Signal 信号
A camera roll kept since 2023, a WeChat studio launched in August 2026, LinkedIn as a public notebook, a home-built bilingual subtitle pipeline — and the long making-of of the site you are reading.
Fig. 8 — A camera roll as the record of where the walk actually went.
- 2023 140
- 2024 1,310
- 2025 1,574
- 2026 923
Sep 2023 → Aug 2026 · 2026 counts run to August.
- videos, Sep 2023 → Aug 2026
- 3,947
- contain speech (of 3,943 scanned)
- 1,052
- LinkedIn followers (public snapshot, 16 Apr 2026)
- 888
- WeChat studio launched — WeChat Official Account (公众号) and WeChat Channels (视频号)
- Aug 2026
Next phase
Memory Galaxy — Phase 2
Each star a video, lit only by aggregates until clips are individually approved.
Aggregates only — no clip, file name or transcript is published.
The record
Some of the record keeps itself: nearly four thousand videos on a phone since 2023, a LinkedIn headline frozen in 2024, a first personal website. This chapter is the signal — what was published, what was kept, and how it is being turned into something others can watch.
In August 2026 a WeChat studio began turning the archive into short videos, with a pipeline that has already found the speech in over a thousand clips — and a rule that a person always presses publish. A home-built bilingual subtitle engine carries the pitch videos. Only aggregates appear here; the clips stay private.
And a making-of: a first prototype of this site in August, a blunt critique a month later — not enough light, achievements hard to find — and the plate you saw on the front page as the answer.
Light painting, 2023
In May 2023 a portfolio of light-painting photographs came together: long exposures in which a moving light draws paths that accumulate on the sensor over several seconds. It is the direct ancestor of this site's central image — a dark plate on which the paths of thousands of walkers accumulate into light.
Completed
Five headlines in fourteen months
LinkedIn's email footers keep a quiet record of the profile's one-line headline: ‘student in Tianjin University’ in July 2023; a day later, ‘Applied Math Student @Tianjin University // Transforming Complexity into Simplicity’; then the same with a line seeking UK summer internships; then back to the plain applied-maths student; and from 20 September 2024, ‘Engineering Mathematics Student @University of Bristol’. That last one has not changed since — not for the PhD, the fellowship or the company role. This site is, in part, the overdue headline update.
Completed
A camera roll as a diary: 3,947 videos
An inventory of the personal camera roll in August 2026 counted 3,947 videos shot between 3 September 2023 and 27 August 2026 — 140 in 2023, 1,310 in 2024, 1,574 in 2025 and 923 in 2026 up to August. Month by month, the counts trace the seasons of a life: quiet stretches, and surges whenever a new city or a new project began. Only these aggregates are published; the clips themselves stay private. They are the raw material for the WeChat studio.
Completed
- Videos
- 3,947
- By year (2023 · 2024 · 2025 · 2026)
- 140 · 1,310 · 1,574 · 923
LinkedIn as a public notebook
Until this site, LinkedIn was the de facto public page: the QR codes on the enterprise poster and on the ambassador posters point there, and so, for most of 2026, did zhouyixiaoxiao.com. Its posts are the milestones — starting the PhD, the enterprise fellowship, the festival pitch. The profile had 888 followers at an April 2026 snapshot.
A first personal website
On 3 October 2024 a LinkedIn post announced a first personal website, built a few months after the Tianjin maths guide. Its launch essay was a small personal credo: real freedom exists within constraints, and a game is most fun just beyond your comfort zone. Read again now, it describes a random walker in a bounded box. The address you are reading spent most of 2026 as a redirect to LinkedIn; this site is the third attempt.
Published
Food philosophy, PhD edition
A LinkedIn post set out a ‘food philosophy, PhD edition’ as an optimisation problem: stay reliably fed without leaving the office too often. Two objectives — speed (under fifteen minutes a meal, often under ten, because other work runs in parallel while a potato is in the microwave) and cost — and one hard constraint: nutrition must be complete, macro and micro. It is a joke, and it is also exactly how everything else on this site gets decided.
Published
‘Starting a new position as PhD Student’
On 21 November 2025 a one-line LinkedIn post shared the news: ‘I'm happy to share that I'm starting a new position as PHD Student at University of Bristol!’ — and the profile photo changed the same evening. A small post for a long walk: the PhD it announced is Chapter 01.
Published
Announcing the fellowship
A LinkedIn post in February 2026 announced the appointment as a University of Bristol Early Career Enterprise Fellow for 2026, describing the PhD research on random walks and first-passage phenomena on graphs, and how it can inform decisions under uncertainty — the same mathematics that became BioPath.
Published
Ink wash with a single red
Two vertical images made with AI image generation under close art direction: a Chinese ink-wash landscape with a red sun, a pagoda, cranes, deer and a lone boat, made as a red-envelope cover in February 2026, and a remix with red lanterns and a gate for the Lunar New Year. Monochrome ink and a single vermilion accent — the palette this site is built on.
Completed
A home-built bilingual subtitle pipeline
The local build of ffmpeg shipped without a subtitle renderer, so subtitles took another route: every bilingual cue is rendered as a transparent image and overlaid, in chunks of about ninety seconds processed in parallel — roughly twenty times faster, with an 8 min 44 s 4K clip rendered in about two and a half minutes. A native Swift tool followed in July, and caption rules in August: at most two lines, 18 Chinese or 46 English characters per line, zero overlaps, and a terminology audit.
Shipped
‘First-Passage Universe’: the first prototype of this site
The first design for this site, in August 2026, was a canvas of eight artboards: a particle-field hero, a prologue, a memory galaxy, a two-trajectory timeline, a digital twin and a research page. Reopened a month later, it earned a blunt verdict — no feeling of light and gradient, and no way to see the achievements — and a sharper brief followed: disruptive, playful, deeply artistic, strongly interactive, and a real summary of everything so far. The luminous plate on the front page, with the achievements beside it, is the answer.
Completed
Finding the speech in 3,947 videos
A resumable background pipeline exported each video, extracted its audio, deleted the intermediate file and ran voice-activity detection, all under an adaptive disk budget on a machine short of space. Over about thirty-six hours it processed 3,943 of the 3,947 videos with no outstanding failures, and flagged 1,052 as containing speech. Only these counts are published; the speech itself includes other people's voices and stays private.
Completed
- Videos with speech
- 1,052
A WeChat content studio
In August 2026 an AI-assisted studio was set up to turn years of phone footage into short videos for WeChat Channels (视频号) and a WeChat Official Account (公众号). Four goals frame it: map every video in the archive; build a voice and a digital presence with clear AI disclosure; profile the speaking style and suggest how to improve it; and semi-automate publishing — with the final ‘publish’ click always made by a person. The transcription route is chosen and the pipeline is built; the topic map, and a ‘memory galaxy’ for this site, come next.
Launched
This site: First Passage, Nº 01
The site you are reading, in its first edition: a live first-passage experiment in which walkers leave Tianjin and search a luminous plate of 2021 to now for whatever you choose to measure. It replaces the page that, since April 2026, simply forwarded zhouyixiaoxiao.com to LinkedIn. It was designed and built with a large team of AI agents working to one specification, with every fact drawn from a verified, privacy-tagged record — and nothing private shipped.
Nº 01 · live
Evidence ledger
| Date | Item | Status | Links |
|---|---|---|---|
| Light painting, 2023 | Completed | no public link | |
| Five headlines in fourteen months | Completed | ||
| A camera roll as a diary: 3,947 videos | Completed | no public link | |
| LinkedIn as a public notebook | Ongoing | ||
| A first personal website | Published | no public link | |
| Food philosophy, PhD edition | Published | no public link | |
| ‘Starting a new position as PhD Student’ | Published | ||
| Announcing the fellowship | Published | no public link | |
| Ink wash with a single red | Completed | no public link | |
| A home-built bilingual subtitle pipeline | Shipped | no public link | |
| ‘First-Passage Universe’: the first prototype of this site | Completed | no public link | |
| Finding the speech in 3,947 videos | Completed | no public link | |
| A WeChat content studio | Launched | no public link | |
| This site: First Passage, Nº 01 | Nº 01 · live | no public link |