Explosive capacity growth on the production side, endlessly rising thresholds on the consumption side — the dumbing-down of web fiction is a microcosm of humanity drifting further and further down the road of amusing itself to death. Every new medium in history has reshuffled the deck, but text, images, sound, video, interactivity, VR/AR — the sensory channels are basically all covered by now. What is the next medium that can unlock new demand on the consumption side? Maybe the answer is "generative narrative along the time dimension" — the same story seed, but a different story for everyone who steps in.

ByteDance announced that the Feishu product team and the Doubao product team are being merged into a new Doubao product team. My first reaction to the news was a bit of melancholy — the internet is like a giant steamroller. Digital tenant farmers, exploited by monopoly giants, riding the express train of the times, ready to be thrown off at any moment. In my eyes, all closed-source software and services can have only one final destination: the trash heap of history. The only thing humans truly grow is their inner wisdom; the only thing humans truly possess is their inner emotions.

In principle, autoregressive probabilistic prediction can never produce true creativity. I spent three months writing a novel with AI, took part in the entire journey of a book from signing to completion, and through countless rounds of practice mapped out the real boundaries of what AI can do. So where does humanity's true value lie? The answer isn't in what AI can do — it's in what AI can never do.

AI can hand you crash-course moves, can quickly turn you from a clueless outsider into a beginner who can wave his hands around a bit, but it can’t give you the “kung fu beyond kung fu” that a real master grinds out after decades of rolling through the jianghu — taking blades, stepping in pits, seeing through the tricks behind the rules. Those real sweeping monks never carry in their hearts the standard motions of this move or that; they carry the whole jianghu — its shifting winds and tides, the way people’s loyalties turn. That kind of cultivation is never something a crash-course secret manual can give.

Have I ever told you about the boundary of self-awareness? Virtualization / mind transfer Because more and more people now believe that one day we’ll be able to abandon the body and keep only ...

I remember someone once told me: when you keep a cat, you have to remember to discipline it. Don’t let it develop bad habits—if it does something bad, you have to hit it. Spoiling it and pampering ...

Last night after finishing a phone call with my mom, combined with some of the wisdom Lukia had shared with me before, I had some insights. I wrote them down during the night and organized them this morning. The master says: Whether you’re chanting Buddha’s name or handling affairs, always use the first thought, not the second thought. The true first thought is not the first idea that pops into your head — that first idea is just the consciousness of human nature’s curiosity. Like how many children’s first thought upon seeing ice cream is “I want to eat it,” but eating it might give them a stomachache. The consequences aren’t necessarily something they can afford. The master explains: “More often than not, it’s greed, it’s delusion. Don’t get it wrong. The so-called first thought is seeing your original nature, it’s the outflow of your true mind, your original face. Thoughts of craving food, craving comfort all belong to the deluded mind, the greedy mind — not the true mind.” There is a big house. In the basement of the house lives a giant dragon. It is the owner of the house, but it has been sleeping all along. The house has many servants and stewards. Under the head steward’s leadership, everyone keeps repairing and expanding the house, living their lives in perfect order. The owner has been asleep the whole time — all matters big and small are handled by the steward. As time passes, the steward mistakes himself for the owner and forgets that the true owner is sleeping. The steward is like our consciousness; the dragon is the original face (or you could say, the soul). Many people practice spiritually precisely to awaken the dragon, to recover true insight — only then can the first thought emerge.

Half asleep, I heard a fly buzzing against the window glass, thumping into it again and again, trying to find a way out. It kept at it, failing and trying again across the wide pane, droning the w...

My view: prayer is a kind of thought energy, and it can prompt the natural environment around us to respond. The strength of that thought energy depends on the cultivation of the person praying. As Gao Yueming puts it, “In essence, worshipping the Buddha is not about asking the Buddha for things — it is about asking yourself to create the causes and conditions that bring about the karmic result.” Prayer is thought energy that issues a request for causes and conditions to ripen into results. Take the earthquake in May: during the three minutes of national silence, many people prayed in their hearts for the people in the disaster area. One person’s prayer thought energy may not be much, but the thought energy of 1.3 billion people praying together with good intent can transmit an energy to nature, and that energy can let crustal movement gradually return to stability.