Year 2

0. Looking Back

Counting 51 blog posts, another year has passed.

Learning Harvest

Functional Programming: Haskell x13
React: React x11
NodeJS: Node x2, Electron x2, Custom IDE x4
Specifications: CSS x6, ES Module x1, W3C specification process x1, HTTP caching x1, macrotask and microtask x1
New Concepts: PWA x1, WebAssembly x1, Web Components x1
Tools: Webpack x1, rollup x1, lerna x1, Docker x1
Solutions: JS memory leak x1, WeChat Official Account x1

My curiosity about functional programming has grown into a big tree. I've peeked inside almost the entire React ecosystem. The Node knowledge I stored two years ago is officially being put to use. The CSS proofreading I did intermittently for 9 months is finally finished. The "new concepts" from back then are rarely mentioned lately... My focus is relatively concentrated, and I'm consciously engaging in systematic learning.

Goal Completion

Went through the CSS specifications again, but the knowledge system still hasn't formed.
Reviewed algorithm textbooks; gained some insights but also some confusion.
The obsessive desire for functional programming has finally been satisfied.
Product, operation, interaction, visual communication, color composition, and graphic composition seem to have been neglected.
Read a lot more source code, but lack higher-level abstract thinking.
Too little attention to new technologies; I've accumulated nearly six months' worth of FEX Weekly.
The ROI for Japanese was too low, so it was shelved.
The "Jacket Project" was completed one year ahead of schedule in another way, without deviating from the original intention.
icebrick progress 30%, shelved.
Girlfriend plan, well, completed 6 years early.
Initial completion of the speech ability improvement plan.

The completion of major goals barely reached the standard. The shelving of icebrick is quite a pity. I've finally started to accept a different version of myself and stopped being so stubborn.

Growth Experience

The hollow-out relay in August, the long ordeal in October, the heart-pounding encounter in January, the uneasy siege in March, the unexpected outperformance in April... The ups and downs of life are much more exciting and much heavier than expected.

A 40-year career is a long-distance run.

As the senior said, the gains and losses of a moment are trivial under a 40-year overview; they don't matter. What matters is knowing what you want.

1. Insights

The 5 stories of the 2nd year revolve around three books: Influence, The Silent Majority, and The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs.

Loving Someone

Yes, I have a girlfriend now; her name is Mengge.

This time, no more cowardice. Bravely say "hello" and open your arms to embrace.

Love needs to be expressed. Like valuable thoughts, it is meaningless if it is not spread. Just like the plot in a movie:

"Why did you get married?"

"We can talk to each other."

"Be specific!"

"Before we even speak, we know what the other is thinking."

Imaginary communication seems like a higher realm of expression, but in reality, it's a lack of expression. So in the end, even the last bit of affection disappears.

Unlike thoughts, love needs to be nurtured and continuously injected with vitality; it doesn't become more profound over time like the ripples of a thought. But life cannot give the romance that love needs, so seemingly accidental romance is always carefully designed.

Yes, it looks like a kind of deception. But how can love deceive?

First consider another question: what is the ideal "her" like?

The answer is another, better version of yourself. She possesses all the virtues you long for but lacks most of your own flaws. That's right, we can tolerate flaws in others because we know deeply that we are not perfect.

Exposing your imperfect self to her without any concealment and displaying these numerous flaws one by one: stubbornness, sensitivity, dullness, laziness... Loving someone in your own way will only force the other person to flee:

Being treated with sincerity leads to losing friends.

So, to love someone, present a better version of yourself to her every day, rather than sticking to that unchanging so-called "sincerity."

The Power of Speech

"Then your 'obedient IDE' isn't very easy to use in this regard."

When I heard this sentence again on July 3, I was truly a bit surprised.

In a speech on April 13, I introduced this carefully designed one-sentence title, like that air purifier advertisement:

Purify the air of the whole house in 10 minutes.

The first time I tried to apply the speaking skills I've learned over the past six months, the effect was surprisingly good. In the time of just one slide, I tucked this sentence into the audience's heads, and the impression was so deep.

In these six months, from The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs to Talk Like TED, and then to The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, I gradually realized what a speech is. In fact, it's not an exaggeration to study public speaking specifically as a technology or even an art:

How so?

Speaking skills have improved.

The ripples stirred by the water droplet in the TED intro refer precisely to its vision of spreading ideas: letting thoughts from different fields collide through speeches, thereby generating more value. If good thoughts aren't expressed brilliantly, they can't reach others to trigger resonance, and thus cannot generate their due value. In the end, it's just:

Playing a good hand badly.

Where Are My Sharp Edges?

The rules of the game are the same. Those hypocritical things I have always been unwilling to accept will sooner or later have to be conformed to.

I want to keep some sharp edges, but the rules don't allow it. It seems there are only two choices: either accept or pretend to accept.

And I would rather choose the latter, to be a person like Sai (from Naruto). Learning through books how to become the kind of person I dislike—at least appearing to be so on the surface—is for survival. A senior brother questioned this view, believing:

Liking or disliking seems just like another way of saying what you are good or not good at.

How similar this is to another scenario:

Because you can't answer, you question whether the other person's question is good.

From an objective perspective, both types of questioning are reasonable and sharp. The former masks the fact with "disliking" because of lack of skill; the latter avoids it on the grounds that the topic is too obscure because they can't do it. Yes, it seems irrefutable. But looking at it the other way, regardless of whether one can answer, the questioning of the problem will exist; regardless of skill, liking and disliking are also facts that cannot be changed immediately. I remember when I was a child, I liked narratives, but perversely, my descriptive essays were highly praised, even though I didn't like piling up rhetoric.

The things I truly dislike are those that the heart resists, such as learning to say things against my will for the sake of survival. The Silent Majority calls this "speech tax":

Even some great figures have "said some things against their will," which shows the tax base is very wide. Because of the existence of the speech tax, no matter what we have said, we don't have to blame ourselves: the words were mandated from above.

Similarly, learning to do things against one's will for survival is also reasonable. Living in that era, the author Wang Xiaobo seemed well-versed in this:

By the way, my teacher has great knowledge but is very naive; I have little knowledge but am an old fox.

Just as in We Three, Qian Yuan, who came from a "dangerous" background, managed to survive intact through ten years of turmoil with the wisdom that "sailing the high seas depends on the helmsman."

So, in fact, my sharp edges are still there, and they might always exist, but they will no longer be shown.

From a Bad Person's Perspective

Speaking of which, it was from Dark Time that I got to know Liu Weipeng, and then learned about social behavior, and discovered the book Influence.

I read it twice, and the perspectives were completely different. The first time focused on "How can I avoid being affected by influence weapons?" (the good person's perspective); the second time considered "How to utilize influence weapons?" (the bad person's perspective).

The difference between the two is whether one wants to be a clever sheep or a knowledge-armed wolf. Sheep use this knowledge to identify traps and reduce losses; wolves use it for hunting and gaining benefits. Just like the scene in Wrath of Silence:

Eating vegetarian is not a good habit. Sheep—they also eat vegetarian.

Only from the bad person's perspective will one try to apply this knowledge and exert its original value, rather than just having the ability to identify knowledge products.

Dimensionality Reduction Strike

This term comes from The Three-Body Problem. It means the most powerful weapon is making the natural laws the opponent knows invalid. Once the foundation is gone, everything built upon it will collapse.

Attacking from a higher dimension to a lower dimension (let's call it high-dimensional strike), the opponent will have no way to defend. A Singer throws a piece of dual-vector foil, and the entire solar system turns into a painting...

In fact, high-dimensional strikes also exist on the knowledge level, and they are equally powerful. For example, in an article I read before, here is part of its table of contents:

Preface
  Twenty Glorious Years
  The Disturbed Rainbow
Toolization
  The Meaning of Toolization
  The Deficiency of Toolization: The Law of Leaky Abstractions
  Functional Thinking: Abstraction and Intuition
Front-end and Back-end Separation and Full Stack: Technology and People
Engineering
  What is Engineering
  A Front-end Development Plan that Returns to Reality
  Declarative Programming and Data-driven: Gains and Losses
  Progressive Front-end Architecture
  Online Quality Assurance: The Difficulty of Front-end is Not in Front-end
Extended Reading
Postscript

It permeates with a sense of historical weight, and history is an authoritative argument (so-called "citing classics"). Readers endure pressure from authority (one of the influence weapons). The author is like preaching to the audience on a pyramid leaning against the long river of history; before even speaking, it seems deeply convincing.

Why is it like this? Where does this authoritative pressure come from?

There is a passage in The Silent Majority:

The purpose of studying literature and history is to "review the old." People with cultivation in these areas live in a long period from the past to the present. The purpose of studying scientific knowledge is to "know the new." People with scientific knowledge can foresee the future; they live from the present to the boundless future.

Knowing history allows one to have experience from the past to the present. In terms of the depth of knowledge, it's like standing on a high mountain and initiating an information-asymmetric dialogue (high-dimensional strike); naturally, "he who stands higher wins."

The first time I experienced a knowledge dimensionality reduction strike was in an interview. The other party easily crushed the theoretical foundation I had built with the history of Google Polymer, making everything established on it meaningless. A knowledge dimensionality reduction strike directed at basic theory can also end everything by pulling the rug out from under it.

Another time was when talking about views on React. The other party responded with "it's all just tools" in a way that built a skyscraper on level ground. It was like drawing a yellow circle on the ground and teleporting to another time and space to shout back, elevating a concrete question to an abstract level, successfully escaping disadvantage and returning to the advantage zone:

                 Others don't know
                     ^
                     |
           Advantage Zone |   Blind Spot
                     |
You know ------------|---------------> You don't know
                     |
        Common Knowledge | Disadvantage Zone
                     |
                   Others know

The reason abstract knowledge is more advantageous is that its dimension is higher. For example, sayings like "technology is just a tool" make sense when applied to any specific technology. After occupying the abstract high ground, the entire war will be elevated to this abstract level. Any discourse lower than the current highest level of abstraction will lose its meaning, and what follows is a massacre like a tragedy in the solar system.

It's a bit like an "up-dimensional strike." Because one doesn't have an advantage in the same-dimensional space, one finds a way to move the battlefield to a higher-dimensional space to implement a high-dimensional strike.

Therefore, in terms of knowledge storage, abstract general theories are also extremely important. Firstly, possessing higher-dimensional abstract knowledge allows one to manipulate any dialogue; secondly, it can be used to counter high-dimensional strikes.

What I Am Pursuing

What is it that the heart truly desires?

A free environment? Career development? Technology?

Then, what is technology? Eight years from now, what kind of "Besieged City" will I be in?

All along, I have believed in my feet more, believing that as long as I keep walking, I will eventually reach the place that is waiting for me. Therefore, I never look up at the sky, nor do I dream.

As for dreams, I hope to be like those thoughtful predecessors, injecting thoughts into technology and expressing my unique value through it. This requires an extremely long period of accumulation and precipitation, catching that exciting idea when a spark flashes, and finally facing a war of thoughts alone, like searching for the gate of life:

In all the world, the most troubled person is Hu Qiaomu. Because when he thinks about a problem, he always thinks from the first degree to the 180th degree, often moving to the opposite of himself, contradicting himself and suffering greatly.

By continuing to walk, it seems I will always get closer to my dreams. Because the more knowledge I accumulate and the larger the set of knowns is, the easier it is to map and infer from that set when facing the unknown. In fact, learning Haskell was to establish a "pure" set of knowns. From a sufficiently long timeline, everything learned is useful. For example, I suddenly realized:

The way CSS animation is defined is very similar to Flash, such as keyframes, empty keyframes, and ordinary frames in Flash.

There were 4 years between learning Flash and CSS animation. The wonderful connection between knowledge always appears at some point. So even a detour is a winding path forward. However, this way of growing is not rational, because each step's choice is neither locally optimal nor globally optimal; it's more like a worm trying to navigate a maze. Yes, all along, I have been exploring this unknown road in this way, ignoring all kind reminders, and moving forward in the dead of night, clumsy and stubborn.

The senior said only by letting go of self-esteem and vanity can one hear the heart's desire. Just like:

I see that I am looking for unhappiness; I accept this feeling with all my heart and let go of the need for it.

2. Goals

Year 3

Front-end Tech Ecosystem
The Ideal Framework
Algorithms
Art of Speaking
Higher-Dimensional Thinking

Meeting a Better Version of Myself

Dear, there is no one else outside, only yourself. The external environment is just a projection of the inner world.

Yes, my numerous shortcomings are all real; there are no excuses.

Effective Communication

Effective communication is reflected in both parties being able to exchange information in a harmonious way and reach an agreement.

However, the most direct way of conveying is usually not the most effective. Just like a speech, it needs to establish an emotional connection, fully perceive the other person's situation, and first let "you" become "us." But many times, what hinders communication is not the information itself, but the collision of emotions from both parties:

Communication is an emotional game.

Fortunately, emotions can be guided, like "crowd control" in a game. So, start with positive emotions and guide the other person to generate positive emotions, thereby communicating rationally.

Maintain an Empty Cup

If you always stand inside the circle, you will never see the unknown at the edge, just like a cup full of water.

Just like the "resetting to zero" that Teacher Hou mentioned, every time I step out of my comfort zone, I devote myself to becoming a dry sponge and starting from zero again. This is a kind of courage to say goodbye to historical achievements.

Staying in a familiar area and always looking at new things in an inferential way makes it impossible to see the part that is completely different:

Why read underscore?

I heard it helps in learning functional programming (I can't say it doesn't help at all, but it's still far from FP).

Thinking About Change

Willingness to work -> Responsibility -> Breakthrough

The senior wanted to say is that changes are happening all the time. Facing them in an unchanging way will lead to being phased out sooner or later.

Survival of the fittest. Only by constantly repositioning and achieving self-breakthrough can one cope with change.

3. Plan

From now on, be an elegant person.

Main Path

Front-end Tech Ecosystem
The Ideal Framework
Algorithms

Side Path

Art of Speaking
Design Aesthetics

Daily Routine

Higher-Dimensional Thinking
English