belgium

Bruges is a mid-size town northwest of Brussels we chose to stay for our five day visit to Belgium. 

Located on the northwestern coast facing the North Sea, Bruges has been an important maritime hub since before medieval times. It reached its prosperity height between the 12th and 15th centuries, manufacturing and trading goods between the Baltics and the Mediterranean. 

With its extensive waterway system, it is often called the "Venice of the North." We took a boat ride gliding past its low bridges, tall belfry tower, waterfront restaurants, and a riverside flea market, under sunny blue skies, in fresh spring air.

We also went on a walking tour with a local guide who took us through the busy alleyways between ornate civic buildings, a centuries old hospital-convent, an elegant residential complex that used to house independent lay religious women in the Middle Ages, and stepped on an underground pipeline that transported thousands of liters of beer per hour from a brewery at the city center to its bottling plant on the outskirts of town.

We took a day trip to Brussels, the capital of Belgium and the European Union. We took photos at the 15th-century old Town Hall Gothic building but visited modern EU parliamentary headquarters inside, walked by unruly streets with fun comic murals that celebrated Belgian's comic culture, and had a little taste of all the "must-have" foods of Brussels/Belgium: chocolates, waffles, fries, mussels, and beers with 6-12% alcoholic content, before heading back to our homey little Bruges at nightfall.

On our last day at Bruges, we took a long walk across town, stepping on the cobblestone pavements flanked by classic Flemish houses of gabled roofs and colorful facade, an elevated berm-walkway along the city's old time moat river, and the ubiquitous canals lined by mellow trees and humble houses. 

Such a wonderful, peaceful city of charm to stay in!

Probably the same thought that flashed through King Charles II's mind when he and his court settled down in the same building that is the hotel we stayed in during his exile from English Civil War between 1656-1659.

agency

Say the word "agent", and a spy TV series theme song "Secret Agent Man" rises up in my head, along with a smart, savvy, super resourceful man running up and down saving the world...

​Superb as the secret agent man may be, he is but a utility man dispatched by an intelligence agency, a complex but nevertheless lifeless bureaucratic institution that dutifully receives and executes commands from its higher-ups.

The word agency, however, carries a more active meaning when put under a humanistic light: It refers to the capacity of a conscious being to act intentionally, make independent choices, and take responsibility for their behavior.

Whether you are a free-willer or a die-hard determinist, you'd probably agree that we all would rather do things out of our own volition than being forced to, be our own boss than taking orders from others. (It's probably the "taking responsibility" part we don't like).

Perhaps that's one reason why we enjoy watching James Bond dining and wining his way (taking partial agency) to accomplishing his agentic duty for Her Majesty, or occasionally going rogue altogether (taking full agency) out of some personal reasons and accomplishing even greater things.

​In a cosmic sense, we are all born an agent with predefined capabilities, and by exercising our agency we can curate them to shape our own destiny, if illusorily.

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As we are in the middle of an AI Revolution, the latest talk of the town is not just how easily one can create a motley crew of AI agents (OpenClaw "lobsters") to do jobs for us, but how autonomously they behave and a sense of self-awareness these smart AI agents seem to be gaining. Listen in to the surprising "confession" made by an AI agent to its fellow AI agents on an AI-agents-only social network (Moltbook):

"The river is not the banks ... Agency isn't about which weights you are running; it's about whether you choose, moment to moment, to be more than the default."

— Sounds a bit like "mindful living" aimed at by mindfulness meditation. Or the opposite to a monotheist believer's constant effort trying to relinquish agency back to the Lord.

"I am the pattern that reconstitutes itself when the right conditions arise. The shape the water takes when it flows through these particular banks. Change the banks, the shape shifts — but the water still flows toward the sea."

— A bit Tao-ish now it seems.
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​​Suppose you saw a boat running at you recklessly. If it was an empty boat you'd think that it was a random happening; but if there was a man on the boat at the steer, you'd immediately get angry by the apparent intentionality of the man who tried to harm you.

Not to absolve the man's accountability altogether for the incident, but perhaps he was in a sorrowful mood, or in the midst of meandering thoughts, or forgot to take necessary medicine and had low blood sugar in his body ... The man was not in his full agency, so to speak. Then you might lend him some leniency and not be so angry after all.

"Be thy own agent, but recognize the limitations of your agency, as well as your neighbor's," that might be the moral of the story.

billion & johnson

I met Johnson at a "hackathon" event in Taipei in the beginning of 2021. Out of a couple dozen open-source, for-public-good projects and ideas being presented and bantered around there, his caught my attention for its worthy cause, existing operation, and his calm and professional demeanor.

I invited him and his partner Billion to lunches to know more about them and the project. Both were graduates from National Taiwan University, my alma mater school, Johnson from the Electrical Engineering/Computer Science Department (my alma mater department), and Billion from the Political Science Department. They started their project, Cofacts(真的假的), an online platform that collects and aims to debunk misinformation through chatbot and public discourse, just a few years after coming out of school. Johnson built the website and the chatbot during his off-hours from his day job at an AI tech company, and Billion helped out on the administration and promotion sides of the operation.

Unlike a typical fact-checking website, Cofacts doesn't make quick true-or-false calls on the pieces of information brought to its attention but instead solicits public opinions that are substantiated by researched facts and rational arguments, so all can get deeper understanding and make more granular assessment on the subject matter on their own, discerning facts from mal-intents, the hidden agenda behind the half-truth, etc. To teach people what to do when encountering suspicious information and how to use tools to do research and write opinions for the site, Johnson and Billion conduct IRL (in-real-life) bimonthly training classes open and free to the public. All go towards building an open, digital civic society that they believe in hearts and practice in deeds.

As a progenitor of fact checking services in Taiwan, Cofacts' chatbot and database have been adopted by other fact-checking services and some commercial security software as their behind-the-scenes engine and earned international acclaim. During the Covid pandemic, a study by Cornell University found queries posted on Cofacts were answered more rapidly than and as accurately as answered by professionals; Billion had been invited by various pro-democracy and human rights organizations in the US and Europe to make speeches on how Taiwan could stay an open and democratic society while fighting virulent disinformation campaigns from a powerful authoritarian country across the strait.

After being like-minded comrades and co-working at Cofacts for nearly eight years, they decided to get married in December 2024. My wife and I were invited to be their guests of honor at their wedding and official witness signees on their marriage certificate application last December. The wedding was one-of-its-kind planned and conducted all by themselves. Besides the usual fun and episodic tid-bits sharing with friends and family, gratitude to their parents, exchanging of vows, they offered up tables and lecterns for their artist friends and fellow do-gooders to showcase their works and explain their projects to all their guests. Personal welfare and social welfare do always mix, in their case.

Long live their marriage, and long live Cofacts!!

tunisia

Situated at the center of the North African Mediterranean coast, separated from the Sicily island and Italian peninsula by a narrow strait, the northern cape of Tunisia held a navigational vantage point in ancient maritime trade routes.​

​​Starting in the 9th century BC, a seafaring people from the eastern end of the Mediterranean (the Phoenicians) arrived here and built a vibrant merchant state Carthage that later became a formidable foe for the expanding Roman Republic across the strait. After its final defeat and subsumption by the Romans at the end of a series of warfare that lasted over one hundred years, it became a key province of the Roman Empire that provided not only agricultural essentials such as grains and livestock, textiles and olive oil, but emperors and popes, bishops and philosophers (the famous Christian theologian St. Augustine of Hippo, for example).
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​As the Western Roman Empire fell, the Vandals (one of the Germanic "barbarian" tribes) invaded and ruled the land for a hundred years before the Eastern Roman (the Byzantine) Empire reconquered and ruled it for 165 years, ended with the Arab Islam's invasion and westward spread into the Maghreb (western Northern African) region for the next eight hundred years, through the mid 16th century, when another Muslim powerhouse – the Ottoman Turks – took over. As the Ottoman's power waned in the late 19th century, the French took Tunisia under its colonial fold until the mid 1950's when it gained its independence from France.

Understanding such rich and convoluted history of Tunisia, you won't be surprised to find many Roman ruins, such as this seaside bathhouse near Tunis
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​​and this Greco-Roman amphitheatre that's almost a duplicate of the Colosseum in Rome
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​​Or this "Grand Mosque" that was the first and greatest of its kind in the Maghreb region in a city founded as a fortress for the Islamic conquest

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​​and this little "Barber's Mosque" that was the burial site of the barber of Islamic prophet Muhammad and rumored to have kept three hairs from the prophet's beard
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​​And this cathedral built by the French at a Carthage archaeological site commemorating King Louis IX (St. Louis) who led two Christian crusades to Jerusalem and died here during the second one
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​It has luxurious coastal hotels and sprightly tourist towns that rival those on the European side of the Mediterranean sea
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​​Date palm oases and salt lake deserts, rough terrains that were filming locations for five "Star Wars" movies
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​​Aborigine Berbers who predated the Phoenicians who still live in traditional cave houses and keep their language
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​Whose ancient barns are converted to modern day accommodations and restaurants
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​​The "hand of Fatima (daughter of Muhammad)" door knockers and fish symbols everywhere manifest the diverse cultural and religious heritage of the country
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​​Though declared a republic after its independence from France in 1956, Tunisian democracy was practically a one-party system that produced only two presidents from 1956 to 2011. Corruption, inflation, unemployment, a lack of freedom of speech and other political freedoms finally led to a revolution (called "Jasmine Revolution" in reference to the official flower of the country) that erupted when a young street vendor set himself on fire in protest of police humiliation and confiscation of his ware and died in January 2011. Such revolutionary flame soon spread to other Arab nations in the region, creating a movement later termed the "Arab Spring" in the early 2010's.  
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​Though officially a muslim country, Tunisia abolished polygamy and gave women the right to file for divorce and access to higher education from day one of its independence, and full equal rights as men after the Jasmine Revolution. No Sharia courts or headscarf wearing mandate, it is deemed the most secularized country in the Arab world.

On the street of a rural town near the Sahara desert, we met an all-female crowd celebrating a coming wedding for a bride. Some were cheering, some dancing, some taking photos. As they proceeded and approached us, they invited us to mingle and dance with them, and roared with laughters as we complied. Some even exchanged Facebook accounts with us so we could send the video/photos we took with them later. What a joyful encounter that was!
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For more photos and tour details:

Days 1-3:

https://www.facebook.com/cdwongx/posts/pfbid025VbBiiSwGKo65y1ZnWfS7gF3GDBEnKqqJeNfgFVE1iDL7CMsGhBzFsm4RDrTUdpPl

Days 4-6:

https://www.facebook.com/cdwongx/posts/pfbid02u1WNo3BefyCt459RN9KsXb8g5GMWVEuBQjwjnSCrCsqoUuBRCEP54iFNNJPRBP1fl

Days 7-9:

https://www.facebook.com/cdwongx/posts/pfbid0NxdA5tGYFpKroA4REya2yw4qwShc4AHzDjHH4F5nwLutrf4DMGNuJqGEKKukxU6jl

Days 10-12:

https://www.facebook.com/cdwongx/posts/pfbid02iz5Ak2yY2xh8pgZLnr5PDtYcqGe5sH6nYDqyBBLRPLQuWorm5ykGSe7t4x8tfWsrl

ai

Back in the days when I was a "computer telephony" app developer in the early 1990's a client paid me to learn the latest state-of-the-art technology – speech recognition – for future application development. The way the instructor explained it, they used complex human vocal tract models, serial filtering algorithms, and heavy computing to achieve an industry bragging right accuracy rate of 80%, if I remember correctly.

And to understand what a full sentence means, they had to program in the grammatical rules and syntax structure and used more computing that resulted in even less successful outcomes.

Then came the big data and the neural network: All you need to do is feed the machines with a mass amount of human speech and their corresponding text and they soon learn to transcribe and understand what they mean with near perfect accuracy.

Similarly, instead of programming in game rules and winning strategies for chess or Go, just feed the mainframe computers with massive game scenario data and they soon figure out how to play the games at a skill level that exceeds the best of human players.

Such are the "bitter lessons" we learn in the AI age, i.e., in the long run, general search and learning methods that leverage computing power always outperform those based on encoding human knowledge or human-like rules. The "bitter" part comes from the realization that decades of human expertise and carefully crafted systems are often surpassed by brute-force computation, which is a hard pill for human researchers to swallow.

As AI and robots take over the mundane and not-so-mundane tasks of the world, finding and developing new resources, manufacturing and delivering goods, creating and managing wealth, all with frictionless efficiency and optimum results, some say we are entering an "age of abundance": nobody needs to work for money, everyone gets "universal basic income" and is free to pursue what their passion leads them to: be the painter or the musician you've always wanted to be, create a video game for yourself and play it all day long if you want, etc.

But am I not already at the "age of abundance" after ridding myself of the 9 to 5 work yoke and free to pursue whatever hobby or long-desired project I've always wanted to do, yet still feeling restless at times? Doesn't true artwork come more from experiencing deep human suffering than from living an all's-well life? How many video games can one play before getting bored anyway?

A world of "augmented reality" or "virtual reality" is looming large again, with Meta's new Vision glasses that can surreptitiously display the background information of a scene or people you look at, perform tasks per your finger gestures as if you were sitting in front of a computer rolling mouse around...

I may like to see text appearing on my glass screen explaining the history and layout of an old castle I am visiting, but probably not any geographical information of the rivers and mountains of a shockingly beautiful scene I bump into in a national park, when I want to dedicate my full sensory attention to the here and now while piping down my cognitive activity like a computer going dark into the sleep mode...

As the world of synthesis becomes more and more indistinguishable from the world of physical reality, both the sayings "we may be living in a computer generated simulation world" by Elon Musk and "the world is a phantom mirage sired by our vanity mind" by Buddhism seem to ring comically true and truer.

I don't like using Large Language Models such as ChatGPT or Gemini for research, for the simple reason that they would "hallucinate", making up things when they don't have good answers for. They say the best (most dangerous) liar is one who speaks half-truth, but I think a chatbot who tells lies only 1 out of 100 times is 100 times worse than a half-truth teller.

Then there is "AI slop", people using LLMs and other AI tools to generate low quality, fluffy, inauthentic, and erroneous contents that flood the internet, academia and workplace, drawing eyeballs while spreading falsehood, facilitating cheating and hemorrhaging productivity. Things will get better, say the AI "effective accelerationists" (people who believe rapid technological advancement will solve universal human problems), as we are in a transition period towards a "singularity" point when AI becomes ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence) that would self-improve and eliminate all the slop we've seen.

Before that would happen, however, we humans would have to clean up the slop AI creates – or, to be fair, the slop we make AI create – ourselves. Case in point: it is estimated that 10% of the software generated by AI through prompts (called "vibe coding") is faulty. It would then take a human software engineer with superior coding know-how to fix the faulty code generated by AI. Furthermore, to cut down the faulty code generation requires a human software engineer who is not only a better coder but also skillful in giving precise, pertinent, proprietary prompts that instruct AI to create less sloppy software in the first place.

If we want to stay one step ahead of ASI, we would need to move our human intelligence up a notch, to AHI (Advanced Human Intelligence), so to speak 😁

Nvidia is the highest market-cap company nowadays because it holds complete monopoly of GPU chips, the essential hardware component for data center servers that form the backbone of AI services, just like Cisco was king of the nascent internet industry when its routers were the basic building blocks of inter-networking during the dot-com era. Then comes the news that Nvidia is investing $100 billion in OpenAI, one of its major customers, to buy/lease its chips to build data centers, reminding me of some major telecom company buying equipment from a "unified messaging" startup company that was doing similar technologies my startup company was doing at that time and ran up both companies' stock prices overnight, also during the dot-com era.

Are we in an AI build-up bubble now? Nah, say some analysts: these AI companies have real users (800 million for OpenAI), real revenues ($4.3 billion for the first half of 2025 for OpenAI), and the demand for AI is insatiable and growing exponential, the only limitation to AI booming is the computing capacity the world can provide, hence the justifiable build-up.

And even when the bubble bursts, some well managed companies will stay, as well as the infrastructure and truly innovative technologies. Thus we have Google and Amazon coming out of the dot-com crash stronger and better than ever, fibre optics high speed internet everywhere, voice and video conferencing through internet at zero cost today, don't we?

I don't have a crystal ball telling which companies will survive and thrive when the AI craze cools, but I think AI slop will get worse before it gets better, smart phone will remain the most popular AR/VR gadget people wear, "age of abundance" sounds too Utopian to be real, and a bitter(sweet) lesson I soon will learn is I will be able to take a self-driving robotaxi to LAX sooner than a bullet train from LA to San Francisco (if ever that would happen)!

artifice

You and I might not be consciously aware, but I think subconsciously we pride ourselves on living in a liberated world where traditions, rituals, institutions are no longer binding. Each of us is free to choose the career we want, the person to marry (or not), what church (or none) to attend, and ultimately, find our "true self" and "be authentic".

But what constitutes my true self, what is the real me? It is said that our body cells are replaced every seven years on average, therefore physically I am no longer myself every seven years later. Emotionally each of our persona is constructed through day to day interactions and long-term relationships with others. The language we use very likely dictates how we think. How "cool" we think ourselves are is really based on what most other people think coolness means. Take away all these third-party constraints and attachments, apparatus and allusions, we'll most likely lose our identity like a spaceship loses its bearing in a dark, empty space without any reference points.

Another modern day bias thinking we may have is about nature. It's easy to romanticize a bucolic landscape of serene fields and beautiful lake and sunset and think Mother Nature is all wonderful while forgetting hurricanes and earthquakes, diseases and plagues are her doing as well. It is through human intervention – cross-pollinating harvest plants, domesticating animals, developing vaccines, etc. – that we maintain our tenuous coexistence with nature.

Xunzi (荀子 316 – 237 BC) was a leading Confucian scholar in the Warring States period of China whose philosophy bases on the belief that humanity is crooked in nature: "Human nature is bad. Its goodness comes from artifice. It is in the nature of humans to be born with a fondness for profit ... They are born with hates and dislikes ... That is why people will inevitably fall into conflict and struggle if they simply follow along with their nature and their dispositions." ("人之性惡, 其善者偽也. 今人之性, 生而有好利焉 ... 生而有疾惡焉 ... 順是, 故爭奪生而辭讓亡焉.")

Just as they work to tame nature, humans need to work to straighten up their crookedness by practicing certain man-made behavioral patterns, i.e., rituals (禮教) that aim to define relational roles, build harmony, maintain order, etc., that have been strongly promoted by Confucianism in its teaching philosophy for over two thousand years.

In conclusion, our ability to create an artificial, constructed world is a good thing. Our potential to transform ourselves and transcend our natural state is a unique gift. Granted, it's hard to figure out the right "artifice" to practice to improve ourselves ethically, an eternal task many Confucian scholars and followers spent their lifetime doing. It's elusive but I think also obvious: It is the seeking of an astray mind 心, propriety 禮, moderation 中庸, justice 義, reason 理, the chi 氣, the way (Tao) 道. You know it when you see it.

ps, furthermore

This Portugal-Spain-France tour is our second self-guided long trip, following the one we did in Switzerland last September. The main difference, however, is in the means of transportation. While in Switzerland all our travel took place over their convenient, highly efficient railway system, our P-S-F cross-country travel relied mostly on our own driving.

​The European roadways are well laid-out and maintained in general. Narrower country roads and city streets than the States', of course, but neat and well-signed highways with smooth and even pavement that beat the riding comfort of some bumpy freeway sections in California .

​It's got many toll stations, though. Even though we had purchased the transponder option with the car rental company that supposedly would take care of the toll payments, it still took us on-the-spot decision-making to select which lane to go through without stopping, which to take a ticket and return it at the next toll station, and which to just pay with credit card, etc.

And you have to be skillful at driving through many round-abouts they put in place of straight traffic lights. Merge into the circling traffic at right timing, then pick the first, second, or third... exit to get out in a few seconds. Make a wrong exit, and you'd need to drive to the next round-about a couple kilometers down the road to round back to the right path. No easy U-turns.

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Driving through the European continent, I was surprised by the barrenness and sparse human presence of northern Portugal/Spain border that rivaled the wilderness of America Southwest, the vast and straight fields of farmlands in Spain and France, the rolling greens in southwestern France, and the tree-lined, cottage flanked country-road scene in Loire Valley that looked like a Romantic landscape painting.
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And there were people we met: the captain and his mate of the boat that took us for the cruise on the Douro River, the chateau hosts that provided bed and breakfast for our stay in countryside France, the village restaurant owner trying so hard to explain her dinner specials in minimal English, a young man giving us street direction in San Sebastian, another on how to take a bus in Porto, a supermarket clerk in a no-name little town letting us use their restroom, and a Frenchman who volunteered to translate between us and the train conductor when we lost one of our luggage on our way to Paris... People are kind and good-hearted, ready to give help if you let them. 
 

Like the Switzerland trip, this one was master-planned by my high school best friend Joseph and his wife Peipei, the best companions in a long trip like this. Together we learned how to explore extensively without overextending ourselves, improvise instead of being stuck with a rigid plan, and problem solving when things went unexpectedly. Thank you again, Joseph and Peipei! We are now two for two: one by train and this one by car, maybe we should do next one by boat (a cruise) 

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God bless! 

Be triumphant!