Ming Fu Ideas

Learning Chinese: A Practical Handbook

Tue, 09 Jun 2026 15:00:00 +0800

The first essay on learning Mandarin Chinese is a practical guide that explores various strategies for mastering reading, writing, and speaking in the language.

Learning Mandarin Chinese as a native English speaker presents unique challenges and opportunities. Chinese is a tonal language with a logographic writing system, which means reading and writing require mastering thousands of characters rather than an alphabet. Developing literacy often takes precedence, followed by listening and speaking skills. This report explores effective theories and techniques for Chinese language acquisition, emphasizing reading, writing, listening, and speaking (in that order of focus). We will examine structured proficiency frameworks (like HSK and TOCFL), traditional and modern methodologies (grammar-translation, spaced repetition, etc.), character learning strategies, reading techniques, and the use of flashcards. We also discuss how artificial intelligence (AI) enables personalized, adaptive learning and error analysis. Differences between China and Taiwan Mandarin usage, effective practice exercises, and insights from popular learning platforms (Duolingo, Skritter, Pleco, Anki) are included. An annotated bibliography of sources is provided at the end for further reference….

Continue reading: Learning Chinese: A Practical Handbook

MSD

The Platform Manifesto

Sun, 12 Oct 2025 21:00:10 +0800

Law of Platforms

Every enduring platform rests on a few immutable laws. These principles are not about hype, valuation, or growth hacks. They are about structural efficiency and integrity.
A platform exists to amplify others’ capabilities, not to trap them. It scales by reducing friction, externalizing complexity, and relentlessly investing in reliability and composability.

A distilled doctrine

What follows is a distilled doctrine for building platforms that last, around systems that serve, empower, and endure.

Empower the Customer through SelfService Build systems that enable users to provision, configure, and manage their services through the web and API. Shifting control outward reduces operational drag and scales without friction.
Eliminate Friction from Every Flow Streamline the discovery, purchasing, onboarding, and offboarding processes. Ease of entry and exit builds trust, accelerates adoption, and lowers support costs.
Deliver Composable, Reliable Value Provide modular services that integrate easily and perform predictably. Customer satisfaction and retention are earned through reliability and interoperability, not lockin.
Invest in R&D and Operational Excellence Focus spending on engineering depth, performance, and automation. Innovation and upti0me are the truest forms of marketing. Build on open standards. Own your stack. Dependency control preserves longterm autonomy and quality.
Solve Real Problems. Don’t Become One Address material pain points, not vanity features or rentseeking models. A platform’s legitimacy comes from being a multiplier of others’ productivity.
Acknowledge the Role of Savvy Storytelling Even great platforms need narrative clarity and market reach. Ethical persuasion and clear value communication amplify technical excellence.

Summary Principle

A true platform minimizes its own footprint while maximizing others’ capabilities.

Author’s Note

The Platform Manifesto draws from decades of hard lessons in consulting, distributed systems, SaaS architecture, and digital infrastructure. These laws are not ideology. They are operating constraints. They define how platforms sustain themselves without consuming their ecosystems.

Prove you are a human

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 18:27:01 +0800

The current anti-pattern in online web hosting security:

Front-end the site with a third-party security service. Cloudflare is a good one.
Activate a blanket security policy, perhaps the service’s default one, which scrutinizes all requests to all endpoints in the same way. The policy prevents non-human clients from accessing the site’s RSS feed.
Offer no simple way to contact the site owner to ask for a change to the policy, other than first by signing up for the site or joining some Discord server.

The last roadblock almost completely ensures that the problem will go unreported.

But the question is: why is the security layer not more intelligent in this regard?

NVIDIA’s AI factories

Sun, 15 Jun 2025 19:27:20 +0800

NVIDIA recently unveiled a new compute and software platform at COMPUTEX, the annual computer trade show.

They claim this platform will revolutionise data centres, turning them into factories that produce AI tokens at scale. The small box in the photo is the unit I’m particularly interested in. It’s likely the only one in their portfolio that doesn’t require additional service from Taipower.

Siri is a failed User Interface

Sat, 17 Sep 2022 13:08:55 +0800

What if Apple had spent ten years perfecting some fundamental capabilities?'

Give directions and explain multistep processes clearly.
Asking questions and prompting for answers needed to fulfill a request.
Maintaining a transcript of previous queries and answers.
Organize queries and answers into the user’s corpus and knowledge base.
Draw on the corpus when replying to requests.
Integrate into other subsystems and mediums, such as the file system, notes, tagging, text, audio, and video.
Integrate into Shortcuts and automation tools.
Understand and speak in multiple languages simultaneously.

These capabilities would set a foundation for Siri to be truly helpful and extraordinary and would be a demonstrable advancement in the art and science of User Interface and information architecture.

But Siri is more like a glorified field on a Search web page. Without an Internet connection, Siri cannot answer a simple question, “What time is it?”

At some point, Apple folks made architectural decisions and set business priorities that fixed Siri on a path that neither delighted customers nor advanced the state-of-the-art.

Tree Removal in Shilin Dist. 砍樹在台北市士林區

Sat, 30 Oct 2021 15:08:23 +0800

The public works administration’s uprooting of trees along Zhongzheng Road has been a mini-controversy for a few months. The city removed the old trees to make way for the underground construction of a new MRT train line. The city also said the trees were sick.

The section of the road affected by the tree removal is an area I know pretty well. Pre-COVID, I would be there regularly. I happened to find myself there last night for a dinner event, and it was a strangely disorienting experience. Bare of the lovely trees, the road had been reduced to its ugly concrete roots, and stepping out of the restaurant, I could not figure out where I was or which way to go.

The new reality is both saddening and enraging at the same time. If I were a resident of the area, the removal action would miff me. For suddenly, my lovely neighborhood looked like any old, dilapidated concrete shit hole in Taiwan.

I cannot help thinking that the city officials at some deep level must hate themselves to cancel out one of the success stories over the decades. Whoever planted them there (and around the city for that matter) both beautified and preserved a bit of green in a typical Concrete Urban Monster. The “developmental” mindset of “the more concrete, the better” has been the practical urban planning and economic development tool for decades. Taiwan and Taipei have also spent large sums on vanity architecture projects that were never completed or proved too complex for local firms to deliver. But these trees were a success.

Source: PeoPo Citizen Journalism 公民新聞

The news report highlights how citizens and officials can meet, explain, and discuss these issues. For me, it drives home that we need citizen journalism more than ever all over the U.S. as a countervailing force to corporate media and as a curative to the “QAnon” conspiratorial lines of communication fracturing the body politic and destroying the country. Reconnecting national news to its roots locally would help people understand each other and motivate them to seek truth and positive action for change.

MSD

Taiwan's electronic health records

Fri, 29 Oct 2021 09:44:46 +0800

It’s difficult to describe to friends and family in the USA how utterly broken the medical system is there.

For many, who have decent insurance, there is little appreciation for how much better, fairer, and cheaper it could all be. Until you have experienced the Taiwan medical system, you realize that the US has not a system but rather a hodgepodge of medical markets, broken ones at that. I can and will expound on this topic some other day.

But for now, my motivation for writing this brief entry is to express a bit of delight for today’s latest “hack” (and to give some praise to the National Health Insurance administration). Consider this bit of XML:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?><myhealthbank> <bdata> <b1.1>A**********</b1.1> <b1.2>20211029</b1.2> <r0>【民眾下載健康存摺資料之聲明書】健康存摺有您的詳細就醫醫療資料，下載後請妥善保管，資料如有需要轉交第三人或企業、公司使用，應請自行評估風險及責任。提醒您：資料提供給第三人時請留意是否只提供部分資料、並約定使用期間及日後可要求刪除資料的權利。 </r0> <r1>

That’s the opening bits to my comprehensive health records detailing office visits, prescriptions filled at pharmacies, test results, etc. Every interaction with doctors, clinics, hospitals over the years is recorded and available to me and my doctors. The data is available in a variety of formats for human and computer consumption, and I can download it on demand by logging into my account on the NHI website.

Logging into the website is not a mere matter of username and password. Taiwan has put in place a system based on crypto smart cards. “My company” has one for interacting with government services and fulfilling regulatory requirements. And just about everyone living here has an NHI photo ID smart card. The crypto chip on board provides a secure means to establish identity and authorization to my records and NHI services. The same card is used when visiting doctors and paying for services.

iPad Cursor and modes of interaction

Tue, 07 Apr 2020 08:45:00 +0800

Some impressions of iPad Cursor support after a couple weeks using it with a Magic Trackpad:

I like it. Visually and practically, it works well.
It has rough edges: invoking Slide Over does not work for me reliably or smoothly. If you have even mild or slight motor problems, the process is painful and frustrating. Apple needs to rethink this a bit.
iPad has four modes of primary input currently: hand gestures, keyboard, trackpad, and pencil. Now they need to unify the experience so one can accomplish all basic interactions with one or the other.
- Example: I want to be able to use the pencil to tap on things and invoke actions, like bringing up Control Center, just like with the trackpad.
- Example: I want keyboard shortcuts for invoking and manipulating the various multitasking UIs and modes, especially Slide Over.
Also, I would like to see Siri added as a fifth input device for these functions.
- Example: “Siri, show Slide Over” … “hide Slide Over” … “done”
- Example: “Siri, split the screen on the right, add Safari”
iPad as a chameleon that can change its look and mission by combining (or removing) specialized components, much like a camera system, makes it a fun and versatile platform. But at the basic levels of interaction, I would like to see these components be co-equal in capability and usage.

MSD