Bo's Blog: life

I Passed My Driving Test - and And I Have Something to Say

2026-03-30T13:47:12+00:00

I passed my driving test today. Finally. Long sigh. Goodbye to the UK learner system, with all its quirks and frustrations. Goodbye to the overpriced lessons, the examiner theatre, and the months of waiting for a slot. It's done. But since I'm in a reflective mood, let me leave with one parting observation -- because I genuinely could talk about UK roundabout design for an entire day without repeating myself. The roundabout, as a concept, was designed for light, manageable traffic. The logic is elegant in theory: no signals, drivers yield naturally, traffic flows continuously. It works beautifully in a quiet market town. It does not work in a city of tens of millions of people and millions of cars -- and the infrastructure itself quietly admits this. When a roundabout is functioning as intended, you don't need traffic lights on it. The moment you start bolting signals onto a roundabout, you're essentially acknowledging that the original design has been overwhelmed. Take the two major roundabouts near Mill Hill test centre, where I passed my test. Apex Corner and Mill Hill Circus — both traffic light controlled. Mill Hill Circus goes further: six "keep clear" boxes painted across the roundabout itself. Six. That's not a roundabout anymore, that's a signalised junction that happens to be circular. The keep clear boxes exist precisely because without them, the roundabout gridlocks. Drivers from one arm block the path of drivers from another, and the whole thing seizes up. The deeper problem is that roundabouts depend entirely on every driver behaving correctly. In low-traffic environments, that's a reasonable assumption. In a dense urban area, it only takes one confused driver, one hesitation, one mistake -- and the whole system backs up. There's no mechanism to absorb the error. Traffic lights, for all their inefficiency, at least impose order. A roundabout just hopes for the best. If nothing structurally changes, driving tests in the UK -- particularly in London -- are only going to get harder. The roads are more congested, the junctions more patched-together, and the margin for error on test shrinks accordingly. I got through it. But the system isn't getting any easier to navigate, for learners or anyone else.

Tags: life, thoughts

Note on 1st March 2026

2026-03-01T16:13:17+00:00

The UK driving system feels surprisingly disorganized, especially when you come from a country where things are done differently. Back home, we have large, dedicated driving schools with their own internal road networks. Learners stay within those controlled environments until they've genuinely mastered the basics -- steering, observation, manoeuvring, clutch control -- before ever touching a public road. The whole process feels structured, efficient, and relatively straightforward.

The UK, by contrast, is a different story. Expensive lessons, near-impossible exam slots, and a testing process that often feels more subjective than it should be. The core issue is this: you're not really being examined on your driving ability -- you're being examined on your ability to make the examiner feel safe. Those are two very different things.

I failed my test once already, and looking back, both reasons highlight exactly this problem. The first was approaching speed -- not dangerously fast by any objective measure, but enough to make an examiner uncomfortable when they don't know you or your capabilities yet. The second was lack of observation, which is honestly debatable. You might genuinely check your mirrors with a subtle eye movement and take in all the information you need, but if the examiner didn't see you do it, as far as they're concerned, it didn't happen.

So, this post is partly a reminder to myself for next time. Drive slower than you think you need to, especially when approaching junctions or hazards -- give the examiner plenty of time to feel settled. And make your observations obvious: turn your head, use your mirrors frequently and visibly, and don't rely on subtle glances that only you know happened. It sounds performative, because it is -- but that's the nature of the test.

I feel if everyone going into their test applied just these two principles, the national pass rate would jump by at least 30%.

Tags: life

Note on 25th February 2026

2026-02-25T23:17:35+00:00

I don’t believe healing is a function of time. The popular metaphor--“hold a dyed cup under running water and it will clear over time”--suggests that time itself is the cure. But time doesn’t heal us; it only changes the environment in which we keep living.

We can live the same week 52 times a year and call it “time passing.” Or we can use time deliberately: read, learn, move our bodies, go into nature, meet people, challenge assumptions, and reflect - how we turn raw experience into meaning.

To me, healing is not dilution. It’s digestion. It’s the work of breaking down what happened, extracting meaning, discarding what harms, and rebuilding a self I can respect.

Here’s the uncomfortable question I have to face: if I’m still stained, is it because the water isn’t running--or because I’m not scrubbing?

Tags: life, thoughts

Note on 25th February 2026

2026-02-25T22:27:28+00:00

I found out that I quite enjoy going to the gym, it feels kinda homy to me, everytime when I feel angry, distressed, or sad, going to gym helps me to recover from my bad emotions. And even if I am in a good mood, going to gym also helps me to feel better.

Anyways, tonight I went to the gym because I am at a bad mood, and the reason why I am at a bad mood is because:

I did not sleep well as some random person called the wrong number, and called me 3 times this AM to wake me up!
Not a very productive day at work, spent a lot of time scrolling and browsing, not much work done.
My mom shares that she has just started buying stocks (she invested 100% into one random stock she knows nothing about and asked me to teach her how to make money on stock market while I am literally losing money as well.). I think her ignorance is gonna make her lose a lot of money -- she has a history of being scammed ~140k USD.
One of my 2026's resolutions is to find a girlfriend this year, but I don't know if it is I am trying to hard or what, I constantly feel the relationship I am trying to build with other people is not stably building up, it feels more like walking on a icy uphill, one mistake can take you all the way back where it started, or even worse.

Anyways, hit the gym tonight, did leg pressing, feels good, gonna do a bit of work, let's get better and do it again tomorrow.

Tags: life, thoughts

Note on 18th February 2026

2026-02-18T23:45:54+00:00

And also recently I have been feeling that the world is so divided ... Many people that refuse to pay for all the AI services and stick to the free tiers, a huge portion of them still has the impression that AI is stupid, makes a lot of mistakes, can not do serious stuff, etc.
But for programmers like us that heavily interacts with AIs, trying different models and providers, actively researching new frameworks... I have been dazzled to an extend that I feel for the future of internet, more things will be developed for AI than for humans, because AIs are just so much better at interacting with the WWW than humans, I believe in the very near future, the new generations, not only they will not know how to use a computer, also they may not even know how to use a phone (you may find this a bit exaggerating, I would like to explain in more depth but the space is too little for me to write it all, let's talk about it in a cafe...), as AI will do things for them, order food online, shopping, organizing trips... If you know about the pace theory:

six significant levels of pace and size in the working structure of a robust and adaptable civilization. From fast to slow the levels are:

Fashion/art
Commerce
Infrastructure
Governance
Culture
Nature

For the development of AI at the moment, the 'art' and commerce is spinning fast already, next, once we have the infra and governance to be laid out, the cyberpunk future (AI direction) is very near to us.

Tags: AI, life, thoughts

Note on 9th February 2026

2026-02-09T22:13:43+00:00

Got very frustrated today because as I’ve been pulled into more and more projects as I develop my skills, nowadays I’m constantly working on multiple threads at the same time—and my work laptop only has 16GB of RAM, so everything starts to feels unbearably SLOWWW recently!!!

The annoying part: it’s hard to get a better laptop as long as the current one is still technically “working fine.”

But, a good thing about working in a company that is heavily relying on Cloud is that you can always get access to plenty of servers, and I claimed one of the spare servers and turned it into my remote linux dev environment, and suddenly, Game Changer!

No more running 5+ projects locally.
No more local Docker chaos.
No more WSL overhead.
VS Code now just serves as a network editor, and I can work on 10 projects at the same time very smoothly.

(And yes, I use VS Code because IntelliJ is too heavy. Funny enough, the resources I “saved” by switching from IntelliJ to VS Code are now fully consumed anyway.)

Honestly, this feels like how modern development should work: remote dev servers, SSH from anywhere, and your full environment always ready. You don’t even need to carry your laptop even if you are on-call — if something urgent comes up, just open Termius on your phone, SSH into your dev server, and everything is there: environment, dependencies, runtime.

Happy Coding!

Tags: programming, life

Note on 9th February 2026

2026-02-09T19:33:12+00:00

Yesterday visited the V&A Storehouse with of one of my bachelor school’s alumni fella, it's quite interesting to see the variety of things they have put in the storehouse, and also to get a sense of what a modern storehouse for art and relics looks like.

Quite amazed that they put a whole piece of facade of a demolished building (Robin Hood Gardens) into the storehouse, basically placing part of one building inside another. Absolutely wild, it must mean a lot for older generation Londoners.

Tags: life