Hi, I'm Xiluluke. I'm on a work trip in Langzhong, Sichuan right now.

Another week is over. Looking back, it feels like nothing happened, but in fact a lot slipped quietly by. If you don't deliberately remember and think about it, most of your life goes by like this, slipping away unnoticed.

Sports

July, summer vacation, summer. After all these years of working, summer is no longer as full of energy as it was in college. But there's no denying that summer is a season where vitality and energy go together. People with vitality sweat it out to the fullest this time of year, and even people without much energy get swept up if they get anywhere near it.

And for me, July is the month of sports, because several of the world's biggest sporting events are happening around the globe: the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico, the Tour de France, the League of Legends Mid-Season Invitational (MSI), the Esports World Cup (EWC)¹ and more.

Of those, the World Cup isn't my main focus, but I follow the other three. So what happened over the past week?

MSI and EWC

I've been watching League of Legends for many years. This year is different from previous years. After the LPL's² BLG won First Stand³ in the first split, they got a lot of attention, and fans back home were hoping they'd take the MSI title and prove themselves again.

But as of today, both MSI and EWC are over. MSI ended in disappointment with BLG losing 2-3 to Korea's HLE, and at EWC they were knocked out in the quarterfinals.

That means the whole LPL's international run for the second split is over.

If players give everything on stage and still end up with a disappointing result, fans in their region can live with that. The problem is that some players on stage haven't lived up to the spirit of competitive sports. There's arrogance, temper tantrums and trying to look like a pro, and that's something a lot of fans in the region can't accept, me included.

BLG's top laner Bin lacks team spirit. It's not just costing them games, it's also making the atmosphere inside the team tense. Inside the game and out, that's an unstable factor for a team.

From a fan's point of view, losing games is sad, of course. But what's even more discouraging is that the team and player you support don't have a good sense of the big picture, and lose a match because of their own personality and selfish greed, and lose it ugly. That's what really makes you give up.

By contrast, look at Korea's DK at EWC. The club couldn't even pay salaries, a few players paid their own way to compete, and in the end they won the EWC title, moving and thrilling fans around the world.

How long has it been since a story like that happened in the LPL? In the regular season, maybe this year's second split, where the entire Nirvana Group rose together,⁴ was something like it. And at Worlds, I think you'd have to go back at least to the year EDG won.⁵

The Olympic spirit has two principles. First, go all out to win. Second, accept defeat with grace.

As a professional player, you chose this career, and winning and losing is what you face every day.

If the result isn't what you hoped for, but the audience can see from your play that you really competed seriously, then everything else is a passing cloud. Like Cape Verde⁶ at the World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico: even when they were eliminated, they won applause.

But when it comes to League of Legends esports, I think one reason so many people won't accept esports as a sport is that too many athletes (players) show no trace of the Olympic spirit.

Le Tour (the Tour de France)

The Tour de France is the most popular and classic of the three Grand Tours,⁷ and it holds an extraordinary place in the cycling world. I started watching it last year, and this is my second year.

Honestly, two years in, I'm still just getting started. I know many riders' names but not their faces. But as long as you remember who's who and which team they ride for, you can still follow the race. After all, each team only has a handful of main riders.

In my view, for the 2026 Tour you only need to watch a few riders: Pogačar, Vingegaard, Seixas, Evenepoel, and the one I like, nicknamed "Sharp Bro."

As for what's worth watching, there's actually quite a lot. I can list a few:

• How will this year's Vingegaard vs. Pogačar showdown end?
• Can Seixas make his name at this year's Tour?
• Does Evenepoel really have the guts?

The three are ranked from most to least exciting, but nobody expected that the most exciting one, the Vingegaard vs. Pogačar showdown, would already be over yesterday.

Visma's general classification rider and captain, Vingegaard, had a serious crash during the race and abandoned on the spot.

Cycling has always been a high-risk sport. Over the years riders have died in races, and broken arms and legs are common. But for viewers, a crash often happens in just a few seconds.

What you'd been looking forward to hasn't even arrived, and then a rider drops out of the race because of an accident. I think a lot of viewers don't feel it sink in. Their heads are still full of pictures of the Vingegaard vs. Pogačar showdown, and only later does it dawn on them.

Vingegaard has abandoned.

That means the biggest storyline of this Tour is gone. I'm not anyone's fan. I follow the race just to enjoy a different kind of thrill. But seeing one of the top riders exit still came as a shock.

I hope Vingegaard recovers well and comes back to racing!

AI

A Token Usage Tracker

![[CleanShot 2026-07-20 at 17.28.49@2x.png]]

Vibe Usage:⁸ yesterday I found a piece of software that shows your token usage across all the platforms you've used. I don't know if the numbers are accurate, but they're probably about right.

The point is, in the AI world today, "turning things into data" seems to be something lots of people are chasing. Is it important to see how many tokens you've used? I don't think so. I just find it fun to quantify my AI use like this.

It's like how, even though I call myself a minimalist, I have a habit of keeping every egg carton from my fat-loss period and stacking them up one by one, higher and higher. It looks really fun, though I couldn't tell you exactly what's fun about it.

![[CleanShot 2026-07-20 at 17.33.09@2x.png]] In terms of models, over the past three months the ones I've used most are still the two heavyweights, GPT 5.5 and Opus 4.8. Because my Codex account was restricted a while back, I only got to use 5.6 nearly ten days late.

As for how they feel, both Claude and Codex are great to use. They're the two best-known top AI companies, after all.

But I've now left Claude, and Codex is still around. For the reason, see last week's weekly. I won't go over it again here.

I'd thought leaving Claude would be painful, but after two weeks without it, the feeling isn't as intense as I imagined.

Kimi

The AI models I used before were roughly structured like this:

• Claude
• Codex
• DeepSeek

Each of the three had its own role, and together they did my work well. After I canceled my Claude subscription, I went looking for a model that could replace it.

So I subscribed to Cursor. Now I really regret it, because Grok 4.5 isn't nearly as good as the rumors online said.

After that, I subscribed to Kimi, a Chinese large model. I subscribed because its promo page says its ability is slightly below GPT 5.6 and Fable 5 but that it's number one in the world at front-end work.

So I tried the ¥199-a-month membership plan. As soon as I subscribed, I had it do two things right away.

1. Write a user manual for Seedraft. It did this especially well. I'd previously written product manuals with DeepSeek V4 Pro and Fable 5 using the same prompt, and Fable 5's design and layout were clearly much better than DeepSeek's. But once Kimi made one, it surprised me in a different way. Its manual didn't just match Fable's in layout and design, it was ingenious in the design of the whole manual, with real flair.

![[CleanShot 2026-07-20 at 17.45.30@2x.png]] ![[CleanShot 2026-07-20 at 17.46.05@2x.png]] You can see the difference in style just from the tables of contents of the manuals Fable and Kimi made. Fable 5 is the traditional kind, no merits and no faults, while Kimi clearly used some clever ideas to make a stiff table of contents more lively.

Of course, comparing the two documents overall, you can't say one is far ahead of the other. At most it's a difference in style and interpretation, and which is better is up to you.

The point is that Chinese models now have the ability to match the world's top models.

2. Rebuild the first-launch welcome screen of Seedraft that I'd just made with Cursor. This wasn't compared against a top model like Fable, so the result goes without saying. The design Kimi rebuilt really is much better looking than the interface Cursor made with Grok 4.5.

What Kimi means is that developers in China finally have a decent Chinese large model that doesn't have to bow to the US.

And in just these past few days, several AI companies including Qwen and DeepSeek have each hinted that new models rivaling Fable are coming soon.

If this were before Kimi 3 came out, I'd never have believed news like that. But now, buddy, I'm genuinely a little excited. I'm looking forward to the day I have nothing but Chinese models in my hands.

That said, Kimi isn't weak, but it isn't flawless either. The simplest issue is that its quota doesn't seem very durable. The ¥199 membership I bought comes to nearly $30, but in terms of how long it lasts, Kimi doesn't feel much better than Codex.

The other thing is that Kimi has no desktop client like Codex. The current Kimi client can't directly call tools like Skills.

Movies

King of Comedy

After watching Kung Fu Women's Soccer the week before last, this weekend I rewatched Stephen Chow's King of Comedy, one of my favorites among his films.

I just didn't expect to feel so much watching it again after all these years.

I think old movies, Hong Kong films especially, share one trait: they don't try to tell too many stories in one film, and they don't try to establish too many classic characters in one film.

The theme of King of Comedy is simple: love. The film uses lots of scenes to show that Yin Tianchou is an actor whose ambitions never came true, but the real purpose of all of that is to set up the payoff later.

"Hey! You said you'd support me. Were you serious?"

"Yes!"

"You're not lying to me?"

"No, I'm waiting for you."

These two exchanges are Stephen Chow's tribute to love. For Yin Tianchou, playing the male lead in a film isn't just his dream. It's also the temptation of power, resources and fame. As someone born after 2000, when Liu Piaopiao said that "Hey," my heart sank halfway, because I felt the story should go in a more cynical direction about human nature: Yin Tianchou wouldn't answer, would ride off in his car, and Liu Piaopiao would be left alone.

But what I never expected is that Yin Tianchou says without hesitation that he really wants to support her, and there isn't the slightest falseness in it.

Maybe because I've lived in modern society too long, I always figured scenes like this were just artistic devices.

But more than an artistic device, I'd say in that era love really could be this unhesitating and this sincere.

It's just that this sincerity, this respect for love, turned into a bullet that hit me more than twenty years later.

At the end of the film, Liu Piaopiao is knitting a sweater, waiting for Yin Tianchou to come back.

When he returns, Liu Piaopiao rattles off a long string of lines, saying things like even if you're only an extra you have to support me, and Yin Tianchou says nothing but one line:

"Liu Piaopiao, I love you."

No need for more words.

I don't know why the film suddenly adds a cops-and-robbers shootout near the end. It's jarring, as absurd as Shakespeare writing The Two Gentlemen of Verona⁹ and having the brothers' falling-out end in a happy family reunion out of nowhere.

I have no interest in finding the reason behind it. That's stories for you. Sometimes we only pay attention to what we want to pay attention to.

Before Sunrise¹⁰

I think many people today won't be able to sit through this film.

On a train to France, an American man and a French woman strike up a connection because of a noisy German couple, and they spend the whole ride talking in the dining car.

The only dramatic thing in the whole story is that at the station where he should get off, he invites her, who's headed for Paris, to get off with him and keep talking in a strange city. The next morning he'll fly back to America and she'll take the train on to Paris. And she agrees.

The whole film is just the two of them wandering around an unfamiliar city, talking.

Yes, talking nonstop. For an hour and forty minutes, the two of them just talk, about all kinds of topics, including but not limited to their parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, their exes, what annoys them, what they like, feminism, philosophy, music, literature, history, communication studies, media and more.

After watching, all I can say is: if a person can talk with you like that for a whole day, how could you not fall in love? Thinking about myself, never mind with a girlfriend, I've never had a conversation this deep, where nothing is off limits, with anyone so far.

While watching, I even wondered, is this just a difference between Chinese and Western cultures? Can Chinese people really talk to someone about this stuff? Like how the souls of modern people might be fragments of the souls of ancient people?

Chinese people have an extremely heavy sense of shame. Even since reform and opening up, with the impact of the West on our economy and culture, some cultural differences can't be erased in just one or two generations.

In this day and age, everyone is an island.

Having someone to exchange a few words with when you feel lonely is already no easy thing. If I could really meet someone like in the film, who can open their heart and talk for a whole day, then I'd definitely want to become great friends with them, even fall in love with them like the man in the story.

Like the wholehearted love in King of Comedy, Before Sunrise also hit me with a sense of unreality. That shock comes not only from art but from the times.

Footnotes

1. EWC (Esports World Cup) is an annual multi-title esports event held in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia since 2024, covering League of Legends, CS, Dota 2 and more. ↩

2. LPL (League of Legends Pro League) is the professional League of Legends league of mainland China, one of the world's four major regions. ↩

3. First Stand is an international event Riot Games added in 2025, in which the first-split champions of each region compete. It's held earlier than MSI. ↩

4. The LPL regular season uses a group format. Teams are placed into groups such as the "Ascent Group" and "Nirvana Group" based on their results in each stage. "The Nirvana Group rising together" refers to the weaker group's collective comeback. ↩

5. This refers to EDG winning the League of Legends S11 World Championship in 2021, a legendary title run in LPL history. ↩

6. Cape Verde is an island nation off the west coast of Africa with a population of only about 500,000. The 2026 World Cup in the US, Canada and Mexico is the first time it has qualified for the World Cup finals. ↩

7. The three Grand Tours are the Tour de France, the Giro d'Italia and the Vuelta a España, top road cycling stage races of about three weeks each. The Tour de France has the longest history and the highest prestige. ↩

8. Vibe Usage is a tool that tracks AI model token usage. Website: https://vibecafe.ai/ ↩

9. The Two Gentlemen of Verona is an early Shakespeare comedy. Critics have long faulted its ending, where the two male leads are hastily reconciled and forced into a happy reunion. ↩

10. Before Sunrise (1995) is the first film in Richard Linklater's "Before" trilogy. The other two are Before Sunset and Before Midnight. ↩