What exactly is democracy, as a foundational concept of modern society? Coincidentally, Old T recently encountered a case in his residential community where a vote was held to ban electric bicycles from entering. Taking a glimpse through this small window, I believe it can, to some extent, help explain this concept.
I began systematically engaging with AI in 2023. Before that, my understanding of AI was largely confined to conceptual discussions or scattered application scenarios, with limited overall practicality. At least from the perspective of ordinary users and widespread industry adoption, AI truly entered the “usable stage” around the time of ChatGPT 3.0.
Recently, in discussions about American society, a frequently mentioned phenomenon is the so-called “Cutoff Line."(Dead Line) Many people tend to attribute this issue to insufficient welfare, ruthless capitalism, or governance failures. However, focusing solely on the surface level of the system often overlooks a deeper factor: the choice inherent in legal culture itself. In fact, different societies have different answers to questions like “Who should bear the consequences of failure?” and “Should the state intervene in advance?” It is in this sense that revisiting the governance logic in traditional Chinese legal culture may provide a neglected comparative perspective for understanding America’s “cutoff line” phenomenon.
While scrolling through the HN forum this morning, I came across an article on the homepage titled “60% of Legal Searches Now End Without a Click. Here’s What That Means for Your Firm.” Although it discusses the situation with American search engines, the situation in China is quite similar. Currently, over 60% of online searches related to legal questions no longer result in any webpage clicks. Users complete their information gathering and even decision-making directly on the search results page or within the AI-generated summaries provided by the search engine. The article predicts that by mid-2026, this proportion could rise to 70%–80%.
Recently in a WeChat group, I came across ROYWANG’s article “Who is Secretly Following You? Adding an RSS Subscription Counter to Your Blog” . The author created a small script to count blog RSS subscribers, but it only works for blogs whose domain is hosted on Cloudflare. Since my blog uses both VPS and Vercel, the situation is different. Over the weekend, I explored this issue and found the process surprisingly straightforward.
Perhaps because I have recently answered several questions on Zhihu regarding prosecutors and courts, I have been frequently invited to respond to inquiries about the “jury system,” such as “What are your thoughts on the jury system?” “What is the difference between the jury system and the prosecutorial system?” and “What are the pros and cons of the jury system?” After briefly scanning some highly upvoted answers, I noticed that many users with a scientific mindset directly applied mathematical probability calculations to conclude that “under the rule requiring unanimity for a verdict, as long as each individual is mentally sound, the collective outcome will be significantly more accurate than an individual’s judgment.” While such calculations serve as a useful attempt at popular science, helping ordinary people intuitively understand the operational logic of the jury system, they unfortunately overlook the unpredictability of human thought and behavior. Drawing conclusions from simple calculations can lead to significant deviations in real-life scenarios. Here, I will also briefly share my perspective on the jury system.
Recently, Old T saw a doctor in his social circle recommending the Johns Hopkins University “History of Medicine” syllabus. From a global comparative perspective, it provides a detailed introduction, starting with comparisons of medical texts from the Near East, Mediterranean, and China 3,000 years ago, as well as comparisons of medical and bodily concepts between ancient Greece and China. It then covers how Persian and other Western medical knowledge spread eastward and how Chinese medicine spread westward. What surprised me most was that this syllabus from a top American medical school openly discusses the influence of religion on modern Western medicine, particularly how modern Western medicine, in its formation, institutionalization, and value orientation, largely inherits the religious culture of the Western Middle Ages.
Recently, Old T came across an academic paper shared by netizens in several WeChat groups titled “The Possibility of a Large-Scale Return Migration Wave of Elderly Migrant Workers and the Challenges of Rural Reemployment.” The paper points out that as the cohort born during the second baby boom (1962–1970) after the founding of the People’s Republic of China gradually reaches retirement age, a significant proportion of them, especially those who worked away from their hometowns, are not covered by urban employee pension insurance. Upon reaching retirement age, they often receive only the basic urban-rural resident pension insurance, which amounts to just over 200 yuan per month. These individuals, who have already returned, are currently returning, or are about to return “permanently,” find themselves in a dilemma due to the transformation of rural livelihoods and the reduction of non-agricultural employment opportunities. This situation also poses an unprecedented challenge for rural society.
It has been 15 years since my father passed away, and once again, his birthday has arrived.
I still remember his last birthday while he was alive, which fell during the New Year holiday. At that time, I was in college and not particularly mindful of the lunar calendar. It wasn’t until my mother called me in the evening that I realized with shock that I had forgotten my father’s birthday.
Recently, I saw a post on the NS forum asking how to optimize WordPress rendering speed from 2 seconds to under 1 second. My immediate thought was the OpenLiteSpeed + SQLite solution. Firstly, because OpenLiteSpeed is built for extreme WordPress acceleration, and secondly, using OLS + SQLite on a low-performance VPS can maximize server resource savings and deliver a noticeable speed boost.