Faced with platform lock-in and technical churn, I set out to design a personal knowledge-base architecture that could survive for decades. This article shares a four-layer blueprint—built on composability, data ownership, and total decoupling—that I chose after ten years of “digital nomadism” to create a truly free and controllable online home.

What was meant to be a five-minute script to fix category typos on a blog ballooned into a 2,000-line TypeScript project with layered architecture and production-grade features. This deep dive retraces that episode of overengineering and explores how to turn the passion for technology—and the process itself—into valuable knowledge assets.

When AI becomes a coding partner, developers split into two completely different collaboration modes: the “delegator,” who gives AI complete trust, and the “conductor,” who pursues ultimate control. This article delves into these two modes' conflicts, trade-offs, and outcomes through a real website-building story.

Terence Tao’s “smell test” pinpoints the core dilemma of today’s AI: superb at imitation yet short on genuine reasoning. This article explores how the scarcity of process data has become a bottleneck and follows the journey of process supervision from an expensive theory to a generative, self‑evolving practice—illuminating a pathway toward truly thinking machines.

I once regarded ‘aphantasia’ with indifference, secure in my own powers of imagination and recall. Yet a chance reading shocked me into recognising that my idea of ‘imagining’ might differ radically from most people’s—I cannot ‘see’ images in the mind’s eye. This essay records that belated discovery and the ensuing re-examination of my memory and modes of thought.

I used to scoff at talk of AI ushering in an ‘intellectual levelling’. Surely my well-honed search tricks were enough. Yet a recent hunt for Russian-literary sources revealed the limits of my skill and the reach of AI in vaulting knowledge barriers. What follows is the tale of that change of heart, and a few modest thoughts on AI and how we retrieve information.