江汉曾为客，相逢每醉还。浮云一别后，流水十年间。 欢笑情如旧，萧疏鬓已斑。何因不归去？淮上有秋山。– 韦应物《淮上喜会梁川故人》

investing

Oscar Wilde wrote in his story, The Picture of Dorian Gray, that nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing. I guess that it is hard to know the value of things. Take the example of stock prices. IMO, there is no such thing of good stocks but over-valued or under-valued ones. the value of a stock is changing that is hard to know. You must be patient to buy at the under-valued price and be patient to hold as long as you could.

低成本是抵御下跌和波动的最大底气。以合适的价格买入好公司，就像钓鱼那样需要足够的耐心 – 宁可错过，也不要支付过高的溢价。不必害怕错过（FOMO），耐心等待，总会有机会的。

notes

one page (for all of your ideas) or it doesn’t get built

the core tech (support the product but not the product itself) must be separable from the product

one defining constraint must shape the product (core feature: it’s obvious and it is what gives your product identity. A good constaint gives your product a feel.)

Cursor had mostly finished migrating from SolidJS to React.

Internet Archive has ClaudeCode tips.

Bun’s rewrite from Zig to Rust — about a million lines — was executed almost entirely by Claude agents in days, not months.

Cognition just migrated its marketing site from Astro to Next.js.

“Do not confuse motion and progress. A rocking horse keeps moving but does not make any progress.” -— Alfred A. Montapert

Everyone gets to feel busy. Everyone gets to feel urgent. Everyone gets to point at the smoke coming off the machine and say, “See? We’re doing something.” The problem is that a lot of what gets called speed is just impatience with a different name. Real speed exists. Real speed is what happens when the work is understood, the constraints are clear, the people involved know what they’re doing, and the decisions have been made cleanly enough that execution can happen without constant re-litigation.

There is a difference between urgency and haste. Urgency is appropriate when something matters and time is real. Haste is what happens when people want the emotional relief of action without the burden of clarity.

“Make haste slowly.” —- Baltasar Gracián

The better work is usually calmer than people expect. It still moves. It still ships. It still makes decisions. But it does not confuse panic with seriousness. It does not treat every pause as weakness. It does not worship motion for its own sake. It accepts the deeply unfashionable idea that some things get faster only after you stop rushing them. (水到渠成，瓜熟蒂落。不必拔苗助长)

You can move fast for a while by skipping thought, skipping clarity, skipping context, and skipping responsibility. But the work remembers. The system remembers. The people stuck maintaining it remember. Eventually, reality collects what it’s due. And reality is very patient. （Chickens come home to roost: The consequences of doing wrong always catch up with the wrongdoer.)

George Orwell, Animal Farm：“大家都是平等的，但是有些动物比其他动物更平等。”

Lois Lowry, The Giver：“大家都很幸福，因为大家都没有选择。”

美国东部的阿巴拉契亚山脉形成于4.8亿年前，当时其高度曾经超过喜马拉雅山。冰河时期的周期只有10万年左右；因此，阿巴拉契亚山脉大约经历过五千个冰河周期。每到气候变暖的“间冰河”期，冰川就开始融化，水会渗入岩石的缝隙中。到了严寒期这些水就会凝结成冰，其膨胀过程会使岩石松动。轮到下一个“间冰河”期时，这些被“撬松”的岩体就会脱落。在经过了几亿年以后，曾经宏伟壮观的阿巴拉契亚山脉的平均高度只有910米，位于北卡的最高峰（米切尔峰）的高度也仅有2037米。古老山脉的特征是山体比较平缓，而且岩石上的土层比较厚，所以会有森林覆盖。与之相比，美国西部的落基山脉年青很多，大约形成于7000万年前，那时恐龙还处在全盛期。落基山（Rocky Mountain）这个名字本身就显示其年龄特征，很多山体会有陡峭的岩壁。

大约在5000万年前印度板块撞入欧亚板块，喜马拉雅山脉才开始逐渐隆起，至今还在不断升高。大约在1500万年前，喜马拉雅山脉才达到现在的高度。与之相比，中国的其他山脉则古老得多，因此也风化得更严重。例如，大约在1.7亿年前，太平洋板块与欧亚板块发生碰撞，前者插入后者下方，从而逐渐形成了世界上最深的马里亚纳海沟。在随后的漫长岁月中相继产生了中国东部一些南北走向的山脉，包括大兴安岭、太行山脉和武夷山脉。如今，这两大板块之间的挤压还在继续，从而使位于第一岛链的国家和地区频繁出现强烈地震。大约在2.5亿-2亿年前，华南板块与华北板块剧烈碰撞，从而形成了东西走向的秦岭和大别山脉。在更早期的3.8亿-2.8亿年前形成了盘古超大陆，此时天山山脉和昆仑山脉开始隆起。

scoring systems can change our values, without us even noticing.

many of Ed Zitron’s prediction are wrong or not falsible.

清末的世态《儒林外史》老辣、幽默、世故的，刻意不在风月场，而在男人的功名场

《水浒传》被腰斩，《金瓶梅》是禁书，《红楼梦》没写完，《海上花》没人知道。

伯林的《自由的两种概念》: 伯林区分了自由的两种基本含义，称作消极自由与积极自由。消极自由指个人不受政府或其他外界势力干预的自由。美国老百姓在处理自己衣食住行思想言论时，对政府的态度很鲜明：“别管我（Leave me alone）”，要的就是这种自由。积极自由指个人自我行事而实现心愿目标的自由。伯林强调消极自由的基础性地位：必须划出一块“私人领域”，在此范围内，个人的基本权利不受干预。伯林又分析了积极自由概念隐含的一个陷阱。个人有追求自己的目标的自由，但是，那个目标是否“正确”？如何保证其“正确”？有一个著名的答案，是卢梭提出的：要让每个人都置于“公意”的最高指导之下。“任何人拒不服从公意的，全体就要迫使他服从公意。这恰好就是说，人们要迫使他自由。”关于积极自由，这种颠倒的逻辑，这类把强制当自由的思想，后果严重。法国大革命中，罗伯斯庇尔派以“公意”实行恐怖专政，是一显例。要坚定捍卫消极自由，同时警惕积极自由的陷阱。

《Development as Freedom》，2002年出版，书名直译为《以自由看待发展》（任赜、于真译，中国人民大学出版社，2002）按照森的表述，Liberties（自由，常用复数）指一系列法律意义上的权利，包括消极自由范畴内的个人自由权，也包括公共领域的自由权，如集会、结社、政治参与，包括投票选举等等。Freedom（自由）则是指能力意义上的自由，那就是，“个人选择过自己有理由珍视的那种生活的能力”。

康德的理性学说有一个广为人知的论断：理性无法认识不能感知的事物，“彼岸世界”不可知。确实，《纯粹理性批判》厘清了理性的限制。但是，康德理性学说绝不只是否定性的学说。他正面阐述了理性覆盖求真、求善、求美三个领域。在求真领域，理性依赖感知、运用范畴（时间、空间、因果性等）而建构出表述世界的模式。亚里士多德、牛顿、爱因斯坦建构了不同的物理学模式。在不同时代，这些模式代表了人类体认的世界。人的理性有局限，人的理性也极其伟大：人的理性能够认识可以感知的世界——通过理性建构的模式。在这个意义上，康德说：“理性并不是从自然中得出法则，而是自己为自然立法。”康德振聋发聩地宣示：对社会，“人的理性的公开运用必须总是自由的”，对个人，“有勇气运用自己的理性”。

So the gist is that we do not have free will and we are not free agents. However we have constrained and limited agency.

Like Kant noted this agency comes from our mind and our world that is constrained both internally and externally to make sense of the outside world from sensory inputs. no more no less. The agency we have is for our survival in this world. for example, it is evolved for us to learn language easily. it’s hard for us to understand birds’ tunes or whales’ calls. for human being, we have access to two realms, one is our consciousness or the thought realm and the other our actions to change our surroundings or the action realm. the essence of life is a transformer to turn some inputs such as food, words, sensory data into something totally different like a tree from a seed.

a: And if you want to effect change in your own life, you can side step the negative messages about your own limitations and failures by focusing on creating the conditions that make change easier.

b: The trick that this article pulls (and it’s one I approve of) is that saying free will is a fiction, but so is the narrative of fatalism. I agree: we can choose how to play the hand we are dealt, but we don’t choose the cards we get. “We are constrained but not powerless.” as the article author puts it.

b: I like how the author gets straight to the matter of why free will persists: it’s how we blame people for their problems and praise the powerful. I would go further and make it explicitly political: free will is conservative propaganda to justify the status quo, and this is why so many religious people endorse free will and why so many intellectuals discard it. “Free will” is just what Republican assholes say because they know “Don’t choose to have poor parents” makes them sound like an asshole.

c: Conservatives endorse free will because it lets them assign blame. And, more importantly, once we have assigned blame, we can then punish. What’s the point of having power if you can’t wield it against those with less power to force them to give you more power?

“My message to you is this: Pretend that you have free will. It’s essential that you behave as if your decisions matter, even though you know they don’t. The reality isn’t important; what’s important is your belief, and believing the lie is the only way to avoid a waking coma. Civilization now depends on self deception. Perhaps it always has.” – Ted Chiang, What’s Expected of Us （自由更多是一种信念：相信自己可以改变自己的命运，无论身处何地。唯一的真理就是恒久的变化，变化带来机遇。）

d: Nagarjuna (and Buddhism in general ever since he taught c. 150-250 CE) resolved this issue by saying that all phenomenal reality, including the self, is empty of essence. Thus, the entire question of free will becomes a trap wherein one can only reify the illusion of the self/object duality, and further tie oneself to that illusion. YMMV (your mileage may vary), but I have found this to be a durable, load-bearing philosophical approach. (空是变的一种简化，空是死的另一种说辞）

d: In a practical sense, I would say that “freedom” is something of a cursed concept, but one that remains foundational to human experience, and Western civilization in particular. What we notice in life is typically not freedom itself, but it’s opposite. This opposite takes many, often complicated forms. In the sense most often used, the opposite is some form of oppression. This can be anything from chattel slavery to conditions of various economic inequality and the lack of opportunity for advancement and/or exploitative workplaces, to the broadly generic culture of boring, bourgeois suburbia which presents a stultifying lack of choice for self exploration, expression or identity.

d: The danger of writing such as the OP article is that it risks throwing away all criticism of oppressive social structures by waving it away as “circumstances.” As AlSweigert rightly observes, one’s ability to take this point of view is highly dependent on privilege. To those who must scrabble and fight daily for basic needs, the freedom of those whose needs are met is obvious. Likewise to those in a more middle class life, the freedom of the wealthy is obvious. Freedom, in this telling, becomes something that is often ascribed to others while the person who is doing so is experiencing its opposite. Consider the inscription at the base of the Statue of Liberty: Give me your tired, your poor,\ Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free

d: Likewise, as with the author of the OP, freedom is something that can be lost due to illness or injury. I myself have lived through this during my treatment for cancer, and was fortunate enough to recover to live into the progressive loss of physical ability that naturally and unavoidably comes with aging (although I still remain healthy and active into early middle age, the writing is on the wall for how this all goes down).

d: There’s a LOT more to say about all of this. Volumes have been written on the concept of freedom for hundreds of years. I will try to be brief in wrapping this up (not a natural skillset, haha).

d: First, when I was cutting my teeth on philosophy in the rough and tumble coffeeshop arguments of the 1990’s, it was considered fair play when a person argued against free will to offer to slap them. Arguments against free will break down in the face of obvious transgressions. This is true in both positive and negative senses. We celebrate drag queens and condemn abusers. Both celebration and condemnation depend on a conventional understanding of free will.

d: Ultimately, however, free will is a stupid concept, as is determinism. Neither provides a satisfactory or robust basis for philisophical living. Both are very easily shot through with counterarguments. They are simply untenable arguments. Therefore, what accurately describes human existence must be something else that is neither free will or determinism.

d: I think that a language of agency versus oppression or disability is a good place to start.

d: In such a telling, we can see that a person may have different levels of agency throughout their lives, that conditions shaping that agency may be internal or external, and that making changes to those conditions can potentially result in increasing or decreasing the person’s agency. It provides a framework that is open to political and economic analysis. It allows us to see with compassion the constraints that others and we ourselves live with, and to hopefully, potentially make good choices within those situations to increase and respect our own agency as well as that of others.

e: She redefines free will as blaming people for things they couldn’t help, which it isn’t, and then helps herself to what the rest of us call free will by renaming it ‘agency’. Certainly pummels that straw man good, though.

f: The modern Western Buddhist phenomenological observation on free will is that “free will” is debatable, but “free won’t” is definitely a human capability. And the “debatable” part doesn’t need to wait for Nagarjuna to condemn it. The Buddha described a variety of impassible thickets that the skilled avoid entering, and talk about free will is of same nature as the ones he enumerated. There is also a Western philosophical take on the topic, observing that when it’s possible to hold mutually incompatible concepts about reality it’s not the Universe’s responsibility to be describable by our languages, and the apparent paradox is an artifact of how reality is described, not a quality of reality itself. IOW there are no paradoxes, just breakdowns in describing the world. The Universe is under no obligation to be comprehensible to us, nor to be describeable in our languages.

f: “Freedom” is a highly overloaded word. TFA chooses to talk about “having agency” while dismissing “free will” as a conflict with determinism, but here I think is just committing the error mentioned above, which is namely not noticing that “free will” is two words next to each other, not an actual phenomenon in the world, and then trying to push off the conflict with determinism (also a word and a concept, not a phenomenon) by talking about “having agency.” This leads to the same sort of problem that religious people have, when they invoke an infinite God as the creator of the Universe as though that solved something about infinites and ultimates. If “having agency” differs meaningfully from “having free will” I am not able to see that.

f: As for me, my operational notion of “freedom” is “not being so reactive that I never get the opportunity to make a choice because my reactions have already made it for me.” Note that I mention “freedom” and not “free will” specifically. Because most of the time the choice to be made is to exercise that “free won’t.” If it’s not obvious, I gave up on free will a lot more than two weeks ago.

g: I like how the author gets straight to the matter of why free will persists: it’s how we blame people for their problems and praise the powerful.

g: I agree, I guess. It’s a bullshit move to simplify the complexity of things so, and for political reasons.

g: But that said, something I’ve learned along the way is that my life usually goes in a better overall direction when I take some responsibility for the messes I find myself in, the choices I’ve made . Is it all my fault? Hell no. I didn’t trigger the Big Bang, or create the Universe in seven days, or whatever the hell happened. But did I really need to open that second bottle of wine last night? Was I just acting in accord with deterministic trajectories long long long ago set in motion, or was I being an indulgent idiot with poor impulse control who now has a mild headache and overall queasy feeling … ?

g: I do think it terrifies a lot of people that it actually matters what we choose to do. That we can’t just chalk everything up to fate, the will of God (or whatever), or that it’s all just random physics, evolutionary processes etc.

h: I can (and should) look at the reasons for my behavior, but having taken them into account I still need to live my life as if I have agency and my choices matter.

h: Blame and shame are bad solutions for some problems, but I think they have a place in a healthy society. It’s probably an empirical question which problems shame is useful for and which are just made worse. But I don’t think having a stance on “free will” helps you very much with that question, and I doubt it’s a very useful way of convincing other people trade shame for more productive solutions. We’d be better off focusing on convincing evidence of what actually works.

i: Sensible people who want free will don’t want their actions to emerge spookily from nowhere in a contradiction of the laws of physics. They just want certain of their mental processes to determine some of their actions, so that if they hadn’t had those thoughts those actions would not have occurred.

we all know that humam makes mistakes all the time. for us to make less mistakes, one approach is to add frictions to prevent mistakes from happening. for example, banning smoke indoors. for example, making road narrower slows down the traffic/driving. below is another example to design a badge so that the attachment of it to the product won’t go wrong.

j: A specific worker was assigned to attach the badge onto the product. It was symmetrical, and was attached with two (same-size) screws. One per minute, 400 per day, 2,000 per week. At a 0.1% error rate, we would find about 2 badges installed upside down per week.

j: The solution wasn’t to fire them and hire a more conscientious worker, someone who used their “free will” to be more precise in their work. The solution was to redesign the badge so it took one larger diameter screw and one smaller diameter screw, but keeping the screw head the same size. This made the badge impossible to install incorrectly.

j: No one comes to work wanting to do a bad job. Everyone is doing the best they can given their circumstances outside of work. Sometimes, that doesn’t meet your standard. In a psychopathic kind of way, I treat all my reports as cabbages, and it would be a poor farmer indeed who blames their cabbages for not growing well.

k: “free won’t” is a lot more important to individual responsibility than “free will.”

l: Negative consequences are not the same thing as a punishment. A punishment is put on one person by another person for doing something they do not want them to do. Punishments require an active subject with a desire to punish. If a piano falls on my head, getting my skull shattered is not a punishment, it is a consequence. That’s an accident like car crash.