Peter Cai

This is probably more rambling than opinion, but seriously, can automatic email spam filters stop pretending to be clever and just stop rejecting emails? By that, I do not mean disabling spam filters entirely. What I mean is to remove one of their most extreme anti-spam measures: rejecting the email outright. Instead, I think the only acceptable strategies are: either placing them in the Junk folder, or saving them in some sort of quarantine area1. I of course am aware the prevalence of email ...

I have switched to pass, the password manager that conforms to the Unix philosophy, since a few months ago. It stores passwords as a bunch of .gpg files laid out in a file system directory, optionally being a git repository, and provides a bunch of shorthand commands for password generation and management. Compared to other fancy password managers with intricate UI / UX, pass feels very refreshing due to its simplicity and portability. You can use it basically anywhere where you have coreutil co...

When I was a kid, there was a phase where I was extremely afraid of, I kid you not, sleeping. I am not sure how common this is among children, but for me it is a somewhat embarrassing piece of memory. The reasons for my fear of sleeping are a little bit complicated, but one of the major causes is the fear of "not waking up", or sometimes, "not waking up as the same person". To me, it seemed like participating in a Russian roulette game every time I fell asleep: how would I even know whether I, t...

I used to be a cryptocurrency enthusiast, though not of the type who became billionaires by mining bitcoins on a single CPU for 30 minutes in the early 2010s. The story began in 2016, the year when I graduated from high school and finally became an undergraduate student. Naturally, I had a bit more financial freedom than I did in high school, which led me thinking about, well, "investment". Around that time, Bitcoin and blockchain in general was gaining unprecedented popularity, with a lot of mo...

I have been thinking about taking the 100 days writing challenge for a while. Not just for a little while, but for at least a few years by now. Within these few years my blog have been destroyed and restored multiple times, I graduated and I moved -- basically, everything has changed. Yet I have never really made the decision to attempt to write every single day. Not surprisingly, the main reason I have not done so is due to the big commitment I have to make in order to complete it. Writing eve...

While trying to rebuild this blog, I had to browse through an archive of my old articles and decide whether to import them to the new one. Reading articles written by myself in the past feels very strange -- I cannot say about others, but for me, thinking about my past self is one of the weirdest experiences to have. I clearly know that the person, either in my memory or in a written story, used to be me. Yet, all of the self-reflection is done as if it was in third-person. That me, or whoever i...

Hello, world again. It's been a long time since I last hosted anything on this domain. There used to be a blog here, but as I grew frustrated by a certain part of the internet, I deleted the entire blog and left everyone with a bare 404 page. Many have asked what had happened, but none of that matters anymore, to me, or to anyone else. My life has changed completely since then. I moved to a new country, had new plans, and I am basically starting a new life. As such, I figured it is probably a ...

(this post was imported from my old blog) We are not in a time short of products that claim to "encrypt" your personal data with "military standards" and thus keeping them safe from leakage or deliberate attacks. This can really work in convincing a lot of non-tech-savvy people and even some with rudimentary computer knowledge about how secure those products are -- until some leakage events happens out of nowhere and everybody gets screwed. The problem here is that things involving encryption ...

(this post was imported from my old blog) (From "The Zygon Inversion", in 9th series of Doctor Who) ... "It's not fair." "Oh it's not fair. Oh I didn't realize that -- it's not fair. You know what, my TARDIS doesn't work properly, and I don't have my personal tailor." "These things don't equate." "These things have happened. They are facts. You, just want cruelty to beget cruelty. You are not superior to people who are cruel to you. You are just a whole bunch of new cruel people. A whole b...