨天，不尤人，下学而上达。– 《论语·宪问》 Sancho tells Don Quijote: “Don’t die, Señor; your grace should take my advice and live for many years, because the greatest madness a man can commit in this life is to let himself die, just like that.” “I know who I am and who I may be, if I choose,” Cervantes famously wrote. rational animal Kant, 1724-1804 uses reaon as his base of argument. Kant believed that reason is the source of morality and that the categorical imperative binds all rational agents. Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) ...
LOTR
The moment was all, the moment was enough. – Virginia Woolf Good things make choices difficult, bad things leave no choice. – Michelle Cohen Corasanti, The Almond Tree some sw tools little snitch: network monitor quien: better than whois quien github code in Go screen recorder: himi-recorder screen recorder Recordly KEYBOARD sound museum hacking tools LOTR text internet archive Evil fucks up because evil people fundamentally cannot imagine that others are not motivated by the same things as them. ...
Kant and The Fellowship of the Ring
最近在看康德 Kant的第一批判，然后碰巧看到诗人奥登 Auden写于1954年关于《魔戒》LOTR第一部的评论。 To present the conflict between Good and Evil as a war in which the good side is ultimately victorious is a ticklish business. Our historical experience tells us that physical power and, to a large extent, mental power are morally neutral and effectively real: wars are won by the stronger side, just or unjust. At the same time most of us believe that the essence of the Good is love and freedom so that Good cannot impose itself by force without ceasing to be good. ...