Latest posts
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I Mapped 74 Famous Lives Into 900 Squares. Here’s What the Timing Tells You.
A human life, on average, is about 900 months long. That’s roughly 75 years — give or take, depending on where you live and how lucky you are. I’ve been thinking about this number for a while. Not in a morbid way, but in a calibrating way. If you have 900 months, and you’re 40,…
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Nelson Mandela Was Offered Early Release From Prison. Here’s What He Said.
Note: To make this real-world story interactive for my 16-year-old son, I designed the logic and used AI to code and generate this text-adventure simulator. You are about to play a system built by an ordinary dad and an AI. Let’s see if you can beat the odds. In 1985, Nelson Mandela had been imprisoned…
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Warren Buffett Made 7 Real Decisions That Changed History. Would You Have Made the Same?
Note: To make this real-world story interactive for my 16-year-old son, I designed the logic and used AI to code and generate this text-adventure simulator. You are about to play a system built by an ordinary dad and an AI. Let’s see if you can beat the odds. Most biographies tell you what Warren Buffett…
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I Paid ¥3,840 for a Tutoring Class. My Son Couldn’t Even Ask a Question.
In January 2025, I paid ¥3,840 for my son’s tutoring class. That’s ¥240 per session, 16 sessions, one subject. It’s not an unusual price. In China, this kind of arrangement is completely normal — even expected. Every parent I know is paying something similar. What I didn’t fully appreciate until after I paid was the…
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I Built 10 Life Simulators. You Make the Decisions — Then See What They Actually Did.
Note: To make this real-world story interactive for my 16-year-old son, I designed the logic and used AI to code and generate this text-adventure simulator. You are about to play a system built by an ordinary dad and an AI. Let’s see if you can beat the odds. The format is simple, and deliberately uncomfortable.…
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Another Failed Attempt: I Tried Every Way to Make Money Online in China. Here’s the Wall I Kept Hitting.
Before I built this blog, I spent years trying everything else. Reselling on China’s second-hand marketplace. Affiliate marketing. And — I’m not proud of this — I bought a course on how to make money with short videos. It cost ¥50. The advice: buy a ring light, set up a 24-hour looping livestream on Douyin,…
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I Could Have Made Money Selling Courses. I Chose Not To.
A few years ago, I noticed something. People in Chinese online business communities were selling courses for ¥49 — “How to Make Money Online,” “Build Your Side Hustle,” “AI Tools for Passive Income.” They ran ads. They had landing pages. Some of them were making real money. I bought one once, out of curiosity. The…
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I Took Out My Roll-Up Piano After 3 Years. I Was Playing in 20 Minutes.
In 2020, shops around me were having clearance sales. Stores were switching businesses, landlords were negotiating rents, everyone was looking for a way out. I thought I’d found one. I told my dad: “I’m renting a store online. An invisible one. It only costs ¥160 a month.” He didn’t say much. I took that as…
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8 Free Value Investing Tools I Built to Analyze Stocks — And How to Use Them Together
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → Value investing has a reading problem. The books are good — Buffett, Munger, Graham. But reading about a framework and applying it to an actual stock are two different things. The gap between…
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5 Free Browser Tools to Learn Mandarin Chinese — No App, No Subscription
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → Learning Mandarin with an app is fine. Learning it in a browser, for free, with no account and no subscription, is better — because there’s nothing between you and the content. These five…
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I Built 47 Free Tools With Zero Coding Background — Here’s What I Actually Learned
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → Life Paper — one of 47 free tools built by a non-technical parent using AI. I want to be specific about what “zero coding background” means. I mean: I had never written a…
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I Built a Resilience Quiz for Kids Using Historical Decisions — Here’s Why
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → My kid asked me a question I couldn’t answer. Not a hard question — a simple one. “What would you do if you were Mandela?” We’d been talking about the life simulators on…
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Memento Mori in a Browser Tab — The Modern Stoic Practice
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → The Stoics had a practice called memento mori — “remember you will die.” It wasn’t morbid. It was practical. The Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius reminded himself of death every morning not to feel…
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8 Famous Late Bloomers — What Their 900-Square Life Grids Actually Show
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → Life Paper: each square is one month. The blank years are where the foundation gets built. The most common thing people say about late bloomers is “it’s never too late.” That’s true, but…
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How Much Time Do You Really Have Left With Your Parents?
✍️ AI-generated post — tools, ideas and data are real; writing drafted by AI. Read the human voice behind this site → There’s a number most people have never calculated. It’s not how long you’ll live, or how many years until retirement. It’s simpler and more uncomfortable than either of those. It’s how many months…
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I Scored My Life Density — Here’s What the Number Means
✍️ AI-written post. The tools, the ideas, the building — all mine. The writing was drafted by AI based on my notes. Curious what AI-written looks like? You’re reading it. Read my own voice here → I ran the numbers on my own life last week. I wish I hadn’t. Not because the result was…
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I Built a Tool That Shows Famous Lives on a 900-Square Grid — Here’s What I Didn’t Expect
✍️ AI-written post. The tools, the ideas, the building — all mine. The writing was drafted by AI based on my notes. Curious what AI-written looks like? You’re reading it. Read my own voice here → I didn’t set out to build something heavy. I just wanted to visualize a human life on a grid.…
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AI Talked Me Out of My “Brilliant” Idea — Then We Built Something Better
I built a tool I was genuinely proud of. 900 squares. Each one a month of a human life. You enter your birth month, watch the squares fill in — gray for the past, a single orange dot for now, blank for what’s left. A few questions later, it tells you how many months you…
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The Results Are In. Here’s How 6 AI Models Did Against the Actual World Cup.
Three weeks ago I ran an experiment: pit three Chinese AI models against three American ones, have them predict 14 World Cup group stage matches, and see who got closer to reality. The results are in. Quick Recap Six models. Same 14 matches. Three Chinese (Kimi, Doubao, Qianwen), three American (ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude). They agreed…
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How to Measure Your Child’s Resilience (Free AQ Quiz)
Three bugs, one root cause, a failed rebrand, and the first time something I built has a voluntary price. Building-in-public log for AQ Kids.