Intro

Hi, I’m Ziyi, and you are reading my very first newsletter. I’ll be frank in the very beginning: I am not writing to cater to anyone’s taste, and my biggest patron and vip subscriber is myself, which is exactly why I started this project.

Journaling has been a big hurdle in my entire life, despite my multiple attempts at it in different stages of life for vastly different reasons. In childhood, keeping a diary was a recurring homework for school, and as I was a rather absentminded and playful kid, not many events or thoughts really remain in my brain when I had to reluctantly pick up my pencil and rush a piece on Sunday night - so I made up some random stories. In hindsight, it could be my first fiction writing trainings. Then in middle school, strangely, journaling suddenly became a cool trend (well not as strange as some of the TikTok “cool trends” hailed by the nowadays teenagers). It coincided with the overflow of adolescent sentimentality, and the diaries couldn’t get more dramatic. Plus, comparing your journal’s beautiful cover and quality (not of the contents of course) with others' was another ego boost for us. Then in uni, I found out “the successful” usually keep their own blogs. And I decided to copy that idea, which led to the very primitive version of my current personal website with no real content on it. And it stayed that way for years.

That said, I cannot stress enough I truly value you as an audience, and I am open to any discussion and constructive criticisms - which is another principal motivation behind this newsletter. You can leave me comments, ping me on twitter, drop me an email… And I’ll reply ASAIC.

My newsletter is currently structured into 3 sections: Intro, Featured Inbox, Thoughts, and Miscellaneous. I will not group the items into topics here, as they can be anything. I don’t want to set a theme on my newsletter either, but I will probably favor topics in tech a little bit more, plus a lot of random stuff for sure. There might very likely be new sections as I carry on with the newsletters, and there will always be a private section reserved just for myself.

Inbox

Flânerie: The Art of Aimless Strolling

• I had an instant resonance with this article before I even started reading it. I am the kind of tourist who does not like to keep a travelling schedule or a list of todos in a new city. Rather, I like to find my next destination impromptu, if at all, and I’m always ready to change my course anytime when I just feel like it. I also avoid any transportations other than my own legs. This article provided a deep-dive into the art of this kind of aimless strolling, covering its origin, benefits, and literature presence. To quote Balzac, “To stroll is to vegetate, to flâner is to live”.
• Here are a few apps and resources to help you start strolling:
  • Walk Aimlessly: A website for practicing
  • Derive, Get Lost: apps for practicing strolling in a city

The fall of history as a major - and as a part of the humanities

• It is no surprise that less and less uni students are steering away from history these days - but why exactly?
• Four hypotheses were offered and expounded:
  1. College students have shifted their recognition of degree from interest to defined career paths, and History fails to offer one.
  2. History has less “signaling” power than other more rigorous subjects that weed out students. Historians' social influence has also fallen far behind the “data heads” and “intersectionalists”. Our high culture also questions the concept of shared human experience, which is the promise of the history discipline.
  3. ideological shift in historical studies may drive students with different perspectives away. E.g. A left wing history dept. may deter more conservative students.
  4. Simply, Americans no longer like to read.

How Three Arrows Capital Blew Up And Set Off A Crypto Contagion

• The lack of transparency and much false information in 3AC operations enabled them to leverage a lot more than they could handle, while their firm or even frantic belief in the bullish trend in the crypto market super-cycle led to their demise, following the vanish of LUNA and the plummet in the crypto market.

Music for programming

• I love music, but I still haven’t found my own music habits during work. Songs with lyrics often distract me, and those pieces without in my playlists are mostly classical, with which I am also quite familiar and can’t help following the melody. This website provides just the soundtrack I need, in which each “album” lasts 1-2 hrs, compiling wonderfully diverse pieces for focus. The website interface is also a big plus for myself. The only drawback I can think of is their lack of progress bar to toggle and checkpoints of each piece within an album. Otherwise it’s concise just to the point.

Don’t Read History for Lessons

• This article can be read together with the second one, but it explores a much more prevalent question many have encountered at some point - What good does studying history do, and how can we learn from history, if at all?
• What are arguments for reading history?
  1. You can place current events in their prior historical context and be better calibrated to respond to them.
  2. Reading history allows us to learn the lessons of history (strong form)
     • History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes (weak form)
• What are arguments against reading history?
  1. Everything in life is path dependent. Context can be extremely important in any outcome.
  2. Accountings of history are often not accurate, and can never be accurate, thanks to narrative fallacy.
• So how should we learn history?
• The author believes we should read history for concept instantiation, not for lessons
  • Lessons are general frameworks that tells you “if X happens, do Y” or “You should do A and B”.
  • Concept instantiation tells you “This is an example of some concept or idea”.
  • Concept instantiation provides the necessary backgrounds, and they are far more constrained, teaching us to see without forcing us into narrow and generalised recommendations.
• The goal of learning history: Expand the set of prototypes available to us, so that we can do a “pattern matching” on the similarities and use the prototypes as potential and partial solutions.

Thoughts

Lazy, but proactively lazy

• A simple idea I found in Atomic Habits, and I think this really should be carved somewhere in my room as a motto if my landlord wouldn’t fine me.
• Context: I had been a very hardworking person at cutting corners. I don’t want to attribute all of this to external factors, but my upbringing and education I received throughout my pre-uni years have soaked me in the exam-prep atmosphere, and many things I learned at school are often not the knowledge itself but the tricks to bypass the “thinking” phase and cut to the answer directly. For example, in my middle school Chinese classes, instead of really trying to comprehend what the authors are getting at, we were given templates to question answering, and as long as we mention those keywords in the template, we would get points, regardless of the articles. This trick-based learning was pervasive throughout my life, and it was only in college that I realised how hazardous this approach had been, and it was tuning my mind to pure laziness.
• This was also manifested in many other aspects of my life, where I felt like doing the least possible work to get by, which was a clear sign of laziness. But it’s not all bad news. I found that being lazy at some tasks potentially leaves more time and energy for myself on other tasks that I truly enjoy, and I think the term “proactive laziness” is a good summary of this situation.
• A health youtuber Jeremy Ethier raised an interesting point in his videothat instead of planting the ideas of “cheat meals” deep in our mind, we should rebrand them as “planned indulgence”, as we should not feel guilty about something we have planned to do, and this behaviour may be, in fact, beneficial in the long term. I would like to draw the analogy here and use the term “planned laziness” instead. This concept can also be found in iterator designs in many scenarios. For instance, in Python, we can use generators to perform lazy evaluations so that some expression is only evaluated when the outcome is required, and we could save a lot of resources and improve the overall program efficiency. Similarly, instead of being blindly hardworking, we can estimate a curve of overall return against commitment level, and draw a stopping line before the return levels off, and save the energy for other more important and interesting tasks. Or, we can simply use that leftover time to just relax and recharge ourselves, for the better in the long run.

Perils of thinking too much or too little

• I recently had a series of long chats with a friend who recently went through some setbacks in life, and she amazes me in terms of her tenacity and rationality in front of all the hurdles. One diametrically different quality that separates our coping mechanisms when confronted with hardships is how much we think about them. She always tries to deconstruct the problem as thoroughly as possible, while I tend to let these thoughts pass away without even dwelling on them. I have noticed this polarity a while ago, but I’ve been wondering if each of us have been taking it a bit to the extreme, and I want to know if everyone could find an optimized but tailored approach to thinking just enough over any issue.
• Let me make a incomprehensive list of the unwanted features in both extremes:
  • Thinking too much:
    • Takes up too much brain processing power.
    • Huge overhead that drags down life performances in many other aspects.
    • Repeatedly goes over the same ideas compulsively without further clarity.
    • Complicates the situation and in turn leads to more confusion ultimately.
  • Thinking too little:
    • Doesn’t have a clear picture of the extent and impact of the matter.
    • Fosters a habit of escaping from troubles instead of tackling them.
    • feels overwhelmed when the aftermath actually hits.
• Thinking is a highly complex and general topic, and I don’t even dare attempt to unravel the whole subject here. I would like to keep the thread open here, and I will return to this thought when I gather more inputs from more samples.

Miscellaneous

7 basic plots

• A book (or rather a simple theory) that attempts to categorise all the mainstream stories in literature and fictions into 7 basic themes: Overcoming the monster, rags to riches, the quest, voyage and return, comedy, tragedy, and rebirth.
• I was very curious about this idea on my first sight, as I haven’t really thought about distilling stories into simple classes that could generalise to all plots. But this rather structuralist view saw a terrible reception in the literature community, as they compare this theory as “horoscopes” - if you make the predictions/classifications vague enough, they will always be right, but worthless. Indeed, by applying such an overarching label on each story renders no extra value or useful interpretation.
• Nevertheless, I found some similar resources that make the same attempts. They use more archetypes and did not specify they wanted to be comprehensive. I think this approach is acceptable, as we can simply use them as references.
  • 20 Master Plots: And How to Build Them
  • The Thirty-six Dramatic Situations

The Odin Project

• Front-end dev learning map with very detailed and structured tutorials
• Completely free and community-based
• Currently have three modules: Foundation, Ruby-on-Rails Full stack and Javascript Full stack. I am halfway through the Foundation course now.

CryptoZombies

• Interactive in-browser editor and tutorial for solidity and smart contract development with a fun game example
• Completely free
• For everyone - nonprogrammers can also follow
• I am currently at the start of the third course - Advanced Solidity Concepts

Unity Basics tutorial

• All the basics I need to know for a budget 2D Angry Birds game. Highly informative and no time wasted in this 3-hr tutorial.