Superposition © Ryoji Ikeda
(upscaled by SRCNN)

About

A personal website of Allantea.

About me

My name is Liao-Liao（了了）. You can call me Allantea (/alˈlɑnteɑ/) or Leo (phonetically similar to Liao). You can contact me via liu [dot] liaoliao [at] outlook [dot] com or telegram. If you don't know how to use PGP then I don't guarrante you a response.

PGP

Fingerprint: A298 4E4E 75FA 186F 8856 A2AD A8E1 49DA 73E6 4369

You can obtain the key via:

# from GitHub
curl https://github.com/LiaoliaoLiu.gpg | gpg --import

# from my website
curl https://allantea.com/allantea.gpg | gpg --import

I cherish my name. Name, as a concept, has meaning and it's important in the culture I grew up in (if you know D&D, think about truename) . But I found that pronouncing iao is as hard as spellcasting for non-Chinese speakers. Luckily, in Coming of Age（加冠）, we got the responsibility to give ourselves courtesy names. However, this tradition was shamelessly lost in contemporary China. I can only grant myself Allantea, an exotic name. I don't play Genshin but you can pronounce it just like Alhaitham. And I treat it as anabaptism.

Currently, I don't hold any qualifications for the things I write about. But I did get some real training and experience in mathematics/computer science/control theory. I never consider myself a scholar and never want to be one. I am a down-to-earth engineer who cannot tolerate things just work in a nondeterministic Turing machine way.

But being an all-time bottom-up engineer also just works. I am not satisfied with it too. 'You are a classic PhD student!' Prof. Yvonne Coady said to me. I think this facet made people regard me as an austere academic type. No, I am not. I just get the feeling that there're problems I cannot even address. If I could define myself, that would be an 'artisan'. This self-identity traces back to itches I developed very young: I didn't feel comfortable to get an A in an exam without ever having the idea how the exam was made. They still exist today and propagate my every deed like cancer cells.

In the foreseeable future, I want to be an artisan in Distributed Systems field because I got a spectacular feeling when I was learning how The Internet functions on TCP/IP and forms the lives we have today. It's the same feeling when I was viewing Église Saint-Pierre de Caen. I was a mechanical engineering student then.

In case you really want a qualification (if it counts)

I have pathological passions for DevOps and Ricing when there's no new Zelda installment. They help the goal a lot.

Main interests

  • Distributed Systems: storage, computation, and communication; order matters
  • Programming Language/Theoretical computer science/Linguistics
    • I played with scheme using SICP. The implementation of a scheme interpreter gave me invisible but fundamental influences.
    • I tried to learn Functional Programming with Haskell seriously, but gave up, not because I was filtered by monad, not all who wander are lost.
    • Chomsky is one of my "idols" for both Manufacturing Consent and Syntactic Structures.
  • Neuroscience and Cybernetics
  • Robotics: I was a research assistant in a project called Task Autonomous Medical Robot for two years.
  • Literature of any kind, most of my readings are fiction and poetries if research papers and monographs don't count.

These interests share a common goal: I want to understand human, more precisely, human's thoughts.

Mathematics isn't listed because the language for math smells, in a way that's similar to C++ smells, especially when all the wielder cares are getting the job done. And my work doesn't really involve math but arithmetics for a very long time.

I treat my tools as the extensions of my body. So in my spare time, I love tinkering with my operating systems to achieve parallelism, pipelining, and common case first. I don't consider myself a nerd because I also enjoy meeting people. I love bartending. I shot the first picture in my kitchen. I do a little bit of composing. I listen to some experimental music. The header image you see is Ryoji Ikeda's superposition, which I am not going to talk about because I don't have the capability and that will only expose my snobbery. I am also a big fan of poetry. My favorite poem is Tagore's In one salutation to Thee. (If you are a native Chinese speaker, read 冰心's translation.)

bartending
composing
superposition
yeats

Love is something I cannot control, so I make it my highest value1. I stole the phrase from Jordan Peterson even I will never use agape as the alternative for unconditional love. But I can control hatred. Control doesn't necessarily mean I won't hate. Don't say I didn't tell your first.

About this site

The site is built by Next.js. I am proud of using a complex framework to create a basic static website. One could argue that it's a Rube Goldberg machine. Who care? I got the granularity I want. Cloudflare is used as CDN. CSS and graphic design decisions are made solely of my intuition with discipline. I didn't create a ToC component because, even if I did, it won't cover mobile devices. Desktop users can get rid of coddling by tons of similar extensions.

Thanks 「漢字標準格式」 for incentivizing me to build a place where I can express my excessive ego. I've long since thought about it but typography using CSS and HTML is a nightmare if I want to achieve the same level of decency.

The non-encrypted content (pages that have explicit entries) on this site, unless otherwise stated, is released under the CC BY 4.0 license. Please refer to the Creative Commons website.

I won't track your IP and your user agent and I have zero interest and time in diving deep into the interactions between Cloudflare and Nginx. But, really, don't trust anyone who says this, me included. Protect your privacy even though I am using my legal name for this site. People like me really can do something bad and you won't even notice.

Link (exchange)

Link exchange is welcome, as long as you bear the ego I want.
W. B. Yeats Collection 叶芝中文网

The W. B. Yeats Collection website is my craft built with Gastby out of my love, or, more likely, simping, to someone. It's the love that I figured out why love is the highest value. Man gotta experience it, sooner or later, in one way or the other. But if I could go back in time, I would choose to never experience it. It hurts. But it's beautiful.

Footnotes

  1. I am referring to amor perfectissimus. I don't know what it really is. The closest but seemingly contradictory definition I could write down is "reciprocal unconditional love". ↩