Excerpts

I'm fine eating alone, traveling alone, doing everything alone. People always think that's sad. You know what's actually sad? Never doing the things you want to do because you can't find anyone to go with you. — The internet

If something feels wrong to you, it may not be right for you. — Robert Iger

No matter what titles or achievements we gain, at heart we still feel like the innocent child we were long ago. — Robert Iger

Having too much power for too long isn't a good thing. Without realizing it, your own voice gets louder and louder and drowns out everyone else in the room. It slowly becomes normal for people to hold back their own opinions until they've heard yours. People don't dare tell you what they think. They're afraid of disagreeing and afraid of conflict. This can happen even with the best-intentioned leaders. You have to work actively and deliberately to resist the harmful effects of power. — Robert Iger

AI

In just a week or two, I've dropped Codex¹ and Claude Code one after the other.

The reasons are simple. Codex restricted my account login and now requires me to verify with a code sent to my phone number.

I signed up for OpenAI at the end of the month ChatGPT burst onto the scene. I think I just grabbed some online SMS-receiving service and verified with an Indonesian number. Now they want me to verify with a phone number I used years ago, which is honestly a bit much.

So there was nothing to do. My Codex account is gone. In the past, when this happened, it usually went back to normal on its own after a few days, with no verification needed. But now it's been half a month and it's still the same.

After a while I accepted reality and gave up on it.

As for Claude Code, it's the opposite of Codex. It's the AI that everyone in China's internet calls the strict father, from Company A,² famous for banning accounts like crazy, and it never did anything to my account. By the time I decided to stop using Claude, my account was still perfectly intact. My subscription hadn't even expired.

I gave up on Claude for reasons of my own.

In the half month of silence since, I've used AI much less. The main reason is that without my two main workhorses, GPT and Claude, I've ended up with no AI to use. In the past I almost only used those two. As for Chinese models, apart from DeepSeek, I've only dipped into the others like Kimi, Xiaomi and GLM, never used them in depth.

In the last two days I subscribed to a new service: Cursor.

The reason is that I saw online that the Grok 4.5 model is quite strong and good value, and it won't get you banned. I thought, I don't have a single AI model subscribed right now, so I might as well try it.

I'd been worried about account risk controls, but as soon as I got into Cursor I found I could subscribe directly with Alipay, and I smiled with relief.

In practice, though, my experience so far hasn't been great.

They say Grok 4.5 works fast, but after two days it feels too slow to me. This morning, for example, I ran a job with 8 tasks. Normally Codex would finish something like that in 3 to 4 hours, but Grok ran for a whole day... Of course, maybe that's because it got interrupted midway by some unexplained network conflict.

Second, I found that even though I didn't pick Auto and locked in the Grok 4.5 model myself, the system sent a different model to each agent when running the task: Composer 2.5, GPT 5.6, Sonnet 5. I was baffled and had no idea which model was actually doing my work.

Third, Cursor's software isn't as nice to use as Codex and Claude. Codex and Claude are very different in style, one trendy and one retro, but neither has any problems with the basics. Cursor, though, always lags for no reason, and I often can't even quit it with Command + Q, hahaha.

Lately the Seedraft³ project is still being polished. I wanted to register the domain Seedraft.com, but unsurprisingly it was already taken, so I registered a different domain instead. Maybe I'll use it someday.

Domains aren't expensive. Register it first, and maybe you'll need it later.

Typing

In this day and age, is it still worth practicing typing?

While thinking about that, another question came up: how many people these days can't type well?

When I was eight or nine, we had a boxy CRT computer at home,⁴ one of the earlier styles of computers. I remember watching a TV show whose name I've forgotten. The main character was a kid, and in one episode he wanted to try out the adult world, so he put on his father's polo shirt and went looking for a job. One of the jobs was typist.

That shows that in the past, being good at typing was a job you could get paid for.

But with computers where they are today, typing is long past being a skill worth showing off.

My brother finished middle school this year and will start at a vocational school after this summer. I registered him for a new engineering program that will need him to work with computers.

Yesterday I found a typing site (dazidazi.com) and had him test his typing skills. As I expected, he basically types with two fingers and isn't familiar with the keyboard.

I remember that when I was eight or nine, my uncle also pushed me to practice typing speed. I didn't think much of it then. But sure enough, by my teens I typed quite fast, even though I had no idea what being a fast typist was good for.

Is typing fast useful now? Voice recognition is so convenient, and Typeless⁵ is a revolutionary piece of software. All I can say is, you can skip typing, but you can't not know how to type.

If this is the age of AI, the keyboard is still the main way to connect to AI. Likewise, the keyboard is the main way to connect to a computer and talk to it. To visit a web page or write a post, you go through the keyboard.

My brother's computer basics are also fairly weak. I'd like him to learn some theory on computer fundamentals, but he'd probably find it dull. So I figure I'll just start him on typing.

If he gets familiar with the keyboard, that's some progress.

Selling My Bike

I have an idle road bike.

Earlier I took the chainring off this bike and gave it to a friend, who put it on his other bike and sold that.

Now I'm selling this bike, and it's missing the chainring. A chainring isn't expensive at all. You can get a set on Xianyu for a hundred yuan.

But I couldn't be bothered, so I planned to list the bike without a chainring online at a low price.

But I never expected that after more than two months of trying to sell it, I still haven't, and without exception, every buyer feels they can't accept a bike with no chainring.

It seems most people still want a complete bike they can ride right out of the box. And some think that even if you fit a chainring later, it won't be as good as the original.

That's what I find interesting. If you're buying a phone or other electronics, of course you'd want everything original and unrepaired. But why is there an "original parts mindset" with bikes?

In my view, a bike is just a pile of parts put together. Any part made to a common standard can be used directly. I think it has to do with how you understand a thing. Lots of people who don't know bikes see a bike as one whole.

People who do know bikes can take it apart in their heads and see the chainring, crank arms, freewheel, frame, derailleur and so on, a whole bike system made up of many components.

It's like that with bikes, and with lots of other things. Writing, for example. I used to think writing is just writing whatever comes to mind, and that's pretty much true. But behind writing whatever comes to mind, there's quite a lot hidden.

Reading, for one. Whether it's serious essays or social media, reading is at heart an input of information. Writers need constant input to stimulate and sort out their thinking so they can keep trying to write.

Collecting material, for another. When I come across a good line or idea, I write it down. As the saying goes, a dull pencil beats a sharp memory. Things I've copied out stay with me much better than things I've only read once.

In Jian Lai,⁶ when Chen Ping'an comes across a line that catches his eye, he carves it stroke by stroke onto bamboo slips, and every so often takes them out to sun them, sort through them and read them again.

Think of writing as a system. Reading and collecting material are the main parts supporting that system. There are others too, but this is just an example, so I won't go into more.

The upside of thinking in systems is that you can break a vague thing into its parts. Like when you learn a new subject, someone always says: first you have to build a knowledge framework.

But there's a downside too. If you look at everything through this lens, you can miss a lot of interesting things, and it can make you rigid and tired.

In the end, I spent under a hundred yuan on Xianyu myself for a chainring and crankset, put them on, and sold the bike that same day... for several hundred yuan more than my earlier asking price.

Haha. Sometimes going to a little trouble for other people saves you several hundred yuan, but most people never think of it that way.

Kung Fu Women's Soccer

Today I went to see Stephen Chow's new film, Kung Fu Women's Soccer.

I never thought Stephen Chow's comedy had a distinctive style, but after today I have to admit he has a school of comedy all his own. A line or two, a simple setup, and you know right away it's a Stephen Chow movie.

Most of the actors in Kung Fu Women's Soccer are familiar names today: Dilraba Dilmurat, Zhang Xiaofei, Lay Zhang. That surprised me, so at first, seeing these actors perform in the Stephen Chow way, I felt a little unsettled.

That's probably why I found the first half hour painfully awkward. The actors all deliver their lines at top speed in an exaggerated tone, which felt off to me. But when I thought it over later, comparing it with Chow's films at their peak, it all made sense.

Lay Zhang's role as the great-uncle master in particular, I think, was written entirely for Stephen Chow. If the young Chow had played it himself, it would have been a smash.

Overall, I gave the film three stars on Douban.

It's a very Stephen Chow comedy. Compared with his previous film, The New King of Comedy, this one has much more sincerity, and there are lots of thoughtful little touches. I think I picked up on some, like how the skills of the other national team players are designed around their own countries' cultures. Americans believe in science, the Japanese have that hot-blooded edgy spirit, and so on.

What costs it points is that the plot is too simple. I could guess where it was going the whole way. The great-uncle master playing the bad guy and then flipping, Zhang Xiaofei's all-out final strike turning out to be a bluff. All too easy to see coming.

The other thing is what I said earlier. Lay Zhang's acting isn't bad, but Stephen Chow's comic persona is so deeply fixed in people's minds that I could picture exactly how Chow would play the role and what his lines would be.

Last of all, the film made me feel that Stephen Chow is still being himself, no question, but for some reason it always seemed like everything now is just nostalgia for the past and imitation of it.

Just like the golden age of Hong Kong cinema is long gone, and Stephen Chow's hair has gone white and he's no longer in the bloom of youth.

In a time when the film industry is struggling and AI is all the rage, how many people can keep living out their artistic beliefs the same way for decades?

You can say Stephen Chow's movies aren't as good as they used to be, but you can't say he's lost his original heart.

Anyone who's seen Kung Fu Women's Soccer knows this is the most Stephen Chow film in all these years.

Footnotes

1. Codex is OpenAI's AI coding assistant. It evolved from Codex CLI and can complete coding tasks on its own. ↩

2. "Company A" (A社) is Anthropic, the developer of the Claude AI. ↩

3. Seedraft (文芽) is the AI long-form novel writing project I'm polishing. ↩

4. "Boxy-head computer" (方脑壳电脑) is the common nickname for early desktop computers with big CRT monitors, named for the monitor's square shape. They were popular around 2000. ↩

5. Typeless is an AI-based keyboard-free input tool that can replace traditional typing with voice, gestures and other methods. ↩

6. Jian Lai is a xianxia web novel by the author Fenghuo Xi Zhuhou. Its protagonist Chen Ping'an is an ordinary boy who becomes a swordsman. ↩