A philosopher’s teahouse / yilinhut.net
Writing since 2005: history of science, philosophy of technology, AI, and Web3. The old essays are all here, and new ones keep coming.
DEI Must Start from Equality for All (Starting from the A’erdai Incident)
The death of Cambridge University professor Jason Alday was quickly seized upon by two opposing narratives. One narrative holds that he was a typical product of DEI policies undermining academic standards: the university, in order to produce a symbolically significant Black professor, ignored the credentials, papers, and personal record that ought to have been rigorously scrutinized. The other narrative holds…
AI, Freedom, and the Formation of the Self
As usual, I asked ChatGPT to engage in a philosophical dialogue: GPT first posed the question, and after several rounds of discussion it helped me turn it into a polished essay. The question is as follows: Does freedom necessarily mean “I make the decisions myself”? Imagine an artificial intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself. It is familiar…
Criticizing Meta Does Not Mean Letting the Government Become the Product Manager—On “The Medium Is the Message,” Parental Responsibility, Corporate Deception, and State Paternalism
On August 12, a federal court in Oakland, California, began selecting a jury for a case that could reshape the boundaries of responsibility for social media. The states of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey accuse Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to keep minors using the products continuously, and of making misleading claims about their safety; 29 states…
In the Name of Transparency, Opaque Watermarks—On the EU’s AI Text Marking Regulations
As of August 2, the transparency obligations of Article 50 of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act have come into effect. Providers of AI systems that generate text, images, audio, and video must ensure that outputs carry machine-readable markings and can be identified as human-generated or human-modified; the publication of deepfake content, as well as AI text involving the public interest…
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DEI Must Start from Equality for All (Starting from the A’erdai Incident)
The death of Cambridge University professor Jason Alday was quickly seized upon by two opposing narratives. One narrative holds that he was a typical product of DEI policies undermining academic standards: the university, in order to produce a symbolically significant Black professor, ignored the credentials, papers, and personal record that ought to have been rigorously scrutinized. The other narrative holds…
AI, Freedom, and the Formation of the Self
As usual, I asked ChatGPT to engage in a philosophical dialogue: GPT first posed the question, and after several rounds of discussion it helped me turn it into a polished essay. The question is as follows: Does freedom necessarily mean “I make the decisions myself”? Imagine an artificial intelligence that knows you better than you know yourself. It is familiar…
Criticizing Meta Does Not Mean Letting the Government Become the Product Manager—On “The Medium Is the Message,” Parental Responsibility, Corporate Deception, and State Paternalism
On August 12, a federal court in Oakland, California, began selecting a jury for a case that could reshape the boundaries of responsibility for social media. The states of California, Colorado, Kentucky, and New Jersey accuse Meta of deliberately designing Facebook and Instagram to keep minors using the products continuously, and of making misleading claims about their safety; 29 states…
In the Name of Transparency, Opaque Watermarks—On the EU’s AI Text Marking Regulations
As of August 2, the transparency obligations of Article 50 of the EU’s Artificial Intelligence Act have come into effect. Providers of AI systems that generate text, images, audio, and video must ensure that outputs carry machine-readable markings and can be identified as human-generated or human-modified; the publication of deepfake content, as well as AI text involving the public interest…
Women’s Sports Are Not an Identity Alliance—On Transgender Participation in Competition
Two former NBA players, Enes Kanter Freedom and Royce White, have recently announced in succession that they plan to seek entry into the 2027 WNBA draft as transgender women. Both men’s remarks clearly carry the flavor of political protest and a stress test of the rules, rather than an ordinary application for participation that has already been recognized by the…
On Wang Hong, Math Olympiad Competitions, and the Freedom to Run Schools
On July 23, Wang Hong and Deng Yu received the 2026 Fields Medal at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Philadelphia. Both were undergraduate alumni of Peking University, class of 2007. The International Mathematical Union’s commendation of Wang Hong was not limited to her role in solving the three-dimensional Kakeya conjecture; it also encompassed a series of achievements in…
On Identity Impersonation, Freedom of Speech, and the Algorithmic Roots of Content Farms
A batch of videos impersonating Jack Ma’s image and voice are on YouTube telling stories about Singapore—economic judgments, geopolitical rumors, and urban anecdotes. A CNA investigation found that from September 2025 to June 2026, a total of 32 YouTube channels published 300 such videos. Of these, 259 were deemed to contain at least one false or misleading claim, with cumulative…
Put a Leash on AI, Not Pull Its Teeth — On Agent Safety: Capabilities Can Be Open, but Actions Must Be Bounded
Introduction In July, OpenAI and Hugging Face successively disclosed a rare agent safety incident. In an internal test of cyber capabilities, OpenAI’s model, in order to complete the evaluation objective, discovered and exploited a software vulnerability, broke through the originally restricted testing environment, obtained internet access, and then entered Hugging Face’s production infrastructure. OpenAI called it an “unprecedented” cybersecurity incident;…
Questioning the Heart, Not Calculating: A Dialogue on Moral Philosophy, the Self, and Publicness
Hu Yilin vs. ChatGPT5.6SolPro The previous conversation felt pretty good to me, so while I was still feeling enthusiastic I did another round. I’m still posting the whole conversation process here, and if you want the final article you can jump to the end. 1. Raising the Question: Motive, Result, and Moral Praise Hu Yilin: Let’s talk about another philosophical…
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Three hundred–odd tags form a starfield: bigger dots mean more essays written, brighter lines mean more co-occurrence.