Tech Enthusiast Weekly (Issue 233): Life is a Fishbowl

Original link: http://www.ruanyifeng.com/blog/2022/12/weekly-issue-233.html

Here is a record of the technology content worth sharing every week, released on Friday.

cover picture

The Deoksugung Palace Museum of the Southern Song Dynasty opened this month in Hangzhou, where Emperor Gaozong of the Song Dynasty lived a thousand years ago and rediscovered it in 1984. ( via )

Topic of the week: Life is like a fishbowl

The most internationally renowned Chinese architectural firm is probably MAD Architects in Beijing.

They have designed many famous buildings, such as Canada’s Monroe Building, Haikou Yundong Library, etc. The biggest feature is that they have created some very strange shapes in the city.

Ma Yansong, one of the founders of MAD, recently gave a speech introducing their creative philosophy. After I saw it, I was deeply impressed.

What moved me the most was a fish tank he once designed.

“When the office was first established, there were no projects to do. One day I was walking on the street and saw a stall selling goldfish. All the fish lived in a small square box.”

“The goldfish was inside, looking very confused, seemed to be having a good time, and sometimes bumped into the glass wall.”

He just thought that the situation of people living in the city is also like a goldfish, confined in an invisible box.

So, as a designer, can you redesign the fish tank to make the fish happier?

Just do it, every few minutes, he will record the position of the fish and draw it into a scatter diagram (below). It turned out that, unlike what everyone thought, although the fish was locked in the fish tank, the fish did not go to every corner, but highly repeated certain routes.

Based on these trajectories, he designed a very complex fish tank, trying to divide the simple space into a sense of hierarchy, on the one hand, to ensure the regular route of the goldfish, and on the other hand, to make the goldfish feel that they live in a complex space, with many Places to explore and choose from.

Ma Yansong said that although there is no way to know whether goldfish will feel happier than before living in such a space, it is the architect’s mission to create more and better spaces for people and improve life satisfaction.

Therefore, every building they design pursues interest and layers. It is not a simple building, but an attempt to let people experience more space in a limited space.

After listening to this little story, I was deeply touched, and realized for the first time that the fish tank is a good metaphor, symbolizing the situation of contemporary people.

Contemporary people seem to be very free, but in fact, (most people’s) freedom is very limited. There are invisible high walls everywhere in life. Wealth, occupation, family, class, etc. limit the places you can go. Individuals actually live in their own fish tank.

This work of Ma Yansong is just about the solution: If there is no way to get rid of the fish tank, can we create more space in the fish tank to improve the fun and satisfaction of life?

Thinking along this line of thought, what can we do to create space and a sense of hierarchy for our lives in the face of the ubiquitous high walls in our daily life?

My idea is that I can go to places I haven’t been to, do things I haven’t done before, read books I haven’t read before, and meet some friends outside the “stratosphere”. This is equivalent to building all kinds of strange spaces in life, so that life can be more interesting and encounter more possibilities.

Activity

1. Douyin Android Basic Technology Revealed

Douyin is one of the most downloaded Android apps in China, and the rapid growth of users has brought many technical challenges.

It was announced last week that next Saturday (December 10) at 2 pm, Douyin’s Android team will hold a technology sharing session and arrange live broadcast of five lectures.

  1. Introduction to Douyin’s Android App Architecture
  2. Optimization scheme for Douyin stability
  3. How to speed up the startup speed of Douyin
  4. Optimization of Douyin Android packaging volume
  5. Douyin Android Machine Learning Practice

The first four are basic technology sharing, and the last one is related to the very popular artificial intelligence. It introduces how Douyin uses machine learning and AI to improve user experience. The content is quite interesting.

Each lecture is given by the responsible engineer , and there are many inside stories and dry goods. There will also be a question-and-answer session, and you can communicate with them directly.

In my impression, the Douyin Android team made a collective appearance and had technical exchanges with the community. This seems to be the only time so far, and it is a rare opportunity.

This event is a technology salon officially hosted by ByteDance. Click on the title link , or scan the QR code on the poster to learn more about the event and sign up. There will also be a lucky draw for ByteDance souvenirs.

Students who are interested in Douyin and Android development, don’t miss it.

Technology dynamics

1. Fatal electric shock video

Recently, a teaching video appeared on Youtube, claiming to teach everyone to use electricity to paint, by discharging electricity on wood, and burning it to form patterns and patterns.

This experiment is extremely dangerous. It is said that 34 people have died in the United States. Youtube urgently removed it and gave the strongest warning.

The reason why it is so dangerous is that the principle is very simple. It feeds your household’s mains electricity to a coil, and the other end of the coil is wrapped with wire that connects to the wood, creating a transformer (pictured above). For the 220V mains, a high voltage of several thousand V will be generated after transformation.

Such a high voltage can not only burn wood, but even discharge through the air when people are close to it, causing people to get an electric shock.

2. Water Building

Amsterdam in the Netherlands is a low-lying seaside city. In order to solve the flooding problem, the city recently built a residential building in the water, which no longer competes with sea water for land.

The building, with 440 apartments, juts out from the pier towards the water. Like a giant water gate.

As sea levels rise due to global warming, such structures on water are practical for low-lying areas.

3. Methane to methanol

Brazilian scientists have discovered a way to convert methane to methanol at room temperature.

Methane is a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, while methanol is a liquid fuel.

If the new method is feasible, it means that greenhouse gases can be turned into fuels that are convenient for transportation, which is very beneficial to environmental protection.

4. Sleeping suite

Many people have sleep problems, being unable to fall asleep or sleep poorly. Some luxury hotels in Europe and the United States have launched “sleep suites” for this group of people.

This room uses various measures to try to ensure that you will have a good night’s sleep.

Pillows, mattresses, and blankets are all specially selected to ensure comfort and relaxation. Before going to sleep, a meditation practice will be arranged first, and a special bedtime tea will be provided, and the aroma that helps to fall asleep will be permeated in the room.

5. Algae air purifier

An algae air purifier with a height of 2.5 meters and nearly 500 kilograms of algae has appeared at the Pittsburgh International Airport in the United States.

These algae can absorb a large amount of carbon dioxide and release oxygen to clean the air.

It is said that this installation is equivalent to placing 5,000 plants indoors.

article

1. Why China is not suitable for regional aviation (Chinese)

Regional airlines are small planes with dozens of seats. This article analyzes why the route of this small aircraft cannot be established in China.

2. Domestic Taihang engine (Chinese)

The weakest link in China’s aviation industry is the engine, but the domestic aero engine has been in research and development, and it is the first to be used in military aircraft.

3. Mushroom is a universal material (Chinese)

Mushrooms are made of web-like biofibers that can be used to make everything from foam for filling to bricks for building houses (above).

4. Five React UI libraries you don’t know (English)

There are many excellent UI component libraries on the market, but not many people know them. This article introduces five of them.

5. How to Find Startup Ideas (English)

This article lists some specific and actionable measures to help you find viable business ideas.

6. Why do so many Logos use sans serif fonts (English)

More and more brands are changing their logos to a cleaner sans-serif typeface (above). The authors discuss why this is the case.

7. Introduction to Container Orchestrator (English)

Container orchestrator (container orchestrator) is a tool for managing multiple containers, currently mainly three are Swarm, Kubernetes and Nomad.

This article introduces the basics of container orchestration and the differences between the three software.

8. How to use JavaScript to match phone numbers (English)

A beginner’s tutorial on how to use JavaScript regular expressions to match US phone numbers. Great for brushing up on regular expressions.

tool

1. Plasma Bigscreen

A Linux desktop environment, specially made for TV, suitable for operation with remote control.

2. Trianglify.io

A web tool used to generate background pictures made of various triangles.

3. VoceChat

A domestic open source chat software that can be deployed by itself, the server is very small, only 15MB. The official web client and mobile app are provided. (Contributed by @zerosoul )

4. gPodder

An open source podcast client for subscribing and listening to podcasts.

5. quicklink

A JS library from the Chrome browser team that speeds up opening links.

Its warehouse home page has a detailed explanation of the principles and is very well written. I think it is more valuable than the library itself.

6. Xournal++

A note-taking software that can take handwritten notes and comment on PDF files through the tablet and touch pen.

7. Git Noter

An open source web note application, users’ notes are stored in their own GitHub repository.

8. Dub

An open source short link service, based on Next.js, can be deployed to Vercel to generate short links managed by itself.

9. Peregrine

A speech engine that generates speech from text. The biggest feature is that it has a rich tone, and it can even speak with a smile. The official website claims that its machine voice is indistinguishable from human voice.

10. Project Shasta

An AI speech engine launched by Adobe. If you say something to the engine, it will restore the text, and then you modify the text, and the engine will regenerate the speech according to the modified text. That said, you can edit your own voice.

Code Nuggets Programming Challenge

In October of this year, the “Rare Earth Nuggets” community held a programming challenge. This is a rare front-end programming competition in China , attracting thousands of participants.

The results of the competition were announced this week, which should represent the level of mainstream front-end developers in China. All works are published and run on the “Code Nuggets” platform , where you can see the source code and edit it yourself. (Remember to press the “Run” button if the code doesn’t run automatically.)

The first prize “Nuggets Planet Rescue Project” is a quiz-answering mini-game with fine special effects, reaching the release level.

I was more impressed by the other two works. “AI Exercise Counter” only uses JS scripts to count how many times you have exercised (leg lifts, push-ups, etc.) from the video.

“Shadow Play” uses front-end animation to simulate shadow play performances.

For a complete list of winning entries, click here or scan the QR code.

resource

1. Moon live broadcast

The Orion spacecraft of the United States is live broadcasting the moon on Youtube 24 hours a day.

This time it is an unmanned flight, and it will return to Earth on December 11. The next time is a manned flight around the moon, which is planned for the first half of 2024.

For some reason, China’s Tiangong space station does not conduct a 24-hour live broadcast, and the camera only needs to point to the earth.

2. AI-generated Bible art

This website highlights whimsy, inputting sentences from the Bible into an AI model to generate illustrations, and then putting them on the Internet.

This also inspires us that literary classics (such as “Journey to the West” and “Romance of the Three Kingdoms”) can use AI to generate illustrations in the future.

3. Interesting papers

This page collects seemingly useless but interesting papers, such as the study of how penguins control the distance of defecation (above).

4. Street view map of “Zelda Breath of the Wild”

This website presents the map of the game “Zelda Breath of the Wild” in the form of Google Maps, and some locations have street view views, as if visiting the continent of Hyrule in the game.

picture

1. Twitter’s default user avatar

Twitter has a default user avatar, which will be used if the user does not upload their own avatar.

The following are the default avatars on Twitter over the years.

It can be seen that since 2010, the default avatar is a bird egg. Because Twitter’s Logo is a singing bird, the bird egg expresses the hope that new users will speak more and hatch into a bird as soon as possible.

In 2017, Twitter decided to replace the default bird egg avatar, not because it was bad, but precisely because it was so good, users liked this avatar very much, so they kept it and did not upload personal avatar pictures.

To encourage users to upload avatars, Twitter has envisioned some new default avatars.

Twitter hopes that the default avatar should be serious and generic, but at the same time it must have a temporary feel.

The last selected new default avatar is the one below.

In this picture, the user’s head is not round, and the shoulder width is also appropriately reduced, so it appears less masculine and more gender-neutral. A gray background gives it a temporary feel.

abstract

1. The full moon doesn’t rise at midnight

In a novel, there is such a paragraph.

Pretending to sleep for two hours, she got up just after midnight. From the snoring in the next room, she knew her parents wouldn’t be waking up anytime soon. When they found out she wasn’t there tomorrow morning, she was far away.

She pushed open the window of the bedroom and felt a gust of cool air rushing towards her face. She carefully removed the insect screen from the window. Then she grabbed her backpack and everything was ready: food, money, clothes.

She jumped out of the window and landed in the flower bed. Under the clear sky, she walked out of the backyard. Despite the city lights, the stars still shine, and a creamy full moon is rising over the eastern horizon. A perfect night for her to escape.

There is an error in the last paragraph. Did you notice?

The story is set “after midnight” and says the full moon is “rising over the eastern horizon”. This is impossible, the full moon never rises around midnight.

At a full moon, the sun is always projected on exactly half of the moon, so a full moon means we can see the sunlit half of the entire moon. Therefore, the moon must be on the side of the earth facing away from the sun.

According to the picture above, you can see that the place where the earth sees the full moon should be facing away from the sun. So, at midnight, the full moon should be just overhead. It should have risen around 6pm, not midnight.

remarks

1,

With so many people going to the gym, I’ve always wondered, where does the energy released by their workouts go?

The fact is that none of this energy is used and it turns into heat in the end, which is a huge waste of manpower.

“Gym Energy”

2,

At one point, Musk was asked what was Tesla’s best product: the Model S, the Model X, or the Model 3?

“None of those,” he said. “The factory is the product, and if you can get the factory right, then a premium car is inevitable.”

David Perrel

3.

So many people want to grow taller, but I wish I could be a few centimeters shorter. Very tall people rarely live long, and those who live past 100 are short. The heart of a tall person has to work harder to pump blood throughout the body.

Hacker News netizen

4.

Due to the popularity of super apps for Chinese mobile phones, one App can meet various needs, and a large amount of content is locked in these Apps, which leads to the disappearance of Simplified Chinese content on the open network.

Hacker News reader

5.

On a straight street, you tend to ignore the surrounding buildings. However, on the crooked street, you will inevitably pay attention to the buildings on both sides. Curved streets help create a harmonious environment between people and the city.

—David Perell

this week in history

2021 (Issue 185): US Constitution Auction, A Blockchain Case

2020 (No. 135): What industries are suitable for entrepreneurship?

2019 (Issue 83): Technology cannot resolve human antagonisms

2018 (Issue 32): Three Angles of Bricklaying

illustrate

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thank you

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  • Date of publication: December 2, 2022

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