I once did reliability engineering on my own data. On my books, that 180,000-yuan house was never real estate — it was a 100TB personal data center: dual-site redundancy, targeting five nines past ten nines of reliability — one failure in a billion runs. Disks die, so I kept copies; houses collapse, so I kept sites. When the blueprint was done, I reviewed it once more and found the one component no replica could cover.
The weakest link in this architecture is me getting physically destroyed. My own failure rate could not be pushed below ten to the minus nine, no matter how it was computed. And the conclusion is funnier: if I’m physically destroyed, I won’t need the research anymore either. You engineer a system down to a one-in-a-billion failure rate to protect a premise — you — that stops participating in the system the day it fails. At the end of reliability engineering stands a person, and a person is the first hardware in the stack to die.
Eleven Nines
Hardware dies, houses collapse, people expire. The race of nines ends at the flesh: ten nines is the limit of my disks, eleven nines is the limit of mathematics — and death is not a failure, it’s a shutdown. It never enters the reliability budget, because it never gets repaired.
So I’ve decided to open-source my entire architecture. The day I’m physically destroyed, my thinking will still exist. This is not sentiment; it’s an architecture decision. For a mind to outlive its body, it must first move out of the body — open source is that removal process: code, logic, and operations manuals carried out of my head into a place that doesn’t share my lifespan. The valuable part isn’t the code; it’s the documentation: why this factor was chosen, how survivorship bias was handled. Code is the answer. Documentation is the derivation — and the thinking lives in the derivation.
The Most Absurd Thing
But a bucket of cold water must be poured by my own hand: even if I open-source all of it, without marketing my GitHub gets zero stars — no one will ever understand how much of one person’s life went in there. Open source solves persistence, not propagation. A seed thrown into an unwatered field dies all the same. So immortality isn’t one action; it’s two: open source, plus propagation. The star count isn’t vanity; it’s the heartbeat monitor of an idea. That is also why I write this website: it’s the ventilation system for my own thinking.
Hometown
In other words, GitHub is actually my hometown. No property fees there, no calling the plumber; every commit is a stroke carved into a stone genealogy, and no matter where the body sits — Shenzhen, Huizhou, Tokyo — git pull always brings down the same home.
But it isn’t: my hometown is hosted on Microsoft. The territory, the sky, the power grid, the running water of this hometown are all Microsoft’s — GitHub is merely one province on Microsoft’s map. Immortality has no free tier, only a hosted plan: undying, but living after death on someone else’s servers.
I signed the contract. If someday my repository hands you a 404, that isn’t a lost page — that’s a whole hometown, genealogy and all, moving away.
