Notes

Sam Henri Gold:

He is going to go through System Settings, panel by panel, and adjust everything he can adjust just to see how he likes it. He is going to make a folder called “Projects” with nothing in it. He is going to download Blender because someone on Reddit said it was free, and then stare at the interface for forty-five minutes. He is going to open GarageBand and make something that is not a song. He is going to take screenshots of fonts he likes and put them in a folder called “cool fonts” and not know why. Then he is going to have Blender and GarageBand and Safari and Xcode all open at once, not because he’s working in all of them but because he doesn’t know you’re not supposed to do that, and the machine is going to get hot and slow and he is going to learn what the spinning beachball cursor means. None of this will look, from the outside, like the beginning of anything. But one of those things is going to stick longer than the others. He won’t know which one until later. He’ll just know he keeps opening it.

That is not a bug in how he’s using the computer. That is the entire mechanism by which a kid becomes a developer. Or a designer. Or a filmmaker. Or whatever it is that comes after spending thousands of hours alone in a room with a machine that was never quite right for what you were asking of it.

I was that kid.

Marcin Wichary:

“Tools don’t make you a better designer” feels like another version of the abused and misunderstood “less is more.”

Sure, the best camera is the one you have on you. But wouldn’t you prefer that camera to also be the best camera for whatever it is that makes you tick – a great sensor or glass, an amazing build quality, a friendly user interface, a logo that makes you want to step up, or some particular quirk or sentiment that you can’t even explain, but matters a whole lot to you?

I’m told I should be annoyed if someone’s first reaction to seeing a nice photo I made is “what kind of camera do you use?”, as it diminishes my accomplishments as a photographer. But: I chose the camera, and bolted on the appropriate lens, and realized over the years the aperture priority mode and very precise focus area is what makes my brain happy.

Maybe it’s the 1960s typewriter you need, or a newfangled e-ink-based writing implement, or maybe you just have to open TextEdit and close everything else. I’m not going to tell you the novel comes out then. But the novel might never come out if you don’t figure out what tool can help get it out of you.

Howard Oakley:

When the Software Update pane offers a macOS update, it has already done a lot of the preliminary work, in fetching the catalogue of updates, checking through them to determine which could be installed, and working out what that would require. This enables it to provide a first estimate of how much needs to be downloaded. Note this is only an estimate at this stage, and may not include additional components such as an update to Rosetta 2.

Before the download can begin, softwareupdated has initial preparations to make, including reloading and downloading the Update Brain responsible for much of the task of installation. Following that are extensive preflight checks, and together those account for the first 15% of the progress bar shown. On a fast Apple silicon Mac, the progress bar may jump straight to that 15%.

[The download] starts at that arbitrary 15%, and is completed when the bar reaches 55%. In between those it should progress according to download speed, but that can be highly non-linear.

As soon as the download is complete, there’s another preflight phase lasting from 55%-60%, then the downloads are prepared for installation. This phase doesn’t apparently involve their decompression, which is largely performed on the download stream during the download phase.

Preparations are arbitrarily assigned a period of 30 minutes to complete, but now seldom if ever require that long. As they’re allocated to the last 40% of the progress bar, this phase usually completes much quicker than the times given.

The final 5 minutes are often the slowest, and can take a few minutes longer than that, as the files for installation are gathered into a ‘stash’ ready for the Update Brain to install. Because the progress bar tends to jump straight from 95% complete to 100% this can make it look as if the update has frozen.

Northwestern University:

In a new study, the Northwestern team developed a new mathematical model showing that fashion trends tend to cycle roughly every 20 years. By analyzing roughly 37,000 images of women’s clothing spanning from 1869 to today, the team found that styles rise in popularity, fall out of favor and then eventually experience renewal.

Using custom tools, they measured key features of dresses—hemline, neckline and waistline positions—turning clothing designs into numerical data that could be measured and tracked across decades. To analyze the data, researchers built a mathematical model based on a simple idea: the tension between wanting to stand out while still fitting in. Once a style becomes too common, designers move away from it—but not so far that the clothes become unwearable.

“Over time, this constant push to be different from the recent past causes styles to swing back and forth,” Abrams said. “The system intrinsically wants to oscillate, and we see those cycles in the data.”

But this pattern has lost its clarity in recent decades. Starting in the 1980s, the data show a wider range of skirt lengths appearing at the same time, suggesting that fashion trends are becoming more fragmented. Rather than one dominant trend, niches emerge, reflecting more diversity in fashion.

Raymond Chen:

Back in the days of 16-bit Windows, many system components were redistributable, meaning that programs that used those components could include a copy of those system components and install them onto the system as part of the program’s installer.

It was common for program installers to overwrite any file that was in their way, regardless of the existing file’s version number. When these installers ran on Windows 95, the replaced the Windows 95 versions of the components with the Windows 3.1 versions.

Windows 95 worked around this by keeping a backup copy of commonly-overwritten files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. Whenever an installer finished, Windows went and checked whether any of these commonly-overwritten files had indeed been overwritten. If so, and the replacement has a higher version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the replacement was copied into the SYSBCKUP directory for safekeeping. Conversely, if the replacement has a lower version number than the one in the SYSBCKUP directory, then the copy from SYSBCKUP was copied on top of the rogue replacement.

An earlier design simply blocked the installer’s attempt to overwrite the file, but this ended up creating more problems.

The way that worked best was to let the installer overwrite anything it wanted and then go back and try to clean up the mess.

Michel Chaouli:

And it’s true, in a lifetime of nonfinishing I have learned that the practice [of not finishing a book] can be its own way of reading, even a way of admiring the book I seem to be spurning. Sometimes I am so intoxicated by the beauty and the intelligence of a novel that I must set it aside. The charge it delivers is so inordinate that I need to measure out the doses I permit myself. (Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard is one such book for me.) Or I put the book down because I fear its force. It’s so good I worry it will smother every last spark I need for my own writing (which is how Virginia Woolf felt about Proust).

Something in the structure of the work demands [not finishing] it, demands it because it touches something in the structure of our lives. This is true of any work arranged around a plot, however loose, and it is true because the worlds of these works (novels, plays, movies, TV series) have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They have a beginning and a middle because they have an end. When dealing with them, like it or not, we must deal with the end, their end and ours.

Like every reader, I know instinctively that events gain in significance as the end draws near. There are ups and downs throughout, but once you enter the homestretch, the up-and-down logic changes. Time no longer flows but starts ticking, and the space of possibilities narrows.

Unlike life, the novel does not just break off midstride; it ends, which means that things come to a close—not all things, but enough of them. Plotlines are tied up—sometimes neatly, sometimes not. What seems like a knot is in fact an unknotting (the literal meaning of dénouement in French), an untangling.

罗志恒：

黄金作为无息资产，其持有机会成本高度取决于资金成本与利率水平，继而直接受到美欧货币紧缩预期升温的冲击。

资金在高位获利了结，抛售离场。此次美伊冲突并不是毫无征兆的“黑天鹅”事件，早在 2026 年初，美伊谈判就陷入僵局，美国加速军事集结，这都是有迹可循的，市场也早已提前定价。

权益市场受波及，产生连锁反应，杠杆与流动性恐慌形成对黄金的集中抛压。[…] 随着股价持续下跌，这些高杠杆的多头头寸面临巨大的强制平仓压力，投资者需要在短时间内筹措资金以满足清算要求。在此背景下，前期累积了较高浮盈的黄金便成为变现的首选标的。

“乱世黄金”本身就是市场对黄金的误读，当真正的战争爆发、经济金融危机来临时，黄金也只是变现手段。

当前的定价逻辑使黄金更接近“风险资产”。[…] 2022 年起央行购金加速，成为推动金价走高的主要力量。[…] 央行持续购金并没有对私人投资产生“挤出效应”，反而提高了私人投资需求。[…] 私人投资需求的增长主要由投机资金驱动，这造成黄金交易结构短期恶化，多头交易拥挤，进而使黄金的短期走势愈发受投机情绪与资金流向主导，波动性显著放大。

Elena Monaldo:

However, it was precisely this marginality that enabled poetry to maintain a critical distance from the cultural mainstream, thereby fostering renewed vitality and transforming it into an alternative space of discourse (Yeh 1992: xxiii). After 1976, the equally marginal independent publishing scene further sustained this transformation, when some journals broke away from politically orthodox content and formulaic rhetoric to actively explore new modes of expression and circulate innovative poetic forms.

During the 1980s, the exploration of subjectivity initiated by Shu Ting [舒婷] was further developed by a group of women poets who infused it with a distinctly gendered dimension. Unlike Shu, they focused more specifically on the emotional and psychological worlds of the female self, often engaging with unconventional subjects and striking imagery (Zhang 2002: 108).

Shu Ting’s (b. 1952) To an Oak (致橡树) [is] a poem that explores the possibility of a gender-equal relationship grounded in women’s autonomy.

Motivated by a desire to respond to her generation’s ‘dire need of respect, trust and warmth’, Shu Ting (1995: 85) avoids ideological constraints, using poetry to contemplate the human condition in its widest sense. Indeed, her concern is the recovery of an emotional world—desires, hopes, insecurities, and frailties—that defines humanity before gender.

Equally significant was the influence of American confessional poetry, which enabled emotions—frustration, anguish, fear, and guilt—to be publicly voiced and transformed into a collective experience (Zhang and Chen 2016: 154). Sylvia Plath became a model for writing that foregrounds women’s lived realities.

李一鸣：

将个人电脑挡在门外的，通常是地方法院向他们出示的一份文件——最高人民法院于 2020 年印发的《关于进一步规范庭审秩序、保障诉讼权利通知》。其中第七条这样写道，“对重大敏感案件和依法不公开开庭审理的案件，人民法院应当禁止携带电子设备进入法庭，采取屏蔽网络信号等必要技术措施，防止庭审活动信息被不当传播，确有使用必要的，需经人民法院准许”。

2020 年最高人民法院发布的《关于切实保障律师诉讼权利的通知》中强调，“不得限制律师携带电脑等办案必需的设备参加庭审”，“这样来看，两份‘通知’呈现出‘前后矛盾’的状态。”

法院此举，是对律师辩护权的剥夺或限制，“这属于人为制造辩审冲突，‘毫无意义’。法庭纪律既然有严格规定，不得违规录音录像。那如果律师违反法庭纪律，可以按照法庭纪律的约束事后追责。不能因为担心有人可能违规，就预先剥夺所有人正常工作的权利”。

Adam Kirsch:

Julia Kristeva devotes some pages of her recent book on Arendt to her changing appearance, as documented in photographs: from the girlish “seductress” of the nineteen-twenties, gazing poetically at the camera, to the confident intellectual of the fifties, whose “femininity . . . beats a retreat” as her face becomes “a caricature of the . . . battle scars” received during her public career.

The correspondence, which is collected in “Letters 1925-1975,” is revealing, first of all, in its very incompleteness. Arendt kept all of Heidegger’s letters, from the very beginning; he kept few of hers, and none from the early years. As a result, Heidegger’s voice dominates the book, just as his personality and his decisions dominated the affair. As one would expect, Heidegger—an older male professor, who also happened to be one of Europe’s greatest philosophers—treats his teen-age lover with a combination of passion and condescension. He is capable of poetic raptures: “The demonic struck me. . . . Nothing like it has ever happened to me,” he writes not long after their first meeting. Yet while Arendt’s intellect helped draw him to her, he is deeply patronizing about her intellectual ambitions. He urges her to take a “decisive step back from the path toward the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure,” and to concentrate instead on becoming “a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness.”

Early on, in an autobiographical composition addressed to Heidegger and titled “Shadows,” Arendt described herself in the third person: “Her sensitivity and vulnerability, which had always given her an exclusive air, grew to almost grotesque proportions.” As late as 1929, when Arendt ran into Heidegger at a train station and for a moment he failed to recognize her, she found the experience shattering: “When I was a small child, that was the way my mother once stupidly and playfully frightened me. I had read the fairy tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him anymore. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying: but I am your child, I am your Hannah.—That is what it was like today.”

Pamela Paul:

While a field increasingly dominated by women has become more open to studying issues like pregnancy, motherhood and female sexuality, it may also exert its own biases. Nonetheless, when it comes to a deliberate exploration of men’s inner lives—how they think, feel and express themselves—the male psyche is becoming less the norm than an aberration.

鍾娜：

兩年後，全球金融危機爆發。和過去的、未來的金融危機一樣，2007 年末到 2009 年期間這場為時 19 個月的金融危機改變了美國乃至西方家庭的飲食習慣。收入縮減導致外食減少，食材選擇雖然 變化不大，但品質降低，購買頻次減少。如何將有限配料變成令人滿足的佳餚，成為所有家庭成員關心的話題。與此同時，在經濟蕭條中失業的男性回歸家庭，參與烹飪的機會相對增多，收看電視節目的時間變長。為了更好地瞄準這類原本對美食節目缺乏興趣的觀眾，平台決定加入「競技」元素。

Fischler 認為，正是這種雜食者的悖論讓吃不僅是簡單的「進食」，而成為一種具有豐富內涵的「接 納」（incorporation）——讓食物穿過世界和自我的邊界，從身體「外部」進入「內部」。吃的後果常常是不可逆的。接納一種食物就意味着接納它的全部或部分屬性（所以才有民間迷信「吃什麼補什麼」）。我們由我們所吃下的食物定義，通過建立接納的原則（它很大程度上體現為味覺），（也就 是俗稱的「口味」）我們試圖掌控自己的身體、心靈乃至身份。

Wikipedia contributors:

Research shows that heavy users of LLMs can correctly determine whether an article was generated by AI about 90% of the time, which means that if you are an expert user of LLMs and you tag 10 pages as being AI-generated, you’ve probably falsely accused one editor. People who don’t use LLMs much do only slightly better than random chance (in both directions).

张杜超：

个人破产的债务“清零”之所以在制度讨论中被寄予厚望，很大程度上来自一种理想化的推演：只要创业者知道失败后可以通过法律程序摆脱债务负担，就会更愿意承担风险乃至持续创业。但从我们接触到的实际情况来看，中国企业家的行为逻辑绝对更为复杂，受多种因素交织影响。很多企业家再次创业，更多是因为行业机会、人脉资源或者个人经验，是否背债至少不是决定性因素。

在一些较大规模的破产案件中，我们在与实控人交流时，虽关注现实困境的解决，但他们更多讨论未来如何重新发展——大部分企业家即便背负着巨额债务，仍然在寻找新的商业机会，有的通过团队合作，有的通过新的投资人，重新参与市场活动。这部分企业经营者，很少把再次创业直接与破产制度项下的债务能否清零挂钩。从这个角度看，把个人破产制度视为激励企业家创业的关键工具，多少有点“制度想象”。

s4dbrd:

The fundamental problem with usermode-only anti-cheat is the trust model. A usermode process runs at ring 3, subject to the full authority of the kernel. Any protection implemented entirely in usermode can be bypassed by anything running at a higher privilege level, and in Windows that means ring 0 (kernel drivers) or below (hypervisors, firmware).

The kernel was, for a long time, the exclusive domain of cheats. Kernel-mode cheats could directly manipulate game memory without going through any API that a usermode anti-cheat could intercept. They could hide their presence from usermode enumeration APIs trivially. They could intercept and forge the results of any check a usermode anti-cheat might perform.

The escalation has been relentless. Usermode cheats gave way to kernel cheats. Kernel anti-cheats appeared in response. Cheat developers began exploiting legitimate, signed drivers with vulnerabilities to achieve kernel execution without loading an unsigned driver (the BYOVD attack). Anti-cheats responded with blocklists and stricter driver enumeration. Cheat developers moved to hypervisors, running below the kernel and virtualizing the entire OS. Anti-cheats added hypervisor detection. Cheat developers began using PCIe DMA devices to read game memory directly through hardware without ever touching the OS at all. The response to that is still being developed.

effective kernel anti-cheat requires the same OS primitives that malicious kernel software uses, because those primitives are what provide the visibility needed to detect cheats. Any sufficiently capable kernel anti-cheat will look like a rootkit under static behavioral analysis, because capability and intent are orthogonal at the kernel API level. This is a constraint imposed by Windows architecture, not a design choice unique to any particular anti-cheat vendor.

Modern kernel anti-cheats universally follow a three-layer architecture: [kernel driver, usermode service, and game-injected DLL.]

The separation of concerns here is both architectural and security-motivated. The kernel driver can do things no usermode component can, but it cannot easily make network connections or implement complex application logic. The service can do those things but cannot directly intercept system calls. The in-game DLL has direct access to game state but runs in an untrustworthy ring-3 context.

Daphne Merkin:

He makes a list of different ideas that have struck him from his reading and training, among them: to make what is unconscious conscious (Freud); to break the spell of self-deception (Amadeo Limentani); to tolerate ambivalent feelings and experience the world with less fear and fragmentation (Melanie Klein); to wrest knowledge from suffering (Jonathan Lear).

[W]e live, it may fairly be said, in post-psychoanalytic times. The interior life, predicated on a measured reflectiveness, has largely yielded to the instantaneous responses and public enactments of social media. Psychoanalysis, which from the 1940s through the ’70s was de rigueur for serious-minded people of every stripe, lost its sheen and became an object of mockery as the culture moved toward a more externalized, Oprah-ized approach to the self, in which mortifying secrets were uttered aloud instead of in the confines of a therapist’s office.

Psychoanalysis, in other words, wasn’t simply a sociological fad, something that was destined to become passé as newer fashions came in. One may argue about its scientific validity ad infinitum, but there is no denying the power of many of its foundational insights. Or as the literary critic Harold Bloom once put it: “Throwing Freud out will not get rid of him, because he is inside us. His mythology of the mind has survived his supposed science, and his metaphors are impossible to evade.”

“Psychoanalysis,” Grosz observes, “is two people not knowing together.” If one reason people go into therapy is to feel perceived and retained in the mind of another person (to, quite simply, tell their story to an attentive other), it helps to have someone curious sitting across from you (or behind you, in the case of classic Freudian analysis, where the analyst sits out of sight four or five times a week, listening and occasionally saying something). “When we cannot find a way of telling our story,” Grosz notes, “our story tells us — we dream these stories, we develop symptoms, or we find ourselves acting in ways we don’t understand.”

Margaret Talbot:

To appreciate Hite, it helps to think of her as a collector of first-person accounts and not as a scientist.

Her work represented a legitimate trade-off. As she reasonably argued, a truly random sample was close to impossible in sex research, because a random slice of the population would not agree to answer such probing questions. In exchange for hearing from a self-selected group of respondents, she got remarkably intimate, frank, and detailed accounts from thousands of people.

The solid, official-sounding “Report” in the title probably won attention for the book. It also encouraged expectations of scientific rigor that Hite was bound to disappoint.

Hite’s approach began with the survey she’d devised for her first study: some sixty pointed questions for women about how, when, and why they had sex. She printed them—at a gay anarchist print shop and commune in lower Manhattan—in rainbow ink on pastel paper, decorated with hearts and starbursts. As Campbell writes, they resembled a “teenage diary, not a clinical questionnaire,” a look that Hite hoped would invite unguarded replies, and probably did. Masters and Johnson, in their 1966 book, “Human Sexual Response,” defined orgasm as “those few seconds during which the vasoconcentration and myotonia developed from sexual stimuli are released.” Hite’s informants, precise in their own way, were more likely to offer a description like this: “a gradual tensing of my body which reaches a sharp peak then hits a thrilling plateau, a kind of screeching, sliding across a plane” that then “lets go in five to six fluttering convulsions.”

[T]horoughly Hite was formed by the women’s movement of the nineteen-seventies. Her books read less like sexology than like transcripts of the consciousness-raising sessions that were a hallmark of second-wave feminism—though the forensic specificity with which some of Hite’s respondents describe their orgasmic sensations and techniques remains pretty singular.

立法會研究刊物：資訊述要《炒賣黃牛門票》（2019）：

香港現時有若干法例╱規例適用於炒賣黃牛活動，當中最重要的是《公眾娛樂場所條例》(第 172 章)(“娛樂場所條例”)。該條例第 6b 條在 1941 年制定，旨在應對當時街頭炒賣黃牛活動所引致而變得日益普遍的“不能容忍的騷擾”。根據該條例第 6b(2) 條，任何人以“超過東主、管理人或籌辦人所定的款額的票價”，售賣、兜售或游說他人購買在獲發牌場所舉辦的節目的門票，即屬犯罪。售賣門票的人如觸犯該條文，可處罰款 2,000 港元，而這款額自 1950 年以來一直不變。然而，目前並無已知的相關執法紀錄。

在 2002 年，民政事務局長發出一項豁免令，其中包括豁免由民政事務總署和康樂及文化事務署 (“康文署”) 管理的場所需要有公眾娛樂場所牌照。目前，由康文署管理的表演及康體場所在本港為數最多，包括最受歡迎並設有 12 500 個座位的香港體育館。不過，該項豁免安排現時被認為是一個漏洞，導致在這些獲豁免公眾場所舉辦的任何節目，其門票銷售皆不受娛樂場所條例第 6b 條的規管。

Actually more of an event ex nihilo for me: something something and I had a ticket at hand and didn’t want to liquidate it. Felt like an intruder at first, knowing few of the songs or insider talk. But it turned out that a good show rewards mere presence, and the crowd’s energy doesn’t ask whether you belong. The execution was thoughtful and streamlined (love the VCRs), and the performance flawless. Really beautiful show.

Notes on logistics to and from Shenzhen Bay. There are direct EE buses 永東巴士 between SZB and Gate H of Kai Tak. The first leg is not recommended because it costs more than the Route B2P + Tuen Ma Line (HKD 60 vs 33.6) and doesn’t really save time (both take ~70 minutes with walking time included). The return trip, however, is arguably the only affordable option (HKD 100) to get back to SZB before the checkpoint’s closure at midnight. (Do exit via Gate D to avoid the crowd lining up for buses.) Thanks to the newly opened Central Kowloon Bypass 中九龍繞道, it took less than 50 minutes nonstop.

More photos in the gallery.

Hollis Robbins:

Friedrich Hayek’s 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society” is having a moment in AI and tech circles. The argument is that the knowledge needed to run any complex system is never in one place. It exists as dispersed fragments held by separate individuals whose expertise is knowledge of temporary opportunities. Call it last mile knowledge. Centralized bureaucracies fail because they assume this knowledge can be gathered and acted on from above. The idea is that LLMs are a kind of centralized bureaucracy, and the tech people reading Hayek are interested in why they may falter in the same way.

Hayek’s 1949 essay, “The Intellectuals and Socialism,” circulates in very different circles. In this essay, Hayek described intellectuals as “professional secondhand dealers in ideas” whose function is not original thought but the filtering and transmission of other people’s ideas. The intellectual, Hayek writes, judges new ideas by how readily they fit into his general picture of the world. The essay is about ideological sameness among the educated class, proposing that professional structures reward conformity.

Read together, the 1945 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of a bureaucratic system that destroys local knowledge by demanding interchangeable units. The 1949 Hayek explains uniformity as the product of an intellectual class converging on fashionable ideas. Monoculture and centralization are both a matter of everyone doing the same thing but for different reasons. I have been interested in how people mistake one for the other. When critics of the American university see thousands of identical syllabi, for example, they reach for the 1949 Hayek every time and see ideology. I say, look at infrastructure.

The 27 million syllabi are scrapable because accreditation agencies require evidence of what courses contain, and state articulation agreements require documentation that a course at one institution is equivalent to a course at another.

Nickan Arzpeyma:

The inner child often communicates through the body rather than through clear thoughts: a tight chest, a drop in the stomach, an urge to withdraw, appease or cling.

If you are struggling to put a name to an emotional state, metaphor can be especially useful. When a feeling feels vague or overwhelming, try giving it an image. You might picture the inner child behind a door, in a small room, or waiting in a particular place.

Luke Winkie:

Studded across what is known as “BookTok”—the informal TikTok-based digital hub for the greater romance community—are innumerable riffs on the same conclusion. Dozens of book-focused content creators have posted videos of the smile dropping from their faces upon discovering that the novel they have just cracked open is written in the third person. The emotions expressed often amount to a feeling of betrayal, as if an author is snidely trolling them by purging their prose of copious first-person pronouns. (Some of the more dramatic TikToks with this complaint end with the offending fiction getting chucked into the garbage.) Elsewhere on BookTok, readers mourn their own self-diagnosed ineptitude; they’d like to savor the richness of third person, they say, but, for whatever reason, are unable to wrap their minds around the vantage point. “I feel like I don’t know how to read!” said one exasperated TikTokker, bemoaning the all-seeing narrator pervading two books she couldn’t quite grok. “I can’t do it. I tried. It does not work for me.”

For decades, the quintessential romance novel was a gooey parlor drama with bursting corsets and lacy gowns written entirely in third-person omniscient. Within that framework, an author was liberated to accentuate the rippling deltoids of the novel’s rakish libertine, or to mire in the melodrama of a forbidden tryst, absent the limitations of personal subjectivity. Great sex requires a secret language shared by two or more souls; therefore, in fiction, the conventional thinking went, it’s most easily expressed by an all-knowing narrator.

Fan fiction has always been underpinned by the fantasia of exploring a beloved fictional universe on one’s own terms, and unsurprisingly, a good amount of the work is written in first person, particularly within the subgenre known as self-insert, in which authors imagine themselves—or a thinly veiled surrogate—into the source material so they too may join the House of Gryffindor or glitter in the sunlight with Edward Cullen. These days in particular, a lot of DNA is shared between these two modes of publishing—traditional and fan-made—with the barriers that once divided them blurring to the point of becoming effectively indistinguishable, as publishing houses scoop up beloved fics, slap a new coat of “We changed all the copyrightable identifiers; you can’t sue us” paint on them, and sell the remixed results for $20.99 apiece. If fan fiction asserts the primacy of personal wish fulfillment, then you could argue that this new wave of romance novels serves—and reflects—the same purpose.

Daroc Alden:

Depending on the algorithm in question, post-quantum cryptography can produce signatures much larger than comparable traditional algorithms. ML-DSA-44, which is a standardized post-quantum signature scheme thought to have security similar to Ed25519 signatures, produces signatures 37 times larger. Naively adopting post-quantum signatures for authentication could cause certificate chains to take up more data than the actual content of the web site in question […]

The solution that the new working group (called “PKI, Logs, and Tree Signatures” or PLANTS) has been discussing inverts the relationship between signatures from certificate authorities and the transparency logs. Currently, a certificate authority first creates a certificate, then logs it in a certificate-transparency log, and then optionally includes the signature from the log in the certificate as a piece of additional information. This is, in some sense, redundant: the information that the certificate is valid is already present in the certificate-transparency log, so why send the client any information other than proof that it appears in the log?

Instead of having a chain of signatures in a certificate to represent some transitive relationship between a certificate authority and a root of trust, the third-party observers would add their signatures to a certificate authority’s log as they validate it. A browser can choose its own criteria for which third-party observers it trusts, and whether it requires a quorum of them before accepting the state of an issuance log.

The certificate seen by the client would therefore no longer be a chain of signatures leading back to a root of trust: it would be a set of signatures from the certificate authority and any relevant observers attesting to the state of the issuance log, plus a proof that the web server’s public key was included in the issuance log. This constitutes what PLANTS calls a “full” certificate. For an individual web site, a full certificate doesn’t decrease the number of needed signatures; but since the issuance logs are append-only, if a browser has already verified the issuance log for a certificate authority up to some checkpoint, it doesn’t need to see the signatures for that checkpoint again. Instead, it can ask the server to just send the proof that the server’s public key appeared in the log prior to that point — a “signatureless” certificate that should be substantially smaller.

最近经历了一次 Oura Ring 4 的质保换新，过程出乎意料挺顺利，简单记录一下供参考。

我这个 Oura 4 是大概一年前在闲鱼上淘的拆封品。从去年底开始电池明显不行了，官方标称续航 7 天，实际从 5 天、4 天一路缩到最近只能撑 3 天半。本来没抱太大希望，不过正好之前看到文章说 Oura 换新很爽快，就还是试试。

客服入口在 Oura app 菜单里的 Support，点开是个客服机器人。按照国内套路，遇到这种 bot 都想直接喊转人工，但这个 bot 倒是真管事的。打了一句 “battery life is far shorter than expected”（没有模板，意思差不多就行），就引导我授权提供充电诊断数据；检查完记录，直接确认了电池有问题，让填收货地址创建了工单。

没过一会人工客服接手，发邮件让我确认地址、尺寸，还要提供官网订单号。但我是捡垃圾，当然是没有订单号的，也就直说了是从 reseller 买的，没有订单号。结果对方也没多问，几个小时后就通知我 replacement 已经发货了。从提报到发货只花了半天，除了地址总共跟厂商（连人带 bot）打了三句话，确实爽快。

劉擇明、鄧思穎：

香港個別地名“灣”的特殊讀法，反映香港地名的一些歷史來源。[…] [土瓜灣、長沙灣、銅鑼灣] 這些地名的“灣”字，來源可能是四邑話（開平、恩平）地名的低變調。四邑話來源可以說明《新安縣地圖》中“土瓜灣”的“瓜”記成“家”，“長沙灣”的“長”英譯沒有記成客家話的“Chong”，“灣”字讀低變調而保留 [a] 元音等情況。本文的分析，也應該適用於“上環、中環、西環”等地名的“環”字。

香港島北部維多利亞城的主要地名“上環、中環、西環、下環”，和後來的“銅鑼灣”都有陽平調的 [wan²¹]。這些地方和四邑地區的關聯更大。Carroll（2007: 19）指出香港島人口在 1841 年 1 月開埠時只有五千到七千人。開埠一年後，即 1842 年，增加至一萬五千到二萬人。香港島北岸原來的無人之地，短時間內發展成香港的行政中心。在短短一年間大幅增加的這批移民，究竟從何而來？恰巧負責建設維多利亞城的，就是原籍四邑開平的譚亞財；而後來大批經香港轉往北美的移民，也多是從開平出發的（Carroll 2007: 60）。雖然現在四邑話一般以台山台城話為代表，但香港開埠初期時，沒有來自台山的代表人物，開平人的比例較高，內部以開平話對話也不足為奇。這些移民的口語讀音，可能就是香港島北部海灣 [wan²¹] 地名的來源。事實上，“環”字地名字的寫法是到了後期才固定下來，早期曾經寫作“灣”（H. B.1873）、也寫作“還”。H. B.（1873）指出是先有“中灣”“上灣”的寫法，後來才改用“環”字。由此推斷，“環”這讀音是口語傳入，而且可能受到四邑移民的影響所致。某些地名，講廣州話的人聽到實際發音後改用“環”或“還”去記錄這個“灣”的特殊讀法，但某幾個地名一直保留“灣”的寫法。後來發展銅鑼灣一帶的商人利希慎，也是四邑人，銅鑼灣甚至有恩平道、新會道，開平道、新寧道等以四邑地名命名的街道，可見四邑人跟香港島北部的淵源，也說明了四邑人對香港的影響。