Hahn Ryu's thoughts and records
Bomb, Tomb, Womb: What Will the Scientists' Village Give Birth To?
Los Alamos gave birth to the bomb, and the bomb left tombs. For centuries, Hahoe has turned tombs into a womb. What will Andong's new village of scientists give birth to?
The Love That Survives Dislike
On miun jeong(미운 정), and carrying your own share of pain
An Economy That Does Not Sell the Original
Memory is not for sale. What can be paid for is making the record, protecting and proving it, and what grows from the original, while the person who told it can still say: this much, and no further.
For a Country Too Busy Surviving
The numbers survived, but the people vanished. The camps survived, but the lives vanished. Before we ever hated each other, we never knew each other.
The Swallows Come Back to Ipgyodang
After more than a century of silence, Byeongsan Seowon held a lecture assembly again. A first-person account of a day spent reading, asking, and sweating in a scholar's robe on the hall's wooden floor.
The Future Is an Interpretation of the Past
For the first time in history, every person's story can be recorded. Why that matters for governance, for AI alignment, and for a country that packed a century of upheaval into one lifetime.
Eonryeong: The Spirit That Lives in Words
Karpathy says we are summoning ghosts. Anthropic just found emotions moving inside Claude. An old word for the spirit that lives in words turns out to describe what is happening in our machines.
Thinking About the Global Maximum in a World of Local Maxima
Nobody meant harm. Each actor climbed its own local maximum, and the sum converged on a structure nobody wanted. In that world, is thinking about the global maximum futile? It is not a question of futility. It is a question of role.
The Cold Fortress and the Warm Table
Two men who made it in America, both with Korean roots. One built a wall toward Korea. The other knelt. On Bom Kim’s silence and the letter chef Edward Lee wrote in halting Korean.
Bom Kim, Coupang, and Korea’s Alignment Test
Coupang leaked millions of customers’ data, and its founder would not face the National Assembly. The question Korea is now asking Bom Kim is not about strategy. It is about what kind of person he will be.
On Living With Unresolved Divisions
Why Stability May Depend on What We Do Not Resolve
The First Resonance
How this space began
Portrait of Someone Born in 1981
Born on the hinge between analog and digital, scarred by Korea's 1997 crisis, first into Hell Joseon. A self-portrait of a generation of translators, and of one who went home to rewire the circuit.
Why Hahoe, of All Places
The river turns back, the ancestors' tablets are never moved, and the ethical questions we are asking now have long been lying here. Hahoe is not a preserved place. It is a promised one.
Jingbi: The Art of Turning Pain into Meaning
Jingbi is usually mistaken for a lesson in never repeating a mistake. The real thing is harder: to live past pain again, to acknowledge it, to weep with it, and to leave it as a resonance the next generation can feel.
Reconnecting the Broken Circuit
What my grandparents lived through in the Korean War was not just the suffering of distant ancestors. If they had not lived that pain first, I could not have lived this life.
A December Night Asks a May Dawn
May's silence answered December's uproar: what is not remembered comes back. From the night martial law was declared in Seoul to the graves of Gwangju on May 18.
Hahoe Village, an Integrated Circuit of National Memory
Visiting Hahoe is not tourism. It is a ritual act of reconnecting to a civilization's memory, asking where you stand within it, and realigning the ethics of today.
How We Are Changing in the Age of Sensing
What matters now is not who can say the most, but who can sense most finely and respond most clearly. A short note on the turn from knowing to sensing.
To You Who Hear This Resonance
Transcendence is not a vertical ascent. It is the horizontal infinity that opens at the end of a vertical descent.
There is Nowhere to Hide Behind the Code [3/3]
The last of three confessions on EOS governance corruption. Do BPs and the ENF, standing on votes traded behind the scenes with customers' tokens, have any legitimacy? A proposal to start by fixing exchange voting.
There is Nowhere to Hide Behind the Code [2/3]
Who votes with the EOS you leave on an exchange, and how? Vote buying and vote swaps harden into a cartel, shown down to my own KakaoTalk screenshots. Staking is voting.
There is Nowhere to Hide Behind the Code [1/3]
A confession from a node operator who has run an EOS block producer since 2018. Part one of three: how vote buying and exchange staking hollowed out the chain's governance, and my own share in it.
Let’s go back home, EOS.
An open letter to the EOS community, autumn 2023. Two years after the split from Block One, the ENF did all it could, yet EOS lost 90% of its value. It is time to reconcile and go back to the original vision: Profi, Bullish, and 140k BTC.
What Crowdfunding Means for a Hardware Startup
For a hardware startup, crowdfunding is no longer a question of whether. Lessons from running a $1.47 million Kickstarter: what it is, what it is not, and why the money is not yours to spend on development.
