Darkmatter in Cyberspace

Today is the last day of 2022. Since the first outbreak of Covid-19 in Wuhan, in January 2020, the whole planet's been under the shadow of this virus for 3 years. All humans are suffered from the diseases, deaths, and chaos brought by it. But as a native Chinese and an observer of Chinese and other societies, I found some interesting things during this pandemic. Among them, the different attitudes toward this virus are especially worth investigating. If you see enough street views in China and other countries, it's easy to find some differences. All people wearing masks, especially N95-like masks, even in the wild? No doubt, you're in China. Super long lines waiting for the nucleic acid test? China. Shopping rush for masks, medicines (effective and ineffective), food, water, everything needed for everyday life? Of course, you're in China. Looks like Chinese lives are destroyed by the virus, while in fact they're destroyed by the irrational fear of the virus. Why Chi...

 Once upon a time, there're a clan in the forest called Comu, who built village U, where you can find all the virtues people chase desperately in other villages: justice, freedom, democracy, friendship, honesty, bravery, and so on. This universe was perfect, and vitally fascinating to nearby clues without freedom and rationality traditions. It provided them a shortcut to constituting a good or even better community than that in the western part of the forest. For example, they had schools, libraries, and universities. They enshrined the right of the villagers in the constitutions. They built highways, super dams, and high-speed rail networks. They developed high-tech, and explore other planets and deep oceans. But that's not the whole story. Their athletes got more gold medals in Forest Olympics. Their people claimed more happiness in everyday life. There were no tragedies and scandals in their newspapers and no corruption in their governments. Some people say Comu cheats. Ther...

 Traditional system programming languages are C/C++. In recent years Rust gain more and more attention in this area. C is by far the most successful programming language on this planet. I tried it a couple of days ago in a small command line app. The mental model of a C programmer is quite different from the "high-level languages", such as Python, Java, PHP, etc. As a C programmer, you have to estimate the volume of data your app deal with constantly. How to fit the data into the memory, on the stack or heap? Do these estimation hold on any platform you want to deploy? When the estimation doesn't hold, what will happen by executing the current code implementation? These questions are hard to answer, even for experienced programmers. Hence except for those performance-critical applications, few people choose C as the implementation language. C++ was invented to make C "higher level". However, its main problem lies in that it's too ambitious and powerful. We k...

 "Three-Body* is a well-known sci-fi, especially in the Chinese world, by Liu Cixin. It won the Nebula prize in 2014 and the Hugo prize in 2015, the first Chinese sci-fi that won worldwide prizes. However, when I first read this novel in 2014, I can't even finish it. The story started with a tragic “criticize and struggle demonstration" targeting the heroine Ye Wenjie. As a child of a "class enemy", she'd been abandoned and betrayed. So when she received a message from the three-body world, warning her not to respond by exposing the Earth's position in the universe, it was natural that she responded with a welcome message, hoping that the world can redeem the corrupted humanity on the Earth. A wonderful start. In my opinion, this is why the novel won its reputation in the Western world: the first sci-fi talking about the Culture Revolution, which like many other political tragedies, was erased intentionally by the ruling party in this country. However, t...

"American Gods" is Neil Gaiman's Hugo and Nebula Awards winner novel. In modern society, no matter the East or West, the old Gods are fading, while new Gods (cars, the internet, iPhone, etc) are taking their places. The history after the Industrial Revolution is like a tape being fast-forwarded. Old Gods can't adapt to the more and more fast pace of modern society, like villagers in a metropolis. Yesterday's glories no longer exist. They're ready to be forgotten. However, they're still remembered by many people. They call their names for help, taking them from the old continent to the new one. There they met the new Gods and fought for survival. These are some backgrounds. Years ago I read the Chinese version, then saw the TV shows. This year I began to read the original version. Now I've finished about 10%. Inside the novel's fantastic shell, there's a philosophical quest: now we live in a world where the telescope and spacecraft tell us there...

The article "Lessons from Russia's cyber-war in Ukraine" (The Economist, December 3rd) analyzed some key factors of the ongoing cyberwar in Ukraine, as an important part of the Ukraine war. First, it pointed out that Russia prepared for a long time before the war. Their computer hackers brought down the satellite communications Ukraine relies on. They implanted malware "wiper" in hundreds of Ukrainian systems to delete data on the devices, and another malware called Industroyer2 to attack Ukraine's electricity grid. However, today we know Ukrainian repelled most of Russia's cyber attacks. They learned from their failures in 2015 and 2016 when cities were paralyzed, and civilian services were cut off. The critical part of Ukraine's successful defense is the intelligence support from the West. Before Russian troops crossed the border, the intelligence departments of the UK and the US warned several times. So Ukrainian have enough time to redeploy their...

A couple of days ago in the recent podcast "Knowledge and creation won't be spread with X" of The Weirdo, three hostesses shared their opinions about feminism from a pure female angle, most of which were acute and insightful. As a researcher mainly in cyberspace (but also interested in the beauty and complexity of humanity) and a straight man, I want to share some ideas from recent years. First, as people say, men are from Mars, and women are from Venus. Mars is the god of warfare, while Venus is the god of beauty. Men are mostly warriors and hunters, while women are mostly organizers and gatherers. However, besides the fact from a long history of homo sapiens, what are the real meanings hidden in these nouns? While most people agree that the goal of warfare is win and conquest, what's the goal of beauty? Maybe the point is when we ask "what the goal of something", the omitted premise is, the thing we're talking about is a tool of life, rather than life...