About
Hu Yilinonline as 古雴
Formerly associate professor of the history of science at Tsinghua University; now an independent scholar, initiator of CNDAO and founder of TIANYU ARTech. This site, Suixuan, has been open since 2005: all 1,394 posts are here.
Run the pointer through the stardust.
Even if ninety-nine per cent of the universe is darkness, when I look up at the night sky I still see a sky full of stars.
The sky is beautiful not because it is full of light, but because in that endless dark a few points of starlight are enough to move us deeply.
This universe, this world, this life are dark and a mess, but I love them, and I am enchanted by all of these wonderful things.
- posts
- 1,394
- years
- 22
- tags
- 365
A galaxy of writing
Every post is a star: 1,394 of them spiral out from the 2005 core. Colour shows the topic, size the length. Point at a star to see which post it is; click to read it.
It started with one post
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2005–2008
Stars and campus
A young philosophy student at Peking University: the philosophy of the starry sky, reading notes, thoughts on Buddhism. Suixuan opened, and the pen name 古雴 began here.
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2009–2012
The phenomenology years
Reading groups and the ontology of media: starting from Husserl and Heidegger, “media” slowly became a method; Arendt and political commentary took shape in the same years.
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2013–2016
Meeting Bitcoin
The Bitcoin trilogy asked what money and the state are; the lectures on the general history of science were worked out in class and became Outdated Wisdom.
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2017–2022
Tsinghua’s history of science
Helping to build the department and teaching there, three books in a row, and the first looks at Web3 and the metaverse.
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2023–2024
The AI wave and Huawendao
After ChatGPT, asking again what scholarship is for; the crypto renaissance and the Huawendao white paper ran alongside.
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2025–now
Leaving, and free scholarship
Moving to Singapore as an independent scholar: AI and scholarship, streets and walking, the redesign of Suixuan, and the writing goes on.
- Encrypted Flight Vol. 11 | Will Tsinghua People Who Have Gone Out Dream of a Bitcoin-Standard World? An Interview with Hu Yilin
- The Street Is Not a Tourist Attraction—Afterword to I, My Singapore, My Street, My Walks
- If Scholars Don’t Use AI, That Counts as Academic Corruption
- From “Whether There Is a Mind” to “How to Establish the Mind” — The Broader Question of Heart-Mind Studies in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Questions orbiting questions
The questions look scattered, but they circle one core: how technology shapes the way we exist. The history of science gives depth, phenomenology gives method, the ontology of media is my own term; Bitcoin, Web3 and AI are the sharpest present-day cases of these old questions.
Click a satellite to see the writing it holds.
About this site
I am Hu Yilin (胡翌霖), known online as 古雴 — born in Shanghai in 1985. I studied philosophy at Peking University (Ph.D. 2014, under Wu Guosheng) and was an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University from 2017. I am now an independent scholar, the initiator of CNDAO, and the founder of the TIANYU ARTech studio. My work moves between the history of science, the philosophy of technology, media theory, and, in recent years, AI and Web3.
Suixuan (随轩) is my personal blog, running since 2005 — more than 1,300 essays and counting. It is my study, notebook, and teahouse: philosophical essays, histories of science and technology, book reviews, course summaries, public commentary, and records of everyday life. The Topics page maps the whole terrain; the Selected series collect the essays I would most like a new reader to start with; the Books section holds full texts of my published books and manuscripts (in Chinese).
About this English edition. The English versions of the essays are translated from the Chinese originals with AI assistance and reviewed by sampling. The Chinese original is always authoritative — every English post links back to it at the end. Classical Chinese quotations keep the original text in parentheses where practical. If you spot a translation that misleads, I would be glad to hear about it in the Guestbook.
Books in Chinese include Outdated Wisdom: Fifteen Lectures on the General History of Science (《过时的智慧》), What Is Technology? (《什么是技术》), A Strong Programme for the History of Media (《媒介史强纲领》), and An Introduction to the Philosophy of Technology (《技术哲学导论》) — all readable online in the Books section.
Contact: hyl510@gmail.com. Comments are open under every essay.
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