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Summary I downloaded it because they were running a promotion with my club. It’s fun. I think I’m hooked. Thanks to it, my desk has never been cleaner. It’s nice to see so much of campus and so many familiar faces. I want to go back. All that traffic concentrated into two minutes a day... a developer’s nightmare. But I want to build something like this, too. The photo is my first BeReal posted on time. Ingenious This is a case study in the enormous power of a single idea. You don’t have to look beyond a red ocean to create a blue ocean; you can make one by expanding its boundaries. I learned that in the first session of an entrepreneurship course I took last year, but it’s hardly easy to do—especially in social media, where an established user base is practically the whole service. Yet by offering an unusual way to share unpolished everyday moments, BeReal. has carved out a space among giants like Instagram. It now has 50 million monthly active users and has raised over $100 million in funding without generating any revenue. 503 Service Unavailable The concept is simple, but implementing it elegantly may be harder than it looks. Traffic surges at a set time each day. It’s as if the whole world were trying to register for classes together, every single day. How BeReal. handles that flood of traffic is something I’d like to study further, but one thing is clear: it hasn’t completely solved the problem yet. Today, as I was writing this, I took a photo when the notification arrived and tapped “Send,” only for the app to crash. Another time, the app stopped working even though my notification window had already passed. Sure enough, it happened to be notification time in another region (BeReal uses four time zones to keep notifications within daylight hours). As its user base grows, this is something the developers will need to address to improve the overall experience. Or they could just count on users being willing to come back after a crash and leave it at that. Freeze Tag If BeReal. can manage its surges in traffic and its service model while growing its market share, it could become an even more interesting app. It’s fun to imagine people on the streets of Seongsu-dong or at Shibuya Scramble Crossing all stopping in their tracks at once to take selfies. I once wanted to make a film that started with my curiosity about the lives and thoughts of a passerby, a farmer glimpsed from a train window, or someone being interviewed live on TV. It would begin from one person’s point of view, then rapidly shift to the perspectives of the people they could see, and on from there. I think this app might be the closest way to bring that idea to life. * There’s a documentary that similarly captures the same moment in different people’s lives, though the perspectives aren’t connected: One Day on Earth . Thumbs Up If the idea of posting within a limited time is the cake, RealMoji is the icing. On BeReal., instead of leaving a like or an emoji, you react by taking a photo of your face. That’s called a RealMoji. You can use photos you’ve taken in advance for a handful of preset emojis, or take one on the spot. Unless you tap to enlarge it, a RealMoji appears at about the same size as a regular emoji. Thanks to our remarkable ability to recognize faces, though, it’s easy enough to make out both the expression and the person behind it. These little photos make each reaction feel much more alive. I don’t think I’m very good at using this feature myself. They say humans can make and recognize more than 3,000 expressions using 42 facial muscles, but after agonizing over what to do, I always end up giving a thumbs-up. I can see why Facebook chose it for the Like icon. ...

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Suddenly, he must have felt as though he were strolling slowly through the stillness like a shepherd. ... From time to time, after crossing hundreds of kilometers of grassland even more deserted than the sea, he would come upon an isolated farmhouse. It looked like a boat carrying human lives, swept backward through the rolling waves of grass. Then he would tilt his plane’s wings in greeting. ch.1, p.16 ︙ The radio operator thought that somewhere in the sky a thunderstorm must be lurking, like a worm inside a fruit. ch.1, p.17 ︙ Fabien felt tired as he slowed his engine on the approach to San Julián. Everything that softens human life —houses, little cafés, trees by the roadside—grew steadily larger as he drew near. ... Even in poverty, people manage to live with a generous spirit. From now on, he wanted nothing more than to live simply, gazing through a window at an unchanging view. Even a little town like this would do. For once a person has chosen a place, they learn to love it, content with the chances life brings their way. ch.1, p.18 ︙ Now, like a night watchman, he discovers the human lives the night reveals: their calls, their anxieties. That modest star glimmering in the darkness is a solitary house. When its light goes out, the house shuts itself inside its love. Or inside its worries. It ceases to communicate with the world. Those farmers seated before a lamp at the table do not know what they long for. They do not know that their longing reaches this far into the vast night. But Fabien discovers their longing when, after flying a thousand kilometers—his plane bucking as if alive in violent turbulence, crossing ten thunderstorms like battlefields and passing through the moonlight that shines between them—he approaches each of those lights with a sense of triumph. Those farmers think their lamp illuminates only a humble table. But from eighty kilometers away, it looks like a light waved desperately out to sea by someone on a deserted island, and he is moved by its call. ch.1, p.22 ︙ How agonizing was the mournful song of the mail plane, hurled like a blind arrow into the curtain of night! ch.6, p.50 ︙ In life, only stones had been gentle with him. ch.6, p.51 ︙ Perhaps all Leroux’s greatness lay in his homely appearance, which had led him to devote his life entirely to work. ch.6, p.51 ︙ For a while, he could hear the deep resonance carried by the wind and the open air in a human voice. (?) ch.9, p.74 --> ︙ This sleeping city offered him no protection. When he rose into the sky like a young god, stirring up dust, the city’s lights would seem futile. ch.10, p.78 ︙ He smiled. ‘Soon I’ll be far, far away from this city.... There is beauty in departing at night. Pull the engine lever toward the south, and in less than ten seconds the landscape changes; you’re flying north. Then the city is nothing but a deep sea.’ ch.10, p.81 ︙ He thought of the pilot. ‘I am freeing him from fear. It is not him I have attacked. Through him, I have attacked the pressure that paralyzes a person when faced with the unknown. If I listen attentively to his story, sympathize with him, and take his adventure seriously, he will come to believe he has returned from a mysterious world—and that mystery is the source of his fear. He must descend into that dark well and climb back out able to say there is nothing there. He must descend into the very heart of night, into that dense darkness, without even a miner’s little lamp to illuminate his hands or the plane’s wings. He must put a shoulder’s breadth between himself and the unknown.’ ch.11, p.87 ︙ Rivière countered. “It is a matter of life and death for us. Every night, we lose the advantage over rail and sea transport that we gained during the day.” ch.11, p.88 ︙ In any case, everything would be decided in this deep darkness. ⋯ Between him and the sun lay a night so deep he could not escape it. ch.12, p.97 ︙ Failure makes the strong stronger. Unfortunately, though, we are gambling with human lives in a game that scarcely takes account of what events truly mean. On the surface we win or lose, gaining some paltry score. And then we find ourselves bound to that superficial defeat. ch.13, p.99 ︙ “Mrs. Fabien would like to speak with you, sir.” ‘There it is! What I feared has finally happened!’ Rivière thought. The emotional side of the drama was beginning to emerge. At first, he refused to acknowledge it. Mothers and wives do not enter operating rooms. On a ship in danger, feelings must be kept in check. They do nothing to help save anyone. ch.14, p.109 ︙ An undertaking, even the building of a single bridge, destroys individual happiness. Now Rivière could not help asking himself, ‘By what right?’ ‘The crewmen who may now disappear could have lived happily....’ He seemed to see their faces, bowed in the golden sanctuaries lit by evening lamps. By what right had he drawn them out of those sanctuaries? By what right had he taken them away from their private happiness? Wasn’t protecting that happiness the first law? Yet he, too, was destroying it. Those golden sanctuaries are fated to vanish one day like mirages. For age and death destroy that happiness more ruthlessly than Rivière himself ever could. Perhaps there is something else to save, something more enduring. Was it to save that part of humanity that Rivière did this work? If not, his actions could not be justified. ch.14, p.112 ︙ An ancient leader might have felt no pity for human suffering, but he would have felt immense pity in the face of human mortality. Not pity for the death of each individual, but pity for the human race, like sand swept away by the sea. And so, perhaps, he led his people into the mountains to erect stone pillars that the desert could not bury. ch.14, p.114 ︙ He felt he could still fight, still try his luck. There was no fate imposed from outside. But there was a fate within. It came the moment a person recognized his own weakness. Then every possible mistake swept over him like vertigo. At that very moment, through a gap in the storm above his head, a few stars glittered like bait in a deadly trap. He was certain it was a trap. Th

Lately, I’ve been working on a side project alongside my startup team’s work. The frontend and backend have each come far enough that it’s time to connect them (I’ll probably write about what the project is when I release its MVP). I didn’t want to pay for EC2, and sharing the Raspberry Pi that runs gunh.ee seemed complicated, so I reinitialized and booted up the other Raspberry Pi I’d set aside because of an Ethernet cable issue in my previous post . The Ethernet interface still isn’t showing up, but speed isn’t an immediate concern, so I’ll deal with that later. Raspberry party To distinguish inbound traffic directed at our home’s single public IP address, the two servers need to use different external ports. Port numbers have conventional uses: 22 for SSH, 80 for HTTP, and 443 for HTTPS, for example. So I left those external port numbers as they are for the gunh.ee server, added 10000 to each for the side project, and configured the router to translate traffic headed for the side project to the corresponding conventional internal port numbers by subtracting 10000. The top three entries are for gunh.ee; the rest are for the side project. Every time I do something like this, I’m reminded how much taking Intro to Computer Networks has helped. Thank you, Professor Moon. ︙ I already went through the Ubuntu setup process when setting up gunh.ee, but there are still a few points that trip me up sometimes, so I’ll jot them down here. (On a Mac) The entire process of downloading an Ubuntu image, writing it to an SD card, and booting from it is described in detail here . To format the SD card, select it in Disk Utility, click ‘Erase,’ and choose ‘MS-DOS (FAT32)’. To write the downloaded image file to the SD card, use the following command. Leave the image file compressed. sudo sh -c 'gunzip -c ~/Downloads/ | sudo dd of= bs=32m' Once it has booted, enter your Wi-Fi details in /etc/netplan/50-cloud-init.yaml as described here , save the file, and reboot. /etc/network/interfaces is a file used by ifconfig , but ifconfig isn’t installed in the initial Ubuntu setup, so entering the information there won’t help.

It’s really, truly, incredibly good. First, let’s get some background music playing. I hadn’t planned on seeing it, but a friend had a spare movie ticket, so I just picked something that was showing. I can’t believe I nearly missed a masterpiece like this. It was the most fun I’ve had watching a movie in ages, and the most I’ve ever enjoyed an animated film. I can’t stand predictable stories and I don’t usually watch animation, so by all rights this shouldn’t have appealed to me much. But the direction and music more than make up for it. I got goosebumps several times: when the Shohoku players first appeared one by one as sketches, when Ryota Miyagi had his breakthrough, when there was one minute left in the game, and more. Another huge plus is that you can understand and enjoy it without knowing anything about the original manga. Last year, I went to see Dune (⊃∪∩∈) knowing nothing about the original novel and had a rough time. There was a brief explanation of its world at the beginning, but it covered only a fraction of the enormous story, and I couldn’t even take that much in. For the first time ever, I dozed off in a movie theater. This time, though, all I knew going in was that I’d heard Hanamichi Sakuragi’s name a few times. Thanks to each player’s distinctive look and personality and the way their stories unfolded, it wasn’t long before I could see a jersey number and immediately remember who that player was. Oh no, at this rate I might end up reading the entire original manga. It makes me look back on my own life and wonder whether I’ve ever had a breakthrough like Ryota Miyagi’s. I need to live more fiercely.

I had no idea it was going to be this kind of story... lol By the middle, it had taken a turn there was no coming back from. I’d never been able to get into classic literature, but I picked this up to see whether, now that I’m older, I could appreciate even a little of what makes it great. Not a bad introduction to the Classics series. Characters Monsieur Voldemar / Volodya (16) Zinaida (21) Count Malevsky Dr. Lushin Maidanov, a poet Nirmatsky, a retired officer Belovzorov, an officer

I’m writing this to celebrate successfully connecting the gunh.ee server to Ethernet today. Here’s a shocking fact about gunh.ee: the server hosting it is a Raspberry Pi behind the TV in my living room. A photo I took when I first plugged it in on December 13, 2021 With so many hosting services available, why did I take the hard route and set up a server computer myself? Well... Hosting services fall into two broad categories: shared hosting and VPS hosting. The former is the cheapest way to launch a website, and it’s what I used for my first site, which I launched in the fall of my freshman year of college. The trouble is that the low price comes with limited flexibility. It supported everything needed to run a basic website, but I couldn’t run anything else. Of course, I didn’t know much back then, so it was plenty useful to me. I had a great time experimenting with and learning from the tools it provided. By the end of my senior year, I wanted to do much more with my new server. I wanted to write and run my own web server in node.js, create APIs, and use it for things beyond the web. For that, I needed VPS hosting. With a VPS, I wouldn’t have the physical machine, but I could install and use whatever software I wanted within the space allocated to me. The company I’d used as a freshman offered VPS hosting too, but this time I decided to try AWS EC2 for its flexible resource allocation and reputation, among other things (though EC2 differs somewhat from a VPS in how it handles virtualization , they’re similar enough here). The temporary landing page I put a fair bit of work into I created an EC2 instance, connected my domain, and put up a temporary landing page. A month or two later, the instance fee came out of my bank account. I don’t remember exactly how much it was, but it wasn’t unaffordable. Still, the thought of another monthly expense bothered me, and I wanted to avoid it if I could. That’s when I remembered the Raspberry Pis lying around my house. It’s harder to bring myself to pay for something intangible They were two Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ boards I’d picked up in my department’s student room about a year earlier. The boards were in a box with some sensors and wires, and the lid said anyone who needed them could take them. They must have been left over from a major course or side project. I hadn’t brought them home with this in mind, but they seemed perfectly suitable as servers. Their performance was bound to be lousy, but each was a complete computer. And since they weren’t particularly powerful, it would be a shame to leave them sitting unused. As soon as the semester ended, I got to work setting up the server. There was far more to do than with EC2. With EC2, I could choose an operating system, set a few port rules, and connect remotely over SSH right away. With the Raspberry Pi, I had to do everything myself: format the SD card that would serve as its main storage, download an Ubuntu image and boot it, connect to the network, and set up port forwarding for SSH. The Raspberry Pi has no screen, and I didn’t have an external monitor, so I connected it to the living-room TV over HDMI and sat on the floor to work. It ended up behind the TV partly because the router was nearby and things there rarely got moved, but mostly because I had to do all the CLI work on the TV until I could connect over SSH. I spent three or four days doing almost nothing else. I obtained an SSL certificate, got HTTPS working, built the Vue.js project I’d been developing locally, and uploaded it to the server. I can’t tell you how happy I was when I finally confirmed that I could access the site on my iPhone. December 18, 2021 A screenshot I took then. The post page looks a little different now: there’s no longer a cover image or an emoji in the header. I wanted the site to feel modern but understated. When I started developing it, I thought Notion’s design was excellent, so I exported a Notion page as HTML and copied out its entire stylesheet. I made some changes where needed, but as I built the pages while largely keeping that style, I suddenly wondered: is this really understated? The emojis that often appear on Notion pages felt youthful and fresh, but they could also be distracting. On a site centered on writing, they would make the text feel less compact. So I kept refining the pages, using emojis and images only where necessary and minimizing the use of color to preserve that understated feel. While building the site, I also thought the design of the Chosun Ilbo website was good (regardless of politics). And when I visited New York late last year, I felt that the websites for MoMA and the Whitney Museum were aiming for something similar. Take a look at all three and you’ll probably get a sense of the look I’m after. Actually, the development story above was supposed to go in this site’s first and second posts . But I tried to fit everything I’d learned and felt at the time into a single post, ran out of steam halfway through, and abandoned it. Only now, after forgetting so much, can I sit down and sum up the whole process in one go. I might as well dump my notes on reference sources here, too ⋮ The point is that this site runs on a tiny Raspberry Pi behind my living-room TV. In other words, every time you visit gunh.ee, your request comes through my house before the response heads back to your device. ... Back to today. Since the server went live, I’ve used it for quite a few things besides publishing blog posts. Above all, it’s been incredibly convenient for testing web-service deployments. Deploying something under a new domain meant buying that domain, finding a hosting service, and waiting for DNS propagation—all of which took time and money. Creating a new subdomain on gunh.ee solved all of those problems. Today’s idea to connect the Raspberry Pi, which had been relying on WLAN, to Ethernet came to me while I was planning to test a new service on gunh.ee. Before testing a whole lot of request-response exchanges, I figured I should optimize the server’s connection. This wasn’t my first attempt to switch to Ethernet. I’d long felt that images in my blog posts loaded too slowly. At first I thought the Raspberry Pi’s processing speed was to blame, but the more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that image sizes and connection speed were the problem. I was u

After surviving 34 months of the chaotic COVID era, Lee finally tests positive. Actually, I’ve been sick for a while. Two or three days before I came home, near the end of my trip—about two weeks ago now—I came down with such a bad fever and body aches that I thought I was going to die. I’d walked more than 20,000 steps a day for three weeks, so it would have been stranger if my body hadn’t given out. A high fever and a throat that felt like it had been stabbed: this had to be COVID. I was paying for all that carefree wandering around without a mask. Huh? But my PCR test at Incheon Airport came back negative, and so did a rapid antigen test at my local ENT clinic. Had I dodged it again? About ten days went by. I finished the three days’ worth of medicine the clinic had prescribed, and another week later I felt more or less back to normal. So what did I do? Went climbing hard, of course. I cleared 14 blue routes and 25 green ones at The Climb (I’d expected to lose muscle from being sick, so I was pleased to do better than I thought). But I guess I overdid it. Yesterday, the next day, I took a sharp turn for the worse and my fever came back. Today my throat started hurting again, but the symptoms were still milder than they’d been around the time I came home, so I was going to wait a few more days. To be honest, I was also reluctant to return to the ENT clinic. Last time, telling the doctor I’d tested negative at Incheon Airport seemed to motivate them to push the swab much too far up my nose, and it had left me a little traumatized. But my mother, who knows full well that I have a rather high pain tolerance, insisted I go today since the clinics would all be closed tomorrow. So I ended up visiting a different place from the one I went to last week. When the person at reception asked if I wanted an antigen test, I said no, partly because of the trauma and partly because I mistakenly believed I was super-immune. But once they took my temperature, that plan was promptly rejected. And then, well, I got swabbed again and tested positive. What puzzles me is this: my symptoms two weeks ago were almost identical, and if anything they were worse then, so why did I test negative? It’s hard to believe that was just a bad cold and I came into contact with someone infected afterward. I hadn’t been feeling well, and the only proper outing I’d had was to go climbing. The line on today’s test was so dark that it looked as though I was teeming with the virus. Can it really multiply that much in just a day or two? Maybe I’d become desensitized because the pandemic has gone on so long, but my attitude had been, “If I catch it, I catch it.” Now that I have, I think the best thing is to avoid it if you can until it’s over. The muscle aches and swollen throat are painful, but those I can handle. I’m sure they’ll get better soon, and like I said, I have a pretty high pain tolerance. The problem is the decline in my cognitive function. This symptom, which seems to have appeared a little later than the others, after I got home, is something I’ve never experienced before. I can’t concentrate properly on work, and my mind feels cloudy or as though it’s floating. Even when I speak or write, it feels as though my sentences are taking some kind of detour (?) instead of passing through my usual thought process. I’d been determined from the start of this trip to write a splendid travelogue, and I dutifully noted down every impression that came to me. But I’ve barely touched the actual piece because I’m afraid that if I write it now, I’ll just produce garbage. It’s a shame, since the longer I wait, the less immediate it’ll feel. To be honest, earlier I wasn’t even sure I could write this post properly, though I seem a little better now. From what I’ve read, this is called brain fog brain fog , and it seems to be a common symptom of COVID. What’s a little scary is that it’s considered a long-term symptom. In my case, the feeling persisted even earlier this week, when I had almost no physical pain. So it’s hard to guess when my head will feel clear again. If any of you have had similar symptoms, please tell me how things went for you. I’ve been taking an entrepreneurship course at school lately, and I feel lousy because my condition has kept me from engaging with it properly. It’s a bit chilling to think what would have happened if this had been a regular semester when I was taking classes for credit. Maybe I should count myself lucky instead. As it happens, the entrepreneurship course is on break next week, so I’ll stay put, isolate, and get plenty of rest. Recommendations for all-time favorite books, films, and TV shows welcome.