Society on Fengyu WANG

Refuse to Change, and It's Over

Sat, 31 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

History offers a coincidence: two men named Wang An, nine hundred years apart, dead of the same disease. One built a company from a Boston garage to a valuation that overtook IBM, then went bankrupt within six years. The other turned an empire in a new direction, then watched his reforms repealed one day at a time after his death. Hang their stories side by side, and the diagnosis sheet is the same.

Rearview-Mirror Epistemology

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

In 2021 I bought a star fund and later lost half of it. I am the one who got trapped at minus 50%, and I intend to remember this moment for the rest of my life. What I want to remember isn’t the pain. It’s a principle: every piece of evidence that made me bet came from a rearview mirror.

The Rearview Mirror

It started with a question: doesn’t the Sharpe ratio feel like inspecting an asset through a rearview mirror? It measures how much return you got per unit of risk — but every number it uses is historical net-asset value. My fund’s Sharpe was around 1.2 in 2019 and 2020, with annual returns of 55% and 95%; by 2024 the same figure was negative. The metric hadn’t become false; the road had changed. The flat, straight road in the mirror only ever described what was behind you.

Open Source Is Immortality

Tue, 27 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

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.

This Didn't Have to Happen

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

On August 26, 2025, a glacial lake burst in Nepal, and a debris flow ran 42 kilometers down the gorge in 90 minutes, hitting the Gyirong border crossing at half past ten in the morning. In the surveillance footage, less than five seconds passed between the debris flow showing itself and swallowing the parking lot; buses and heavy trucks were knocked over like paper. The reports at the time: three dead, more than five hundred missing.

The Rich Are Rich Because They Do the Math

Mon, 19 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Hong Kong phone plans come in two kinds: prepaid SIMs, top up and use, and contract plans that bind you for 24 months. I’ve been on prepaid for six years — three hundred HKD a year, tops. A contract? I ran the numbers once: defaulting at worst costs you twelve thousand. So I never understood people who sign contracts — until I put every defense on trial, one by one, and the trial ended at my own doorstep.

The Poor Pay an Attention Tax

Tue, 13 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The day the typhoon made landfall, I was among the last to know. My attention was elsewhere; only at the door did I discover the buses had stopped, and I walked home pushing my suitcase into the wind. Friends call that focus. I say no — it’s a place where I get a discount. The discount has a technical name; I’ll get to it.

First, the tax. I once noticed something: the poorer a person is, the more of his time goes to taking out the trash, buying household supplies, checking today’s weather. Days filled with these chores leave no room for thinking about the things that actually matter. There is no tax office for this levy, no bill. Everyone pays it anyway. I call it the attention tax.

Impotent After One Hour of Gaming. Eighteen Hours of Code, No Problem.

Fri, 14 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Gaming, I go impotent after one hour — call it cyber impotence. Coding, not at all. Eighteen hours straight, no problem.

Same screen, same chair. Where’s the difference? Games are consumption: the goals were designed by someone else, the rewards written by someone else; you’re grinding levels in a world somebody else owns. After an hour, the dopamine bill is settled, and what’s left is emptiness. Code is production: the problem is yours, the solution is yours, and the world now contains one more small thing because of you. Eighteen hours isn’t enough, because behind every solution stands the next problem.

Businesses with Long-Term High Margins

Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Long-term high-margin businesses keep their books in the columns of human nature that never change.

Greed, fear, loneliness, vanity — these entries have not been revised in millennia. Technology iterates, trends expire, human nature never gets a patch. So the industries that keep producing windfalls collect the same emotions from the same species: speculation collects greed and hope, supplements collect the fear of death, credit collects desire and impatience, the emotion economy collects loneliness. Only the shell changes — alchemy then, “longevity science” now; gambling dens then, derivatives now.

First Principles of Making Money

Wed, 01 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000

People throw the phrase “first principles” around as a slogan. I treat it as a tool for dissection: keep asking “what is this built on,” layer by layer, until you hit bedrock. The chain below is what I got when I dissected “making money” that way. Eight layers.

The chain itself

The first principle of making money is creating value, not selling time. The first principle of creating value is solving problems, not providing labour. The first principle of solving problems is identifying real needs, not self-indulgence. The first principle of identifying real needs is practical feedback, not working in isolation. The first principle of practical feedback is fast iteration, not polishing to perfection. The first principle of fast iteration is validating the model, not shipping for its own sake. The first principle of validating the model is systemising it, not grinding alone. The first principle of systemising is leverage, not linear accumulation.

A Bank Teller's Existential Crisis

Sat, 30 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

At nine in the morning the shutter rises: the name retires, the staff number clocks in. Six years as a teller is not worth pitying. It is worth dissecting — this job runs every symptom of the service economy through a single window.

Symptom one: time. In year one he watched the clock. By year six he stopped — not from habit, but from switching himself from a person who experiences time to a machine that runs a process: customer arrives, handle, leave. The hard part is never the rush. It is the empty gaps between customers. Behind bulletproof glass, with nothing to do and no one to talk to, only one thing remains: facing his own consciousness. The question “what am I doing” surfaces only in the gaps. Busyness is the anaesthetic; the gaps are the disease.

The Rapid Development of Artificial Intelligence

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The rapid advancement of AI has a highly differentiated impact on different economies. For economies that occupy the lower-end of the technology chain and rely on large-scale labour as their engine, this impact first manifests as economic urgency.

Take parts of Southeast Asia as an example. Their past competitiveness did not come from technological advantage. It came from the scale and cost advantage of their labour force. This is a development path that compensates for efficiency through quantity. As AI increasingly replaces standardised intellectual and manual labour, the sustainability of this path is being fundamentally shaken.