The Real Freedom

When I finished my college entrance examination, I was about to make my choice of major. At that time, there was a popular steamer Xuefeng Zhang who recommended us to choose computer science as our major and avoid majors like biology, chemistry, environment and material. He even called the four majors as the "four deep pits". I'm pretty sure that he didn't know computing chemistry at that time. However, his words actually make sense at a prospective.

Try to remind yourself a article Xiao Yao You¹ by Zhuang Zhou, In the end of the article, he mentioned some people like Song Rongzi, Lie Zi. Such people have excellent ability but they still eventually depend on something else to achieve their abilities. He argued that someone who don't depend on anything else can achieve the ultimate "Xiao Yao"(freedom). Bake to the argue of major choice, some majors like experimental biology, chemistry depend on expensive instruments and materials, which makes it impossible to learn and research them freely. On the contrary, most aspects of computer science only depends on an arbitrary computer, which is relatively cheap and easy to get. Therefore, computer science is a major that can achieve real freedom.

In our real life, we inevitably depend on various external things. We depend on air, water and food to survive, we depend on internet infrastructure to access the digital world. Anywise, anyone who uses computers eventually depend on ASML lithography no matter they use TSMC, Samsung or Intel process. So the absolute freedom is impossible to achieve.

Albeit this fact, we can still pursue relative freedom to give us more choices and possibilities. We can choose open source software to avoid the bondage of proprietary software. We can choose ARM architecture to avoid the monopoly of x86 architecture. We can choose RISC-V architecture to avoid the bondage of big chip companies. We can choose Linux operating system to avoid the bondage of Windows operating system. We can choose SYCL instead of CUDA to avoid vendor lock-in. All these choices can give us more freedom to us for diversified possibilities.

In conclusion, real freedom is hard to achieve absolutely, but we can still pursue relative freedom in our life. By making wise choices, we can achieve more possibilities and opportunities in our life.

Glossary

1. Xiao Yao You — The version of this article I learned stops at "至人无己，神人无功，圣人无名" Back to text ↑