(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

On Monday morning while commuting on the train, I took out my e-reader and continued reading Hofstadter’s “I Am a Strange Loop” (setting a flag here - I should write a review later). In Chapter 18, the author uses the relationship between regions and ethnicities as an analogy for each person’s body and mind. He mentioned that Poland’s territory has been partitioned multiple times throughout history¹, but the Polish people still exist. The first line of the Polish national anthem is “As long as we live, Poland will not perish!”

(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

(It’s been a long time since I’ve dealt with academic materials. This article attempts to revisit the academic paper format.)

Abstract

Google’s latest experimental AI product can generate discussion audio from academic papers. The author used their own paper as input to try the product and found that the generated audio provides a fairly accurate summary of the paper. While the product currently has some limitations, it shows promise for the future.

(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

Continuing from the previous post, my son had spring break in early April, so I booked a trip to Philadelphia well in advance. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate - it rained heavily for several days straight, and both the Wild Safari and Diggerland that we planned to visit were temporarily closed. (The business owners who were hoping to make a fortune during spring break must have been even more heartbroken! Could they buy insurance to hedge against such risks?) Fortunately, several backup attractions that became our main destinations turned out to be surprisingly amazing and worth documenting.

(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude. This article talks about translation from English to Chinese, therefore this English version might not make a lot of sense comparing to the original Chinese version.)

A while ago, I happened to stumble upon Yi Zhongtian’s “Philadelphia Storm” that I had previously bookmarked, which recounts the process of the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. Since I was planning to visit Philadelphia, I decided to read up and learn about it to enhance my upcoming sightseeing experience (though I later failed to secure tickets to Independence Hall, which is another sad story).

(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

In the second half of last year, I visited several nearby ruins. I had planned to write about these trips, but due to my chronic procrastination, I kept putting it off until I almost gave up. Recently, I discovered a treasure of a content creator, An Zhengming. An article on Zhihu describes her as belonging to the “ruins painting school.” She wrote Non-Mainstream Art History, which includes several sections specifically about ruins. So, I thought I’d strike while the iron is hot and finally write about my visits to these ruins. Although the stories behind these ruins may not compare to those of ancient Greece or Rome, they have their own unique charm.

On 8/25/2022, Heroku announced that they are shutting down their free tier products, which include the free tier dyno that Bara runs on. As a result, http://bara.davidfeng.us/#/ starts returning 503 from 11/28/2022.

I built Bara, a Yelp-clone full stack site, as my final project from App Academy in 2017. It probably helped me get my first software engineer job at Oracle. I would like to thank Heroku/Salesforce for letting me using their free tier product for more than 5 years (2017-2022). I know this day would come eventually but when it actually came, I still felt sad.