Ten Years Later, Setting Sail Again
After ten years of silence, I have given this blog a complete makeover and started writing again. A place to record the changes brought by technology and AI, gather my thoughts on collaboration, language, and cognition, and leave a few traces of life and what I have learned along the way.
How I got here
At last, I have picked up my pen again (well, my keyboard) and started putting words down.
By my count, this should be my fifth blog. I threw myself into each of the previous ones for a while, too. First came MySpace, then CSDN and NetEase, and finally the previous version of sparkshining.com. But little by little, I let them all fall by the wayside. Some of those blogging services have vanished altogether. The old sparkshining.com stopped in August 2016, followed by ten whole years of silence.
A lot has changed in those ten years. I changed jobs twice. After experiencing the orderliness of a large company, I eventually found a perch at the small company where I work now. The projects are on a completely different scale, but I have a stronger sense of purpose and a greater sense of control. My children have grown from toddlers learning their first words into middle and high school students, and their thinking has grown deeper, too. Every so often, they take me by surprise and leave me thinking, “I never knew you could look at it that way.” For someone who loves watching how other people think, those surprises are about the best gift there is. Of course, I did not record those ten years of growing up, especially how they came to understand and explore the world. That is a regret I cannot make up for.
Throughout those years, technology kept moving. New tools and ideas arrived, and frameworks took turns in the spotlight, but the way we worked stayed much the same. Then 2025 came along, and with AI coming of age, a whole new world suddenly opened up. Since then, the pace of change has been dizzying. AI that could once do little more than trade messages back and forth could suddenly hold its own against humans on all sorts of tasks, once given context and a harness to work in. Then came agents and orchestration systems, and suddenly a lot of fiddly little jobs no longer needed my attention. I am a programmer, yet little by little, I stopped opening my IDE. Writing code by hand has become a “traditional craft,” something I do only when I want to “get the feel of it again.” Faced with such disruptive technology, some of the “youngsters” at work feel frightened and lost. But I really do not think they need to. Some skills we used to earn our living with may be worth less now, but technology has also made things that were once beyond our reach easy. We may no longer have a head start, but the shackles are off, and there is freedom to be had. How could that not be exciting?
Take this blog. Much of the design work, from the layout, colors, and animation to the illustrations, was done by AI. Looking at this version next to the one I built by hand, I can barely stand to look at how ugly the old one was. That is what technology can do. It is also what got me to pick up my pen again and put my thoughts down, one by one. A way to share them with the world, and to take stock of what several decades of life have taught me. How lucky I am to have the chance.
What I want to write about
What I want to write about has never really changed. I like to observe and get a feel for how we humans, who fancy ourselves the wisest of all creatures, find ways to understand the world and change it. My previous blogs simply had “Technology,” “Life,” and an extra category called “Thoughts.” These days, I have rather more subjects in mind.
There are three main reasons. First, the longer I work in management, the more I learn about how people collaborate. So many wonderful human stories unfold through the different ways we work together. I want to write them down. Second, I somehow stumbled into a language-learning company, and then somehow stumbled into learning a few more languages: French, Spanish, and Cantonese. My horizons suddenly widened. The countless threads connecting languages, and the clever little twists of wit tucked inside them, are just too much fun. I cannot help wanting to record them. Third, AI is having an enormous impact on human society. Oddly enough, working with AI helps me see our own patterns of thought more clearly. I have enough thoughts on that alone to give it a category of its own. “Technology” cannot quite hold it all.
So I settled on six categories: Technology, Management, AI, Cognition, Language, and Culture. Some may come and go. We shall see.
In several languages
As I mentioned, over the past two years I have been teaching myself French, Spanish, and Cantonese, alongside English. My French hovers around B1, though it is still decidedly half-baked: I can read, but listening, speaking, and writing are another story. I am just getting started with Spanish and Cantonese. I would not even claim A1.
Partly for the pleasure of it, and partly to nudge myself into getting more comfortable with these languages, I will present this blog in Chinese, English, French, and Spanish. For Cantonese, I will stick to standard written Chinese, so there will not be a separate version. The Chinese will be entirely my own work; I promise not to have AI ghostwrite it. The English, French, and Spanish versions will be AI translations. I will check the English and French myself, but I am afraid I cannot do much for the Spanish yet. If you spot anything that sounds too much like AI, or simply does not sound natural, please get in touch. I would hate to miss a chance to learn. Hopefully, my Spanish will get to the same level one day.
There is a lovely French word, “démarrer.” It originally meant casting off the mooring lines before heading out to sea, then came to mean starting a machine, getting equipment running, and even beginning a project. In the Chinese word “启航” (setting sail), the character “启” depicts a hand pushing open a door, with the broader sense of opening up new possibilities. English, too, has expressions like “set sail on this project.” So, enough talk. Let us set sail!
PS: The old blogs
After ten years, I feel that the depth of my thinking is quite different from what it used to be. I really cannot bring myself to put those old scribblings on display again, so I have cleared out the previous posts. To everyone who so generously linked to this blog back then, all I can say is sorry. I hope you will keep supporting this little patch of mine.