Now that one-twelfth of 2025 has passed, I’ve finally found a spare moment to hurriedly pen this so-called “year-end summary.” The past year was even more challenging than 2023. Like before, I was brimming with ambition, faced repeated failures, and often found myself groping through the dark alone. But even in the darkest nights, I saw stars winking above. In the end, all I want to say is: “Joy turns to sorrow, recognizing that all things wax and wane.”
Coding Chronicles
In 2024, I made 112 contributions on GitHub, surpassing my 2023 tally. I worked on some UI inspired by sudden flashes of insight and lines of code enriched by ChatGPT’s wisdom. Beyond this, I also uploaded the source code of this blog to GitHub.
In 2023, I frequently changed the theme of my blog, which was built on Typecho. In 2024, spurred by registering the new domain, I transitioned to Hugo—a much more user-friendly system. After studying numerous resources, I managed to deploy and migrate the blog just before the school year started. I’ll likely stick with Hugo for the long term. If I find more free time this year, I’d like to dive into Hugo theme development and craft a design best suited to this blog.
Be a Person with Poetry in Their Heart
In late January, I attended the “Kunpeng Youth Sci-Fi Literature Award” ceremony with several fellow student representatives. As we waited for the event to begin, a group of noisy elementary school students chattered in front of us, and the organizers endlessly looped promotional videos on the big screen. It was all quite grating.
The atmosphere only lightened after the awards ceremony concluded, when the winners delivered their acceptance speeches. One winner passionately declared that sci-fi literature represents profound reflections on both science and humanity, and a great sci-fi work can guide the direction of the future. I realized that a truly thought-provoking sci-fi piece must possess a “dual perspective”: gazing toward the future while being deeply rooted in reality. It needs both the “telescope” to dream of the stars and the “microscope” to dissect human nature—a blend of imagination and insight.
Later in the year, I was selected as one of six representatives from my grade to participate in a district-level essay competition. The high school topic, “My AI Friend,” left me stunned. Writing an argumentative or explanatory essay didn’t seem compelling, and even writing a narrative about my user experience felt uninspired. After much deliberation, I submitted a subpar sci-fi story.
The journey back was in the twilight. A friend remarked on how tiring it was to spend over two hours writing an essay, which dampened her love for literature. Peering out the bus window, I saw November’s wind scattering dust across the sky. The sunset filtered through the haze, creating a golden ribbon of light that reminded me of Márquez’s La luz es como el agua. With a mind both foggy and reflective, I felt a bittersweet ache.
I suddenly recalled a line from Dead Poets Society: “The crowd without faith surges endlessly; the city is filled with ignorance. What’s the meaning of living in it? The self? Life? The answer lies in your existence, your irreplaceable existence.”
It feels like living in a highly developed information age has worn down our “edges.” Like a brand-new piece of clothing that inevitably shows wear and tear no matter how carefully it is handled, our once-sharp confidence has been dulled by the realization of our own limitations. Those ideals we once thought were within arm’s reach now feel like distant dreams, the proverbial “poetry and the faraway places.” Never before have we been so acutely aware of the gaps—between ourselves and our peers, between the past and the present, between our aspirations and reality. Our thoughts have grown more mature, our vision broader, yet at times we find ourselves more cynical, even more prone to despair. We are painfully aware that we are on a path we must take, but every step forward is marked by a sting of hardship.
Our generation feels like a wool sweater thrown into a spin cycle—whirled around by the high-speed demands of academics, the bleaching agents of exam rankings, and the tumble-drying effect of six hours of sleep a night. In the end, we come out pilled and misshapen, only to iron ourselves smooth by morning and pretend to be the latest display in a store window.
Even if we admit that we are beaten time and time again, we cannot abandon the faith to rise and fight once more. Even if we feel trapped and embittered by the concrete and steel cages around us, it doesn’t stop us from striving to transform ourselves and enrich our lives.
I once saw a post on a classmate’s blog with an illustration that read: “We don’t need to be poets, but we must have poetry in our hearts.(我们不用做诗人，但要做心中有诗的人。)”
Modern people emphasize the idea of having “poetry in their hearts,” which, at its core, is a resistance against collective sensory numbness. I’ve observed commuters on the subway: the same glowing phone screens, the same weary expressions, as if they were standardized data packets being transmitted through fiber-optic cables. Yet, when someone notices their reflection in the window or becomes engrossed in a physical book, that moment captures the truest essence of poetic sentiment. This ability is not about superficial elegance or romanticized pretensions but a defense mechanism to prevent oneself from becoming “shaped” as a mere tool of capital.
Before the summer break, a senior returned to our school as a young author to give a talk. After the session, I hurried to the front, first practically asking for her autograph, then taking the opportunity to ask her some questions about literary creation. During our conversation, she recommended a poetry collection by Wang Jibing. His poems, deeply rooted in real life, sprout from the soil of reality with an idealistic spirit, exuding a realist charm.
I remember at the beginning of high school, I met a classmate from the next class who brought a collection of Guo Moruo’s poems, inherited from his father, to school and enjoyed them in his spare time. Last year, while writing a travelogue during a study trip to Changsha, I accidentally came across a “hidden gem” of a Bilibili creator dedicated to spreading the beauty of classical poetry. It made me realize that most people’s hearts are still filled with poetry.
Of course, true poetic sentiment isn’t merely about writing, reading, or appreciating verse. It lies in reconstructing an aesthetic of survival to resist the numbing effects of modern materialistic society.
The real dilemma faced by our generation is that even “letting our minds wander” has become a skill we need to learn. Various platforms teach people about so-called meditation, mindfulness, and spiritual healing, inadvertently turning rest into yet another KPI. Having poetry in one’s heart, however, allows for a sense of “aimlessness”—even if it produces no quantifiable value, it can still give time a tangible texture.
The Future is Coming
In 2017, when Google researchers designed the Transformer model, they likely couldn’t imagine it becoming the foundation of general artificial intelligence (AGI). By 2022, when I first heard about a company called OpenAI and its chatbot model, I was scrambling to find a platform to register for ChatGPT.
Fast forward to 2024, and tools like Qwen 2.5 and DeepSeek were making waves. I deployed these models in our classroom computers using Ollama for offline information retrieval.
I remember back in middle school, when faced with difficult questions, we would mostly turn to classmates or teachers for help, or search on Baidu or Google. Now, when encountering confusion, we can simply ask Doubao or ChatGPT and quickly obtain relatively accurate answers. The once primitive yet universal process of knowledge transmission and cognitive training has been swept away by the tide of AI. The moment we open an AI-powered conversation webpage, our ways of thinking and paths of understanding have already begun to shift quietly.
Some may worry that artificial intelligence could lead to job losses, widen wealth gaps, or constrain human thinking. These concerns are reasonable, but they should not be overstated. AI is merely a powerful tool; as the saying goes, “A gentleman uses objects without being used by them.(君子使物，不为物使)” AI itself is not frightening—what’s frightening is the inability to think independently and the lack of common sense. With DeepSeek r1, for example, you can throw a complex question at it and get a theoretical framework in under a minute. Yet when it comes to deep analysis, overreliance on such tools could lead to mental atrophy, causing us to lose the ability for profound thought. By outsourcing the task of “finding answers” to AI, we may also quietly abandon our capacity for “formulating questions.”
From another perspective, AI has broken the traditional boundaries of cognition. It allows us to transcend the limitations of time and space, enabling access to vast amounts of new knowledge anytime and anywhere. Faced with this world-changing technology, the key is to remain clear-headed: treat AI as a “Search Engine Pro,” not as a “brain extension.” For humans, AI should not replace thinking; instead, questioning and probing AI can stimulate deeper levels of cognition.
Will AI replace some human jobs? Yes, but most professions won’t be abandoned by humanity simply because of AI’s efficiency. As technology advances, the finest creations increasingly require surpassing mere instrumental rationality. When AI eliminates technical barriers, human creativity is instead driven toward more essential realms: the nuanced experience of existence, the capacity to embrace cognitive chaos, and the raw rebellious spirit that persists even within the confines of tools.
Perhaps the creators of the future will be those who can master AI while deliberately preserving their personal style, those who skillfully utilize algorithms yet insist on creating surprises. When I first experimented with Stable Diffusion, MidJourney, Pika, and Suno AI, I wondered whether everyone might one day become a digital artist. But I soon realized my own lack of “creative inspiration.” Despite appreciating countless works by others, I often found myself unsure of what I wanted to create. Thus, even if future AI achieves extraordinary capabilities in art and music, only a small number of individuals are likely to truly become artists or musicians. Similarly, while AI can code, this doesn’t mean everyone will become a programmer.
Looking Back, Reflecting on the Present
In 2024, I read Xin Qiji’s Zhegutian (鹧鸪天), which resonates deeply with my year’s journey:
In youth, I led armies, banners unfurled,
Riding forth with armored troops to cross the rivers’ swirl.
By night, Yan’s soldiers polished their silver bows,
At dawn, Han’s arrows flew to fell the enemy’s throes.
Reflecting now, on past glories and dreams,
I sigh at my white beard, untouched by spring’s gleam.
Once, I held strategies to bring peace to the land,
But now, I trade them for a neighbor’s book on planting trees by hand.
At the age of twenty-three, Xin Qiji led fifty horsemen in a daring charge into the enemy camp, capturing the traitorous general Zhang Anguo and riding through the night to present the prisoner in Jiankang. Over forty years later, this legendary feat was immortalized in his poem Zhegutian with the line, “Once, I held strategies to bring peace to the land, but now, I trade them for a neighbor’s book on planting trees by hand.” By then, however, Xin Qiji had transformed from the bold young general who wielded his spear into an old man planting trees with white hair. When the pro-peace faction regained control of the court, the former leading figure of the pro-war camp penned his most heartrending elegy.
Half of high school has already passed. During my first year, I came to fully realize how different this phase was from the “idyllic” days of middle school. Back then, I prided myself on being open-hearted and exceptionally talented, yet those carefree adolescent years vanished like morning dew, leaving me astonished at time’s ruthless swiftness. Now in high school, I’m driven by relentless ambition. Though blessed with abilities and ideals, my actions often resemble hasty sketches rather than deliberate strokes. My academic rankings reveal a gap between my current standing and the lofty goals I set long ago. There are reasons: my English scores lag significantly behind classmates due to vocabulary deficiencies - the landmines planted during years of neglect finally detonated with devastating force. As the ancient verse goes, “The road ahead is long and arduous; I shall search ceaselessly high and low.(路漫漫其修远兮，吾将上下而求索)”
This year saw me actively participating in group activities, even earning mentions in our school’s official social media posts. I choose optimism as my compass, hoping future me will carve a radiant path from present struggles. Yet it pains me - in youth we envision infinite possibilities, until daily trivialities, failures, and conformity gradually erode our curiosity. We increasingly crave comfort, losing not just our pride, but also the surging passion, courage, and vitality that once pulsed through our veins during our rebellious phases.
This inaugural high school year contained multitudes: soaring ambitions and repeated defeats, solitary groping through darkness punctuated by moments catching stars winking in the night sky. Memories and regrets linger like the moon playing hide-and-seek behind classroom buildings at dusk, or spring sunshine on dormitory balconies rippling through my consciousness. These experiences force me to acknowledge how this self-chosen high school has fundamentally shaped me. The three years here cannot be meaningless - their significance already weaves through my personal narrative. Perhaps the story itself is the meaning.
On this fresh page of life, I inscribe these words: “Your existence is ultimately your own to command. Embrace independence, accumulate experiences, vanquish your weaknesses before others exploit them. Construct your sanctuary with your own hands, yet summon the courage to reduce it to ashes when necessary—for true growth ignites in the crucible of self-revolution. Be phoenix-proud: perching only on wutong trees, drinking only from crystalline springs. Learn to embrace the agonizing flames of rebirth—they are both destroyers and life-givers. Within their fury, you’ll discover your most authentic self.”
So be it. My spirit remains luminous—what more need be said? As part of China’s most vital young generation, even when fate frowns and challenges roar like tigers, we shall transmute our passion into blades of purpose. Let this body forever serve the nation—why crave passage through jade gates when devotion becomes our frontier?(愿得此身长报国，何须生入玉门关？)
Finale: Radiant New Year!
