Stop! Check! (sniffs pants) Check passed! You can go now! (lies down and turns head)

• 🧩 A Life Fragment

The plum wine I brewed myself is so good it knocked me out 🫠

• 🍺 All in the glass

Finally, our project has reached the point where we need a user system. But I really don’t want to write CRUD anymore, so I started surfing the web.

(For friends who aren’t software engineers: CRUD stands for Create, Read, Update, Delete. It basically means writing the same boilerplate code over and over in the same way—essentially, it’s grunt work.)

Then I realized I’m totally out of touch! At this late stage of the internet wave, so many technologies have already spilled over, becoming free or cheap (compared to your business) infrastructure.

Take ChatPdf (https://www.chatpdf.com) as an example. It’s a small tool that uses ChatGPT to interpret PDFs. How was it built?

• Core capability comes from ChatGPT
• The user system and software backend are built directly on Google’s Firebase, meaning theoretically it doesn’t need its own cloud servers to execute product functions, while also getting rid of a ton of complex and worthless CRUD features.
• The payment gateway uses Stripe—just configure it, no need to build a whole bunch of complex vendor integrations from scratch.

And then, a product with an annual revenue of over $100 million can run stably and efficiently! I couldn’t even find any funding records for ChatPDF online, which suggests it probably originated from some guy’s side project. How did a little software engineer become a billionaire? Well, you see, you just never know—one’s fate depends not only on personal effort but also on the course of history… (At this point, Grape jumped up and slapped me twice, telling me to stop paying homage.)

This web surfing experience really blew my mind. Being behind the times means I need to study hard! So I continued surfing the web for a few more days.

Haha, and over these days, due to the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I discovered tons of such infrastructure products, making me deeply realize that in the future, fine-grained division of labor will no longer be the only viable growth driver. Perhaps in the future, everyone can work poetically again, relying on their creativity and truly functioning as humans.

# On this topic, I’m setting a flag here to write about my observations on a small facet of open-source software. # The third picture is Grape.

• 🧩 A Slice of Life

[“Comrades, do you still remember our ideals?” 2023 Animation Graduation Project [Steel Bones] 5th XunGuang Little Universe Award - Bilibili] https://b23.tv/dNIa0qI

Deeply impressed.

The author is clearly a practical idealist.

Why do I say that? Let’s analyze the title on Bilibili.

Several elements in the title: Comrade, graduation project, the animation’s own title, and the award.

What feeling does it give you? The feeling I got when I saw this title is that it first uses these symbols to pre-sketch your expectations for the content.

Idealistic; Progressive; Romantic; With a hint of pessimism; Because it’s a graduation project, likely a bit immature; Award-winning, bearing the endorsement of cultural authority.

Then the length of ten minutes is neither too long nor too short—you won’t think it’s too long to watch, and it’s not so short that it lacks any information.

So you’ll probably watch it, and you’ll watch it all the way through.

This is exactly what a practical idealist does: they understand the current situation, know the good and the bad, understand the pain and trauma; and precisely because they understand, they can view it as a tool and then utilize it.

I’m amazed that the author has gone beyond knowing what and why, without stopping at academic, ivory-tower cultural criticism, without retaining that characteristic aloofness and purism. Instead, they have gone a step further, reaching out in a tangible way to more passersby who don’t know the story, exerting influence, trying to awaken the idealism in people’s hearts and build a better world.

What will happen in the end? I don’t know. We don’t know what the future holds, but we choose diversity, choose difference, choose pain, choose failure. We acknowledge the filth of the present, admit it, rather than ignoring it.

The Bodhi tree may wither, the mirror stand may gather dust; perhaps we cannot reach the realm of “originally nothing,” but we do not choose to wipe it diligently either. Instead, we strive to live, to carve out a brand new world.

• 🍙 Animation Check-in

Origin

I came back to Xi’an to take care of some business. That evening, I met up with my college buddies, Shaocong and Yahui, and we had the spicy Sichuan peppercorn chicken I’d been dreaming about. Afterwards, on a whim, we slipped back into our old university.

Due to the pandemic, I hadn’t been back in a long time, so I was like a country bumpkin who’d never set foot on campus, constantly repeating “Holy shit” in awe.

Even though I had an alumni card ready, I pretended to be a nonchalant student and confidently walked past the security guard through the Southeast Gate, smoothly turning onto the steps beside the road and into the courtyard of Zhongying College—undergrads are evenly distributed across the eight colleges on campus. Each college consists of several dorm buildings with its own access system, clubs, library, study rooms, bubble tea shop, and student union. Zhongying is in a prime location: to the south is the most vibrant Southeast Gate; to the east is the famous Kangqiao cafeteria (Photo 5), renowned across Asia; to the north is the hot spring bath (genuine spring water); and best of all, there’s no nightly power outage, so you can study or game all night.

A Mysterious Senior Student Knocked on Our Dorm Door?!

Seeing the dorm building door wide open and the dorm mother not around, a clever idea struck me—I decided to go upstairs and see what Room 0235 looked like now.

I walked up the familiar stairs to the second floor, right in front of Room 0235 facing the staircase. I carefully confirmed there was someone inside, steeled myself, stepped forward, and knocked. Fear, yes. And another feeling I’ve painfully become intimately familiar with over the years: a mix of pride and sheer helpless absurdity. It had been so long. Since we left, Room 0235 had already sent off another batch of graduates.

The screech of a chair moving came from inside. My heart was pounding, I could barely breathe, my mind went blank—I just stood there, waiting for the door’s judgment. Only a few seconds passed, but it felt like years. The door opened.

A boy in military training camouflage stood at the entrance, looking utterly puzzled at the sight of me. I quickly explained that I used to live here and wanted to take a look inside. He opened the door a bit wider to let me in, then turned and sat back down—right where I used to sit.

I took a photo, full of emotion, beaming with a smile, yet awkwardly not knowing what to say. Maybe I should have acted like a wise old alumnus and offered some arrogant words of encouragement or gifted something to these kids under twenty, but my mind was empty and my hands were empty. So I just told the guy who opened the door, “Buddy, I used to live in that spot.” He gave me an awkward smile too, with a hint of curiosity in his eyes. I smiled back at him, then turned and left.

Other Visits to Old Haunts

Maybe I was too overwhelmed. By the time I came to my senses, I was already a few hundred meters away from the dorm.

To calm myself down, we took a long walk around the campus. Here are some observations:

• It’s summer vacation for sure, but because the Class of 2022 didn’t have military training last year, this summer’s short semester has been replaced with military training!

• Walking past my old lab, I remembered that during my senior year, the lab moved to that building. Since I was off on an internship and didn’t plan to pursue graduate studies, they didn’t give me a new access card—basically kicking me out of the lab. 😡

• Walking along Wutong West Road toward the North Gate, I said to Yahui, “See that building marked ‘Ser’? If you blew that up, all the universities in the northwest would lose their internet!” Yahui: “๑ᵒᯅᵒ๑”

• Went into the Hall of Distinguished Alumni in the Science Building and found a photo of the elder who changed China—the birth and death years had been updated. 😭

• Exiting the Science Building, I stood before the statue of the “Goddess of No Failure.” I thought maybe it was because I never prayed to her back then that I got banned from a final exam and had to take a make-up exam, resulting in a big fat zero on my transcript. Well, actually, it was because I hated that teacher and skipped class—that was the punishment. 🖕🏿

• The “Goddess of No Failure” is actually a statue of a woman with her arms raised high, but because she looks completely naked, everyone calls her the “Goddess of No Failure” (no clothes = no failure, a pun in Chinese) to pray for passing exams. (Photo 6)

• Passing through the library to the Four Great Inventions Square, I suddenly noticed a classmate sitting on the steps, focused on his laptop (Photo 7). Yahui said, “Looks like Chen Shen.” I looked closer—it really was. Chen Shen back then, when we were too drunk to get back to the dorm and were lying around opposite the school gate, would proudly pull out his laptop and pretend to work. (Photo 8)

• When we got back to the Southeast Gate, we found it already locked. We almost considered climbing the wall, but realizing we weren’t as agile as in the old days, we obediently took a detour to the South Gate.

• Shaocong proudly pointed to the Foreign Languages Building in the southwest corner of campus and said that a few years ago, his girlfriend came to take IELTS there and posted on social media that she wanted to find a boyfriend from this university.

Afterword

Two days ago, Pruderior told me he read my Gcores posts and found them interesting.

“But, I noticed they’re all about the past, not things happening right now.”

Looks like even this current entry fits that description. I’ve always believed that ongoing events are not yet settled, and as my current self, I can’t evaluate my own present state. On one hand, I don’t know how to evaluate it—I haven’t had time to think carefully, and hasty judgments could convey incomplete or misleading information to others. On the other hand, I’m afraid of being proven wrong and then criticized by others over the long haul.

Recollections and evaluations of the past don’t have those problems. Locked in time’s cage, others’ opinions have no room to interfere. So I do tend to wait until things are completely over, then combine new experiences and insights to evaluate what happened to me in the past.

But maybe that’s too lonely. Like the last photo—it’s from the first semester of my freshman year, during those frantic 24 hours of reviewing for the “Ideological and Moral Cultivation” exam in our dorm, featuring Chen Shen, Alvin (and my toes??). Every time I look at this photo, I smile knowingly. That warm moment is forever gone. Sure, it lives in our memories, but it’s truly frozen in time. I don’t think of myself as someone trapped in the past, so perhaps I shouldn’t act like one either.

Maybe immature thoughts about current events can also be interesting, fresh, and inspiring.

Maybe I’ll post some of those. 🖖

• 🧩A Slice of Life

I discovered that a static website I made years ago to prank my college roommate is still online, which means he’s been paying for the domain all these years. This sent me down memory lane.
https://declaration.vanderchen.com/

My college roommates and I were incredibly close. The one who shared the wall with my bed was surnamed Chen. Since he showed up with a “Hello World” in C on the very first day of freshman year, while the rest of us knew nothing, we started calling him “God Chen” from then on.

What kind of person is God Chen? Let me list some fun facts about him:

1. God Chen gave himself the ID “VanDerChen,” pronounced “Van der Chen.” It sounds like a Dutch nobleman.

2. During the summer break of freshman year, God Chen pulled an all-nighter for several days straight, single-handedly carrying seven people to complete a major project for the summer term. After that, I started studying hard so I wouldn’t hold him back.

3. God Chen would stay up all night every night. I almost never saw him sleep at night. Of course, being awake might mean studying, or it might mean playing 4399 games.

4. Before exams, God Chen would activate his “Ultimate 24 Hours.” With those 24 hours, even if he had never studied a course all semester, he could still score high.

5. God Chen was quite sturdy, and since our beds shared the same wall, I often ended up getting “disciplined” by him.

6. God Chen is a 120% man—meaning his descriptions of events are often 20% more exaggerated than reality. Combined with other endearing qualities that invite teasing, we loved to roast him. The outcome, however, was usually getting beaten up.

7. God Chen missed the cutoff for the graduate entrance exam math by one point, but his specialized course scores were ridiculously high. The professors really wanted him as a student (unpaid labor), but unfortunately, our school was too rigid that year. So he was reassigned to the University of Science and Technology of China, and now he’s Dr. Chen. This just goes to show—people never know what’s coming. A person’s fate depends not only on personal effort but also on the course of history. A small-time college graduate like God Chen, ████████ (if I write any more, this post might not get through).

8. A few years ago, while slacking off at work, I suddenly missed God Chen. So I bought a domain, set up a small website on GitHub Pages, and made this “Van der Chen Declaration.”

9. Later, I visited him in Suzhou. After getting beaten up again, I transferred the domain to him.

10. Not only did he not take down this site used to roast him, but he also put up his own blog on the same domain.

Image 1: The Van der Chen Declaration (plagiarized from the Zen of Python—the more I think about it, the more embarrassed I get)
Image 2: While traveling in the UK, I found a forebear of the Van der family in some museum.
Image 3: A discussion between me and lxyl about this.

• 🫖 Tea Time

Zheng Zheng bought a new iPad, and we plan to try using it as a whiteboard for our online meeting room. Feishu’s whiteboard feature is actually pretty handy—all participants can write on it.

Soon enough, it got silly, and we found ourselves feeling like we were playing with mud as kids.

• 🐟Office Break Room

A month later and I’m still wandering through the Mili universe; this song is called Summoning 101.

Hearing a soft, melodic chant, I step through a portal that suddenly appears before me; tiptoeing to her desk, this witch with hair like twilight. She’s writing a fresh page of notes on paper—likely the very spell that summoned me.

Everything in this world feels so magical to me: autumn moon’s falling leaves, summer’s gentle breeze, spring’s floral scent, and the witch’s bouncing short hair.

In my world, time was later proven not to be one-dimensional as people think. Or rather, “one-dimensional” alone can’t capture the intricate web of time. To me, time is a gift, flowing through each person one after another, leaving its mark.

We can’t communicate—my fangs and claws are useless here. She speaks to me over and over in words I don’t understand; I don’t understand, but they sound like songs.

But no matter—take my paw! Teach me your language, show me the wonders of this world.

I know this meeting might just be a small joke of time—or at least, I used to know. Because later I grew bolder, grew greedier, and actually wished these moments could last a little longer, just a little longer.

—And then the portal connecting two worlds suddenly collapsed.

I reached out, futilely trying to grasp her. As the door closed, my left arm was severed. Autumn moon withers, summer scorches, spring only brings allergies. Everything looks so desolate. Can I miss you? I howled, I long for you.

But it sounded like a one-armed wolf cub whimpering in an empty field under the night sky.

Then time kept flowing, and I wandered aimlessly. Many years passed, but the mark she left never faded—I wandered. These memories give me strength; even with one arm, life is manageable—I wandered. I kept pondering the meaning of life, the delicate connection between life and time—I wandered. And her beautiful words—I never forgot them, even though I still don’t understand—I wandered.

Then the door opened again.

Her hunched figure flickered in the blizzard; I rushed over, trying to shield her. In her dying moments, she saw me—tears flowed, ignited, and her flesh began to dissolve.

The storm stopped. In the broken hut, I looked around—nothing was as it once was.

On the table lay 617 pages of intricate notes—the fruit of a thousand years of her wisdom. Scattered around were materials used as catalysts—she had been searching for me across tens of millions of worlds for years.

At the center of the magic circle, I held her withered bones—this witch with hair like moonlight.

For the last time—take my paw! Even if the seasons are no longer clear, in this apocalyptic midwinter; even if youth is gone, even if hair is silver, your crystal-clear eyes still shine like torches—so beautiful…

I tried to speak to her, but all that came out was a long wolf’s howl.

Owoooooooooooooooooooo

• 🎵 What I Listened to This Week