⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

Over the past year, some members of the “Wiwi Blog Universe” have started a trend of submitting themselves to nownownow.com, which has made me wonder if I should also try submitting myself to nownownow.com?

However, after thinking about it, I think I shouldn’t submit it for now?

All the members contributing to nownownow.com in the “Wiwi Blog Universe” are from Taiwan. I was born and raised in Hong Kong and have never lived in Taiwan for an extended period, so I’m considered a foreigner in the “Wiwi Blog Universe”. The Hong Kong section of nownownow.com currently has 10 members, and from what I’ve seen, they’re all English websites. Also I see someone equates “Traditional Chinese” with “Taiwan” directly, implying that all Chinese-speaking regions outside of Taiwan should be all using Simplified Chinese. It would be a bit awkward if I included myself in it and nobody really reads it.

Furthermore, if you submit yourself to nownownow.com, they will ask you some basic questions about yourself. If you don’t answer them, you’ll be listed in the “missing photo” or “missing profile questions” section, which may affect your visibility. However, firstly, there are some questions I’m not quite sure on how to duel with, and secondly, I’m a person who is a bit values ​​privacy, and I don’t like to reveal too much about my personal information (or information that I would consider too personal) to strangers.

Additionally, this website currently does not have its own domain yet. I don’t know if I will migrate the website to another domain in the future. If I do migrate the domain, it might be a bit troublesome to change the links on websites own by others.

I wonder what opinions my fellow bloggers have on this. Feel free to contact me via email, private messages, or comment (if I ever set up a comment board on this site)!

📌 Update on 2026/05/05

Wiwi later published a new article “NowNowNow World Champion”, in which he mentions that “if everyone in our BlogBlog Club Universe works together, Taiwan can have a chance to break into the top three, or even win the championship¹”. After reading this, I thought that the BlogBlog Club only has about 100 participants, and not all of them are Taiwanese (I myself am actually a foreigner from Hong Kong). Even if all the participants in the BlogBlog Club submitted themselves to NowNowNow, Taiwan still wouldn’t be able to get into the top three. Therefore, Wiwi’s viewpoint is likely exaggerated and flawed, so I immediately wrote an email to Wiwi to discuss about this.

And he responded by saying, “The BlogBlog Club Universe isn’t limited to those who have already submitted posts; it also includes all the readers of these websites, the website owners’ friends, and potential members who will be brought in later²”. Is this an exaggeration?

⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

This website has been running for two months, but it still doesn’t have its own domain ¹. Today, let’s discuss the topic of choosing a domain name.

Of course, I know that GitHub Pages can be linked to a custom domain, but I haven’t done so simply because I’m too lazy to spend money to buy a new domain.

Preference to .com domains

Many blogs inside the “Wiwi Blog Universe” show a strong preference to .com domain names.

In the internet age, having your .com taken is like having your name taken.

——Alex Hsu “How an engineer dad picks baby names”

• JN has two posts (1, 2) discussing getting domains, himself using a .com domain.
• One of Wiwi’s submissions to the “Pushing the Pit” theme mentioned that he would “set an alarm to wake up in the middle of the night to grab a .com domain”.
• Alex Hsu says that he spent USD $1700 to buy his current .com domain. He also expressed his strong preference to [firstnamelastname].com domains.
• You’ve bought the domain name, and you still need to feed it. Eddie Lv mentioned that maintaining a .blog domain would cost him USD $2600 per year, which made him give up on the idea, and he ended up buying a .com domain instead.

Top-level domain hierarchy

Some people have a “top-level domain hierarchy” in their minds, which looks something like this:

.com > .net/.org > gTLD > ccTLD

By definition, all two-letter top-level domains are “country code top-level domains” (ccTLDs). According to this hierarchy, Lightingale Community is at the bottom of this hierarchy.

Not long ago, 7-zip was found that it has its .com domain name being squatted as a phishing website, this highlights the importance of registering .com domains for services with high brand awareness.

Additionally, if you’re considering setting up your own mail server, you would have to consider the fact that the global email service has been plagued by spam mails for many years as well, creating a trust deadlock that makes sending emails from new domain names very difficult. It’s said that emails sent from .com domains would have a higher deliver rate, while newer domains like .win and .xyz are often used for suspicious purposes, and are more likely to be distrusted by other websites.

My domain plans

Maintaining a domain name is very expensive, and buying a domain name just for a blog isn’t worthwhile. Even if this website eventually has its own domain, I’ll probably put the blog in a subdomain like b.example.com. In fact, I already have a fairly detailed list of subdomains in mind:

• a/ai: Self-hosted privte AI service (if ever made)
• b: Blog
• f: Forum, message board
• g: GitHub Pages／self-hosted Gitea? (if ever made)
• i: Image host
• m/mc: Minecraft server
• ms?: Self-hosted Mastodon? (if ever made)
• s/t?: Tiny URLs
• sx: Self-hosted searx (if ever made)
• v: Self-hosted PeerTube (if ever made)

Choosing a domain name

The question is, what kind of domain name should I choose?

Some people like to use their real names as domain names. Alex Hsu mentioned that he prefers such domain names². I would consider the issue of identity segregation, even if I bought a domain name containing my real name, I wouldn’t use it for this particular blogging identity.

Furthermore, the future of .io is quite uncertain. Until its future is clear, it’s best not to buy a new .io domain.

Dark web domain names

Lightingale Community has members regularly using dark web services, some of them also help the entire community set up dark web domains.

• Tor and I2P have readily available tools for mining domain names. Someone even mined a bunch of .onion domain names starting with yjspi.
• Yggdrasil is essentially a virtual IPv6 address that can be bound to any domain name. I would just have to create a subdomain called y/ygg for it.
• Lokinet may lack readily available domain mining tools.

⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

I’ve read Alex Hsu’s “The omakase blog: building an opinionated personal site” recently, let me share some of my personal opinions.

Light mode and dark mode

This site currently offers both light and dark themes, with automatic detection by default, but users can also switch between both themes by clicking a button on the menu.

But what if you’re forced to choose one? Alex mentioned he recently removed the light mode entirely, which I think is fine. Conversely, since I’m the kind of person who likes to hide in a dark room late at night to look at my phone, I don’t really like the constanly blindingly bright mode of 廢文小天地 and Wen (that kind of blindingly bright mode is more suitable for e-ink screens or paper reading, maybe I should invest in an e-reader?). In the ancient days before CSS, the default layout was always in light mode, which is why browsers now default to light mode unless colours are specified using CSS.

Simplified/Traditional Chinese conversions

I’ve considered adding a “one-way Simplified/Traditional Chinese conversion” function to this website, but I’m lazy and haven’t implemented it yet.

As for “two-way Simplified/Traditional Chinese conversion”, it’s basically a cancer. A one-to-many conversion in Simplified Chinese often leads to over-conversion.

I was born and raised in Hong Kong. Compared to Taiwan, due to cultural contact and changes in population structure, Hong Kong people have more opportunities to encounter Simplified Chinese in their daily lives. Hong Kong people generally have better reading ability for Simplified Chinese than Taiwanese people, and there are fewer cases of “Simplified Chinese reading difficulties” or “much slower when trying to read Simplified Chinese”. My own fluency in reading Traditional and Simplified Chinese is actually not that different most of the time.

Horizontal and vertical writings

Within the “Wiwi Blog Universe”, there’s a blog that’s uniquely written vertically, that’s “Me” (e89295).

Local language textbooks in Taiwan and Japan share a common feature: they are both written vertically. In contrast, textbooks in mainland China and Hong Kong are all written horizontally (although Hong Kong does have many vertically written Chinese books).

In the past, electronic devices, which are dominated by Westerners who lacked vertical writing traditions, often have poor support on vertical texts. However, the support for vertical text on electronic devices has nowadays improved considerably.

That being said, vertically formatted web pages like “My Blog” might be better viewed horizontally on mobile devices.

Table formatting

Numerous studies have shown that limiting the width of text layouts can improve the reading experience (at least for horizontal text). I have many linguistics articles that include tables. When there are many columns in a table, it often overflows, which is not quite aesthetically pleasing. Perhaps I should look into better table formatting mechanisms, or maybe I should just use images instead?

📌 Want to use it now?

• The source code is here!
• Supporting CSS

A practical little toy developed during the research of Hugo.

Usage

Markdown syntax:

{{< ruby Text Pronunciation >}}

Rendering effect: Text（Pronunciation）

⏳ Current Status

• 🏡 I’ve always been living in Hong Kong.
• 💼 I’m still unemployed. I briefly mentioned this in my “Perfect Days” post.

❓ Recently doing

• ⛪️ I’ve been maintaining my church attendance routine for the past year, but I still have no plans to believe.

The romanization system used in this article is Jyutping.

Initials

Standard Cantonese has 20 phonemic initial consonants. Although many people do mix up several pairs like /n/ and /l/, /ŋ/ and /ʔ/ ~ ∅.

Alveolar and postalveolar affricates seems to be either allophones or free variation. Some people pronounce /ts/, /tsʰ/, /s/ before unrounded vowels, and /tʃ/, /tʃʰ/, /ʃ/ before rounded vowels, while some people only pronounce the alveolar variant in all positions. Linguistic materials suggest that these two sets of initial consonants are actually distinguished in pre-1950s Cantonese, however. See my other post “A Brief Discussion on Several Chinese Dialectal Phenomena” for further information.

Rhymes

There are usually considered 8 main vowel phonemes in standard Cantonese, although there are about 11 realizations of these phonemes. Items marked with an asterisk * are rare rhymes.

Older Cantonese also has /om/ and /op/, though they are usually merged into /ɐm/ and /ɐp/ today.

/aː/, /ɐ/, /ɛː/ and /iː/ are considered as unrounded vowels, while /ɔː/, /œː/, /uː/ and /yː/ are considered as rounded vowels. The roundness of the vowel may determine whether the /ts/, /tsʰ/, /s/ or /tʃ/, /tʃʰ/, /ʃ/ set of initial is used.

All stop codas (i.e. -p, -t and -k) are unreleased, unlike most European languages.

Tones

短陰入 and 長陰入 are also referred as 高陰入 and 低陰入 respectively.

💡 Fun fact

Cantonese is one of the handful Chinese variant that preserves the 陽上 tone. Most modern Chinese variant just merge it in 陽去 or 陰上.

⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

After reading about Alex Hsu’s post “Your RSS posts might only live half as long as everyone else’s” today, I immediately checked the information in my RSS feed, and found out that the <pubDate> field inside the RSS feed takes the date field instead of the lastmod field, specified inside the post’s frontmatter. The publishing time I expect to be displayed in RSS feed should be the latter.

My current publishing process

This site is currently built using Hugo and GitHub Pages. When I write a new article, I will look at the current time just before saving the file, then manually fill in the time into the date field of the frontmatter, and then push it to GitHub as soon as possible. When I update old articles, I don’t edit the date field but lastmod instead. Little did I know, that such an update method would actually screw myself up.

Start working on it

To modify the publish date inside the RSS feed, we can start with the file layouts/rss.xml (at least this is the file for the theme I am using now). There is a line in this file that looks like this:

<pubDate>{{ .PublishDate.Format "Mon, 02 Jan 2006 15:04:05 -0700" | safeHTML }}</pubDate>

Where .PublishDate represents the date field of the frontmatter, and lastmod is .Lastmod. Just replace this value and it should be done.

I don’t know if it is possible to automatically fill in and change the publish date based on my current publishing process. If possible, I might try it when I have time in the future.

📌 Update on 2026/04/24

Found this Hugo option to fetch dates from Git. Not sure if it’s useful for me or not.

⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

Well, this is a follow-up post. The original version of the question set used in this post comes from Kev Quirk, an incomplete list of traditional Chinese blogs that have recently followed suit includes: 廢文小天地、Hong-Sheng Huang、JN、侃侃而隨想極短文、Ikuka、Shuyu、Wiwi、Alex Hsu、Shuo-Jen Huang。

Question list

1. Why did you start blogging in the first place?
2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
4. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
6. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
7. What’s your favourite post on your blog?
8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

My answers

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Mainly for storing some notes and also to check out BlogBlog Club? I haven’t finished organizing all my notes yet.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

Currently, the only “platform” I’m using is GitHub Pages, and the website interface itself is generated using Hugo. Perhaps I’ll consider renting a VPS sometime when I wish to set up a message board. Perhaps I’ll migrate the entire website to another hosting platform sometime in the future.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I dabbled in Blogger a long time ago, but I didn’t have as much free time to write blogs back then, so I quickly abandoned it.

How do you write your posts?

All markdown files are edited directly using a local text editor.

This blog website has English and Cantonese versions, but since I rarely promote this website in circles where people don’t understand Chinese, most of the English content on this site has been roughly translated using machine translation tools, and I’ll proofread it more carefully later when I have time.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

It’s hard to say, there’s no fixed time.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Both. Sometimes, when an idea strikes, I immediately write the whole thing and publish it right away. Other times, if I only have a small part of an idea, I might save it as a draft, or I might publish it first and then revise it later. Those articles for BlogBlog Club, which require more effort, are also written in parts. I don’t think I’ll have the willpower to maintain daily updates in the short term, so there’s no point in hoarding posts.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

The number of posts on this site is not very large at the moment, so it’s hard to say.

Any future plans for your blog?

• When the website has enough traffic, I might consider setting up a message board?
• Perhaps I’ll consider moving the entire website to its own domain?

⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

It’s said that in foreign countries (especially the Western world, and particularly in older elevators), elevator doors don’t always provide a “close” button.

It’s also said that in some places, the “close” button on elevator doors is just a placebo.

However, in Hong Kong, from what I’ve seen, the “close” button on most elevator doors actually works.

From an engineering perspective, adding a “close” button complicates the entire elevator’s design, so sometimes it’s better to not provide one.

From a cultural perspective, perhaps foreign cultures simply don’t care about making the elevator doors close quicker, they’ll close automatically when the time comes, why are you even rushing!

I have an elevator I use frequently, and its close button seems to be a placebo. As soon as someone enters and presses the floor button, the door starts closing by itself.

⚠️ Notice

This post is a draft translation from the Chinese version which have not yet been thoroughly proofread.

💡 BlogBlog Club!

This is my submission article for “BlogBlog Club Party - April 2026”. This month’s topic is “Productivity”, hosted by Wen. If you have your own blog, feel free to join us together!

Incomplete information game: Prisoner’s dilemma and Nash equilibrium

Many games in this world involve incomplete information, meaning that each party involved has hidden information that is unknown to the other parties.

Let’s say the police is negotiating a plea bargain with two prisoners. If both prisoners remain silent (“mutual cooperation”), they will each serve to six months in prison; If one testifies against the other (“defects”) while the other does not (“cooperates”), the one testifying will be set free while the other serves ten years in prison; If they both testify against each other (“mutual defection”), they will each serve five years. The two prisoners are separated and cannot communicate with each other.

This is called the prisoner’s dilemma. You’ll find that when neither side can trust the other, the optimal strategy for both, considering only their own interests, is to defect! However, mutual defection doesn’t bring better overall benefit to either side (it only maximizes the individual interests of each prisoner), creating a lose-lose situation of “better to die than live in dishonour.” When neither side has any incentive to unilaterally change their choice, a Nash equilibrium is formed.

It can be said that many consequences of incomplete information games actually reduce the overall productivity of the entire world.¹

(If the benefits of cooperation outweigh the losses from betrayal, it’s not called the prisoner’s dilemma but a stag hunt. In a stag hunt, both “cooperation” and “betrayal” are Nash equilibria.)

Twilight of the gods: A lose-lose situation

Facing the never-seen change of lavatories, there’s no perfect ready-made product in every way. You can only pick the least smelly one from all kinds of shit, and try to make it into a way that you can accept.

Advertising dilemma

Applying the prisoner’s dilemma to the business world, it can be interpreted as follows: Each company has two choices: one is to invest more resources in advertising to weaken or defeat competitors (mutual defection); the other is to reach an agreement with competitors to reduce wasted resources on advertising (cooperation). In the real business environment, mutual defection is extremely common, resulting in a large amount of resources and network traffic being wasted on advertising, while the vast majority of consumers don’t even glance at it.

In this game, the ultimate victims are the end users. Overly aggressive advertising has forced them to activate ad blockers. With Google’s declaration of war on ad blockers, a new dilemma is quietly unfolding. Some websites and services (which may have some value) have to rely on advertising to survive or they will starve, but advertising services rely on various privacy-violating trackers, scaring away privacy-conscious users. However, this user loss indirectly threatens the platform’s finances, creating a dilemma.

Browser wars

Let’s first take a look at the browsers you’re using. What are the advantages and disadvantages of common browsers?

• It’s not the first day that Google Chrome has been criticized as spyware and adware.
• Microsoft Edge’s interface is relatively annoying, and has also been criticized as spyware and adware.
• Firefox’s backgrounds appear more free, and its interface is cleaner, but due to its market share, some websites may not be as Firefox-friendly. Besides, Pront and (past²) Wiwi accuse it of being a spyware, and the Android version of Firefox is reportedly not very handful.
• According to Lumière Élevé, one of the co-founders of Lightingale Community, Brave should receive the same treatment as browsers that “threaten user security” (to be blocked in LTGC’s services), and says that “No one’s going to cry over a crypto bro’s scheme anyway, it’s even using the Chromium kernel controlled by Google.”, “I don’t care if it’s held at gun point or not”.
• Safari is exclusive to Apple platforms, and it used some unsavoury methods to forcibly maintain its market share.
• LibreWolf is quite suitable for privacy enthusiasts, but it’s not worth to be considerated for loading pages that require hardware acceleration.
• Cromite is probably the most privacy-conscious browser in the Chromium-family, and it doesn’t have any shit from the cryptocurrency communities, but it still has some of the original sins of the Chromium-family³.

From above, there’s no perfect ready-made product in every way. You can only pick the least smelly one from all kinds of shit, and try to make it into a way that you can accept.

Ragnarok of instant messaging softwares

Instant messaging softwares are also a pile of shit, you can only choose from different kinds of shit.

• Discord is too commercialized, and there’s still controversy surrounding age verification.
• Telegram now has more and more paid features, the idea of “forever free” is a thing of the past. Furthermore, the Telegram’s sound transmission quality is worse than that of Discord’s.
• Matrix’s stability (especially the Synapse-based home server) doesn’t seem to be good enough.
• Stoat aims to replace Discord. Although it uses the slogan “anti-discrimination”, it seems to have regional discrimination against people from certain countries, which is a case of generalizing from one to the whole group.
• Fluxer is also an alternative to Discord, but it has learned Discord’s monetization methods exactly, and even surpassed them.
• SimpleX is usable and offers top-notch security, but cross-device login is out of the question.
• While Signal’s encryption itself is not particularly problematic, there are many issues beyond encryption. In addition to the notification push of private messages containing plaintext, the team behind it has no concept of anti-censorship and continues to recommend their seriously problematic TLS proxy to users in censored regions, putting users at risk.
• WhatsApp will keep feeding your information to Meta, it’s too commercial.

Powered by love

It’s quite ideal that one could make a living solely by participating in free software projects, but in reality, very few people can sustain themselves entirely through free software development.

In reality, FOSSes often rely on the following methods to survive:

• Selling related peripheral services (such as technical support for Caddy, cURL, SQLite3, as well as a certain scorewriter software with a bad eating manner)
• Dual licensing of software allows open-source software to use its dependencies for free under open-source licenses, while closed-source software requires a paid license. (such as Qt, JUCE)
• Obtain special grants (such as grants from NLnet, FOSS.United, etc., such as Rethink).
• Selling pre-built binary files (such as Ardour)
• Obtaining government contracts (Tuwunnel obtained a funding contract from the Swiss government) or corporate contracts (Valve funded some KDE developers through corporate contracts).
• Getting donations (Purely powered by love, requiring a lot of popularity.)
• Exploiting loopholes in licensing agreements to directly sell licenses (RHEL)

These survival strategies often have a low success rate when starting free software, resulting in free software often becoming a side hustle that doesn’t receive sufficient labour, leading to the current free software market being of inconsistent quality.

The stagnant free software market

“What’s the use of free software if it can’t even get anything done?” — Anonymous

The consequence of games is that many necessary software and services often fail to meet (all) ideal conditions, even though there are actually quite a few readily available options.

Wiwi once compiled a guide to real tech nerds. I think many of his views (at least in 2026) are too radical, and some projects are actually not very realistic. Insufficient budgets could even become a burden on productivity.

• Do you really think everyone in the world is capable of building their own offline AI? My bottleneck isn’t in technical ability, but rather in aspects that the most Taiwanese wouldn’t even aware a shit of. See below for more details.
• “Attitude towards advertising” is a dilemma, as stated above.
• Avoiding subscription services (or “renting”) sounds very ideal and lofty, but in this era of twilight of the gods, how many buy-to-play software options are actually available?
• Proprietary formats can surely be avoided for personal use, but when you have to work to make a living, do you think you can completely avoid them?
• With the free software market still stagnant, market demand will lean more towards mainstream operating systems like Windows and macOS, making Linux software development less commercially viable. Wine is not a panacea.
• Do you really think setting up a self-hosted mail server is that easy? The global email service has been plagued by spam mails for many years, leading to a trust deadlock that makes it very difficult to send emails from a self-hosted mail service.
• Instant messaging software is a twilight of the gods, as stated above.

However, I’m currently still struggling financially. This blog you see here doesn’t even have its own domain name⁴, let alone any of the extremely expensive self-hosted services.

The impact of artificial intelligence on productivity

Given that artificial intelligence can quickly accomplish tasks that previously required far more time and effort from humans, it’s fair to say that AI’s productivity (in some areas) has already surpassed that of humans. In these AI-dominated fields, only the most outstanding humans will survive, those whose productivity cannot keep up with AI will be eliminated by society.

• When I was a child, I dreamed of becoming a software engineer, but now that vibe coding is so popular, being a software engineer is no longer as commercially viable.
• When I was a kid, I dreamed of becoming a fan artist, but now AI can draw faster and with fair quality than humans.
• Static translations, even if not accurate enough, has been eliminated by “good enough” products. Only the more challenging real-time interpreting still has demand, or one could consider switching to translating “low-resource languages” (such as various Chinese “dialects”).

However, running artificial intelligence consumes a lot of electricity. Given the current global energy crisis, will the development of artificial intelligence be forced to slow down?

How can artificial intelligence be used to improve productivity?

In the age of artificial intelligence, how can we effectively utilize AI to improve our productivity and avoid being left behind by society?

• We shouldn’t completely reject Vibe coding, but we also shouldn’t rely on it entirely, and we shouldn’t blindly accept AI-generated code. Who knows when an intelligent rebellion occurs?
• Artists either need to find a way to become the best human being, or they can use AI to create a draft first and then find a way to refine it.
• Try to strengthen the connections between people. Some industries emphasize communication with humans and should not be so easily replaced by AI.