When I happened upon Mr. Lu Changhai's personal website, I was deeply struck by it.
What drew me in was not the technology behind the site. By today's standards, it is in fact remarkably simple. What I admired was something else: over more than twenty years, one person had gradually accumulated his essays, opinions, reading notes, travel writing, and reflections on science and society in one place.
When there are only one or ten pieces of writing, they may seem like little more than scattered notes. But once the timescale stretches to ten or twenty years, they begin to take on a very different meaning. The website is no longer merely a website; it becomes something like a record of how a person's thoughts have changed across different stages of life.
That made me think about how often my own thoughts wander across very different subjects.
Sometimes they begin with a problem I encounter in research. Sometimes they concern mathematics, physics, or artificial intelligence. At other times, I suddenly find myself thinking about education, consciousness, death, technological change, or questions that are difficult to place neatly within any single category. Many of these thoughts begin as nothing more than a conversation, a short note, or a judgment that happens to take shape on an ordinary day.
If I do not record them, they are very easy to lose.
Even when they are saved somewhere—in chat histories, note-taking apps, or different folders—it becomes difficult, years later, to see them as parts of a coherent whole.
That is why I decided to build this website.
I do not want it to become a blog that exists simply for the sake of being updated, nor do I want it to be an extension of my résumé. More precisely, I hope it can gradually become a private study that remains with me over the long term: a place for relatively serious writing on science and technology, but also for ideas that are still unfinished; for long arguments, but also for brief notes that may contain only a single thought.
Some of the views recorded here may eventually be overturned by my future self. Some essays may be substantially revised years after they are first written. I do not see that as a defect. On the contrary, if this website really does remain for many years, then changes in my thinking should themselves become part of what it records.
Today, this place is still almost empty.
And perhaps that makes this exactly the right moment for a first essay.
If many years from now this site has accumulated a large body of writing, I hope I will still be able to come back to this page and remember how it began: one day, I happened upon the personal website of someone who had continued writing on the internet for more than two decades, and suddenly thought—
Perhaps I could begin doing the same.