Mark's Space

Welcome to Mark Xu's personal site, sharing tech and life.
Maybe the Future Will Only Have the Liberal Arts and Engineering: Thoughts on a 3Blue1Brown Video

Maybe the Future Will Only Have the Liberal Arts and Engineering: Thoughts on a 3Blue1Brown Video

[AI-translated] Tonight I finished watching 3Blue1Brown's video “There Has Never Been a Better Time to Devote Yourself to Mathematics,” and it stirred up some feelings that I record briefly here.

Read full article

From the 408 OS Exam to Production: Why Is the Signal-Sending Function Called kill Instead of send?

[AI-translated] While in the intensive review phase for the 408 exam, I noticed that the inter-process communication function is named kill(), which made me curious about what the name actually means.

Read full article
Why Do Some Websites Have “www” and Others Don’t? — The Modern Configuration Edition

Why Do Some Websites Have “www” and Others Don’t? — The Modern Configuration Edition

[AI-translated] Picking up where the previous post left off, this one focuses on why we no longer use www today, and on how we actually handle it now.

Read full article
Why Do Some Websites Have “www” and Others Don't? — The Origin Story

Why Do Some Websites Have “www” and Others Don't? — The Origin Story

[AI-translated] I always assumed the www in the address bar was just something the browser hid from us. The more I looked into it, the more I found that it connects to the division of services on the early Internet, the constraints of DNS, and the way websites are deployed today.

Read full article
FingerBlock: A Game Demo Built with AI

FingerBlock: A Game Demo Built with AI

[AI-translated] A chance update notice from a hand-tracking library gave me the idea, and a day and a half later I had a simple rhythm game demo.

Read full article
The Story of Beautifying My RSS Feed Page

The Story of Beautifying My RSS Feed Page

[AI-translated] A record of how the RSS feed on my personal site evolved: working, beautified, suddenly broken, and finally fixed.

Read full article
Why I Am Not Bullish on Humanoid Robots

Why I Am Not Bullish on Humanoid Robots

[AI-translated] I have never been bullish on humanoid robots becoming the next generation of general-purpose productivity. I want to put my current judgment on the record: if I end up being proven wrong, I will at least be able to look back and see exactly which of my concerns the industry managed to overcome.

Read full article

How Easy Is It to Build Web Effects Now? A Few Frontend Components and Animation Resources to Share

[AI-translated] Sharing some really cool frontend components I have come across online recently!

Read full article
Queue Implementation Approaches: From Constraints to a Decision Tree

Queue Implementation Approaches: From Constraints to a Decision Tree

[AI-translated] While reviewing data structures, I realized I keep choosing the wrong way to implement a queue, so I built a decision tree to lay out the factors involved and summarize them.

Read full article
A Wuhan Food-Crawl Diary 1

A Wuhan Food-Crawl Diary 1

[AI-translated] While preparing in Wuhan for a second attempt at the postgraduate entrance examination, I took a day off on the weekend, followed a local creator's route around the city, visited the Hubei Provincial Museum at last, and ate plenty of good food.

Read full article
TCP Slow-Start Window Growth: A Three-Level Comparison of Textbooks, RFCs, and the Linux Kernel

TCP Slow-Start Window Growth: A Three-Level Comparison of Textbooks, RFCs, and the Linux Kernel

[AI-translated] TCP slow start is often simplified as “the congestion window doubles every RTT,” but textbooks, RFCs, and the Linux kernel describe the same mechanism from different layers. I compare the three views to clarify whether cwnd grows by ACKs, bytes, or complete segments.

Read full article
Behind localhost: A Network Journey That Never Leaves Home

Behind localhost: A Network Journey That Never Leaves Home

[AI-translated] Does localhost really pass through the network protocol stack when we use it during development? How many layers of the network are involved?

Read full article
Rejecting Reward Hacking: My Four Years at University

Rejecting Reward Hacking: My Four Years at University

[AI-translated] As I left university, I wanted to record both my memories of those four years and how my choices gradually taught me not to treat grades, rankings, and a résumé as life's only objectives.

Read full article
A Xiamen Food-Crawl Diary

A Xiamen Food-Crawl Diary

[AI-translated] With only a few days left before graduation, I was reluctant to leave Xiamen, so a classmate and I visited several interesting eateries around the city—some delightful, others disappointing.

Read full article
What Do Computer Science Majors Actually Learn?

What Do Computer Science Majors Actually Learn?

[AI-translated] For anyone who wants to know what a computer science and technology major actually studies: it is not just writing code, and not just fixing computers, but a whole course of training built around computation, systems, software, and engineering practice.

Read full article
Why Do I Recommend College Students to Write Blogs?

Why Do I Recommend College Students to Write Blogs?

Although the idea of writing blogs already feels a little outdated, I still recommend it. It helps you clarify your thoughts, record the process of growing up, and maybe even meet like-minded people along the way.

Read full article
Handy Little Tools for Surfing the Web

Handy Little Tools for Surfing the Web

[AI-translated] A running record of the browser extensions I use and the other small web tools I recommend.

Read full article
Looking at AI Through the Lens of Meme: Thoughts After Playing Death Stranding 2

Looking at AI Through the Lens of Meme: Thoughts After Playing Death Stranding 2

After finishing the story of Death Stranding 2, I began to understand MEME as a way for the genes of human culture to keep growing. AI can reuse these cultural genes, but new cultural genes may still have to grow out of human experience.

Read full article
From Student Innovation Project to Graduation Thesis: How My Research Thinking Evolved

From Student Innovation Project to Graduation Thesis: How My Research Thinking Evolved

From a student innovation project and a medical management system to reproducing and improving a pelvic fracture CT segmentation algorithm, this post records my graduation project and how I slowly learned to find the real problem inside failure.

Read full article
Four Years at University, and a Few of My “Little Drawers”

Four Years at University, and a Few of My “Little Drawers”

[AI-translated] I have always had a habit of collecting interesting sources of information, so I wanted to write down the few that I remember as high quality, frequently updated, and genuinely fun to read—for my future self, and to share with everyone else.

Read full article
Mac Terminal Setup Notes

Mac Terminal Setup Notes

My old terminal was packed with oh-my-zsh and plugins I could barely remember, and it looked ugly enough that I did not even want to use it. So I decided to rebuild my terminal from scratch.

Read full article
When Open Source Is Only a Prompt: I Found a Ridiculous New Way to Open Source

When Open Source Is Only a Prompt: I Found a Ridiculous New Way to Open Source

I recently found a GitHub project called voice-input-src, a voice input app for Mac. The surprising part is that the repository contains only one detailed prompt for AI.

Read full article
My First Blog

My First Blog

This is the literal first blog post on my personal site, sharing my thoughts and experiences.

Read full article
Guangzhou Travel Notes

Guangzhou Travel Notes

This is my travel note in Guangzhou. (translated by ai)

Read full article
Notes from Xi'an

Notes from Xi'an

[AI-translated] I happened to find the travel diary I wrote after visiting Xi'an. It is still a simple day-by-day record, but it brings the trip back to me, so I am publishing it here before finding it by accident all over again.

Read full article
Chaoshan Travel Notes

Chaoshan Travel Notes

This is my travel note in Chaoshan. Tracked my first experience of travelling by myself. (translated by ai)

Read full article