Latest posts
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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.
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5 Free Chinese Learning Tools I Built While Living in China (2026)
I’ve spent the past few months building free Chinese learning tools — one at a time, based on what I actually needed while living in China and studying the language. This post collects all five of them in one place, with a note on what each one is good for and when to use it.…
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Chinese Writing Toolkit: Model Essays and Sentence Banks for 11 HSK Writing Types
The HSK writing section trips up almost everyone. It’s not that learners don’t know Chinese — it’s that they don’t know the specific formats Chinese formal writing expects. An invitation letter has a structure. A complaint letter has a structure. A self-introduction essay has a structure. Get the structure wrong and you lose points even…
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Free HSK 1–3 Flashcards: 400+ Mandarin Words, No App, No Login
Most Chinese flashcard apps want you to pay for HSK packs, create an account, or install something. I couldn’t find a free browser-based option that just worked — so I built one. 400+ HSK1–3 vocabulary words. Spaced repetition. No account. No install. Open the page and start. Try It → Open Mandarin Flashcards — free,…
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20 Chengyu With Their Original Stories: A Free Tool for HSK4–6 Learners
成语 (chéngyǔ) are the four-character idioms that appear constantly in Chinese — news, conversation, WeChat, speeches. Once you hit HSK4, you’ll encounter them everywhere. The problem: every textbook explanation I’ve seen just gives you a translation and a definition. That’s not how you actually learn them. You learn a chengyu by knowing its story. Almost…
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Free Pinyin Annotator: Paste Any Chinese Text, Get Instant Pinyin Above Every Character
Last week I was reading a WeChat message someone sent me — full of characters I didn’t recognize. I needed pinyin above every word, fast. So I built one: a free browser tool that annotates any Chinese text with pinyin instantly. No app to install. No account. Paste text, click Annotate, done. Try It Free…
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I Turned 10 Life Simulators Into a Chinese Reading Lab
A few months ago I built a series of life simulators: ten historical figures, ten turning points, and a simple question — what would you have done? The simulators were in English. They worked. But last week I had a different idea: what if the same ten stories could teach Chinese? That question became the…