MochiaoWRITING / NOTES & ESSAYS
Research notes, project retrospectives, and long-form writing on technology and economics.
Independent thought demands autonomy of the subject, yet the structure of thinking presupposes the presence of others. Both propositions are true, and they cannot be reconciled—an essay that stays in that contradiction a while.
Raising hype from an everyday term of abuse into an analytical concept: its definition, its dynamics, its political economy, and why seeing through hype may itself be a form of hype.
A short survey of LLM evaluation: from MMLU to agent benchmarks, and how eval stopped being a post-training QA step and became the thing that shapes the model.
A five-character regulated verse written to a set theme—a painting of gleaners—under a fixed rhyme, revisited years later and lightly revised.
Agentic AI is changing more than our tools: it is reshaping the unit of labour, the scale of organisations, capital structures, the role of the state, and the distribution of value.
From temple fever and digital wooden fish to a low-desire society: how a generation seeks somewhere to place its future when upward mobility stalls and the nearby disappears.
A full-stack view of the strategic, technological, industrial, and civilisational transition as the marginal cost of agency approaches zero.
A thought experiment about computational limits, structural complexity, and higher cognition.
The gender gap in higher education has reversed, while public debate remains trapped in yesterday's narrative.
A rhapsody in praise of staying under the quilts through the depths of winter, in the company of Zhuang Zhou, Zai Yu, Ji Kang, and Chen Tuan.
What this website is for, and what I hope to keep here over time.
April in Beijing: the night wind hammers the window. Sleepless and ill, I listen, and set down the three things that make a night wind unlike a day wind—clarity, distance, solitude.
The sun was good that day, good to the point of glare. Years later I understood that the ordinariness of that afternoon was the deepest wound the parting left.
Cultural confidence grows by carrying tradition forward, learning from others, and renewing the inheritance for a new age.