↓ Skip to main content

Posts

2026

Oracle's Free 4-Core 24GB Server: From Signup to Running
Engineering Practice · 2026-04-07 · 5 分钟

Oracle's Free 4-Core 24GB Server: From Signup to Running

Oracle’s Always Free plan gives you a 4-core, 24 GB ARM server every month — no expiry, no charge. The same specs cost $80–100/month on AWS. This post strings together signup, pitfalls, instance creation, and keep-alive. Oracle free VPS: the full path from preparation to running What You Get # Oracle’s free tier is called Always Free. Not a trial, not a limited-time promo.

1011 字 阅读 ➔
Codex Keeps Reconnecting? Four Fixes
Engineering Practice · 2026-03-31 · 4 分钟

Codex Keeps Reconnecting? Four Fixes

Codex talks to the ChatGPT backend over WebSocket by default. If your network path involves Clash, a corporate proxy, cross-border transit, or Cloudflare challenge pages, that long-lived WebSocket gets killed easily — and you end up staring at Reconnecting... 1/5 over and over. Turn off WebSocket and switch to plain HTTP streaming requests, and the problem mostly disappears. Comparison of the four fixes Why WebSocket Breaks Behind Proxies # The WebSocket protocol starts with an HTTP Upgrade request; only after the server returns 101 does it switch to the long-lived connection. That long-lived connection is exactly where the problem sits — proxy servers, firewalls, and CDN nodes all run timeout policies on idle connections, and Cloudflare’s challenge mechanism can inject an interstitial page mid-path. Any link in that chain kills the connection, and the Codex client starts Reconnecting.

700 字 阅读 ➔
Third-Party Telegram Clients: What to Use and What to Avoid
Engineering Practice · 2026-03-24 · 4 分钟

Third-Party Telegram Clients: What to Use and What to Avoid

Conclusion first: there are a lot of third-party Telegram clients, quality varies wildly, and you should avoid the closed-source ones as a rule. Since 2021, Telegram has required first-time registration to receive its verification code on the official mobile client — desktop and third-party clients can’t register directly. That’s already a signal. Third-party Telegram clients by platform: an overview This post is a curated list. The source is a roundup post by Telegram’s @LCGFX; I’ve reorganized it by platform and added open-source status and risk judgments.

654 字 阅读 ➔
Foreign Apple ID Registration: Four Paths That Work
Tutorials · 2026-03-17 · 7 分钟

Foreign Apple ID Registration: Four Paths That Work

Registering an Apple ID for another region shouldn’t be hard, but Apple keeps changing the flow. Most tutorials online record only a single path, and the comments are full of people saying it no longer works. More annoying: after registering, your first App Store login has a chance of being bumped straight back to the China store. Here I’ve put together all four methods I could find, plus a complete plan to avoid being sent back to the China store. Not just the US store — the same applies to Turkey, Japan, and Nigeria.

1288 字 阅读 ➔
SMS Verification Platforms: My Honest, Ad-Free Rundown
Engineering Practice · 2026-03-10 · 4 分钟

SMS Verification Platforms: My Honest, Ad-Free Rundown

Signing up for services like GPT, Claude, or Telegram needs a number that can receive verification codes — but you may not want to hand over your own phone number. That demand spawned a batch of SMS verification platforms: some free, some paid, some aimed at developers. Here are four I’ve actually used; as of May 20, 2026, all were still accessible. Platform status changes at any time, so open the site and check yourself before using one.

814 字 阅读 ➔
The Engineering Reality of Multi-Agent Collaboration: Triggers, Topologies, and Deterministic Merging
Engineering Practice · 2026-03-03 · 19 分钟

The Engineering Reality of Multi-Agent Collaboration: Triggers, Topologies, and Deterministic Merging

Packing multiple probabilistically sampled large language model instances into a single codebase or production pipeline is, fundamentally, constructing a distributed system over an unreliable network using stochastic state machines. The axiomatic foundations of classical distributed computing—deterministic state transitions, reproducible failure modes, Byzantine fault tolerance, and atomic commits—collapse almost entirely when applied to modern generative models. Tech social media abounds with utopian product demos: one agent searches documentation, another implements business logic, a third writes unit tests, and a fourth conducts code review, while an orchestrator agent glides over the process like an infallible engineering manager. Yet anyone who has pushed such topologies into a 500,000-line monolithic repository or a high-concurrency production environment knows the reality: the system rapidly degenerates into distributed chaos. Unsynchronized modifications cause silent overwrites and split-brain states; non-deterministic rollouts cause cognitive divergence; token consumption explodes in a positive-feedback avalanche; and parent and child processes lock each other in cognitive livelocks.

3823 字 阅读 ➔
AI Psychosis: When MTTR Fanaticism Meets Resilience
Deep Thoughts · 2026-02-24 · 9 分钟

AI Psychosis: When MTTR Fanaticism Meets Resilience

I have a strong intuition: some companies in the tech industry right now are going through a full-blown AI psychosis, and inside those companies, rational conversation is simply impossible. I’m not talking about strangers — I’m talking about personal friends I deeply respect. That leaves me worried about how this ends. This fear has a specific source. I lived through the great MTBF (mean time between failures) vs MTTR (mean time to recovery) debate when infrastructure moved from traditional ops to cloud and cloud automation. Now those exact same arguments are resurfacing in a new costume — only the scope has widened from infrastructure to the entire software industry, and possibly to the whole world.

1789 字 阅读 ➔
Reverse Engineering Claude Science: From 54 Tables to Modern TCM
AI Technology · 2026-02-20 · 7 分钟

Reverse Engineering Claude Science: From 54 Tables to Modern TCM

A 67 MB DMG installer, 164 MB unpacked, hiding Anthropic’s Claude Science (internal codename Operon). After reverse engineering it, I found 54 SQLite tables, a 9-layer security model, 30+ bioinformatics skills, and a complete AI agent platform for computational biology. On the other side is TCMSP, an AI-native Traditional Chinese Medicine systems pharmacology platform under active development. Looking at the two projects side by side, some design ideas are worth cross-referencing.

1311 字 阅读 ➔
A New Playbook for AI Programming: UI First, Then the PRD
Deep Thoughts · 2026-02-17 · 6 分钟

A New Playbook for AI Programming: UI First, Then the PRD

Everyone knows the standard Vibe Coding flow by now: write user stories → produce a PRD → AI generates the backend → AI generates the frontend → demo and verify. It works, but at delivery time the UI interaction experience often falls far short of expectations. Where does it go wrong? In the PRD itself. 1. The Fundamental Problem with PRDs # PRDs (Product Requirements Documents) were never that friendly to humans in the first place. Three reasons:

1189 字 阅读 ➔
A Guide to SSH Remote Development in the Codex App
Engineering Practice · 2026-02-10 · 5 分钟

A Guide to SSH Remote Development in the Codex App

Update note: This post is based on the Codex App as of May 2026. SSH Remote is still in alpha, and the configuration methods and UI entry points may change with new releases. If anything here has gone stale, refer to the official documentation for the latest. The Codex App now supports connecting to remote machines over SSH; the feature is currently in alpha. If you develop on remote servers, train models, or run environments there, this is worth a try. It lets you connect to a remote server directly inside Codex and work in the remote filesystem and shell — no more jumping back and forth between a local terminal, VSCode Remote, SSH, and tmux.

945 字 阅读 ➔