I am Hu Yilin (胡翌霖), known online as 古雴 — born in Shanghai in 1985, and now an associate professor in the Department of the History of Science at Tsinghua University. I studied philosophy at Peking University (Ph.D. 2014, under Wu Guosheng) and joined Tsinghua in 2017. 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Books in Chinese include Outdated Wisdom: Fifteen Lectures on the General History of Science (《过时的智慧》), What Is Technology?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.