Modern urban life means long indoor hours, irregular meals, and lack of sunlight β all leading to serious nutritional imbalances. A recent checkup revealed I was severely deficient in Vitamin D, which pushed me to research modern nutrition in depth.
Even with a balanced diet, modern farming and food processing have reduced nutrient density. Depleted soil, over-processing, and long-distance transport and storage all contribute to nutrient loss.
While working on better eating habits, sensible supplementation is a practical way to maintain health.
This article is for reference only and does not constitute medical advice. Everyone's needs differ. Ideally, get tested and adjust your regimen based on your actual levels. Excessive intake of certain vitamins (especially fat-soluble A, D, E, K) can be toxic.
Always consult a doctor or registered dietitian before starting any supplement regimen, especially if you have chronic conditions, take medication, or are pregnant/nursing.
Finally, supplements are not a substitute for a balanced diet, regular exercise, good sleep, and sunlight.
Recommended intake: 800-1000 mcg RAE daily. 2000-5000 IU is safe. Don't exceed 10,000 IU/day.
Timing: After breakfast or lunch. Fat-soluble, needs fat for absorption.
Deficiency: Night blindness, dry eyes, skin issues, weakened immunity.
Food sources: Liver, dairy, egg yolk, fish liver oil. Plant sources (carrots, sweet potatoes, spinach) contain beta-carotene which converts poorly β roughly 1/12 the efficiency of animal sources.
π My regimen: 5000 IU daily, after lunch. Brand: Shuangjing Vitamin A softgels 5000 IU.
Recommended intake: Don't take individual B vitamins alone β take a complete B complex. Keep total daily intake under 50 mg.
Timing: Water-soluble, can be taken anytime. No fat needed.
B vitamins work together as enzyme cofactors. Taking the full spectrum is more effective than singles.
Deficiency: Beriberi (muscle weakness, edema, heart failure), nerve inflammation.
Sources: Brown rice, whole wheat, oats, soybeans, pork, sunflower seeds.
Deficiency: Mouth ulcers, cheilitis, glossitis, light sensitivity, blurred vision.
Sources: Liver, dairy, eggs, leafy greens, legumes.
Deficiency: Pellagra, skin irritation, diarrhea, dizziness, fatigue. Poor capillary circulation (cold hands/feet).
Sources: Fish, poultry, liver, whole grains, peanuts, mushrooms.
Deficiency: Rare. Fatigue, irritability, sleep disturbances, nausea.
Sources: Nearly all foods β liver, chicken, eggs, whole grains, broccoli, avocado.
Deficiency: Rare. Hair loss, skin inflammation, brittle nails.
Sources: Liver, egg yolk, milk, mushrooms, nuts. Gut bacteria also synthesize biotin.
Deficiency: Anemia, fatigue, birth defects (neural tube defects).
Sources: Liver, eggs, leafy greens, legumes, citrus. Easily destroyed by cooking.
Important: Women should supplement folate before and during pregnancy.
Deficiency: Megaloblastic anemia, neurological issues (numbness, memory loss), fatigue.
Sources: Almost exclusively animal products β liver, meat, fish, eggs, dairy. Vegans and elderly are at risk.
π My regimen:
Recommended intake: 100 mg is the minimum. 200 mg daily is better, 500 mg is optimal, 1000 mg when sick.
Timing: Water-soluble, anytime. Split doses if taking large amounts β the body has a limited absorption ceiling per dose.
Deficiency: Scurvy, weakened immunity, dry skin, fatigue, bleeding gums.
Food sources: Citrus, kiwi, strawberries, bell peppers, broccoli, leafy greens.
π My regimen: 100 mg daily, anytime. Brand: Northeast Pharma Vitamin C 100 mg tablets.
Vitamin D is essential for calcium homeostasis, bone health, and immune function.
Timing: Take with a meal containing fat for best absorption. Don't take at night β it can interfere with sleep.
Deficiency: Rickets, osteoporosis, weakened immunity, bone pain, muscle weakness.
Sources: Sunlight is the primary source (30 min/day). Also found in fish liver oil, salmon, egg yolk. Very hard to get enough from food alone.
Recommended intake: 800 IU maintenance. If deficient: 2000-5000 IU. If severely deficient: 5000-10,000 IU for a month, then retest.
Important notes:
π My regimen: 5000 IU daily, after breakfast with fatty food. Brand: Naturewise Vitamin D3 5000 IU.
Recommended intake: 15-20 mg daily.
Timing: With meals. Fat-soluble.
Deficiency: Neurodegenerative issues, muscle weakness, vision problems, weakened immunity.
Food sources: Vegetable oils, nuts and seeds (almonds, sunflower seeds), leafy greens.
π My regimen: A handful of nuts daily, or 1 capsule (100 mg) after lunch. Brand: Shuangjing Vitamin E 100 mg softgels.
Timing: With meals. Fat-soluble.
Deficiency: Rare in adults. Bleeding tendency, coagulation issues.
Food sources: K1 from leafy greens, K2 from liver and fermented foods (natto, cheese).
π My regimen: K2 (MK-7), 100 mcg daily, taken with Vitamin D3. MK-7 has a longer half-life and better bioavailability than MK-4.
2 capsules daily, one each with breakfast and lunch.
Brand: Viva Naturals Fish Oil (EPA 750 mg + DHA 284 mg + DPA 25 mg).
Mitochondrial fuel. 100 mg daily, after lunch with fish oil.
Brand: Doctor's Best High Absorption CoQ10 (with BioPerine for 30%+ better absorption).
Note: May be stimulating β avoid taking at night.
1 capsule daily, after breakfast. Pair with Vitamin C for better absorption.
Brand: Blackmores Lutein Defense (10 mg lutein + 2 mg zeaxanthin). Don't take at night.
D3 activator and sleep aid. ~200 mg, one hour before sleep.
Why: Long-term D3 supplementation depletes magnesium. Glycinate form is well-absorbed, gentle on the stomach, and promotes relaxation and sleep.
Avoid: Magnesium oxide β poor absorption, causes diarrhea.
Three times daily, one tablet each time.
Brand: Nandao Zinc Gluconate 70 mg tablets. Absorption rate is low, so higher dosage is needed.
]]>Original article (Chinese): Daily Nutrition Supplements
The problem isn't the mouth. It's the thinking. When people can't speak briefly, they usually haven't thought things through β or don't know which parts to keep.
Speaking has two layers.
Most people get stuck on the first layer. Short video, bullet comments, and instant messaging have trained us into "reflexive fragments" β we speak the moment we think, instead of thinking before we speak. Expression fragments, and the logical thread snaps. Polish the technique all you want; without the way, it won't carry.
Ask three questions before you speak:
Answer those and you've already cut the speech in half.
Here's a common mistake: treat concision as cutting every sentence to the bone, like a telegram.
That's wrong β especially at work. Strip out the polite buffers and the words turn hard. People aren't parsing your grammar; they're reading your attitude. Words like "maybe," "roughly," "if possible," "I think" look like filler, but they're lubricant. Cut too far and the meaning survives while the tone dies.
It's cognitive science.
Cognitive load theory, developed by John Sweller, rests on one premise: working memory is tiny. It holds only about four chunks of new information at once (Miller's classic 7Β±2, refined by later estimates to 4Β±1). Every redundant word occupies a slot. Fill the slots and whatever comes next simply falls out.
That's why this line from Strunk & White's The Elements of Style is worth memorizing:
Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts.
The same applies to speech. Every word you delete frees a slot in the listener's working memory. It's not a stylistic preference β it's respect for their attention.
Information theory makes an even harsher point.
In his 1951 guessing experiment, Shannon estimated that written English carries roughly 80% statistical redundancy β most of what you hear can be predicted from context. A 2025 PNAS study pushed further and separated out "semantic redundancy": about half of a sentence's uncertainty comes from its meaning, the other half from its wording.
In other words, rambling is the default of language. The brain naturally leaks filler because it costs nothing. Concise speech goes against nature β it has to be practiced on purpose.
This also explains a familiar annoyance: people who use recognizable words yet communicate nothing. Redundancy is meant to absorb noise, but too much of it becomes the noise. Cutting is not about zeroing out redundancy β a channel needs some slack β it's about removing the parts that carry nothing.
The military and journalists figured out the same thing long ago: put the conclusion first.
The U.S. military's communication standard is BLUF β Bottom Line Up Front. Give the bottom line, then the reasoning. Barbara Minto's "Pyramid Principle," developed at McKinsey, is the same logic: conclusion on top, evidence beneath, each layer supporting the one above. Journalistic writing uses the inverted pyramid: the most important information goes in the first paragraph, the rest in descending order of importance.
Why? Because listeners leave whenever they want. Spend five minutes on setup and your audience walks at second thirty, taking nothing with them. Lead with the conclusion and at least they leave with the one thing that mattered.
Same for everyday speech: give the result first, then the process; the recommendation first, then the reasoning. Don't make people guess what you're getting at.
Four drills. They're simple; consistency is the only trick.
Write it down, cut it in half. Write out what you want to say, then delete: every "actually" and "just" that doesn't change the meaning, every repetition, every bit of throat-clearing. Cut until you can't cut any more β then read it aloud. You'll find spoken language needs its own rhythm that writing doesn't.
Record yourself. Capture two minutes of impromptu speech and count the fillers: how many "so," "like," "you know," "um." The number will shock you β and then you'll stop.
Give a one-sentence recap. After explaining something complicated, add "in one sentence: β¦" and compress the whole thing to a line. Do it often enough and you'll start filtering before you speak.
Have someone verify. After you explain, ask: "Summarize it back in three sentences." If they can't, your message had waste in it.
Here's what these drills most often produce:
| Original | Concise | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| I actually haven't quite figured out the whole process yet, so I might still need some more time to double-check. | I haven't figured out the process yet β might need more time to confirm. | In formal settings, "I'm still working through the process" is more polished than "haven't figured out the process yet." |
| I don't think I've received that file yet β not sure if it was sent to the wrong place or just missed. | Haven't received the file β was it mis-sent or just missed? | To a boss or client, soften with "maybe it was missed?" The "maybe" takes the edge off the implied blame. |
| I understand what you mean, but I feel like maybe we could discuss it a bit more and see if there's another option. | I get what you mean β but let's see if there's another option. | "See if there's another direction" sounds even more collaborative. |
| Overall the plan is pretty good, but I feel like we might still need to polish the details a bit. | The plan is solid overall β let's polish the details. | "Let's polish" is a joint effort; "we need to polish" reads like criticism of the current version. |
| Sorry, I didn't quite catch that part just now β could you possibly say it again? | Sorry, I missed that β could you say it again? | Natural, polite, softener intact. Leave it alone. |
Being concise and being minimal aren't the same thing.
The real craft isn't word count. It's that the speech got shorter while the attitude survived β the meaning stayed the same and the tone improved. "We need to polish the details" is an inspection; "let's polish the details" is an invitation.
This is where a language's texture lives. The content doesn't change; a shift in tone and phrasing makes the difference between feeling criticized and feeling respected. How you speak is where emotional intelligence shows up in the room.
So practicing concision isn't practicing "talking less." It's three things:
Do all three and your speech shortens on its own β and stays short without turning harsh.
One: Bilibili's open-source project bilibili-API-collect received a legal demand letter and shut down. Two: a post on Linux.do, How I Treated a Hacker to Prison Food, in which a red-team investigator assembled a hacker's real identity from public information alone and got him sent to prison.
One person was traced by a company, the other by an individual. They point to the same fact: in the digital age, your identity is almost entirely built from public information. Protecting your privacy is about managing the links between your identities.
bilibili-API-collect (BAC) was started in 2020 by a developer known as "Yijie". In six years it accumulated 20.4k stars and 200+ contributors, effectively becoming the standard third-party API documentation for Bilibili. In late January 2026, the author received two letters from a law firm: a demand letter and a follow-up criticizing the "incomplete remediation." The letter alleged the project "systematically collected and organized Bilibili's non-public API interfaces, their calling logic, parameter structures, access controls, and security authentication mechanisms, and distributed them to the public in the form of technical documentation and code examples." The repository was deleted soon after. The full story is in the shutdown announcement and the author's follow-up reflection.
The timing is more telling. In early January 2026, Tencent had just filed a DMCA with GitHub against a batch of WeChat-related open-source projects, on the same grounds of "invading user privacy." When APIs become the chokepoint through which big tech controls data in the AI era, any channel that bypasses the official ecosystem gets shut down.
The author's framing: the internet is a dark forest. The government is the Singer, big companies are advanced civilizations, and individuals and small companies are the weak ones. To survive, the weak must hide themselves and clean up after themselves.
A company had been harassed by DDoS and phishing attacks for three months. A red-team investigator started from a single Open Redirect payload in the attack logs, found a personal blog hosted next to the attack infrastructure, then used the blog's email to find the same handle on HackerOne, which led to Twitter.
The tweets leaked the attacker's country, age, when he entered the field, that he was job-hunting, and the dates he earned two certifications (eCPPT, OSWA). Those timestamps were the breakthrough: the investigator narrowed LinkedIn candidates from tens of thousands to about twenty, then combined photos, platform verification, domain registration records, and an enumerated email address to close the loop from "anonymous attacker" to "real person." No intrusion, no social engineering β all legally public information.
It shows that doxxing today isn't a business that requires hacking skills. It's a jigsaw puzzle: every piece looks harmless on its own, but together they form a full ID.
Put the two stories side by side. A person gets traced by an organization through the email and phone number they voluntarily provided at signup; a person gets traced by an individual through the IDs, timestamps, and photos leaked in their public footprint. The common thread: identity is made of links. As long as a single edge connects two identities β the same email, the same username, the same photo, the same timeline β anonymity is paper-thin.
A few conclusions follow:
Cross-platform reuse is the biggest hole. Usernames, emails, and phone numbers are the "primary keys" of identity, and the three things attackers want most. Using alias emails, unique IDs, and fewer phone-number bindings is, essentially, deleting your primary keys.
Social media is the richest source of clues, and timestamps are the deadliest. Posts like "finally got my cert today" or "one year at the company" put month- or day-precision information on a public wall. Location, routine, certifications, offers β once cross-referenced, they narrow the search faster than intuition suggests.
Resumes and professional networks are confessions. Schools, employers, project dates, photos, platform verification β all of it is designed to identify a person. Publishing a resume means consenting to be identified from it.
Purchase records and registrations are the receipt at the end of the trail. Domain WHOIS, server registration emails, forum accounts β everything you paid for leaves a record. Separating work assets from personal ones is key to stopping someone from finding you through your infrastructure.
For individuals, the real defense isn't any single platform β it's isolation. Split your life into a real-name side and an anonymous side, with no shared primary keys between them. The more thoroughly you do this, the more clues the other side must collect, and the higher the cost of the puzzle. The BAC author was easily identified precisely because his open-source identity and his personal information had no separation at all.
Here I need to draw a line. Talking about self-protection is not teaching people to hide from the law. On the contrary, the Linux.do post is persuasive precisely because the entire trace was legal, and it ended with the offender in prison.
The truly safe posture is not keeping your secrets airtight, but leaving nothing in your legally public footprint that can be used against you.
Criminals should fear that public information can become evidence against them. The rest of us should learn to make ourselves not worth doxxing, and impossible to fully assemble.
| Dimension | Real-name side | Anonymous side |
|---|---|---|
| Information | Real name, school, employer, real photos, location | Unique ID, alias email, custom avatar |
| Used for | WeChat, job hunting, banking, socializing | Tech discussion, open source, forums |
| Iron rule | Never shows real name, photos, work or school info | Never shows anonymous IDs or content |
Business assets should be equally separated from personal ones: a VPS, domain, or blog used for testing should share nothing with your personal email and phone.
Back to the dark forest. Information self-defense isn't about hiding more carefully β it's about managing links:
Most doxxing victims weren't broken by sophisticated techniques. They assembled the puzzle themselves, one fragment at a time.
Your contact list is swelling while your friendships are shrinking. WeChat holds hundreds of names; the people you talk to daily number in the single digits. In school, you walked to the cafeteria together after class and booked movie tickets for the weekend. As an adult, friendship carries a quiet sense of distance: three or five months can pass without a message, dinner needs a week of schedule coordination, and a wall of Moments likes is all that keeps you "still present in each other's lives."
Yet the people who reassure you most are often exactly the ones you're "not in regular touch with."
In short: adult friendship hasn't faded. Its maintenance method changed, from "being there" to "showing up when it counts." Faintness is the norm; distance is the failure.
You casually mention that you need extra hands for the weekend move. The friend says little at the time, then shows up on the day, on time, holding iced drinks. You mention being hungry at midnight during overtime; half an hour later, a warm late-night snack arrives at the front desk. You hesitate a long time before asking for help; the other person asks no questions, only "how much do you need, just say it."
No instant replies required. No forced small talk. No fear of awkward silence. Each of you is busy with your own life, yet when you meet, there's no hint of estrangement.
Psychology has a name for this unspoken arrangement: responsiveness. The real metric of a relationship isn't contact frequency β it's whether the other person "catches" your need. One deep, responsive exchange holds a relationship together better than a hundred scripted hellos. Research even finds that serious conversation predicts rising intimacy, while small talk predicts the opposite. Small talk doesn't feed a friendship; deep conversation does.
Why must contact frequency fall? It's not that people changed. The budget changed.
Dunbar's number says the cognitive ceiling on stable relationships is around 150, split into layers: 5 intimate, 15 close, 50 friends. Every layer is fed by time, and time has a hard cap. Dunbar quantified the toll: roughly 34 hours of interaction turn an acquaintance into a friend; a best friend costs hundreds.
Adulthood carves most of that time out for work and family. Marriage, children, moving β every shift in your life's radius sheds a few friends. There's even a famous "romantic cost": entering a new relationship costs you about two people from your support network. Not callousness. Capacity.
So "faint" is almost the inevitable shape of adult friendship.
But then: why, once faint, do these friendships last the longest?
Every study converges on the same conclusion: a friendship's texture is cast during the high-contact period; what follows is a low-maintenance steady state.
In a survey of 28,000 people, 92% said their best friend was made in school days. That stage has time to spare, and trust gets confirmed over and over. The faintness of adult friendship lives off that old capital.
Faint-but-not-distant isn't "unmaintained." Earlier investment keeps paying interest. The principal is the hundreds of hours you once spent together; the interest is that "how much do you need, just say it" at the moment it counts.
This is also why faint and distant are different things: faintness is relaxation after familiarity; distance is decay from long-term neglect. Dunbar's team found in a tracking study that six months apart starts eroding emotional attachment, dropping the relationship a layer. The difference in practice: with a faint friend, you speak and they catch you; with a distant one, you speak and they're already gone.
Loneliness damages health on a scale comparable to smoking. Psychology has a finding: after 30, friend count stops mattering and quality starts determining happiness. A meta-analysis of nearly 150 studies found that people with strong relationships had roughly 50% higher survival rates.
Youth friendship is addition β the more people you know, the better. Adult friendship is subtraction β the few who remain are the ones who truly hold you up.
Friendship didn't fade. You finally learned who deserves to be remembered when it counts.