Yesterday, while browsing Zhihu, I came across a question: “How do you evaluate the view that ‘AI is America’s Urban Investment’?” Under this question, there was an image that has been widely circulated online recently—a network diagram depicting the intricate flow of funds and collaborations among tech giants Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, and Oracle, dubbed the “AI Perpetual Motion Machine.” Some have questioned whether this complete “internal cycle” constitutes a massive asset bubble, comparing AI to “America’s urban investment,” which could eventually collapse.

Recently, Lao T has been browsing Zhihu, reading over a dozen questions and hundreds of answers about Kangxi and Hong Chengchou. Roughly estimating, the total word count likely exceeds 300,000. Regarding what could be called the most influential contemporary phenomenon of “grassroots historical invention,” Lao T has some personal reflections. Here, Lao T won’t revisit whether Kangxi was Hong Chengchou’s son but will instead share some thoughts on the phenomenon itself.

This Double 11 shopping festival, Old T bought two printers: one laser printer and one 3D printer.

Recently, my mom received a call claiming to be a “provincial public security satisfaction survey.” She didn’t answer the first two times and only picked up on the third attempt. She even called me to ask if it was a scam. As a legal professional, Old T was aware of such things. A few years ago, while taking my child to the hospital for a check-up, I was also “surveyed.” But undoubtedly, this kind of opinion polling seems like a “rarity” in China. Compared to the frequent poll data seen in foreign news, the presence of such surveys feels much less noticeable. If not for these two “survey” experiences with my family, I wouldn’t have known such “polls” existed domestically.

A few days ago, news about “nine villages in Zhaoqing being transferred to Foshan” flooded Old T’s social media feed. Many people took one look at the map and chuckled: Isn’t this the location of the long-planned Guangzhou New Airport? Instantly, the old joke about “Guangzhou providing the fame, Foshan the funds, and Zhaoqing the land” resurfaced.

I’ve been using the Hugo Stack theme for a long time to write my blog. It’s a great theme, but I think it’s better suited for blogs with a lot of images. My current website has accumulated over 1,700 photos, and with the Stack theme, generating the site produces an additional 7,000 to 8,000 files! This makes the entire repository very large, making it difficult to deploy on third-party free platforms like Cloudflare Pages.

This article primarily explores updating a Hugo blog via email and the feasibility of using GitHub issues as a publishing platform for Hugo blogs. It also shares experiences from writing a WeChat public account article with over 100,000 reads and discusses the use of a new VPS provider, Zouter.

On the way home from picking up my daughter from school yesterday, she asked me a soul-searching question: Why does our family speak Mandarin? Indeed, Old T’s entire family hails from the same county in Hunan, but since moving to Guangdong, we’ve all naturally switched to Mandarin. Especially Lawtee himself—having been in Guangdong for 18 years, he’s spoken Mandarin the entire time, which feels somewhat odd.

Recently, Lawtee decided to upgrade the Nezha probe because the communication domain required for the previous V0 version was about to expire. Although such probes may seem like “harmless” little tools, they generally carry significant security risks. If compromised, all servers connected to the probe would undoubtedly be “taken out in one go.” Therefore, while upgrading the probe, Lawtee also added some basic protection measures.

Recently, while revisiting old articles, Lawtee reminisced about the days of tinkering with QQ logins and felt a wave of nostalgia. Phone calls? You can dial anyone globally—a China Mobile number to China Unicom connects instantly, no barriers. But chat apps? WeChat, Douyin, DingTalk, Weibo, QQ—each is a “walled garden,” ignoring one another. So why do phones work seamlessly while chat apps don’t?

Why Can Phones Connect Freely?

The global interoperability of telephone systems appears to stem from standardized protocols, such as those established by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), enabling seamless technical integration. But Lawtee believes there are deeper reasons behind this.