Latest posts
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Albert Einstein Failed His Entrance Exam, Worked as a Patent Clerk, Then Signed the Letter That Started the Atomic Bomb. Would You Have Made His Decisions?
Eight decisions. Seventy-six years. One life that changed physics, politics, and the nature of war. I built this interactive simulator so you can face the same choices Einstein did — before you see what he actually chose. In 1895, a sixteen-year-old boy in Munich failed his university entrance exam. His French was poor, his overall…
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I’m a Chinese Blogger Trying to Use Reddit. Here’s What Nobody Tells You.
My blog is 15 days old. Traffic is basically zero. I’ve written 30+ articles, built three tools, submitted pull requests to open-source projects for backlinks, and posted on every platform I can access. The one platform I can’t access is Reddit. Not because it’s blocked — though it is blocked in mainland China without a…
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I Hit Claude’s Token Limit on a Friday Night. The Alternatives Were Worse.
It happened on a Friday night. I was in the middle of building a new tool for the site — a social icebreaker game called the Loneliness Test. I had a working prototype but it felt off. The invite-copy feature wasn’t right. The animations were janky. I kept asking Claude to iterate. Then this appeared…
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Why I Failed at Side Hustles for 8 Years (And Why I’m Starting Again)
I logged into my old Facebook account today. It had been 8 years. The first thing I saw was a ghost town. My “Sales Goji Berry” & “Roolup piano” page was still there, frozen in time. I saw a list of contacts from 6 years ago—people I had added in a blind attempt to “grow…
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My First “Twitter Ban”: A Value Investor’s Lesson on Spamming
I have a great product. I’ve spent months building 50+ free, high-utility tools. I have a clear, honest vision. When you believe in something so deeply, the urge to scream it from the rooftops is overwhelming. I wanted the world to see it now. So, I did what any desperate builder does: I went to…
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My Friend Was Hired as a Human Thermometer. AI Fired Him in 20 Minutes.
Last Saturday, my friend was paid to do something absurd: sit near a server room and check the temperature like a human thermometer. The air conditioner in his company’s server room had suddenly stopped working. The replacement unit wouldn’t arrive until Monday. Someone had to make sure the servers didn’t overheat. The company’s solution? Assign…
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A Broke Motorcycle Repairman From China Beat Ducati at the World Superbike Championship. Can You Make His Decisions?
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. His name is Zhang Xue. Outside the…
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The Odds Are 1 in 17 Million. I Built a Shuangseqiu Number Generator Anyway.
Shuangseqiu — 双色球, “dual-color ball” — is the most popular lottery in China. It draws three times a week. Tens of millions of tickets are sold per draw. The jackpot requires matching six red balls (drawn from 1–33) and one blue ball (drawn from 1–16). The odds of matching all seven: 1 in 17,721,088. To…
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3 Classic Lateral Thinking Traps. Most Smart People Get at Least One Wrong.
There are three questions I’ve tested on people for a while now. I started doing this informally — asking friends and colleagues — and I’ve since turned it into a short online challenge. The questions are not measuring intelligence. They’re measuring a specific thing: whether your brain makes automatic assumptions so fast that you act…
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13 Ranking Lists for China’s 757 University Majors — Best Overall, AI-Resistant, and More.
China has 757 officially recognized undergraduate majors. When a student sits the Gaokao and needs to fill out a university application, they’re choosing from 757 options with very different trajectories — in terms of employment, income, and exposure to AI disruption over the next decade. There’s no single right ranking. “Best” depends entirely on what…
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259 Chinese Career Paths, Each With Salary Range, AI Disruption Level, and the Degree That Gets You There.
When my son started high school, I started paying attention to the gap between how Chinese university majors are described and what they actually lead to. The problem isn’t that information is unavailable. It’s that the information exists in fragments: salary surveys in one place, career descriptions in another, hiring trends somewhere else. There’s no…
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I Built a Free Pinyin Annotator That Works Instantly in Any Browser — No App, No Account.
If you’re learning Chinese and you encounter a text you can’t fully read, there’s a workflow most learners use: copy the text, paste it into a separate tool, get the pinyin, go back to the original. It works, but it interrupts the reading. I wanted something simpler: paste the text, see the pinyin appear above…
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20 Chinese Idioms With Their 2,000-Year-Old Original Stories — Free Browser Tool for Mandarin Learners.
Chinese idioms — chengyu (成语) — are one of the most distinctive features of the language. They’re four-character phrases, and almost every one of them comes from a specific story: a historical event, a fable, a military situation from two thousand years ago. The problem is that most Chinese learners encounter chengyu as vocabulary items…
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10 Historical Decisions Told in Chinese (HSK 4–6). Read the Story, Then Make the Call.
There’s a problem with most Chinese reading practice tools: the content is either too simple to be interesting or too complex to be useful at an intermediate level. Graded readers at HSK 4 tend to cover things like “Wang Fang goes to the supermarket” or “Zhang Wei plans a trip.” These are grammatically appropriate but…
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11 Types of Chinese Letters, Grammar Patterns, and Sentence Banks — All in One Free Browser Tool.
Written Chinese is not a single register. The language you use to write a formal complaint letter is different from the language you use to write a thank-you note, which is different again from a self-introduction or a cover letter. For people learning Mandarin — especially people who have functional spoken Chinese but struggle with…
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I Built an Offline Mandarin Flashcard App for English Speakers Learning Chinese. It Works Without Internet.
Most Chinese learning apps require an account. Most require an internet connection. Most have business models built around keeping you in the app longer than you need to be. I live in China. My experience of watching English speakers try to learn Mandarin here is that the biggest problem isn’t vocabulary size — it’s that…
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Buffett Says You Only Get 20 Investment Punches in a Lifetime. I Made a Tool to Track Mine.
Warren Buffett has a thought experiment he’s returned to more than once. Imagine you’re given a card with twenty punch slots. Every time you make an investment, you use one punch. When the card is full, you’re done — no more investments for the rest of your life. He argues that if people actually operated…
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I Distilled Warren Buffett’s Most Important Investing Criteria Into a One-Page Screen.
There are a lot of “Buffett investing frameworks” online. Most of them are long. Some are twenty questions. Some are entire books. I wanted something shorter. Not because I’m lazy, but because I’ve found that long checklists have a specific failure mode: you fill them out, spend an hour doing it, and at the end…
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What Percentage of Your Life Is a Black Hole? I Built a Clock to Measure It.
Here’s a question I didn’t know how to answer until I built a tool for it: how much of your life do you actually remember? Not in total, but proportionally. If you’re 45, you’ve lived 540 months. How many of those months left a clear memory? How many blurred into the background — the routine,…
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Your Entire Life Fits on One Sheet of A4 Paper. I Made a Tool to Show You Where You Are.
I had a strange realization at some point in the last year: I have no mental picture of my remaining time. I know, in the abstract, that I’m somewhere in the middle of my life. But “the middle” doesn’t feel like anything. It’s a phrase. It doesn’t change what I do on a Tuesday morning.…