As I was contemplating the last letter, I noticed a fairly big problem. The trick. It didn’t work. Once I sensed my intention to publish this letter, my writing changed—“when I had some kind of external audiences in mind,” indeed. But who did I really intend to write for? I mean, if I couldn’t get rid of the feeling that someone’s gonna read this, I probably should try to understand the essence of that “someone,” right? ...

To the me of tomorrow, I just wrote a short daily memo to you before going to bed. I had to, or your brain may have dropped something important or precious by dawn. Post-COVID brain fog is really infuriating, huh? Nonetheless, writing that memo was actually fun—I didn’t have to think much, just letting whatever came to mind manifest through my fingers. In a similar vein, I was shocked that people actually read my Steam review of Citizen Sleeper. ...

RSS—short for Really Simple Syndication—is an XML-based content syndication format, designed to share content across different platforms. In plain English, RSS is a machine-readable file telling a reader program the list of content entries (posts, podcast episodes, etc.) from a certain site. It’s kind of like the role of “follow” or “subscribe” in modern social media, but in an open and decentralized manner. People keep saying RSS is dead or is dying. ...

“There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” — William Shakespeare, Hamlet The term “woowoo” often arises in discussions of spiritual things—unexplainable phenomena—or even conspiracy theories. It carries quite a dismissive connotation. Irrational. Superstitious. Nonsensical. One of the YouTube creators I follow even puts in blaring “woowoo alerts” when discussing some not-so-scientific aspects. The top-voted definition on Urban Dictionary1 perfectly captures the derogatory feelings of this word: ...

I had long been using Cygwin as my main operating environment when I needed to use Windows—which helped me keep my sanity level above zero. A little while ago, I migrated from Cygwin to one of its derivatives: MSYS2. Why? Cygwin’s package manager (the setup.exe) wasn’t nice, to put it nicely. MSYS2’s package manager, pacman, was one of the low-headache package managers I liked. I frequently needed to interact with native Windows executables from the command line. ...

Once upon a time, within the tendrils of a misty forest—where spirits coiled around ancient oaks—there was a yellow-brownish fox traveling along a gravel path. Let’s call her Citrine. She was a curious fox. Citrine yearned to uncover the mysteries veiled behind the eerie mist, away from the beaten trail. She wanted to know. She wanted to experience. But she was afraid. She had always been taught to stick to the path. ...

It was many years ago. At my to-be-previous job, we wanted to try some new modeling things. We grabbed the then-latest TensorFlow docker image (Since the model was based on TensorFlow—I forget which one though) and it spun up smoothly. The container even printed a pretty logo in colorful ASCII art as shown in the cover image. The experiments went well. We eventually packed some more dependencies and an sshd (and some sort of init, of course) in, and asked IT to put the image on a shared GPU box. ...

I’ve been wanting to do this for a pretty long time. Wanting to set up a place. A place to write things, where I own what I write. A place not at the whim of some random megacorp walled gardens. A place that represents who I am and what I do. A place I can point people …