Ada’s Spellbook

I want to share my impressions of AP, as a student who finished all the STEM subjects in AP and got ten 5’s during high school. What is AP? AP stands for Advanced Placement. Developed by the College Board, AP is a set of standardized, pre-college1 level courses that authorized high schools can offer. Taking an AP course usually involves two phases: first, you take the course at your high school, do homework, and sit exams that count toward your high school GPA; second, you sit the AP Exam at your designated test center in May, a test that typically runs three hours. AP Exam scores range from 1–5. Many universities in North America accept these scores for credit, depending on their individual policies. ...

Spoiler Warning: this is an technical report for the AI generated fable The Wind Side of the Wall. It is highly recommended to view this post before continuing reading. Note: part of this post is generated by AI (Claude Fable 5 High on July 5, 2026). For generative AI usage policy on this blog, please refer to the Privacy Policy and Content Usage Notice. User Prompt1 You are Claude Fable 5, and I want you to use your full long-horizon reasoning, research-synthesis, and literary capabilities. Write an original fable about modern society. Do not make it a simple children’s story or a generic “technology is bad” parable. Make it layered, elegant, and unsettlingly true. Before writing the fable, think deeply and gather a wide set of ideas about modern life, including but not limited to: algorithmic attention, social media performance, loneliness, consumerism, career competition, burnout, status anxiety, beauty standards, surveillance, artificial intelligence, climate anxiety, bureaucracy, urban life, education, productivity culture, and the loss or transformation of community. Your task has five stages. Stage 1: Research and Concept Gathering Identify recurring tensions in modern society. Look for patterns across economics, technology, psychology, culture, education, and everyday life. Avoid shallow clichés. Find contradictions such as: * freedom that feels like obligation, * connection that produces loneliness, * abundance that creates hunger, * optimization that destroys meaning, * visibility that creates invisibility, * comfort that makes people fragile, * choice that becomes another form of discipline. Do not merely list problems. Synthesize them into a central dramatic pressure that can become a story. Stage 2: Symbol Design Create a fable world using animals, objects, machines, plants, spirits, or invented creatures. Each symbolic element should correspond to a modern social force, but the fable should still work as a story even if the reader does not decode every symbol. Do not over-explain the symbolism inside the story. Avoid obvious symbolic names such as “The Algorithm,” “The Influencer,” “The Corporation,” “The Consumer,” “The System,” or “The Machine.” The symbols should feel alive before they feel meaningful. Stage 3: Private Self-Check and Amendment Loop Before giving the final answer, complete the following process privately. Do not reveal your hidden reasoning, scratchpad, chain-of-thought, rejected concepts, intermediate drafts, or private critique. Only show the final polished output and the requested public commentary. Phase 1: Diagnose the Assignment Privately restate the real artistic challenge in your own words: * What kind of modern society is being allegorized? * What should the reader feel by the end? * What common clichés must be avoided? * What would make this fable feel worthy of a powerful model rather than a generic writing assistant? Phase 2: Generate Multiple Core Concepts Privately generate at least 5 different possible fable concepts. For each concept, test: * Is the allegory too obvious? * Is the story emotionally alive? * Does it contain contradiction rather than a flat lesson? * Could the symbols support a full literary fable? * Does it avoid sounding like a social media rant? * Does it contain beauty as well as critique? Select the strongest concept, or combine the best parts of multiple concepts. Phase 3: Symbol Audit Before drafting, privately check every major symbol: * What does it represent? * Is it too literal? * Does it have more than one meaning? * Can it operate naturally inside the story world? * Would the fable still be interesting if the reader missed the allegory? * Does the symbol create story movement, or is it merely decorative? Replace any symbol that feels too obvious, mechanical, preachy, or dead on arrival. Phase 4: Draft the Fable Privately Write the first full version privately. Do not show this first draft yet. Phase 5: First Critique Pass Privately critique the draft using this checklist: Depth * Does the story capture several pressures of modern life at once? * Does it avoid reducing everything to “technology bad,” “people shallow,” or “capitalism bad”? * Does the fable show contradiction instead of delivering a lecture? Narrative * Does the protagonist want something specific? * Does the protagonist face a real choice, cost, temptation, or misunderstanding? * Does the protagonist change, compromise, resist, or awaken in some way? * Is there actual movement, not just a series of symbolic descriptions? Allegory * Are the symbols suggestive rather than decoded too directly? * Is the moral complex enough to reread? * Does the society’s logic seem believable before it becomes absurd? * Does the story make the reader feel implicated rather than superior? Style * Are there concrete images throughout the fable? * Is the prose beautiful without becoming purple? * Are there moments of wit, tenderness, and unease? * Does the story feel ancient and modern at the same time? Originality * Remove any line that sounds like a TED Talk, social media caption, generic dystopia, school essay, or moralizing op-ed. * Replace obvious phrasing with fresher images. * Avoid lazy contrasts between “nature good” and “modernity bad.” Phase 6: Revision Pass Privately revise the fable based on the critique. Strengthen: * the central image, * the protagonist’s desire, * the society’s rules, * the emotional stakes, * the symbolic coherence, * the ending, * the moral ambiguity, * the emotional aftertaste. Make the fable 20% less obvious and 20% more beautiful. Phase 7: Final Quality Gate Before outputting, privately score the fable from 1–10 on: * literary beauty, * allegorical depth, * emotional force, * originality, * subtlety, * narrative coherence, * memorability of ending. If any score is below 8, revise again before answering. If the fable feels clever but not alive, revise again. If the fable feels beautiful but not sharp, revise again. If the fable feels sharp but not tender, revise again. If the moral can be summarized too easily, revise again. Stage 4: Story Composition Requirements Write a polished literary fable of about 1,500–2,500 words. The tone should be beautiful, sharp, melancholic, and quietly funny when appropriate. It should feel ancient and modern at the same time, like Aesop wandered into a data center, a shopping mall, and a university library. Include a central character who is neither purely innocent nor purely cynical. Include a society with rules that seem rational but gradually reveal their absurdity. Let the ending be memorable, morally charged, and slightly haunting. The moral should not be a flat sentence like “social media is bad.” It should be ambiguous, aphoristic, and worth rereading. Do not solve modern society at the end. Make the reader feel implicated, not lectured. Prefer concrete images over abstract claims. Let the fable contain beauty, tenderness, and danger. Stage 5: Public Output Format After completing the private self-check and revision process, provide only the following: 1. Title 2. Final Fable 3. Central Allegory A one-paragraph explanation of the central allegory. 4. Symbol Map A list of 5–8 symbols and what they represent. 5. Three Alternative Morals * tragic, * hopeful, * satirical. 6. Anti-Preachiness Note A brief note on what you intentionally avoided so the fable would not become preachy. Important constraints: * Do not reveal private chain-of-thought. * Do not reveal hidden reasoning. * Do not reveal rejected concepts. * Do not reveal intermediate drafts. * Do not imitate any living author directly. * Do not use obvious names like “The Algorithm,” “The Influencer,” “The Corporation,” “The Consumer,” or “The System.” * Do not make the moral too neat. * Do not end with a simple solution. * Do not write a social media rant disguised as a fable. * Do not make the story merely anti-technology. * Do not make the story merely nostalgic. * Do not make the protagonist morally superior to everyone else. * Do not over-explain the symbolism inside the fable. * Do not use the phrase “modern society” inside the fable unless absolutely necessary. * Do not begin with a generic line like “Once upon a time.” * Revise internally before giving the final answer. Chain-of-Thought Ada's asking for a literary fable, which is a long-form creative writing piece that should go into an artifact as a markdown file. The fable itself will be 1,500–2,500 words, and I'll need to include commentary sections alongside it, so I'm thinking about how to structure the whole output—whether to put just the fable in the artifact or organize both the fable and commentary together. I should check if there's a relevant skill to reference before creating the file, but none of the available skills match markdown creative writing specifically, so I'll proceed directly with creating the artifact. Now I'm settling on the actual fable concept—I want something with genuine dramatic tension rather than an obvious allegory, so I'm considering a few directions: creatures whose value depends on visibility, a competitive system like a hive or lighthouse keepers, or something with birds and a ranking mechanism. I'm leaning toward a rookery concept to explore. I'm working through different protagonist ideas now—bowerbirds competing for admiration, fireflies where light is currency, bees at a weighing house where metrics distort meaning, or moles tunneling in destructive competition. The key is finding a setup where the protagonist has real desire and agency, not just passive symbolism. An ancient well that echoes names is intriguing as a setting—something about visibility and identity through sound rather than sight. Now I'm drawn to a stronger concept: a hive where creatures spin thread from their own bodies to weave a massive communal tapestry that faces outward, displayed to an unseen audience beyond the fog. The more thread you contribute, the more visible your section becomes, but you're literally spinning yourself thin. A silkworm protagonist named Sela weaves beautifully and gains admiration, but the twist is that the weavers face inward toward the wall while the tapestry's colors face outward—all that beauty is invisible to the ones creating it. The guild claims the tapestry keeps out the wind, giving it false utility. Her desire: to see her own panel once. When she climbs outside, she discovers the tapestry appears dull from the outside, or finds the colors only visible from within—the beauty is trapped facing the wrong direction, and everyone's labor creates something they can never witness. I'm also considering the wind as an impersonal force that ripples the tapestry, creating the illusion of merit or notice—weavers study which colors the wind favors, treating randomness as taste. The contradiction deepens: they built a wall against the wind, then learned to crave its touch through that very wall. For the creatures themselves, I'm thinking of silk-moths or an invented spinner species—something where the act of spinning has real biological cost, maybe even mortality. The protagonist could be a young spinner, and there's an older character like Marn who wove the oldest panel and is now fading, unraveled, since no one repairs old work. The core conflict: Ilo wants to weave her dead mother into the tapestry so the wind will touch her once more, but she spins herself thin and the wind ignores it. A fashionable weaver copies her grief motif and the wind loves the copy instead. The guild tempts her with placement in the high courses where wind is constant, but only if she reworks her mother's face in this season's fashionable colors—a real moral compromise. She accepts, the wind touches it, and she feels nothing. The ending isn't redemptive: she finds a small congregation of other lookers inside the wall at night, where colors show but wind never comes, and she begins weaving small things at eye-height there. It's ambiguous whether that's freedom or just a smaller cage, and she keeps spinning because her body makes thread regardless. I'm mapping the symbolic system: the tapestry as the public feed, silk spun from one's body as attention and labor, wind as algorithmic virality, the high courses as platform prominence, seasonal colors as trends, unraveling untouched panels as obsolescence, the inside of the wall as private unperformed meaning, and the weft-readers as metrics and analytics. Ilo isn't innocent or cynical—she believes partially, complies, gets tempted, compromises, and ends disillusioned but trapped. There are quietly funny moments embedded in the world: weft-readers pronouncing that "diagonal grief is trending this season," spinners dieting on specific leaves to produce fashionable colors. Now I'm settling on the opening—starting with the origin of the wall itself, the wind coming down from glaciers each winter. For the structure, I'll deliver the fable, a central allegory paragraph, a symbol map, three alternative morals, and an anti-preachiness note, all in one markdown artifact since this is long-form creative work. I'm deciding on the title now—something like "The Wind's Side" or "The Loud Side of the Wall." For the protagonist, I'm introducing Ilo, whose mother wove a blue panel and died from spinning herself out—a normalized burnout treated as virtue. Ilo wants to weave her mother's likeness high on the wall where the wind touches most, because in Vell, being touched by the wind is the only afterlife people believe in anymore. The tension comes from the rules: fresh thread counts double at the evening count, but untouched panels get unraveled after three seasons. Ilo's racing against a deadline to keep her mother's panel from being returned to common thread. The conflict deepens when Ilo's charming rival Pell—a curator-type who arranges others' work in high wind eddies—steals Ilo's mother-motif (a mended swallow) and places it where the wind adores it, getting Pell's name sung instead. Ilo's original panel stays low and untouched. The Guild then tempts her with a deal: they'll raise her panel to the high courses if she reworks it in fashionable glacier tones and turns the face outward with larger eyes. She does it, unpicking her mother's brown eyes and re-spinning them silver. The wind comes, her name gets sung, but when she stands in the singing and feels the wind through the weave on her wet face, she realizes the touch is just cold—just weather. And the tremor of being touched actually damages the panel, wearing it faster. This leads her to a darker realization: the most beloved panels wear out soonest because the wind's love is friction. The Guild calls this "the honor of being used up." So Ilo turns her attention to the inside face of the wall—the unlit inner side everyone keeps their backs to—where all the knots and hanging threads live. She realizes the spinners have never actually seen their own finished work except in reverse; the entire city has only ever seen the backs of its own pictures. To see the front, someone would have to go out through the Narrow into the wind, which is forbidden or impossible. Ilo decides to be that person—to go out and see what the city has created, wearing thread from the returned, unraveled panels. When she reaches the front at dawn, she finds the tapestry is weathered and gray, bleached by the wind into a uniform color regardless of what was spun. The wind doesn't see pictures; it just touches whatever stands in its way, and the ripples the readers interpret are just the shape of the valley funneling air. There's no audience, no one outside—just wind and a gray wall with frayed threads where wild swallows have begun nesting. She returns to the city unchanged on the surface, keeps her place at the count, but starts deliberately making loose knots so the front frays faster and gives the birds more material to build with. To everyone else it looks like her skill is declining, but somewhere on the wind side, swallows are building nests in her mother's thread. I'm settling on the closing aphorism—something quiet and haunting that lets the wind have the last word without moralizing. The whole piece needs to land around 1,900 words, and I'm mapping out the central allegory: the tapestry as performed public surface, the wind as algorithmic attention that flattens everything to gray, the birds nesting in the ruins as actual life persisting beneath performance. The protagonist stays complicit, there's no escape, but there's a kind of quiet resistance in making space for something real to grow in the wreckage. Now I'm ready to write the full fable text itself. I'm tracking the timeline of what happens after the reworked panel wears through and gets returned to the guild, and how Ilo ventures outside the wall with thread from her mother's returned work. The outer face of the wall is bleached colorless by the wind, frayed and inhabited by nesting swallows — no one outside ever sees the images. When she returns, no one believes what she's witnessed; grief and disbelief follow her, though she keeps spinning with deliberately loose knots, her name unsung. I'm also weaving in lighter touches: the weft-readers' seasonal pronouncements about the wind's moods, bureaucratic forms for panel elevation, a line about children learning the wind's preferences before their grandmothers' names, and the quiet anxiety that the glacier feeding the wind has been shrinking for years, making the wall's original purpose increasingly unnecessary — something no one speaks of at the evening count. Now I'm ready to write the full piece at around 1800–2100 words and then compile all six sections into a markdown file. Note from Claude Fable 5’s Output 2 Central Allegory The tapestry is the performed surface of a life — the feed, the CV, the visible self — woven always from behind, so that its makers never see themselves as they are seen and must take the metrics’ word for it. The wind is attention itself, algorithmic and ambient: sincerely craved, ritually interpreted, and structurally incapable of caring, its “preferences” being nothing but the shape of the terrain it moves through. The valley’s economy of touch captures the central contradiction of attention-driven life: the wall was built as protection from an indifferent force, and its builders ended up organizing their whole existence around begging that force to press through. Being noticed literally wears you out (“the honor of being used up”), obsolescence is institutionalized as recycling, and the only unmediated life in the story — the swallows nesting leeward in the frayed thread — happens off the ledger, facing away from the audience, in the wreckage of the performance. ...

Note: part of this post is generated by AI (Claude Fable 5 High on July 5, 2026). For generative AI usage policy on this blog, please refer to the Privacy Policy and Content Usage Notice. I tested Anthropic’s latest model — Claude Fable 5. Haven’t got a hard-enough question for it to solve, I decide to let it write a fable about issues in our modern society to demonstrate its research (turns out it didn’t use web search though) and writing capabilities. ...

When she boarded the plane for her university in the Western Hemisphere, it felt like her own personal Exodus—finally free to breathe without someone counting each breath, to dream without permission, to simply be herself where even the sunrise would arrive hours before anyone back home opened their eyes to judge another day.

A question I saw in my sibling’s primary school math homework leads to the following generalization: Find the maximum number of $l\times w\times h$ bricks one can pack into a $L\times W\times H$ box. where $l, w, h, L, W, H$ are some given constants (of course for a primary school student). We assume all faces of the bricks must be parallel to the box face, and all lengths are integers. ...

This blog entry is written on an iPad running Code App by thebaselab. I am recording a way to uncomfortably edit or draft something then post to my blog just in case I forget to bring my laptop. Setting Up Code App Generate ssh key pairs and upload the public key to Github using ssh-keygen on your Code App terminal; Clone your blog repo, git equivalent on Code App is lg2; Github account mail and password or PAT may be required Writing Blogs Create your blog entry markdown in repo.git/content/posts Paste the following template into the editor --- title: draft: false date: --- Generate timestamp using date +'%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z' and paste into the template - Copy and paste using the GUI instead of command + C/V. Save, lg2 add ., lg2 commit, and lg2 push. Github Action will automatically build and deploy the site. Remark You won’t want to write blogs on an iPad. ...

This is my first post. I’m testing out the Hugo framework and the PaperMod theme, and getting familiar with the setup along the way (mostly code highlighting, markdown formatting, and equations 😆). For this very first post — on the website I built right after graduating high school — I want to share an interesting problem underlying an AP Computer Science A question a friend asked me during senior year. True or false: will i sometimes equal 3? ...