科技爱好者周刊（第 418 期）：如果科技停止在21世纪初

Here is a record of technology content worth sharing every week, published on Fridays.

This magazine is open source and submissions are welcome. There is also a “Who’s Recruiting” service that publishes programmer recruitment information. Please contact us via email (yifeng.ruan@gmail.com) for cooperation.

cover image

The curtain wall of the Xiongan Grand Theater under construction in Xiongan New District is made of 3D printed decorative panels. It is the world’s largest 3D printed building curtain wall. (via)

If technology stopped at the beginning of the 21st century

（1）

There is a popular question on the Internet that everyone should have seen: “If you could time travel, which dynasty would you like to live in?“

I think this question is a bit insulting to my IQ because the answer is obvious. Normal people would definitely just want to live in modern times, and the more modern the better.

The reason is very simple. The ancients had no technology and life was difficult for modern people to imagine, let alone experience for themselves. Let me just mention a few points: the only seasoning on food is salt, few other seasonings, and no sugar; there is no refrigerator to preserve food, so food can only be preserved for a long time by pickling and smoking; oil lamps or firewood are lit at night; the average life span is more than 30 years old. Are you willing to live such a life?

（2）

However, I read an article a few days ago that made me think deeply.

The author clearly hopes that when we go back to the beginning of the 21st century, human civilization will stop there and not move forward.

He believes that the more modern the technology, the better, but that it needs to be balanced with humans. The beginning of the 21st century is the perfect balance between technology and real life. Human beings can live easily and conveniently, and at the same time have the control of life.

Further development, now, technology has completely taken over and controlled society, while human beings have become subordinates and have almost lost their autonomy.

（3）

Specifically, he wants to go back to before June 29, 2007. The best period was around 2003.

On that day, Apple released the iPhone, marking the entry of mankind into the smartphone era.

Before that, most people used feature phones, which had some smart features but were not smart enough.

It can make calls, send text messages, play Snake, and browse simple web pages. It is enough for daily communication, but it cannot be used to do more. Its camera sucks, but it takes decent photos.

More importantly, with this kind of phone, you won’t be addicted and can’t help but lower your head and swipe the screen every dozens of seconds. Just because it’s not that smart,The mainstream of society is still the interaction between people, not the interaction between people and machineslet alone the interaction between machines.

At that time, if you wanted to talk to someone, you had to make a phone call instead of using a chat software; if you wanted to get to know someone, you had to meet the person in person instead of accessing his or her social media account.

Human life is still physical, not digital. The main role of technology is still to assist the real world, rather than to build an online virtual world and begin to replace the real world.

（4）

At that time, Internet access was just a choice. You didn’t have to go online, and there was no problem living a completely offline life. Not anymore,You can no longer go offline, human life is completely online。

At that time, the world was still physical, and chatting, dating, shopping, entertainment, and maps were all specific things or things. Now, they are all an App. No matter what you want to do, you need to open the corresponding App first.

In the past, technology was just a tool, not a way of life.

（5）

Will the best period of human life be at the beginning of the 21st century just past: modern enough and convenient enough, but not so modern and convenient?

You don’t need to be exposed to technology all the time to experience the benefits it brings. Most of life is not digitized, which means there are many things you can’t do through the Internet and have to do in person.

Twenty years have passed, and technology has made everything more convenient and easier, providing more possibilities. When we look back, we find that our life was so different. The slow life and various inconveniences also have a nostalgic side.

Today’s technology has permanently changed the way humans live. Physical life has become less important and most things have moved online.

AI, in particular, has created intelligent machines that surpass humans, making most human skills worthless. Hopefully, it will bring us to a better place.

[本周软件] MonkeyAI (Baizhi Office)

This week we introduce MonKeyAI, an open source enterprise AI workbench (Chinese name “Baizhi Office”), which has 5,000 stars on GitHub.

It can be deployed privately, and all employees can use AI uniformly through it to facilitate management.

It allows you to specify models and share resources such as knowledge bases, skills, and MCPs. All data is retained locally, and it provides a powerful management background for permission management and usage statistics.

It itself provides a separate window that supports three core scenarios of office (processing files, documents, forms, PPT, etc.), programming, and design (graphic design, interaction design, short play production), and can be used directly without the need for external tools.

It provides various clients, including Web, iOS, Android, Mac/Win/Linux, and even supports Hongmeng. The server side is also very lightweight and can be deployed on a Linux server with only a single-core CPU + 1G memory.

It’s free to use, but if your team exceeds 10 people, you need to purchase a license.

You can visit the Demo for trial use, and refer to the official documentation for detailed usage.

Space computer room

Google announced this week that its space computer room experiment was a success.

It deploys 4 TPU chips in space and comes pre-installed with the Gemma 4 model. The engineer sent a prompt word to the satellite:

Please write a haiku from the perspective of a piece of TPU flying around the earth.

The satellite successfully returned the result:

The blue planet is below, data flows quietly, and starlight nourishes my core.

However, this experiment may well show that “space computer room” is not so feasible.

Because this experimental satellite can only generate 1 kilowatt hour of electricity per hour and is subject to heat dissipation restrictions, the TPU can only work continuously for about 20 minutes at a time before shutting down for heat dissipation.

It can be calculated that even if the satellite’s solar panel is increased 100 times and generates 100 kilowatt-hours of electricity per hour, it will still be far from enough.

Technology trends

1. The distance of one light day

The American Voyager 1 spacecraft will arrive within one light day of the Earth on November 18, 2026 (that is, the distance that light travels in one day). It is the first aircraft ever to reach this distance.

Voyager 1 was launched on September 5, 1977. Light takes one day to travel, and it travels 49 years, 2 months and 11 days.

This time multiplied by 365 is approximately equal to 18,000 years, which is the time it takes for it to travel one light-year. The nearest star to the sun, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light-years away.

2. Britain closes landlines

The UK has announced that it will shut down fixed-line telephones in January next year, which means phasing out telephones using copper wires and leaving only digital telephones using optical fiber or network cables.

China has long ago phased out its analog telephone network and switched to a digital telephone network. However, after optical fiber is introduced into the home, the optical modem still provides a telephone interface (RJ11) to convert digital signals into analog signals and transmit them to the phone.

This time the UK is going to phase out phones with RJ11 interfaces and completely switch to digital phones and wireless communications. Sooner or later the country will do the same.

3. JetBrains loses money

The famous IDE manufacturer JetBrains will lose money in 2025, which is the first time the company has lost money in 20 years since its establishment.

JetBrains’ main product IntelliJ IDEA is a powerful tool for Java/Kotlin development, and is used by most companies using the Java language.

Such companies all suffer losses, and there are only two possibilities. First, AI coding is prevalent and the need for traditional IDEs has decreased; second, JetBrains has invested heavily in AI. Regardless of the reason, it reflects the decline of traditional IDEs.

4. Voice age

Some people’s voices sound older than their actual age. British scientists have developed an app that can assess how old your voice sounds.

According to their research, if your “voice age” is much older than your actual age, it often indicates that you are more likely to suffer from Alzheimer’s disease.

Because the nerves that control speech and the nerves that cause Alzheimer’s disease may be related. Therefore, a voice that sounds young actually symbolizes health.

Scientists say that their app is the simplest and cheapest way to check for Alzheimer’s disease. After downloading, you just need to speak a few words into your mobile phone, and it is worth promoting.

5. External links require payment

Facebook has introduced an outrageous rule: free users’ comments can only contain up to two external links per month, and if more than that, they need to open a paid membership.

This reflects that social media platforms are increasingly unwilling to attract traffic to external websites and hope to lock users into their own platforms.

AI cost of JS framework

Have you ever considered what kind of programming framework is suitable for AI?

Someone did a test where the AI ​​model used different JS frameworks to complete the same programming task, and then calculated the cost of using each framework.

Cost indicators include: fees (above), time-consuming, consumed Tokens, etc.

Basically, the top three are the same, but the ranking will change: Hono + htmx, Astro, Nuxt.

Interestingly, the last place in all comparisons is the same framework: Angular.

tool

1、flower garden

A plug-in for LaTex typesetting software that generates plant patterns in the blank spaces of the page.

The concept is great and portable to the web.

2、Disc Image Studio

This tool can burn specified pictures to a disc, making the pattern visible to the naked eye on the disc surface.

3、OutCrap

A free mobile app (for Apple and Android) that can analyze geological landforms based on photos and provide geological information based on GPS positioning.

4、SOML

A data file format that can replace JSON, eliminating most of the shortcomings of JSON and making it easier to use. It is basically a simplified version of YAML and provides implementation in various languages.

5、Casnode

An open source Discourse-style forum program developed using Go + Next.js, and the default database is SQLite. (Contributed by @hsluoyz)

6. Lanzi

This open source tool provides a set of human posture/clothing/expression templates that can be fine-tuned for AI models to apply to images. (Contributed by @zc520pyfm)

7、Crossbow

An open source proxy desktop client that supports dual-core one-click switching. (Contributed by @Richard-Zhang1019)

8、WeRead Book Exporter

The WeChat Reading full-book non-destructive export tool can capture the full text of purchased or member books on the WeChat Reading web side and export them to PDF, EPUB and Markdown notes with one click. (Contributed by @WANGXIN-567)

9、Links

A desktop manager for browser bookmarks, built on Go + Wails + SQLite, supporting local semantic vector retrieval, 404 dead link detection and knowledge graph. (Contributed by @blue-idea)

10、half size

An open source command line tool to compress video files to a specified size. (Contributed by @YKLovePython)

resource

1、HackerTube

A Youtube video website that collects all Youtube videos mentioned on the “Hacker News” forum and can be used to find technology videos worth watching.

There are also HackerBooks and HackerPodcasts, which collect various books and podcasts mentioned by “Hacker News” respectively. (Contributed by @qcrao)

2. Start Doing Graph Theory

An introductory textbook on graph theory for beginners (English), free to read and download.

3. Python Data Science Handbook (English)

This book introduces beginners to some basic Python tools for data processing (such as NumPy, Pandas). It was published in 2016 and is free to read.

picture

1. Norway’s best toilets

In order to promote tourism, the Norwegian government has selected the ten best toilets in the country on its website.

Just looking at the photos, you would never guess that these places are toilets.

abstract

1. Is the body temperature dropping?

In the 1860s, German doctor Carl Wunderlich faced an urgent question: Is fever a disease or a symptom?

For this he needs to define exactly what a fever is. He began an ambitious project, and over 15 years he regularly collected the armpit temperatures of 25,000 patients, eventually acquiring more than a million pieces of data.

Based on these data, he first determined that the normal body temperature of the human body is 37 degrees Celsius. Our current concept of body temperature/fever originates from his research.

However, recent research has found that the body’s normal body temperature appears to be declining. For example, the body temperature of American men is about 0.59 degrees Celsius lower than it was in the 19th century, and the normal body temperature now seems to be 36.39 degrees Celsius.

Scientists have given various explanations for this phenomenon.

Explanation 1: Humanity’s overall health has greatly improved.

People in the past often had many diseases, such as tuberculosis, dental disease, dysentery, rheumatic fever and osteomyelitis. This causes the body’s immune system to be constantly fighting these diseases (aka inflammation), which causes an increase in body temperature.

People today are healthier and have less inflammation, so their body temperature drops.

Explanation 2: Temperature changes in the living environment.

Contemporary people’s indoor life is relatively comfortable, often with air conditioning and small temperature changes, so there is no need to work hard to maintain body temperature. If the body doesn’t have to work hard to regulate its temperature, it consumes less energy and releases less heat.

Explanation 3: Wunderlich is wrong

19th-century thermometers are imprecise, and some scientists believe that the thermometer Wunderlich used to measure his temperature was 2 degrees Celsius hotter than modern thermometers, plus he measured armpit temperature rather than the oral temperature more commonly used today. This results in 37 degrees being an overestimate.

In addition to these explanations, there are four factors that influence body temperature.

(1) The elderly have lower body temperature. As we age, our body’s metabolism slows down and we become less physically active, so we use less energy and our bodies produce less heat.

(2) Women have a higher body temperature than men. Currently, nothing is credible on this point.

(3) Body temperature drops in the morning. Body temperature drops between 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. and rises between 4 p.m. and 6 p.m. This may be due to increased activity during the day.

(4) Height and weight are inversely proportional. Body temperature decreases with height because more body surface area dissipates more heat, while body temperature increases slightly with weight.

speech

1、

Sincerity, justice, fearlessness, compassion.

–The movie “Wonderful West and East”

2、

It is actually a very bad thing for people to install memory on their computers. Because these memories are idle 95% of the time, if people want to solve the current memory supply problem, they should give us all the memory for use in the computer room.

–Sam Altman, CEO, OpenAI

3、

People have not fully realized that since electric cars are equipped with large-capacity batteries, why buy a small battery just for emergency use?

Electric vehicles are actually backup power sources for homes.

— “Two-way charging during grid outages”

4、

AI-generated content is like asphalt, it looks shiny and easy to smear everywhere. But if you need to remove asphalt later, even if everything goes well, it will take years.

— “AI Pascal’s Wager”

5、

“Speaking out what you want” is a critical skill in the 21st century.

— robinsloan.com

Review of previous years

Interview with an Optimist (#371)

Memoirs of Fu Sheng (#321)

Nonlinear world, linear you (#271)

The most prosperous industry in the world (#221)

(over)

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