169. Flowers Everywhere
The cover photo shows a tree in full bloom by the road over the weekend. The juxtaposition of the beautiful flowers with a harsh, protruding security camera feels almost like a piece of performance art.
Record the down-to-earth trending technologies seen every week, and publish them here after screening. If you find it good, you can follow this weekly to get update notifications.
Technical Learning
DON’T DIE
https://protocol.bryanjohnson.com/
A detailed guide by Bryan Johnson on health protocols to “not die.” It’s a scientific, forward-thinking approach to optimizing your health and body. Worth a look.
Chen Hao’s Blog: “On my Three Views”
https://coolshell.cn/articles/19085.html
A profound piece by the late Chen Hao (LeftVand) about his views on the world, society, and life. It resonates deeply—he was the kind of engineer many of us aspire to be.
Trending Tools
BewlyBewly: A Bilibili Beautification Extension
https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/bewlybewly/bbbiejemhfihiooipfcjmjmbfdmobobp
A very polished Chrome extension that gives Bilibili a clean, modern interface with almost no setup required. It might actually make you visit Bilibili more often!
Sampler: A Cool Command-Line Tool
https://sampler.dev/
A CLI tool that lets you sample any dynamic process directly from your terminal—like watching DB changes, monitoring MQ messages, or getting notifications when deploy scripts finish. Beautifully designed.
Awesome macOS Command Line
https://git.herrbischoff.com/awesome-macos-command-line/about/
A list of shell commands and tools specifically for macOS. It includes many hidden configurations that aren’t available in the UI, like excluding apps from dark mode, font smoothing, and window transparency.
Just Looking Around
How Modern Workers Can Find Happiness
https://sspai.com/post/86697
An excellent article on Sspai about finding happiness in the modern Chinese workplace, especially in the tech industry. It’s full of points worth reflecting on.
Milk Recommendation: Yoplait 4.0
After trying over a dozen types of milk, I’ve found Yoplait 4.0 (the 15-day shelf life version) to be the best. It’s incredibly creamy and perfect for coffee or drinking on its own. Definitely try it if you love milk coffee.
A Fun Excerpt from “Blood Romance” (血色浪漫), Which Feels a Lot Like Today’s Chinese Internet
Zhong Yuemin often squatted with the villagers, bowl in hand, chatting about nothing in particular, and he found there was simply no common topic between him and the farmers. The farmers liked to talk about village news, which to Zhong Yuemin was dull: the Li family’s man had slept with the Zhang family’s wife, the two Wang brothers were openly and secretly carrying on with a widow from the Chang family, and that widow’s child looked a lot like a bachelor in the village surnamed Zhao.
Most of the villagers were illiterate. The most educated person in the village was the current accountant, Zhang Jinsuo, who had finished upper primary school. A few years earlier he had been the principal and only teacher of the village’s community-run primary school, and everyone in the village who could read a few characters had once been his student. Later the school could not carry on, because the village could no longer support a community teacher: a strong laborer’s work points were worth only five cents a day, so how could they feed an idler? The villagers firmly believed a community teacher was an idler, that it was enough for kids to know a hoe handle, and asked what use reading was. The village Party secretary, Chang Gui, reasoned that since Zhang Jinsuo was an “intellectual” he should be given a way out, so when the school closed he had him switch to being the accountant, which embodied the Party’s policy on intellectuals.
Zhong Yuemin was surprised to find that, living in such poor and harsh conditions, the villagers rarely looked gloomy. They stayed optimistic, and their favorite topics were food and sex. When it came to food, since they had never seen anything better, they insisted that sour soup dumplings and chili oil were the most delicious food in the world. If anyone suggested there were many tastier things out there, everyone would agree that this person had seen nothing of the world, and that the bastard had probably never eaten sour soup dumplings and was just talking nonsense.
Besides food, the remaining topic was naturally the affairs between men and women. When talking about this, everyone got excited, the mood was lively, and people spoke their minds freely, in a truly democratic spirit. Once Chang Shoucai came back from visiting relatives in the county town with a propaganda poster: Chairman Mao in a green army uniform, waving, standing inside a ring of light like a Buddha’s halo. Below the halo was a crowd of foreigners of different skin colors in all sorts of strange clothes, each holding a Little Red Book and cheering, and above it was a line of text: Chairman Mao is the red sun in the hearts of the people of the world.
For the first time, the villagers learned that there were Black and white people in the world, which went far beyond their imagination. A heated discussion followed on the question of what color a baby would be if a white person and a Black person had a child. The question was debated for days, until Party secretary Chang Gui settled it once and for all: “Black and white spots.” His theory was that when a black pig mates with a white pig, the piglets come out spotted. The villagers all said that’s the Party secretary for you, he has seen the world and knows things.
Only the former community teacher, Zhang Jinsuo, scoffed: “Take a bucket of white lime and a bucket of ink, pour them together and stir them well, that’s the color.”