Around 2021, I started reading a lot of web novels. Some were classic works topping historical rankings on Qidian, others were filler novels I stumbled upon through a random Douyin video, and a few were books I abandoned after only a few chapters.
On Wednesday evening, while driving to pick up my child from school, my wife called to tell me that my cousin’s baby had been born. Hearing this news, I suddenly felt a weight lift off my shoulders.
It has been a long time since I last wrote about the Russia-Ukraine war. Over the past few years, this topic has become excessively heated online, with everyone holding their own opinions—many of which are irreconcilable and sharply opposed. After writing a short piece early in the war titled As an Ordinary Chinese, How to View the Russia-Ukraine War, I never updated my thoughts on the matter. Now, it’s time for an update.
Today, I saw someone sharing the Global Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) ranking in a WeChat group. China ranked 76th globally, on par with Moldova and the Solomon Islands, only 5 points higher than India, and 40 to 50 points lower than European countries. My intuition told me that this index might be flawed. China has been seriously tackling deep-rooted corruption in recent years, so it doesn’t make sense for its ranking to drop so significantly. Upon further investigation, I found that this index is truly jaw-dropping.
With DeepSeek stirring global perceptions of AI, more and more businesses and individuals are beginning to integrate AI, and the era of AI democratization has fully commenced. Previously, my use of AI was primarily in the technical domain. However, as AI begins to deeply penetrate various social strata and diverse groups, countless non-technical AI demands are flooding in, and the image of AI is increasingly becoming “monstrous.” This sends a chill down my spine.
Last July, Soomal (also known as Shumao or Digital Duo), which had been operating for 15 years, finally couldn’t sustain itself and began focusing on new media platforms. Upon hearing this news, I felt a void in my heart, as this was a website that had accompanied me since my university days. Fortunately, two days ago, I saw that Dan Zong had finally packaged and uploaded the website mirror, so I downloaded and deployed the mirror site Soomal.cc.
During the Spring Festival, DeepSeek was almost entirely unavailable due to well-known reasons. Especially the API, which often went down for entire days. Even though the webpage was restored this morning, when I opened Cline in VS Code, it just kept spinning without any response. This forced me to purchase a third-party API to use. Additionally, I took the opportunity to test the local deployment of DeepSeek Ollama.
On the first day of the Spring Festival, a notification suddenly popped up on my phone from the “Yue Zheng Yi” app, which felt quite strange. The last time I received a notification during the Spring Festival was due to the COVID-19 pandemic, instructing us to cancel our holidays and return to work immediately. I thought it might be another emergency, but upon opening the notification, I found it was an obituary. It stated that Comrade Deng had passed away unexpectedly from a heart attack on New Year’s Eve after returning to his room to sleep after dinner. Upon receiving this news, I was momentarily stunned.
These are some recent small happenings, mainly for personal records.
This morning, I wanted to add an RSS widget to the sidebar of my Hugo homepage to display cross-site updates. It seemed simple enough, and I had even documented the main process on my 2025 page. However, as soon as I pushed the changes to GitHub, things went wrong. Both GitHub and Vercel failed to deploy the site. Here, I’ll document the subsequent steps in detail.