45 posts tagged with "Technology"

Lao Li stared at the number on the screen, his brows furrowed like a twisted rope.

Li Xiaoming, an ordinary screenwriter at a well-known animation film company, spends his days in front of a computer screen, racking his brains to write all sorts of bizarre plots. Originally, his dream was to become an animation master like Hayao Miyazaki, creating works that touched people's hearts. However, the reality is that he is busy every day with various projects like "IP adaptation" and "traffic first," and has long forgotten his original dream.

Until the movie called Ne Zha was released.

Li Ming felt like an ant trapped in a giant gear. Every morning at 7:30 am sharp, he would wake up, squeeze onto the crowded subway, and then begin his unchanging workday. His job was to review the answers of the artificial intelligence, DeepSeek, ensuring they aligned with the company's values. Li Ming always found this work a bit absurd—having a human review an AI’s answers was like having an elementary school student grade a university professor's thesis, but this was what he needed to do.

Old Wang rubbed his hands together, bowing three times to the dark, hulking "Kitchen God" in the kitchen. It wasn't a wooden statue, nor a printed New Year picture, but a smart speaker with a screen.

The advertising screen in the elevator was once again replaying the promotional video for the "Worry-Free Office" app. Zhang Qiang stared at the stiffly smiling office elite on the screen, feeling a wave of nausea. He had to use this app every day to clock in, submit expenses, apply for leave, and even book a toilet stall.

Zhang Qiang was an ordinary technician, functioning like a cog set in a fixed orbit within the vast corporate machine. He disliked the "continuous monthly subscription" services on various apps on his phone the most, always feeling it was a disguised form of exploitation. A few days ago, he had seen news that a celebrity had also immediately canceled a continuous monthly subscription on an app, and he had felt quite relieved about it.

The cold winter wind cut through the gas station like a knife, leaving it deserted. Only the orange glow of the lights illuminated the cold asphalt. Old Wang huddled deeper into his cotton coat, exhaling a puff of white mist. He had been working the night shift at this remote gas station for five years. Since the company introduced robots to replace human workers, it had become a forgotten corner.

Old Wang had given this robot a name, “Little Iron,” even though it was just a cold machine. He still had a habit of talking to it. Tonight, Little Iron was different. It was no longer mechanically repeating “Welcome, please scan to refuel,” but instead making strange noises.

Old Wang was randomly assigned to the dumpling-making session at the annual party. He rubbed his hands, looking at the various colored dumpling fillings in front of him, feeling like an elementary school student attending a handicraft class. The theme of the annual party was "Technology Empowerment," and even making dumplings had to be tech-savvy—each filling was associated with a QR code, and you had to scan the code to know what the filling was.

Old Wang picked up a ball of meat filling with a small QR code attached. He took out his phone, aimed it at the QR code, and with a "beep," a word popped up on the screen: "A17 Data Stream."

Old Wang sat at his workstation, staring blankly at the blurry screenshot on his computer screen. In the screenshot, a robot on the Spring Festival Gala stage was wearing a flesh-colored pair of tight pants, looking utterly ridiculous under the spotlight.

“Tell me,” Old Wang asked his colleague, Xiao Li, who was sitting next to him, “whose idea was this pair of pants, anyway?”

The fireworks on New Year's Eve were more dazzling than ever before. Programmer Li Ming squinted, his fingers flying across the screen. He wasn't working overtime; he was decoding.

When Old Zhao woke up, he found an "invisible bracelet" on his wrist.