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DJI's Arrogance and Its Price: The GeekCon Police Report

Chongxi — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 16:00:00 GMT

How a technology company spent nine years systematically destroying the security community's trust in it

Prologue: October 24, 2026, Shanghai

It was Programmer's Day.

In Shanghai, GEEKCON 2026 was underway — one of China's top white-hat hacking competitions. Its predecessor, GeekPwn, was founded in 2014, and its founding team DARKNAVY had already pulled off the world's first remote hack of a Tesla back in 2015. Over the past decade and more, contestants have broken into Apple devices, Teslas, Android phones and all kinds of robots. Breaking the most iconic smart devices in front of a live audience is the event's whole point.

This year's drone attack-and-defense segment was called "Runaway Drone." The judges first used GPS spoofing to force a consumer drone into a virtual no-fly zone and lock it down completely. Contestants then had to find an unknown vulnerability, seize back control and break through the flight restriction. The proposition being tested was a hard one: once low-level control is lost, do the safety mechanisms that constrain flight fail along with it?

Halfway through the event, the police arrived.

This was not part of the show. These were real police officers.

Someone had reported the event on the grounds of "illegal hacking instruction and soliciting others to crack devices." Several contestants and judges were taken away for questioning, and the schedule was suspended on the spot. According to security expert Tan Xiaosheng, the person who filed the report was "a drone manufacturer with an extremely high market share that had been cracked." Given that DJI has held more than 70% of China's consumer drone market for years, the internet immediately guessed the same company: DJI.

Wang Qi, chairman of the GEEKCON organizing committee, erupted in public: "I've been doing this for so many years, and I've never met anyone this fucking stupid!"

Tan Xiaosheng was equally blunt: "Instead of solving the problem itself, solving the person who found the problem has become the 'best practice' at plenty of companies. It's truly sad."

That evening, the organizers announced the Shanghai stop was closing. The security world erupted. But for anyone familiar with DJI's history, this was not an accident. It was another rerun.

Background

To understand how absurd this is, you first need to understand what level of event GeekCon is.

GEEKCON was founded by DARKNAVY as a global non-profit platform for security geek technology. Since 2014 it has been held in Beijing, Shanghai, Macau, Singapore, Las Vegas and elsewhere. Huawei, Tencent Security, Ant and other leading Chinese tech companies have sponsored it for years — which is itself an endorsement of the idea that finding vulnerabilities early beats patching them after they explode.

This is a public stage for top-tier security research. More importantly, GeekCon has clear responsible-disclosure rules: it never reveals vulnerability details from beginning to end, and it does not even publicly name the manufacturers of the devices that were cracked. In other words, before the police showed up, nobody had even said publicly whose drone had been cracked.

At the same 2026 event, a vivo phone was cracked. vivo was a sponsor, and its security president was in the room. Nobody called the police. DingTalk was cracked, with an Ant Group executive present as an organizing-committee member. Nobody called the police. A Unitree robot was cracked. Nobody panicked. The only company that called the police was DJI.

The previous GEEKCON 2025 also featured drone attack-and-defense: contestants never touched the bodies of the drones, yet made two hovering drones lose control and crash while hijacking two others into a straight vertical climb. Nobody in the industry thought that was a problem, because that is simply how security research works.

The Finisterre Incident

To understand why the security community's first reaction was "DJI again, of course," we need to go back to 2017.

How the Bug Bounty Started

In August 2017, the U.S. Army ordered a full halt to the use of DJI products, citing "cyber vulnerabilities." Under public pressure, DJI hastily launched a bug bounty program, offering rewards ranging from $100 to $30,000.

In the words of security researchers afterward, the program looked more like a PR move than a genuine attempt to improve security.

Four Days After Launch

Security researcher Kevin Finisterre contacted DJI. In DJI's own public GitHub repository, he found something almost too painful to believe:

DJI's wildcard SSL private key (*.dji.com), AWS account credentials and firmware AES encryption keys were all sitting in plaintext in a public code repository. And they had been sitting on GitHub for two to four years.

What did that key mean? With the SSL private key, you could impersonate DJI's official website. With the AES firmware key, you could decrypt flight-control firmware and bypass every geofence and flight restriction. With the AWS credentials, you could access user data stored on DJI's servers.

Following that key, Finisterre reached unencrypted user flight logs, passport scans, driver's licenses and government IDs — including flight logs from military and government domains. He put together a 31-page report and submitted it to DJI.

DJI confirmed the vulnerability fell within the bug bounty scope and offered the maximum reward: $30,000.

After 130 Emails

Then came a long tug of war. DJI produced an NDA for Finisterre to sign, requiring that he never publicly claim he had discovered the vulnerability. For a security researcher, public attribution is worth no less than cash. The condition was hard to accept. Finisterre consulted lawyers; four of them independently reached the same conclusion: the contract was "extremely risky" and "apparently drafted in bad faith to silence him."

After more than 130 emails, DJI's legal department sent a letter citing the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) — a U.S. federal law that can carry criminal liability.

Finisterre saw it as a threat. He gave up the $30,000 and went public with the whole story. He published an 18-page PDF titled "Why I Walked Away From DJI's $30,000 Bounty," which spread widely through the security community.

DJI's response: publicly call Finisterre a "hacker" and characterize his actions as "unauthorized access."

Another Researcher Had It Worse

In the same month the Finisterre story was unfolding, another researcher, Sean Melia, reported the Heartbleed vulnerability, SQL injection flaws and a serious defect that allowed full access to the purchase-order database. By DJI's own bounty standards, that was worth at least $16,000. DJI offered him $500.

Melia refused and told DJI: "You shouldn't be running a bug bounty program at all."

What Happened to the Employee

The DJI employee who uploaded the keys to GitHub was named Li Zhanbin. He later emailed Finisterre saying he had uploaded them by accident. In January 2018, DJI fired him. In 2019, he was sentenced to six months in prison and fined 200,000 yuan.

Look at the structure: the DJI employee who put the keys online in plaintext went to prison; Finisterre, who found and reported them, was threatened and publicly shamed; Melia, who did nothing wrong, was offered a token $500. DJI itself, the company that actually committed the serious security failure, suffered nothing.

Why the PR Was So Terrible

DJI is a company with a top-tier engineering culture, yet its public relations look as if they were entirely outsourced to amateurs. There are probably a few structural reasons.

The Chinese market never demanded good PR. DJI is essentially a monopoly at home, and consumers have no alternative. In that environment, the PR department's muscle memory is to suppress, not to communicate. When something goes wrong, seal it, threaten, call the police. That occasionally works in China, but it is a disaster in the security community, because programmers are the last people who respond well to that.
It treats silence as arrogance. Apple rarely explains itself publicly either, but Apple's product design is its best PR. DJI copied the posture and forgot the precondition: every decision has to withstand review. Claiming to care about security while reporting white-hat hackers to the police is a contradiction you cannot leave unexplained.

The core issue is that DJI has never really lost. From its founding in 2006 to today, its products have consistently been the best in the world, its market share has never been shaken, and its competitors have died one after another on the beach. A company that spends twenty years in that environment develops a dangerous belief: everything we do is right, because we always win. Every time it "suppresses" a problem, the wrong lesson is reinforced. Every narrow escape makes the next one more reckless.

At GeekCon, DJI had a perfect PR opportunity: "Our products are so good that even top hacking competitions use them as target practice." Instead it chose the approach that generated the most hostile coverage, turning a story it could have bragged about into an industry-wide joke. This is the Streisand Effect: when Barbra Streisand sued a photographer to remove an aerial photo of her home, the photo went from six views to hundreds of thousands. DJI just did it again.

Drones are not phones. There is no "good enough" budget alternative. Flight-control stability, battery life and video transmission quality degrade in ways users feel immediately, and the cost can be a crashed aircraft or an injury. The industry naturally concentrates around the strongest technical player; there is no room for low-end substitutes. DJI's competitors — Yuneec, Zero Zero, Parrot — are either dead or barely breathing.

In a market with one dominant player, DJI knows its user base very well: people who care about security were never going to buy from it, and people who buy from it do not care about security. So from a business-logic standpoint, calling the police may even have seemed rational.

This is the price of dominance, the price of no competition: it protected DJI, and it also removed the pressure that would have forced DJI to become better.

The Deepest Consequence

The deepest consequence of the GeekCon incident is a broken chain of trust.

When a white-hat hacker reports a vulnerability to a vendor, it is essentially a gentleman's agreement: I help you find the problem, you fix it and give me credit or a reward, and everyone is happy. DJI has now publicly declared: play this game with us and we will put you in jail.

From now on, a researcher who finds a DJI vulnerability has only three options: throw it away, publish it, or sell it. Reporting it to DJI has disappeared from the table.

An RCE vulnerability that can remotely control a drone is worth a great deal on the exploit market. Researchers used to wrestle with "I'd feel bad selling this." DJI has now solved that psychological burden for them: if I can be arrested for entering a legal competition, why do I owe you any moral restraint?

DJI's global installed base is astronomical. At a large drone light show, hundreds of machines hang in the air at once. If there is an undisclosed RCE vulnerability, an attacker needs no gun and no artillery — just a laptop to create a major news event. The targets are dense, the crowds are gathered, and the livestream footage is crystal clear. The GeekCon challenge was literally called "Runaway Drone." DJI's police report stopped the demonstration, but it did not stop the vulnerability from existing.

The end result: the vulnerability still exists, except it has moved from the stage to the dark-web price list, and the patch timeline has gone from "a week" to "never." Every DJI drone a customer buys is, because of that police report, actually less secure.

The Only Lesson Humans Learn From History Is That They Learn Nothing

While the GeekCon story was spreading, someone on Zhihu brought up a story from eleven years earlier.

Around 2015, a security researcher disclosed a vulnerability in the dating site Jiayuan on WooYun, then China's largest vulnerability disclosure platform. WooYun notified Jiayuan according to responsible-disclosure procedure, and Jiayuan fixed the flaw. Then Jiayuan turned around and called the police, sending the researcher to a detention center.

That incident shook the Chinese security community at the time, and WooYun eventually shut down in 2016. In 2026, the same script played out on a much bigger stage.

Someone on Zhihu wrote: "That was eleven years ago. I never thought I'd still be seeing this in 2026."

The difference is that this time it was China's most famous hacking competition, and the organizers had enough credibility and reach to fight back, which multiplied the impact. But the structure is identical: a researcher helps you find a vulnerability, and you use the law to attack the researcher.

Vicious Cycle and Slow Death

Put all these events together and a very clear structure emerges:

Winning too easily → no need for reflection → arrogance → suppress problems with power → get away with it → even less need for reflection

Every successful suppression reinforces the wrong lesson. The decision-making system itself is broken, and there is no correction mechanism. A normal company has three correction paths: pressure from competitors (none), users voting with their feet (there is no alternative in drones), and internal dissent (with a personality like Frank Wang's, probably nobody inside dares to speak up). All three are blocked.

DJI will die, but it may die later than anyone expects. Historically, the only things that break this kind of cycle are a disruptive technology that evaporates the moat, or regulators stepping in directly. The former shows no sign of appearing; the latter is being prepared in various countries but is moving slowly.

The most likely path is a combination: an RCE vulnerability is actually exploited, a high-profile security incident occurs, and regulators intervene; overseas markets legislate it out of existence; security talent refuses to work at DJI, and the technical moat starts eroding from within. Any one of these alone is not fatal, but all three together, and suddenly it is gone.

Nokia took ten years. Kodak took twenty. DJI's moat is deeper and its inertia stronger, but once the direction is wrong, depth only makes the sinking more complete.

A vulnerability does not disappear because a demonstration is stopped. It only moves from the stage underground. And the people who pay at the end of the chain are precisely the ordinary customers who spent real money on a drone.

Conclusion

The line worth rereading most from this whole affair is Tan Xiaosheng's: "Instead of solving the problem itself, solving the person who found the problem has become the 'best practice' at plenty of companies. It's truly sad."

DJI's vulnerability is there. Whether or not the GeekCon demo was interrupted, the vulnerability is there. White-hat hackers can choose not to research your products. Criminal groups will not spare your products just because nobody researches them.

In 2017, Finisterre found SSL keys sitting on GitHub, brought the evidence to DJI, was threatened, gave up $30,000 and wrote an 18-page report telling the whole story. Nine years later, security researchers demonstrated a flight-control vulnerability at a legal event and were taken away by police for questioning.

The essence of both events is exactly the same: a technical problem treated as a PR problem, and a PR problem treated as a legal problem.

Every time DJI responds to a technical problem with power instead of technology, it pushes its own customers toward greater risk. This is not exaggeration. It is logic.

And right now, millions of DJI drones are flying in the sky, above people's heads, over farmland, film sets and firefighting scenes, in neat formations above cities. Their safety depends on DJI being willing to take security seriously.

And DJI has given up on security first.

How I Write, and What I Think About AI Writing

Chongxi — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Lately quite a few friends have asked me about blogging, and the thing that gives them the most trouble is how to actually write a post. This is something I can speak about with some authority.

First, don't let the aura of it intimidate you. Just write an ordinary article. You don't need to worry about who will read it. (Tutorials with a clear audience are the exception.) My blog has four categories, but really there are only three kinds of posts: diaries, technical posts and essays.

Diaries are the fun little things from daily life, written down. There isn't much to say about them; they're notes for myself.

Technical posts come in tutorial form and explainer form. The first purpose of writing one is for myself — to organize my thoughts. But I figure publishing it online might help someone else too, so it goes on the blog. I also write up obscure flashing processes, mostly as notes to myself.

Essays deserve a longer explanation.

When I have a thought during the day, I jot it down in Notes, then on the weekend I go through those scattered notes. The ones that can become a full piece go on the blog; the ones that can't keep accumulating. The purpose is still for myself: ten or twenty years from now, when my experiences and thinking have changed completely, I can look back at what I thought when I was young and maybe sigh about something.

As for AI, I'm not opposed to it. I occasionally use AI to help me organize a piece or fix places where the wording doesn't match what I mean. I'm good at talking, not at writing systematic articles. I think that's a pretty distinctive personal trait, and honestly it's kind of interesting.

But I also have to think about the reader, so I'll have AI fine-tune the structure and paragraph breaks to make it easier to read. Nobody wants to stare at a giant wall of text with bizarre sentence breaks that makes them feel suffocated.

At the very least, though, you should not let AI invent an entire article for you. Letting AI polish your content without changing its meaning is editing. Letting AI conjure a castle in the air out of nothing is fabrication.

The Design Philosophy Behind My Blog

Chongxi — Sat, 24 Oct 2026 16:00:00 GMT

I never planned to write this post.

The design is settled, the blog has been running for a while, and saying anything about it feels redundant.

But then someone asked me how I came up with it, and I found I couldn't explain. It wasn't something I sat down and invented one day. It grew bit by bit. Every step had a reason, but at the time I couldn't have told you what that reason was. I only felt "yes" or "no."

So I'll try to write it down, tracing those "yes" moments backward and seeing how far I can follow them.

The starting point was the Lone Trail event in Arknights.

But I can't point to a specific image that made me stop, because it wasn't an image, and it wasn't a character design. It was an atmosphere, something that filled the whole space once you entered the event. After thinking about it, the closest description I can find is: the feeling you get watching documentaries about the Apollo moon landings.

That comparison probably sounds grand, but I don't mean grand narrative. The Apollo documentaries show you very concrete, very technical things. What they give you isn't "wow, this technology is impressive," but something deeper — a strong sense of the future. A person standing at some threshold, about to go somewhere no one has ever been. The feeling isn't clear. You can't explain its logic or its texture, but it's real.

That's what Lone Trail gave me.

Then I started paying attention to its UI design. The information density was controlled very precisely. It wasn't imitating some sci-fi aesthetic; it was using a highly restrained visual language to tell a story about space and humanity's future — and that feeling came back.

I started tracing backward to find where this feeling came from.

The first stop was NASA.

Specifically, the design language of the NASA worm-logo era, roughly the 1970s to the early 1990s. NASA had a remarkably complete visual identity system in those years: strict rules for type, color and layout, with internal documents following a fixed typographic language. You can still find huge numbers of scanned documents from that era on Archive.org or NASA's technical report servers. They were never designed to be "pretty" — they were made for engineers and scientists, and the requirement was accurate, efficient communication.

But when you open those files, you get a strange feeling.

Their beauty doesn't come from decoration. It comes from absolute functional honesty. Every element does the job it is supposed to do; nothing is superfluous. The numbering system exists for citation, the grid exists for alignment, the monospaced type exists because of the printing technology of the time, and the generous white space exists to rest the eyes and leave room for annotations. Not one of those decisions was made for aesthetic reasons, yet the result has a restrained, calm, almost cold beauty.

There's one more thing: those documents were printed. Paper — beige or slightly yellowed paper, not a glowing screen. That texture, that weight, that feeling of writing notes on them (even though we can only see scans now) — the fact that "this is paper" seeps into the visual language and makes it fundamentally different from anything digitally native. It has weight. It is not a sheet of glass.

That directly influenced the background color of my blog's article pages. I don't use white; I use beige. Not for eye comfort or retro nostalgia, but because that color feels like paper. When you read on it, it feels like reading a document rather than staring at a glowing piece of glass.

Going further back, I arrived at Swiss International Style, also known as the International Typographic Style.

This was a graphic design system developed in Switzerland in the 1950s and 60s. Its core is the grid system, sans-serif type (most famously Helvetica), clear hierarchy of information, and a fundamental attitude: the purpose of design is to let the content be seen, not to let the design itself be seen.

Less is more comes from here. But the word "less" is easily misread as "simple" or "lazy." Swiss International Style doesn't mean that. It means something closer to "nothing superfluous." Every element must be able to answer one question: why are you here? If it can't answer, it shouldn't exist.

There is something almost cruel in how cool this logic is. It does not accept "this looks better if I add it" or "this makes the page look less empty." Those are not reasons. But that strictness also brings a particular kind of freedom: once you remove everything unnecessary, every remaining element carries weight and deserves attention.

From Swiss International Style to NASA's document aesthetic to Lone Trail's UI, I see the same logic evolving across different eras and different media. All of them trade restraint for clarity, subtraction for trust.

I'm not a graphic designer, and I'm not doing academic research. I was just tracing the source of a feeling, and when I got somewhere and felt it was enough, I started building. Then I ran pnpm dev, watched the page come alive, and thought: yes, this is the feeling. I really can't explain it, but that's exactly how it is.

Where "less is more" actually lands

I once wrote:

People who fill their blogs with gaudy effects and flying pop-ups have no respect for the word "content." Anyone who sacrifices the reader's reading experience just to play with digital building blocks — if even the basic need to read an article comfortably is compromised by a garbage underlying architecture — does not deserve to call themselves a blogger.

That wasn't just an outburst.

I think about where a reader's attention is when they open one of my posts. If it gets grabbed by a scrolling marquee banner, interrupted by a pop-up ad, or dragged away by some flashy irrelevant widget at the bottom, then I have already failed as an independent blogger — not because the writing is bad, but because I didn't give the reader an environment where they can concentrate on reading.

The article page design starts from exactly that. Only the article. Nothing else is needed. Beige background, large enough type, generous line spacing, breathing room between paragraphs. No floating share buttons, no reading progress bar, nothing that jumps out while you're reading. At the end there is author information, a copyright notice and related posts. But all of that appears after you finish reading. While you are still reading, I don't want to interrupt you.

This logic also shapes the overall decorative density of the blog. You'll see a lot of "technical document" language: CEPATO TECHNICAL NOTE, // END OF REPORT. Some people ask whether there's a fictional worldbuilding behind it. My answer is blunt: no, it's pure decoration. But the decoration itself is restrained. It sits in the corners of the page as a marker of visual hierarchy, never dominating. If you notice it, it's fun. If you don't, it doesn't affect your reading. That is where decoration belongs.

All of this grew naturally out of the same person, and I don't see any contradiction. The blog contains philosophical reflection, technical notes, diaries and personal thoughts. The shell is a cold, hard technical-document design; inside is very ordinary writing by a very ordinary person. Is that a problem? People are like that. I am like that. All of it comes from the same core.

Why a blog and not Weibo

I thought about this question for a long time. I've said before:

Time punishes everyone who doesn't pay attention to recording things.

Today I want to add the second half:

Keeping your records somewhere unsafe is a lack of respect for yourself.

The first sentence is about the necessity of recording. The things you think don't matter now will become the things you want to find in five years and can't. Not every record is meaningful, but everything meaningful deserves to be recorded. Time will not preserve those precious moments for you. It will erase them.

The second sentence is about where you keep them. If all your writing lives on Weibo, WeChat public accounts, Zhihu or Xiaohongshu, those platforms can disappear at any moment, ban your account at any moment, turn what you wrote into a 404 at any moment. Your words are not yours. You are only storing them temporarily on someone else's server. One day the platform shuts down, or the algorithm changes, or your account gets banned over some sensitive post, and you may lose everything you ever wrote.

This is not alarmism. It has already happened. It has happened to me in the past, and it will keep happening.

So I need a place of my own. An independent domain, my own website, full ownership of the data. What I write lives in my repo. I can export it, migrate it and decide its fate at any time. This is digital autonomy. It's not a technical flex; it's basic respect for my own writing.

The Essays page is an extension of the same logic. The things that aren't worth a full article — a one-line thought, a screenshot, a small event — still deserve to be kept, but they don't deserve to be fed to an algorithm on Weibo. Put them on my own blog, ordered by time, purely as a record. No traffic pressure, no expectation of shares, just so these things exist somewhere.

Coffee · Code · Night

My blog has three core keywords: Coffee, Code, Night.

I often write late at night. It's quiet then, and my mind is clear — good for turning what I want to say into words. Many of my posts were written late at night, listening to lo-fi and drinking coffee.

I want readers to feel the same thing when they open this blog: some idle moment, make a cup of coffee, sit down, relax, and slowly read one article. That's the best scene I can offer a reader, and it's also my own favorite reading state.

The whole design serves that scene. Beige background, loose layout, no interruptions. It wants you to slow down here — not skim, not jump around, but actually sit down, relax and finish an article.

Under today's short-video and algorithm bombardment, that is genuinely hard to achieve.

Finally: you know whose place this is

My name is buried in every page of the blog. Not a giant logo, not a reminder every three paragraphs that "this is Chongxi's blog." I just appear quietly in the author card, the about page, the distribution notice, the end of every article. After you finish a post, you won't remember being told who wrote it, but you'll know.

In business terms this would be called brand building, but I don't think that far. I just feel that if you've had a good reading experience here, I'd like you to remember who this place belongs to. I don't care about traffic (I run an independent blog, after all), and I'm not trying to monetize. It's just a simple wish to be remembered.

This blog will never be finished. I use it, notice something feels wrong, change it, feel that it's right again, and keep using it. It will always be like this — something that grows naturally out of me, changing along with me.

I Bought Fake AirPods 4: A Buyer's Remorse and Refund Story

Chongxi — Thu, 08 Oct 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Before I even placed the order, I was already prepared to receive fake AirPods. But I placed it anyway. I really am fascinated by Huaqiangbei knockoffs.

At 8:48 p.m. on October 5, 2026, I ordered a pair of "personal, idle" AirPods 4 ANC on Xianyu. The seller claimed to have the purchase receipt and said the warranty ran until June 2027. Anyone who spends time in second-hand marketplaces has probably already guessed from the title that it was fake. I guessed it was probably fake too, and only ordered because I was confident I could get my money back. Right after I paid, the seller said they'd ship it the next day.

At 11:30 the next morning, the seller marked it as shipped on the platform. Looked normal. Then it stopped looking normal. By noon on the third day it was still "awaiting pickup," so I asked the seller, who said they'd check. Then they ignored me until 5 p.m. So I filed for a refund, citing abnormal logistics. That got the seller's attention. A little while later, the package was quietly picked up.

On the morning of October 9, I picked up the package. From the outside, the box looked fine (did it?). I opened it, took out the AirPods 4 and flipped the lid — and it made a sound exactly like a bicycle bell. I completely lost it. What genuine AirPods sound like that? This was 101.0000% fake. But it actually paired with an iPhone. The software features were mostly there, down to the pop-up. I have to hand it to Huaqiangbei's current counterfeit skills.

Software-wise, the imitation was surprisingly convincing. Of course, ANC and the like were basically useless — on and off made no difference — and the overall experience was terrible. It disconnected constantly. It was almost unusable. I was genuinely afraid that wearing this thing might one day make it explode in my ear.

As for the very convincing version number, you can expose it by checking Apple's official site. The AirPods 4 version number is not 5E135 at all. Working backward, it's probably a 2023 version. Look up the latest version on Apple's site and you'll see: this thing couldn't be more fake.

Also, the AirPods 4 has an H2 chip. Genuine ones show an equalizer on iOS 27. This knockoff doesn't.

To put it bluntly, these Huaqiangbei earbuds exist to look cool and to make a pop-up appear on your phone. Most of the functions are crippled and it simply cannot be used normally. Do not buy this thing just to "have something to listen with." It isn't worth it. It can't even manage that.

I'd had my fun and satisfied my curiosity, so now it was time to return it. I filed a second return request, this time for counterfeit goods. The seller rejected it, as expected. So I filed again and asked customer service to step in. While I was at it, let me show you how bad the forgery was: the seller solemnly provided a purchase receipt, which was of course also fake. See the photo.

I spotted three problems the moment I opened the image:

The store simply does not exist: "Nanjing Apple Store retail store Pukou Jinxiang City Apple Authorized Store, No. 6 Jiangshan Road." There is no such thing.

Store names like that immediately look wrong. And you can check Apple Stores on the official website — Nanjing has no such store, and it isn't on any map.

The part number ends in the China-model suffix.

That made me check the box. Wait a minute — why does your box show a U.S.-model part number? Busted.

Typos.

Look closely at the "issuer" line. Good grief, Taauer? Isn't that supposed to be "Issuer"? I seriously doubt these people ever went to school. How do you get that wrong? And the URL at the bottom of the receipt is even funnier: http:/www.apple.com. My God, a single slash after http. They even misspelled "detail" and "html" — it should be detail.html, but they wrote ret ail.htal. I couldn't stop laughing.

Also, some basic common sense: the first six digits of a bank card number are the BIN and aren't especially sensitive. Normally a masked card number looks like 626799xxxx8821, not 626799**6XXXXX16**8821. How do these people lack even the most basic life knowledge? Their forgery skills are worrying.

And most importantly: checking the serial number is useless now. Scammers copy the serial number from a genuine unit. Of course it checks out — it is the genuine serial number. A serial number check does not prove the product is real. And please don't blindly buy from Huaqiangbei. Apple has no obligation to issue you an authenticity report, so you won't get anything in writing.

After I handed all this forged evidence to Xianyu customer service, the seller agreed to the return within minutes. But then something very strange and very funny happened:

So what if it can be looked up? Does a serial number prove that this is the original owner of that serial number? In any case, the seller covers the return shipping in this situation. As consumers, when we buy counterfeit goods we should defend our rights. Never compromise with sellers like this. That evening I dropped the package off at my local pickup station. I had to pay the shipping upfront; after the item is returned, the platform will ask the seller to reimburse me, and if the seller refuses, the platform will cover it.

A Deep Dive Into the Huawei vs. Xiaomi Fan Wars

Chongxi — Sat, 26 Sep 2026 16:00:00 GMT

There are two groups in China's tech scene that have been insulting each other for nearly a decade, with no sign of stopping. One is the Mi Fans; the other is the Huawei faithful — the true-believer user bases of Xiaomi and Huawei respectively. The war between them is one of the longest-running, most intense and most absurd cultural phenomena in the history of Chinese consumer electronics.

What makes it absurd?

The thing they are arguing about is never the actual issue.

Mi Fans say Huawei is an IQ tax — overpriced with terrible value. Huawei fans say Xiaomi is an assembly plant with no core technology, all "self-developed" in name only. Each side repeats its own version. Arguments get swapped out round after round, details get fought over one after another. But if you step back and look at the whole war, you'll see that every spec comparison, every benchmark screenshot, every "objective review" is a footnote to the same sentence:

The phone I bought is better than yours.

Conclusion first, reasons afterward. The reasons can change forever; the conclusion never does. The other side's strengths are "marketing," your own side's flaws don't exist, and any objective review can be read as hating. This isn't a discussion about phones. It's an identity war over "who is more correct," and phones are simply the battlefield chosen for it.

To understand the Chinese Android custom-ROM community, you first have to understand a phenomenon I call flashing PTSD.

In this circle there is an almost reflex judgment: a phone that can't unlock its bootloader is basically a brick. Outsiders find this baffling. Pixel, Samsung and iPhone users find it completely incomprehensible. But the way it formed is actually traceable, and I'd even say quite reasonable.

Starting with MIUI 12, every major version update often made the actual experience worse: the system got slower, ads ran rampant, battery drain increased. Users reported problems; the official response was either silence or a fix patch that broke something else. In that loop, flashing a ROM slowly turned from a geek hobby into a survival tactic. If you couldn't stand it, you flashed a clean third-party ROM yourself, just so the phone remained usable.

Over time, that logic got internalized. Flashing was no longer an option for people who "like tinkering"; it became a precondition for "whether the phone works at all." So phones that don't support unlocking really are, in these people's eyes, dead — because that cuts off the only route to self-rescue.

In the past, Android flashing existed because the software was crude and users needed to add features. The problem is that today, that self-rescue route should never have been necessary in the first place.

Samsung, Pixel and Nothing users probably don't flash and are doing just fine. iPhone users never flash and don't feel like they're using bricks. Which shows that "must be able to flash" is essentially a patch demand created by poor manufacturer software quality, not something a smartphone objectively ought to have.

Root follows the same logic, and it makes the point even better.

Normally, users get root to extend functionality — an active, offensive move. But in the context of Chinese Android, a huge number of users root in order to remove things: uninstalling bloatware that can't be deleted, blocking ads inside system apps, turning off the manufacturer's cloud control. This is passive, defensive behavior. In essence, users are fighting the manufacturer in reverse, taking back the phone that should have been theirs.

Cloud control is especially nasty. The hardware is yours. You paid thousands for it. But the manufacturer keeps a remote control that can throttle it at any time: full performance during benchmarks, quietly limited in daily use. You've essentially bought rented hardware whose performance can be adjusted by the manufacturer's servers at any moment. That's more thuggish than Apple's old battery scandal, because at least Apple offered a barely plausible excuse. Chinese manufacturers don't even bother.

So users who can root gain a kind of "leverage against capital" and become technical players. Users who can't root, or don't know how, just pinch their noses and endure it, resentment building. The two experiences combine to produce a group of people who treat "bootloader unlock" as the moral standard for a phone, placing it above system smoothness, privacy, software ecosystem and actual user experience. Every other metric becomes secondary.

The most ironic part: Mi Fans treat "supports flashing" as one of Xiaomi's great advantages, promote it loudly and take pride in it. But the premise of that advantage is an admission that the official system is so bad users need to rescue themselves. It's packaging shame as a medal — packaging a debt owed by the manufacturer as a privilege granted to users. This is what I mean by manufacturer defects being transferred onto consumers. It should never have existed.

This is a variant of Stockholm syndrome: after being tormented long enough, people stop demanding a manufacturer that doesn't torment them. Instead they internalize the ability to fight the torment as identity, and then look down on people who "have never been tormented."

Why don't Samsung and Pixel users have this PTSD? Because their phone software doesn't treat users as an opponent. The system doesn't require users to rescue themselves.

In arguments about phone brands and operating systems, the Android camp has a classic accusation aimed at iOS users: you've all been domesticated by Apple, living in Apple's cage, unfree and yet convinced you're free.

That criticism isn't unreasonable. iOS really is a closed system with objective limitations.

But the people saying it forget to look in the mirror.

iOS users adapt to not having certain features. That's out in the open: the system is designed that way and everyone knows it. But what do Chinese Android users adapt to? Features being tampered with. On the surface it's an open system; in reality their freedom was quietly taken away by the manufacturer. One is a transparent cage; the other is a cage with windows painted on it, convincing you that you can see outside when it's actually a sticker.

The Chinese Android user's adaptation checklist is long: adapting to boot ads, lock-screen ads, preinstalled apps that can't be uninstalled, mysterious background battery drain, the system randomly slowing down after a while, the emergency protocol of "if something breaks, flash it," and the industry convention that "cloud control is normal."

Then they turn to iOS users and say: you poor things, domesticated by Apple.

Honestly, there is no such thing as adapting or not adapting. Everyone is adapting. Everyone lives under some set of rules. The only differences are three: who made the rules, whether the rules suit you, and whether you're aware that the rules exist.

Being aware is called a rational choice. Being unaware is called "it works great for me." Both are adaptation. Only the self-perception differs.

Back then, wrong beliefs had a natural correction mechanism.

You lived in a village. Your information circle was that big, your social circle was those few dozen people. If you said something absurd or expressed an unrealistic view, someone would immediately push back and correct you. Strange minority opinions had a hard time surviving long in that physical community, because they constantly encountered feedback from the majority.

The internet destroyed that mechanism completely.

Before, you were the only weirdo in the village: isolated, under pressure, either persuaded or forced to move. Now you can find ten thousand identical weirdos online. Ten thousand weirdos together look like the mainstream from the inside — like consensus, like truth — while "the people outside" become the minority, the misfits, the haters. The correction mechanism disappears: you only encounter information that agrees with you, only talk to people who agree with you, and all feedback reinforces what you already believed.

Worse, algorithms actively complete this process for you. Click one piece of content you agree with, and the platform feeds you ten more like it, usually more extreme. You didn't walk into the echo chamber; the echo chamber wrapped itself around you. The geocentric model used to need people to spread it by hand. Now the geocentric model has algorithms distributing it, platforms operating communities for it, and traffic finding every potential believer.

This produces a phenomenon I call the idiot resonance body: a group of people holding similar wrong beliefs gathers together. Instead of being corrected, they reinforce one another, becoming more extreme and more certain, forming a self-sealing information bubble. Inside, people feel increasingly clear-headed. Outside, they look increasingly ridiculous. Both sides think the other is full of idiots.

There's another effect in groups: the lowest intellectual level spreads upward, while the highest does not. Emotion travels faster than logic, agreement is more comfortable than doubt, and following the crowd is easier than thinking independently. One idiot entering a rational group doesn't get corrected; instead, they drag everyone else down. There's plenty of social psychology research supporting this.

So never pick a side. Picking a side means outsourcing your judgment to a collective, and that collective's floor determines the ceiling of your thinking.

Now we can finally talk about the flame war properly. All the spec comparisons, all the quoted reviews — peel them back and there is only one layer:

I am superior to you.

What you actually know is secondary. Knowing how to flash makes you superior to someone who doesn't. Knowing root makes you superior to someone who doesn't. Using a Pixel makes you superior to using a Chinese phone. Using an iPhone makes you superior to using Android. Using Android makes you "freer" than iOS. Every circle has its own chain of contempt. The contents differ; the psychological structure is identical.

What makes this sense of superiority frightening is how cheap it is. You don't need to actually live better than others, achieve anything, or sacrifice anything. You only need to have bought the right phone, or learned an operation someone else doesn't know, and you can enjoy the pleasure of looking down on others online. Tiny investment, enormous psychological return. An absurdly good deal.

So the flame war will never end, because it was never about solving a problem or convincing the other side. It satisfies a need far deeper than "discussing technology": proving that I am superior to you. And that need can never be fed enough. Feed it once, and it wants the next time. Every new flame war is a sequel to the last, because superiority expires and has to be renewed.

How expensive is it to admit "I chose wrong"? I've written about this many times before, but let's review.

First, you have to negate the original choice itself and admit the money was not well spent. Then you have to negate all the time and energy spent defending that choice: the posts you wrote, the arguments you fought, the data you cited, the reasons you gave your friends. Finally, you have to bow your head in front of all of it — often in front of the very people who once mocked you.

Those three together are more weight than most people can bear.

Economics calls it sunk cost. Psychology calls it cognitive dissonance. But to put it bluntly, it's four words: saving face.

When reality conflicts with self-image, we tend to distort our interpretation of reality rather than revise our self-image. So Huawei's problems aren't flaws; they're "suppression by competitors." Xiaomi's low prices aren't weak product capability; they're "an industry conscience." Reviews that point out problems aren't objective analysis; they're "haters stirring things up." Every piece of information that threatens self-image has a ready-made explanatory frame to catch it and make it harmless.

And the more you argue, the deeper you sink. Once you enter a camp, leaving has a psychological cost, and as time and investment accumulate, the cost grows and leaving gets harder. The people who argue the most fiercely are often the ones already starting to waver. They need to persuade loudly and constantly, because the first person they need to persuade is themselves.

From phone flame wars all the way here, I've really been saying the same thing: how hard it is for people to accept that they are wrong.

But if I stopped there, this would just be an ordinary observation about human weakness that applies to any culture. That would be boring.

The genuinely interesting question is: why is this so intense in China? Why can a phone become identity, a declaration of stance, a battlefield where losing is unacceptable?

The answer is face.

Face is not a personality flaw, and it isn't simple vanity. It is a piece of low-level core code deposited by thousands of years of Chinese society, never truly rewritten. Dynasties changed. Reform and opening happened. Every historical upheaval rewrote many things in society, but face passed through all of those nodes without a single line of code changing.

The reason is that it isn't a learned idea. It is a structural presence coded into life experience from birth.

A child gets good grades: that's the parents' face, their capital for standing tall in front of neighbors and relatives. A child does badly: it isn't just the child's failure; it's a collective shame the whole family must bear. Going further, marrying well is the family's face; what job you get is your parents' confidence when they speak in public; what car you buy and what home you live in are your valuation within this network of relationships.

People live under other people's gaze from birth, and are never given the chance to ask: what do I myself want?

People raised this way are used to getting self-evaluation from outside, used to treating others' opinions as the mirror for self-knowledge. Without the mirror, they cannot see themselves.

Face is the surface. The deeper thing is the relationship-based society.

In the underlying logic of a relationship society, people are not bound by contracts but by debt. You help me, I owe you, and one day I must repay. The repayment can take the form of money, resources or favors, but the account never disappears; it only circulates through time. The relationship network is an asset. Maintaining it requires continuous investment. Breaking it is bankruptcy.

Under this framework, many behaviors that look inexplicable to outsiders have a complete internal logic. Giving gifts isn't necessarily corruption; it's a necessary operating cost for maintaining relationships. Asking for a favor isn't "going through the back door"; it's cashing in a historical favor debt. Giving someone face in public is maintaining their credit; making them look bad in public is an attack on their relationship assets.

An individual in this system is never an independent entity. They are a node in the relationship network. The node's value depends on the number and quality of its connections, how many resources it can mobilize, and how many points it is worth in others' eyes. Once detached from the network, the node becomes an isolated point — nothing at all.

So Chinese people have two deepest fears: loneliness and losing face.

These two fears are essentially the same thing: once separated from the crowd, you no longer know who you are.

Loneliness isn't just an emotion. It means you have fallen out of the relationship network, your social assets have gone to zero, your valuation in this system has hit bottom. Losing face isn't just embarrassment. It's a loss of credit, the network re-pricing you, your position in the web being downgraded.

So Chinese people impose on themselves a pile of rules and constraints that outsiders find baffling: what age to marry, what stage of life to buy a home, what attitude to have toward relatives, how to handle social obligations, what image to present in public.

Most of these rules are not what people actually want. They are forced out by that invisible audience: not really wanting to marry, but afraid of being called "left on the shelf"; not really wanting children, but afraid of being called "unfilial"; not really valuing relatives, but afraid of being called "clueless."

You live an entire life performing for an audience that is never fully satisfied. And that audience's scoring criteria are never consistent. One household says you should do this; another says you should do that. No matter how you live, someone gossips. In the end, what you protect is not any real value system, but a minimum defense line: "most people can't currently say anything bad about me."

There's a comparison I've looked into that deserves a closer look.

When Westerners lose their direction, they still have two anchors: religion and individualism.

Religion provides an inner coordinate system: my relationship with God, the value of my soul, my place in the eternal dimension. This coordinate system is internal. It doesn't depend on how the people around you see you. Even if everyone opposes and belittles you, your relationship with God remains, your inner value remains. This isn't to say religion has no problems, only that functionally it provides a mechanism of self-affirmation that doesn't rely on others' gaze.

Of course, I'm an atheist. I'm not trying to promote Western religion. It's just a simple comparison.

Individualism provides another kind of grounding: I am an independent individual. My feelings have value in themselves. My choices are legitimate in themselves. I don't need to be accountable to the collective or to others' expectations. Even if society collapses, even if nobody approves of you, "this is who I am" is itself a place to stand.

In China, both anchors are weak. Religion has always been marginal in Chinese culture and never developed a tradition as deeply embedded in daily life and value judgment as Western Christianity. Individualism has long been treated as a synonym for selfishness and unsociability, suppressed by family ethics and collectivism.

So face filled the gap. It is a substitute spiritual structure that grew naturally over thousands of years in soil without inner anchors: using others' gaze to confirm one's existence and value. This structure is crude, rough and extremely costly, but it works. It solves the fundamental question of "who am I and what am I worth" — except it solves it outward rather than inward.

The problem with outward is that "the outside" is never stable. It can always change. It always needs you to maintain it, perform for it, fight for it. You live forever inside others' evaluations. You can never stop. The moment you stop, you are suspended in midair.

With this framework, we can return to phones. And suddenly the explosive popularity of foldables in China becomes very easy to understand.

A foldable phone is a face machine — and one of the most exquisitely designed face machines in consumer electronics today.

It's expensive enough to signal wealth directly. Its form is distinctive enough that it looks different from ordinary phones on a table. The key moment is the unfolding: going from folded to tablet takes about two seconds. Those two seconds are a natural performance window. People around you can hardly fail to notice; they can hardly avoid a second glance.

That glance is the phone's real core feature.

Thick, heavy, creased, awkward to hold with one hand: for someone buying a phone to actually use, these are real defects. But for someone buying a phone to perform, none of it matters, because the performance was completed in the second it unfolded. The ticket price has already been repaid.

Interestingly, truly wealthy people often don't buy foldables. They don't need a phone to prove anything; their wealth and status have more direct, less explained forms of expression. The most enthusiastic foldable buyers tend to be people who need to be seen and need to be acknowledged.

So when someone spends tens of thousands on a foldable, they aren't buying a phone. They're buying the flash of envy in the other person's eyes when the screen unfolds. For them, that's a good deal.

The same logic applies to cars, bags and educational credentials. Anything that can be seen and compared in a social setting can become a carrier for this logic.

More than a hundred years ago, Lu Xun was studying medicine in Japan when he saw a slide. During the Russo-Japanese War, a Chinese man accused of being a spy knelt on the ground awaiting execution. Around him stood a circle of Chinese onlookers, their faces numb, some even wearing a kind of satisfied smile.

Lu Xun said that at that moment he decided to abandon medicine for literature. Physical illness was not the most frightening thing. Spiritual numbness was.

He later wrote many onlookers. In "Medicine," the revolutionary Xia Yu is beheaded, and not one person in the crowd knows the dead man died for them. In "The True Story of Ah Q," Ah Q is paraded through the streets on the way to execution, and the onlookers find it "not exciting enough." "A Public Example" has no plot at all, only a crowd watching — what they watch and why is never explained, but the circle of people is there, craning their necks, looking.

Lu Xun wasn't writing about villains. The onlooker doesn't hate you or love you; they simply treat your suffering as entertainment, a way to pass the time. That is more despairing than hatred, because hatred at least has warmth — it means you matter to them. Indifferent watching means you are just a passing spectacle. They look, then leave, and nothing remains.

And the people fighting online today are essentially onlookers too, just with a stronger sense of participation. They treat others' wins and losses as entertainment, their own mockery as participation, feeling present while never actually being present. The topic changes again and again, the battlefield moves from place to place, but the core psychological posture — observing others from above — never changes.

Everyone is performing desperately for an audience that doesn't exist.

"Doesn't exist" doesn't mean nobody is watching. It means that audience — the "others" we spend our whole lives trying to please and prove ourselves to — mostly isn't paying attention to you at all. They're busy performing for their own audience, and their audience is busy performing for yet more audience.

The whole theater is full of actors. Nobody is really watching.

Everyone is giving everything to an absent gaze, and the time, energy and attention that truly belong to them are drained away little by little in this performance. Buying phones you don't need, fighting pointless arguments online, maintaining relationships that aren't sincere, completing milestones you don't care about — but "the others" never arrive as expected. The recognition you long for is always faintly visible, never complete, never enough.

The most tragic part is that stopping is more frightening than continuing.

To stop is to face a question that the noise of performance has always covered:

Take off the costume. Who am I?

This is a question many people never get a chance to answer seriously in their entire lives. Because they started performing as children and never stopped. Every stage of life brings a new script: school, the college entrance exam, work, marriage, a home, a car, children — and then the children's school, exam, work. Script after script, with no blank space, no chance to stop, and no reason to stop, because stopping means "not doing proper work," "being clueless," "letting down all those eyes that have been watching you."

So the choice most people make is to keep performing.

Not because they aren't tired, but because they don't know who they are if they stop.

Premier Zhou Enlai coined a wonderful phrase: seek common ground while reserving differences.

Those words are more precious today than they were then, because today they are harder to practice.

Seeking common ground while reserving differences presupposes acknowledging that the other side's "difference" has a right to exist, that "sameness" is not the only correct answer, and that disagreement is a normal state of the world rather than an error to be eliminated. Behind it is a kind of cognitive maturity: the world lives in the gray zone, and most real questions do not have either-or answers.

Only people who can accept gray can truly see things clearly. Only people who can be persuaded at any moment are truly lucid. Never being absolute is the ability to keep updating your understanding at any time. This ability is the most valuable thing a person has when facing a complex world, and it is also the first thing worn away inside a group.

From the Mi Fans vs. Huawei fans war, to flashing PTSD, to the truth about adaptation, to the idiot resonance body, to face and the relationship society, to foldables, to Lu Xun's onlookers —

It has always been the same thing:

How hard it is for a person to live for themselves.

How to Apply for the Bank of China x Bilibili Mastercard

Chongxi — Mon, 21 Sep 2026 16:00:00 GMT

The highly anticipated Bilibili x Bank of China 2233 co-branded Mastercard is finally open for applications today!

This card comes with some pretty exciting features, including the distinctive 223300 BIN and the ability to customize the last six digits of your card number. In this guide, I'll walk you through the application process and cover a few important things to keep in mind.

Applying for the Card

Application link: Bank of China Official Website

Use your own phone number if possible. It's best to provide a mobile number registered in your own name.
You only get five attempts to customize the last six digits of your card number. Both searching for a number and refreshing the results count toward the limit, so choose carefully!

Receiving Your Card

According to the information I've received, the card should arrive at the selected branch within 7–15 business days, after which you'll need to activate it in person.

I'm still waiting for mine, too, so stay tuned to this blog for updates as I learn more!

A few things to keep in mind: You can only apply for one card at a time. Once you've applied for the Mastercard, you can't apply for the UnionPay version simultaneously.

My recommendation? Apply for the Mastercard first.

A Deep Dive into the Apple Ecosystem Experience Across Devices

Chongxi — Thu, 17 Sep 2026 16:00:00 GMT

A little while ago, my Samsung phone suddenly gave up on me while I was playing Terraria. I threw a dynamite stick in-game, and just as it exploded, my phone's screen went completely white. After some troubleshooting, I figured out that the phone had simply gotten too old. Some of its components had finally reached the end of their lives, and that was that.

Since I already owned an iPad and a Mac, my next phone was pretty much destined to be an iPhone.

So, before getting into the main topic, I'd like to briefly talk about my early experience switching from the Android/Google ecosystem to the iOS/iCloud ecosystem. If you're not interested, feel free to skip straight to the Main Topic section below. But if you're not in a particular hurry, I'd recommend sticking around. It's actually a pretty interesting journey.

First of all, the transition wasn't particularly difficult. Apps like Gmail work perfectly fine on iOS, and the app ecosystem wasn't much of an issue either. After switching, I honestly couldn't think of many apps that I'd been able to use on Android but couldn't find on iOS. If anything, downloading apps from the App Store meant I no longer had to worry as much about compatibility issues.

There were really only two things I was concerned about.

The first was my photo library, which I'd been storing on Google. Fortunately, Google and Apple provide a way to transfer photos between their ecosystems. The whole migration took around four or five days, and the process was surprisingly painless.

The second issue was my Samsung smartwatch. This was a much bigger problem. My Galaxy Watch 6 simply doesn't work with iOS. Even with third-party workarounds, the experience is severely limited, which was pretty frustrating.

The obvious solution was to replace it. However, I didn't go for an Apple Watch because, in my opinion, Apple's watches would actually be a downgrade from my Galaxy Watch 6 in terms of health and fitness features. Too many features were missing.

Then, through a series of coincidences, I turned my attention to the Xiaomi Smart Band 10 Pro. After using it for a while, I found the experience pretty good. Notifications and other basic features worked perfectly with my iPhone.

Xiaomi really does deserve its reputation as Apple's number-one accessory maker.

The Main Topic

Ahem. Now that we've got that out of the way, let's get into the main topic: what it's actually like to use devices within the Apple ecosystem.

As of writing this article, I only use an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac, so I'll be focusing exclusively on these three devices.

I've already explained why I don't use an Apple Watch. As for AirPods, I simply don't think they're worth trying out, at least for me personally.

Here are the OS versions I'm currently running:

iOS 27.2
iPadOS 26.7
macOS Sequoia 15.7.9

My macOS version is a little older because I don't particularly want to upgrade to macOS 26. As a result, some issues I encounter might already have been fixed in newer versions, but that shouldn't make much of a difference to the overall experience.

I'll be writing this article based on whatever comes to mind, so the structure might be a little all over the place. If I think of anything else later, I'll come back and add it. You're also welcome to copy this entire article into an AI and ask it to treat the text as source material, then expand on whichever sections you're interested in.

Everything in this article is based on my own real-world experience, and I stand by the authenticity of what I've written.

Cross-Device Integration

Let's start with how the devices work together.

Shared clipboards, using your phone from your computer, and all that stuff are pretty much standard features at this point, so I won't waste too much time explaining the basics. Let's just run through them.

Also, all my ratings are entirely subjective and should be taken as such. If you think I'm wrong, well, then you're right in your own opinion.

Universal Clipboard

Copy something on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, and you can paste it on another device automatically. For example, you can copy some text on your phone and paste it straight into your Mac.

This is genuinely useful, but it's not completely reliable. I'd say there's roughly a 5% chance that a transfer will fail. Sometimes, even if I copy the text again on my phone and try pasting it into my Mac, nothing happens.

It's pretty annoying when that happens.

Rating: 8/10

AirDrop

I used to transfer files between my Samsung phone and other devices using LocalSend, which is open source and works really well. However, it still wasn't quite as convenient as AirDrop.

AirDrop is just ridiculously convenient. Even large files can transfer in seconds, and I rarely run into any issues.

It's simply a brilliantly executed feature. Nothing more needs to be said.

Rating: 10/10

Handoff

Handoff lets you pick up where you left off on one device and continue working on another.

In practice, though, it's pretty terrible.

First, it doesn't seem to recognize third-party apps very reliably. Second, if you leave the app on your phone, the Handoff option on your other devices disappears pretty quickly.

In other words, you have to keep the original app open if you want to continue using it on another device. Even turning off the screen can be enough to break the experience.

Rating: Not worth the hassle

Phone Calls and SMS Forwarding

This is a genuinely useful feature.

You can take calls and receive messages from your iPhone on your Mac or iPad. For example, if I'm coding on my Mac while my phone is charging, I can answer an incoming call directly from my computer without having to pick up my phone.

It's a fantastic feature. The only real annoyance is that switching between devices can cause a brief interruption of a second or two.

Other than that, I have very few complaints.

Rating: 9/10

Continuity Camera

Using your iPhone's camera with your Mac for taking pictures, scanning documents, and so on.

Brilliant. No further explanation needed.

Rating: 10/10

iPhone Mirroring

This is pretty much the ultimate way to use your phone from your computer. It's wireless, and the latency is remarkably low.

I give it a solid 10/10.

But there's one thing that would make it even better: if Apple brought iPhone Mirroring to the iPad as well.

Imagine this: my iPhone is charging on my desk while I'm lying in bed using my iPad. I want to check the delivery details for an order on an e-commerce platform, but I don't have that platform's app installed on my iPad.

If I could simply control my iPhone directly from my iPad, the experience would be perfect. Instead, I have to get out of bed just to check something on my phone.

Come on, Apple. This feels like such an obvious feature to add.

Rating: 10/10, with room for improvement

Universal Control and Sidecar

This is where using a Mac and an iPad together really shines.

Universal Control lets you use your Mac's mouse and keyboard to control your iPad, while Sidecar lets you turn your iPad into a secondary display for your Mac.

Both features have very low latency, and they're incredibly convenient to use.

Honestly, they're just fantastic.

Rating: 10/10

iCloud

I subscribe to the 200 GB iCloud+ plan, and honestly, iCloud is absolutely incredible.

The feature that deserves a perfect score: Desktop and Documents syncing.

You can store your Mac's Desktop and Documents folders in iCloud, and this is where you really start to appreciate what Apple has built.

The way Apple abstracts cloud storage and local file access is exceptionally well designed. When a Mac app accesses files in your Documents folder, it still sees the familiar local path, such as /Users/xi/Documents.

There's no awkward extra layer to deal with. Reading and writing files feels almost identical to working with local storage, yet iCloud can save you a substantial amount of disk space by keeping files in the cloud when they're not needed locally.

Even better, you can access those same files from your iPhone and iPad whenever you need them.

It's an incredibly seamless experience.

Rating: 10/10. A perfect score.

Photos and System App Syncing

Photo syncing and synchronization across Apple's built-in apps are practically invisible in day-to-day use. Everything just works across devices without requiring much thought or manual intervention.

I'd give this a perfect score as well.

Rating: 10/10

Find My and Location Sharing

Find My is pretty much a standard feature at this point. However, Apple also offers location sharing, including the ability to set up location-based notifications when someone arrives at or leaves a particular place.

It's a nice implementation overall.

The only issue is that location sharing occasionally bugs out and fails to retrieve someone's location. When that happens, the other person sometimes has to send the sharing request again.

Still, it's a solid experience.

Rating: 9/10

Family Sharing

Apple also offers various family-sharing features, including shared photo libraries and health data.

Speaking of health data, I've encountered a rather annoying bug. I can send someone a request to share their health data, and they can receive and accept it just fine. However, when they send a request to me, I don't receive any notification at all.

I contacted Apple Support, and they told me it's a known bug that's waiting to be fixed.

For now, I'll give the overall experience a 9.5/10. Once that bug is fixed, it'll be pretty much perfect.

Honestly, iCloud has become so good that I've lost most of my reasons to run a NAS or maintain my own cloud storage.

Well, the only real argument left might be privacy. But I don't store my data in Apple's China-based iCloud service, and I've also enabled end-to-end encryption.

Hardware Integration

Since I don't own an Apple Watch or AirPods, the only accessory I can really evaluate here is the Apple Pencil.

It works perfectly fine with the iPad, but I think Apple could take things a step further.

If I could use my iPad as a drawing tablet for my Mac, that would be absolutely incredible.

Imagine being able to draw directly on your iPad while working in desktop creative applications on your Mac. That would make an already useful accessory even more versatile.

Come on, Apple. Make it happen.

Things I Need to Rant About

There's one thing that drives me absolutely insane: Apple's smart notification system.

Picture this.

I'm lying in bed at night, the lights are off, and I'm looking at my phone. According to Apple's own logic, the system should recognize that I'm actively using my iPhone and send notifications only to that device.

Meanwhile, both my Mac and iPad are sitting there with their screens off.

Then a message comes in.

And somehow, every single device lights up at the same time.

What the hell, Apple?

It's the middle of the night, and suddenly my entire room lights up like someone just detonated a flashbang right next to my bed. It's genuinely uncomfortable.

I swear, at this point, should I just change my notification sound to the sound of a flashbang being thrown?

And you know what else Apple should do? Sync alarms across all devices.

Imagine setting an alarm on your iPhone and having every device in your ecosystem participate.

Every morning, your iPhone, iPad, and Mac all light up and start ringing simultaneously, while your iPhone flashes its LED a few times for good measure.

Congratulations. You've just turned your bedroom into a live concert venue.

Jokes aside, I honestly can't think of many other things that genuinely annoy me about the Apple ecosystem.

I've spent all this time thinking about what to complain about, and this is pretty much the only thing that deserves a proper rant. Everything else has been surprisingly good.

And perhaps that's what makes Apple so impressive: even after using its ecosystem extensively, I still struggle to find much worth complaining about.

My Experience Migrating from Google Photos to iCloud Photos

Chongxi — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

My old Android phone broke, and Google Photos wasn't exactly a great experience on iOS. Back when I was using Android, I used to patch the app to make it think I was using a Pixel XL, which let me store photos on Google Photos for free without using up any of my storage quota.

The problem was that my photos genuinely didn't count toward my storage usage, so I had no way of knowing how much space they actually took up. That also meant I couldn't tell whether I had enough iCloud storage to accommodate my entire photo library.

The solution was to use Google Takeout to request an archive of my photos via email. As it turns out, this also gives you the actual storage size of your photo library.

As you can see, the total comes to 146.09 GB. That means the entry-level 50 GB iCloud+ plan definitely wouldn't be enough. I'd have to go with the 200 GB plan.

The Migration Process

Now for the actual migration.

Google and Apple offer a way to transfer photos directly between their platforms. You didn't seriously think I was going to download 150 GB of photos and then manually upload them all to iCloud, did you? That would be ridiculous.

There's a bit of a misconception in online tutorials. They often tell you to go to Google Takeout and look for the option to transfer your photos to iCloud. The problem is that there's no transfer button on the actual Google Takeout interface. All you get is the option to download your data.

So, guess what? The Transfer your data option is actually hidden away in your Google Account dashboard. But when you click it, Google redirects you to a page within Google Takeout that's not accessible through its regular interface.

Seriously, what were Google's engineers thinking?

As you can see, there's no direct transfer option anywhere on this Takeout page. You have to go to your Google Account dashboard and find it there.

Only after navigating to this page can you actually initiate the transfer. And once you click the option, Google sends you right back to that same hidden page in Takeout.

Why not just put the transfer option directly in Google Takeout in the first place?

From there, simply select iCloud and authorize the transfer. Then comes the long wait.

From what I observed, a few more photos would show up in iCloud every couple of minutes. Google finished exporting my photos around the second day, but iCloud took considerably longer to process everything.

All in all, the entire migration took about three days.

A Few Unexpected Issues

One particularly ridiculous thing I discovered was that iOS doesn't recognize Motion Photos taken with my old Samsung phone. They were all imported as static images, with the motion component lost in the process.

I also deleted some old, unimportant screenshots along the way. In the end, my photo library went from around 140 GB to just 40 GB.

Turns out, people don't bother solving problems until they actually have to.

When I had effectively unlimited storage, I never felt the need to clean anything up. But as soon as I had to worry about storage limits, I suddenly found plenty of stuff I could get rid of.

Now I've got over 100 GB of free space left in iCloud. It would be a shame to let all that space go to waste, so I've decided to share an iCloud+ family plan with some friends instead.

Exploring the Meaning of "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted"

Chongxi — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Today, I'd like to talk about one of my favorite slogans: "Nothing Is True, Everything Is Permitted."

The most common misinterpretation is to read it as a combination of nihilism and lawlessness: nothing is real, so you can do whatever you want. It sounds plausible, but there's a problem with that interpretation. If nothing is true, then the statement "nothing is true" must also be untrue. It refutes itself right out of the gate, which is why I don't think this interpretation holds up.

"Nothing is true" doesn't mean "nothing exists" or "everything is false."

A chair is not "true" in the sense that it possesses some eternal, unchanging essence of chairness. It's made of wood, it will eventually decay, it might have a different name in another culture, and in a different context, it could simply become firewood. What we consider its "essence" depends on the framework through which we perceive it.

"Nothing Is True" means that nothing has a fixed, unchanging essence.

This interpretation doesn't contradict itself. The statement that nothing has a fixed essence is itself a proposition that can conform to the very principle it describes.

"Fire is hot" is an objective fact, a truth. But its validity depends on whether our current conceptual framework can correctly handle the concepts of "fire" and "heat." Whether other possibilities exist beyond that framework is something we simply don't know. Our understanding of a thing depends on how it presents itself to us. If things have no fixed essence, then the truths we construct upon them have no immutable foundation either.

The Cthulhu Mythos offers one of the clearest illustrations of this idea. Lovecraft's horror doesn't come from monsters being ugly or grotesque. It comes from the fact that these entities exist entirely outside the boundaries of human cognition. Our brains simply lack the tools to process them. People go mad not merely because they've witnessed something terrifying, but because the very framework through which they understand reality begins to collapse.

Essence isn't something that exists inherently within an object. It's something we project onto it through our conceptual framework. Change the framework, and the essence changes with it.

So the translation "Nothing Is True" isn't necessarily wrong. The problem is that modern readers tend to associate the word "true" with falsehood and nonexistence, narrowing its meaning too much. The wording itself is precise enough; it's the assumptions we bring to it that distort its meaning.

"Everything Is Permitted" literally means that everything is allowed. But the word "permitted" already presupposes a framework: if something can be permitted or forbidden, there must be something that governs that distinction. Without rules, the concept of permission becomes meaningless. It's like talking about walking through a wall when there is no wall to begin with.

So "Everything Is Permitted" cannot possibly mean that there are absolutely no constraints. Quite the opposite: it implicitly assumes the existence of a framework within which things can be allowed or forbidden.

But what is that framework?

I don't think it's external. It's not the law, God, or the judgment of other people. All these external frameworks can be circumvented, overthrown, or ignored. The only framework that can truly permit you to do anything, in the sense I'm talking about, must be internal:

Your own moral framework. Your own character.

Taking this a step further, I believe that the more you want to do whatever you please, the less you can afford to act on every whim.

Someone who genuinely wants to be free to do whatever they choose must first possess an exceptionally strong degree of self-mastery. Otherwise, they're merely being pushed around by impulses, desires, and other people. That's not doing whatever you want. That's letting your desires do whatever they want with you.

True freedom isn't about letting yourself run wild. It's about becoming internally strong enough that you no longer need external rules to keep yourself in check, because you have become your own rule.

So "Everything Is Permitted" doesn't mean there are no constraints. It means those constraints have been completely internalized. Everything you do is "permitted," not because there are no rules, but because you are the one who establishes them.

Using this phrase as an excuse to do whatever you want is the most fundamental misreading of it. What it actually demands is the opposite: radical intellectual honesty with yourself.

Who built your framework of understanding? Did you arrive at it through your own reflection? Was it imposed on you by others? Or did you simply accept it because you never bothered to question it?

Nothing Is True: Even your own beliefs have no fixed, unquestionable essence. They, too, must be examined.

Everything Is Permitted: No external authority can make your moral judgments for you. You must build your own framework, and then take responsibility for it.

Historically, this phrase has been attributed to Hassan-i Sabbah, the founder of the Nizari Ismaili state and its associated Assassin movement in 11th-century Persia. He was a deeply devout and ascetic religious figure. Yet he almost certainly never uttered these words, because he believed in the existence of absolute truth.

The phrase first appeared in Nietzsche's writings. It was later developed into a maxim in the 1938 Slovenian novel Alamut, before entering popular culture through Assassin's Creed. As it spread, its original meaning was gradually diluted.

One detail worth noting is that when a character utters this phrase in Nietzsche's work, the reaction isn't one of exhilaration or liberation, but of shock and trembling. The version in Alamut also contains an additional word that often disappears from later, more popular translations: "Nothing is absolutely true, everything is permitted."

The difference is just one word, but the meaning changes considerably.

From the very beginning, this phrase was never meant to be a manifesto for unrestrained indulgence. It was later popularization that turned it into what sounds like a cool, nihilistic slogan.

A Guide to the maimai DX LXNS Score Tracker

Chongxi — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

LXNS (落雪查分器) has recently added quite a few useful features, and some bots have announced that they will be using LXNS as their primary data source going forward. So, in this guide, I'll walk you through the entire process, from importing your scores into LXNS to using its various features.

Registration

The official LXNS website is maimai DX Score Tracker.

Simply visit the website and create an account to get started.

Importing Your Scores

Uploading Through the LXNS Proxy

Log in to the LXNS website, open the menu in the top-left corner, and select Sync Game Data.
You can manually configure an HTTP proxy in your device's WLAN settings, although this isn't recommended unless necessary. In this guide, I'll focus on setting things up through a proxy client instead.

Android

Install Clash Meta for Android from the GitHub releases page.
Copy the following URL:

https://maimai.lxns.net/api/v0/proxy-config/clash
Open Clash Meta and tap Profiles to add the proxy configuration, as shown below.

iOS / iPadOS

Install Shadowrocket or another compatible proxy client.
Tap Config in the bottom navigation bar, then tap the plus button in the top-right corner and paste the URL.
Start the proxy, and you're good to go.

Once the website confirms that the proxy has been configured successfully, copy the sync link. Open WeChat, find File Transfer or another trusted conversation, send the link, and tap it to complete the synchronization.

Third-Party Solutions

Syncing Through union

If you've previously synced your scores to maimai DX through union, you can use its LXNS upload feature to transfer your scores from 水鱼 (落雪-compatible maimai score services).

bakapiano

See the bakapiano Score Tracker Guide for instructions.

That's pretty much all you need to know about importing your scores.

Using LXNS

Checking Scores

LXNS provides built-in score management and lookup features. You can click on an individual song to view its score progression chart, and you can also check chart confirmations directly on the website.

It's very convenient.

Using Bots

On QQ, you can use LXNS's own bot, @lxbot.

Many other bots that use Youzi's maimai plugin also support querying your B50 using LXNS as the data source, as shown below.

Keep in mind that not every bot will have the same interface or commands, so check with the bot you're using for instructions on linking your LXNS account.

Once everything is set up, you can usually switch to LXNS by entering:

数据源 1

And that's it! Your bot should now use LXNS as its data source for score queries.

The Modern-Day Version of Carving a Mark on a Moving Boat

Chongxi — Mon, 10 Aug 2026 16:00:00 GMT

Modern people laugh at the ancient story of the man who carved a mark into his boat to find his lost sword, forgetting that people are still doing the exact same thing every single day.

The man in the ancient story did it because he lacked better tools for understanding the world. Modern people do it because there's too much information and everything moves too fast, so they consciously choose not to pay the cost of thinking things through again.

The difference is that the ancient man was ignorant. Modern people choose to remain ignorant.

The problem with carving a mark on a moving boat isn't stupidity. It's trying to use a static reference point to locate something in a constantly changing reality.

Path dependence is another manifestation of the same problem, just from a different angle. In the original story, you're following someone else's old mark to find the sword: someone else took this path and succeeded, so I'll take it too. The older brother made money in a particular field, so the younger brother is pushed into studying the same thing. With path dependence, you're trapped by marks you've carved yourself, unwilling to let go because you've already invested hundreds of thousands into something.

At their core, both are about using information from the past to make decisions in the present while ignoring time as a variable.

What gets replicated is always the surface of a successful outcome, never the conditions that produced it.

You can find plenty of classic examples just by looking at China's major game studios: Genshin Impact clones, Chinese-style extraction shooters, asymmetrical competitive games, and so on. I'll leave the details aside for now.

Path dependence isn't limited to the gaming industry. It's practically everywhere. Game studios copy Chinese-style extraction shooters, restaurants copy Haidilao, and so on.

The more transparent information becomes, the more visible success stories are, and the worse survivorship bias gets. You can see the revenue figures of a particular game, but you can't see all the similar games that failed around the same time. The stronger the temptation to imitate, the harder it becomes to identify the actual conditions behind success.

When things fail, how do people explain it? Poor execution? Bad management?

Almost nobody asks whether the boat has moved.

Because admitting that the boat has moved means admitting that the original decision to carve the mark was wrong. That's a price too many people aren't willing to pay.

The cost of leaving a familiar path has never been purely financial.

Imagine someone who has spent thirty years working in a particular industry. Asking them to consider the possibility that they've been heading in the wrong direction isn't just questioning their judgment. It's questioning the meaning of their entire existence.

Thirty years is no longer just experience. It's their entire sense of identity.

That's why their response isn't necessarily an attempt to reason with you. It's an act of self-preservation.

Someone who has poured four or five hundred thousand into a project and refuses to walk away isn't simply reluctant to lose that money. They're reluctant to abandon the grand claims they made at the beginning, the promises they made to others, the story they've told themselves about their own lives, and, finally, the gambler's instinct that keeps them doubling down just to prove they were right.

At the end of the day, people are fighting against themselves.

People are afraid to admit that something they did was wrong, because that means admitting that the version of themselves who made that decision was wrong, too.

A decision can be changed. But your identity is what you believe yourself to be. Questioning that identity means questioning the person responsible for every decision you've ever made.

If that person was wrong, who can you trust to make the next decision?

So most people choose to protect the last thing they have left: their self-respect.

The human brain has a mechanism for constructing a coherent story that makes everything fit.

This mechanism isn't inherently good or bad. It can't simply be judged in those terms. Throughout human history, it has saved countless lives. It gives people something to hold on to when they're at their most vulnerable, and helps them find a new foothold when their entire worldview collapses.

Someone goes through a breakup, cries for a while, and eventually says, "They weren't worth it anyway."

At that moment, the tears aren't really about the other person anymore. The statement is protecting a different narrative: "I'm a rational person."

They're trying to convince themselves that they weren't as vulnerable as they actually were. The very fact that they need to tell themselves they're not upset is why they need that sentence to hold them together.

But this mechanism can also be exploited.

A personal narrative is how you deceive yourself. A grand narrative is how someone else deceives you. The mechanism is exactly the same; only the scale is different.

Cults target people whose personal narratives have just collapsed, people who have recently experienced upheaval or lost their sense of meaning. They offer a new narrative that's coherent, complete, and full of belonging, filling the void left behind.

You can't simply dismiss the people who join as stupid. They encountered something that filled the void at precisely the moment they were most vulnerable. That's how the underlying human mechanism works.

The most sophisticated narratives go one step further: they define questioning the narrative itself as a sin.

If you don't believe, it's because your faith isn't strong enough. If you have doubts, it's because outside enemies are corrupting you.

Web3 does this, too. So does the self-help industry built around success.

Anything that claims to be the one and only truth is essentially doing the same thing: trading certainty for your right to think for yourself.

The fundamental difference between science and these systems is that scientists offer the best explanations available within the current framework, not absolute truths about the universe. They're always prepared to replace those explanations with better ones.

That's precisely why science can make progress.

Something that's genuinely objective doesn't need to proclaim itself the truth. Nobody needs to become a believer for 1 + 1 to equal 2.

Here's something I once said:

The most painful moment isn't "I don't know." It's "I've always believed I knew, and now you're telling me I don't."

"I don't know" is an empty space. You can fill it with something new.

"I've always believed I knew" is already full. It's filled with pride, past judgments, and a fragile narrative about who you are.

To accept something new, you first have to empty out the old. That process is the real cost.

Every pursuit of truth comes at the price of admitting that, at some point, you were a fucking idiot.

Put the truth in front of someone, and accepting it means letting their personal narrative fall apart. They have to learn to stand again without the old beliefs that once held them up.

Most people will instinctively protect themselves instead, refusing to accept what you're telling them.

There's another thing people often get backwards: the relationship between letting go and figuring things out.

It's not that you figure everything out and then let go. More often, you have to let go before you can figure things out.

Reasoning can't get through because the door is locked by emotion.

People who manage to reach a point of genuine acceptance have often allowed their personal narrative to fall apart at some point. Then they discover that they're still here after everything has collapsed, and that maybe it's not such a big deal after all.

Think about school. Most of us went through it as children.

When I was in elementary school, being one minute late in the morning felt like the end of the world. Later, I realized that being late wasn't actually going to change much.

My narrative had cracked. I let go, and then I understood.

So, Where Do We Go From Here?

If you follow this line of thought far enough, you eventually run into a dead end.

"I've seen through everything" is a narrative.

"I know that my belief that I've seen through everything is itself a narrative" is also a narrative.

You can use narratives to explain away just about anything. There's no hard limit, no numerical value to optimize. It's just a mechanism that keeps generating explanations.

So genuine transcendence doesn't really exist. All you can do is adopt a certain stance: recognize the narrative at work, acknowledge that you're caught up in it, too, and leave a small opening for doubt.

Only by refusing to cling to answers can you keep moving closer to the truth.

The brain's self-protection mechanisms and narrative-generating machinery are part of its underlying code. You can't simply rewrite them. Human society has evolved far too quickly for the brain to keep up.

But the user layer can still be modified. Algorithms can be optimized. Patches can be applied.

Once you know the narrative-generation mechanism is running, you can add a monitoring process on top of it.

Once you know your self-protection mechanisms will kick in, you can make yourself wait one extra second when they do.

Once you know path dependence can trap you, you can run a quick check before making a decision:

What conditions made this success story possible? Are those conditions still present? Do my circumstances actually match the circumstances that existed when it worked for someone else?

If you can't rewrite the underlying system, add patches on top of it.

A tool is just a tool. An ordinary person might use a wrench to loosen a bolt, while a master mechanic can use one as part of a complete vehicle overhaul. Then there are people who expect the wrench to fly around and fix everything by itself.

That's not using a tool. That's indulging in another narrative.

Only by acknowledging the limitations of the underlying system can you build patches that actually work.

There will always be a gap between knowing and doing. That's unavoidable.

But if you can at least get these things straight in your head, you can shorten the amount of time you spend trapped in a mistake.

And honestly, that's good enough.