Notes

New site is live. From the GCP ban to rebuild took about two weeks. It's all static HTML now — honestly feels steadier.

rsync'd the whole site to my own VPS; Caddy serves the static files and I decide the cache policy myself. The upside of having no middle layer: when it breaks, you can see exactly where it broke.

Wrote a one-line backup script with rsync. Far more reliable than that fancy automated setup I had before. Sometimes the best solution is the simplest one.

Tried pulling old blog images out of Google Cache. Some came back, some are gone forever. From now on: keep a local copy of every image.

After three months of tweaking I'm finally happy with Iosevka. Width at 90%, ligatures on only for >, >=, !=, =>, ->. Everything else off. Clean is good.

Found something interesting: when writing copy with AI, the most effective prompt isn't "write it better" — it's "write it more like yourself." AI needs a style reference.

Recently reading The Design of Everyday Things. A book from 1988, yet the discussions of visibility and feedback still fully hold in 2026. Design principles don't age.

After publishing the cyberpunk piece, a friend said I was "too pessimistic." I said it's not pessimism, it's realism. Pessimism is believing things won't get better; realism is looking clearly first.

The Telegram Bot API got an update — finer-grained message-type filtering is supported now. Thinking about rewriting my old bot.

Third draft of the homepage, deleted a lot. Cut a carefully crafted animation, cut a loading effect I thought was cool. What remains is what's actually needed.

Saw a line on Hacker News: "The best code is no code." Not entirely sure I agree. But "the least code" is very often the best code.

The Japanese word 「粋」(iki) translates roughly as "refined, understated taste." Want to write an essay about this concept someday.

Spent a whole day writing in Chinese, Japanese and English. The cost of switching brains is bigger than I thought. But each language really does bring its own way of thinking.

This site ships dark mode only. Not because light themes look bad, but because I wanted to make a choice. Fewer choices can be a kind of freedom.

Taipei's summer isn't even at its peak yet and I already don't want to go outside. AC + iced coffee + terminal = the correct way to do summer.