Not Bear Liu

I looked at screenshots of the movie “The Cow Comes.” The quality is so bad—this is even lower than the final projects my first-year students made back when I was teaching at university.

Apparently the level of quality from the cinema chains isn’t always much better; it can be close to what you see in TV shopping.

It reminded me of a line from J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye,” where the protagonist says in a monologue: “It’s so bad that even I don’t feel like I should stop watching it.”

A lone person watches the horror film “The Boogeyman” on a night filled with bleak wind and lingering rain—it’s so intense!

Saw an update on LinkedIn and I’m a bit confused. Turns out my former employer’s CEO at Vodafone has jumped ship to my even earlier employer, Lesmills. Wow—New Zealand’s market is just way too small.

Using Perplexity to do competitor research—it directly researched a tool that I’m already working on. It’s like a boomerang hitting me.

I’m especially impressed by how Western people have a certain idea about exercise: they don’t seem to have the concept of rain, snow, wind, or frost.

In normal circumstances, if it’s raining, training sessions and competitions basically won’t be canceled—unless it’s an alert-level heavy downpour, or a water sport has to be called off for safety reasons.

For example, my daughter’s Netball match this week was happening during torrential rain, and the little girls still played as usual. They were completely soaked through, for the full 40 minutes—yet they were still just primary school students.

It’s almost as if nobody really emphasizes willpower or fighting spirit; everything just happens naturally.

A new British programmer who’s been living in Thailand just for a short while finished everything that used to take a whole week in just a little over an hour.

With Claude’s help.

Two Ukrainian programmers watched, their faces going blue then white.

The workaholic has arrived!

About portfolios, a few valuable takeaways:

1. Making a portfolio is like a musician releasing a single. It’s not for fun or just to show off. By creating something, you demonstrate your creative abilities, your taste, and what you’ve been focusing on recently—turning thinking into a tangible entity. It’s a carrier, a container.

2. A common problem for many designers (including me) is the mismatch between ability and evidence. Ability refers to taste, hands-on execution, and judgment. Evidence is your portfolio. This is something worth updating, and it has a very high input-output ratio (you invest very little).

3. From a visual perspective, AI can be used as a form of compensation. What clients pay for isn’t my direct visual presentation, but my judgment. So the visual presentation, aided by AI, should be able to reach the level of passing the trust line. It shouldn’t be a deduction, but it also shouldn’t become a selling point. After all, I’m not a web designer.