Building a Generative Artwork That Can Change Its Maker: From Generation to Encounter and Back Again

~ YIN Renlong

Three days after I published an article about turning the refresh button of my website into an artistic compositional gesture, Prof. Yvonne Dohna-Schlobitten unexpectedly invited me to participate in her developing international project as an artist—and, almost in the same breath, in a scientific capacity as well. She had not yet seen this particular work. I sent it to her, explained that every refresh or navigation could produce another composition, and asked her to try it. Her first response…
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What Loïc Taught Me About the Moral Cost of a Miracle: A Tale of Winter (1992) and the Difference Between Hope, Faith, and Certainty

~ YIN Renlong

I expected Éric Rohmer’s Conte d’hiver (A Tale of Winter, 1992) to leave me thinking about romantic fidelity, chance, and perhaps a little theology. Instead, I ended up arguing with Félicie, defending her, criticizing her again, correcting some of my own criticisms after returning to the screenplay, questioning whether her “faith” is really faith, and finally becoming much more interested in Loïc than in the miraculous return of Charles. The film grew richer every time one of my…
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La pericolosa invisibilità della malattia di Addison (morbo di Addison)

~ YIN Renlong

Nota medica: Questo articolo ha finalità esclusivamente informative, di sensibilizzazione sulla disabilità e di comprensione da parte delle istituzioni. Non fornisce consulenza medica, diagnosi, istruzioni di emergenza né raccomandazioni terapeutiche personalizzate. La malattia di Addison e la crisi surrenalica devono essere gestite secondo il piano clinico individuale del paziente e sotto la guida di professionisti sanitari. La crisi surrenalica è un’emergenza medica e richiede un trattamento immediato e un’assistenza medica urgente (NICE, 2024).

Uno dei fraintendimenti più pericolosi…
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The Dangerous Invisibility of Addison’s Disease

~ YIN Renlong

Medical note: This article is intended for general education, disability awareness and institutional understanding. It does not provide medical advice, diagnosis, emergency instructions or individualized treatment recommendations. Addison’s disease and adrenal crisis require management according to the individual patient’s clinical plan and professional medical guidance. Adrenal crisis is a medical emergency and requires immediate treatment and urgent medical care (NICE, 2024).

One of the most dangerous misunderstandings about Addison’s disease begins with something apparently reassuring: a person may…
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What an Addisonian/Adrenal Crisis Taught Me About Computer Failure, and When a System Can No Longer Compensate…

~ YIN Renlong

Medical note: This essay uses Addison’s disease and adrenal crisis as a systems-level analogy for thinking about computer failure. It is intended only as conceptual and educational discussion. It is not medical advice, diagnosis, or a treatment guide. Adrenal crisis is a potentially life-threatening medical emergency; suspected adrenal crisis requires urgent medical assessment and treatment according to established emergency guidance and the individual patient’s clinical plan (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence [NICE], 2024; Bornstein et al.,…
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How a VPS Turned a Network Failure Into a Full-System Outage (Tracing a Cloudflare WARP Failure from DNS Errors to Disk Exhaustion)

~ YIN Renlong

I was not looking for an interesting systems failure. I was expecting a boring one.

On August 16, 2026, I received an UptimeRobot notification saying that one of my WordPress sites had gone down. This was running on a very small Scaleway VPS, and my first thought was almost automatic: the disk was probably full again. I had seen that kind of problem before. UpdraftPlus could leave backup archives on a small root filesystem, free space would disappear, WordPress would…
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Deletion Is a Claim, Not a Command: Can “Deleted” Ever Be a Promise?

~ YIN Renlong

After finishing a long investigation into Git deletion, I thought the difficult part was over. The repository had been the experiment; the broader lesson seemed to be that deletion has several observable states. Then a more uncomfortable question appeared. If a system says that something is deleted, what exactly is it claiming, who defines the scope of that claim, and who gets to decide when the process is truly finished?

I documented the original technical investigation in Deleting in Git…
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Deleting in Git and Rethinking (Philosophically) Deletion as a System Design Question

~ YIN Renlong

Yesterday I removed a file that no longer belonged in one of my Git repositories. It had already been committed and pushed several times, so rather than simply deleting the current copy, I decided to clean up the corresponding history as well.

What looked like a straightforward maintenance task became more complicated once I started verifying the result. The file disappeared from the current branch, then from reachable history, but some of the old commit IDs could still be resolved…
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