Month: January 2019

US-China Cold War

The new dynamic affects people as well as products. China is asking state firms to avoid travel to the US and its allies. And if you were an American or Canadian tech company executive, would you travel to China right now, given that Canada has detained a leading Huawei executive (and daughter of the company’s CEO) for extradition to the US? Meanwhile, many American universities are kicking their local Confucius Institute off campus, most notably the University of Michigan, amid complaints that those institutes are spying on Chinese nationals who attend those schools. Whether or not that is true, this is another sign of the collapse of trust. This is the deeper issue with the US-China relationship: the continuing erosion, in an era of rapid deglobalization, of previous ties built at least partly on a common sense of purpose. Looking back at 2018, it now seems obvious that this was the most important story of the year.

2019-03-15: AI competition

Suppose, however, that the AI competition between the US and China is submerged in a far larger global competition between man and machine. Suppose the strongest, healthiest, happiest country is the country in which human beings are most in control of their lives. Humans controlled by their machines, by contrast, will feel a pervasive, purposeless malaise, locked into what Webb describes as a “digital caste system” with all their decisions made for them in predetermined and directed lives.

2019-06-24: Liu Cixin

A leading scifi writer takes stock of China’s global rise

2020-01-01: Dan Wang

I’ve found it curious that Congress has become so keen to publicly beat up on Facebook and Google while the US considers itself in technological competition with China. In my view, antitrust arguments apply better to companies like Intel and Boeing, which are the tech giants that wield much greater market power. The US responded to the rise of the USSR and Japan by focusing on innovation; it’s early days, but so far the US is responding to the technological rise of China mostly by kneecapping its leading firms. So instead of realizing its own Sputnik moment, the US is triggering one in China.

2020-01-06: and the New Yorker

To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the 21st century, much as the US shaped the 20th

2021-01-27: A proposed strategy

America’s technological leadership is fundamental to its security, prosperity, and democratic way of life. But this vital advantage is now at risk, with China surging to overtake the United States in critical areas. Urgent policy solutions are needed to renew American competitiveness and sustain critical US technological advantages.

In order to lead, the United States will need to maximize its competitive advantage in key strategic technologies in ways that overcome China’s advantages, which include greater scale, hyper-integrated platforms, and faster product integration loop.

Intelligence. We need to upgrade our intelligence capabilities to dominate the forecasting space. If we cannot forecast where technology is going, we cannot stay competitive.

Brain Drain. The United States will need to develop, attract, and retain human capital and foster environments for inquiry and experimentation.

Supply Chains. Building more resilient supply chains is critical to diminishing our vulnerability to Chinese control, but will require significant investment in domestic infrastructure, ally-centric production, and advances in automation.

Multilateralism. We must work with allies to strengthen cooperation among like-minded countries; promote collective norms and values around the use of emerging technologies; and protect and preserve key areas of competitive technological advantage.

Government Redesign. Our internal government structures are not optimized to address the new challenges posed by emerging technologies.

2022-02-22: US losing in war games

Over the past decade, in US war games against China, the United States has a nearly perfect record: We have lost almost every single time. Our spy and communications satellites would immediately be disabled; our forward bases in Guam and Japan would be “inundated” by precise missiles; our aircraft carriers would have to sail away from China to escape attack; our F-35 fighter jets couldn’t reach their targets because the refueling tankers they need would be shot down. How did this happen? It wasn’t an intelligence failure, or a malign Pentagon and Congress, or lack of money, or insufficient technological prowess. No, it was simply bureaucratic inertia compounded by entrenched interests.

2023-02-23: China Internet content may be too low quality to build good LLM.

As of 2021, although the numbers of Simplified Chinese Internet users and English Internet users are comparable, English content accounts for 60.4% of the top 10 million websites in global rankings, while Chinese content accounts for only 1.4%.
The poor quality of Chinese Internet content is the result of Chinese Internet companies, represented by Baidu and ByteDance, who rush to make quick profits. Instead of patiently transporting more books and literature into the Internet, these platforms judge the quality of content based on whether it kills time and drives revenue. After several years of precipitation, it is now difficult to search for high-quality information on the internet in Simplified Chinese, and it should not surprise us that these chatbots confuse themselves as soon as they are asked meaningful questions.

Darknet Evolution

To prevent the problems of customer binding, and losing business when darknet markets go down, merchants have begun to leave the specialized and centralized platforms and instead ventured to use widely accessible technology to build their own communications and operational back-ends.

Instead of using websites on the darknet, merchants are now operating invite-only channels on widely available mobile messaging systems like Telegram. This allows the merchant to control the reach of their communication better and be less vulnerable to system take-downs. To further stabilize the connection between merchant and customer, repeat customers are given unique messaging contacts that are independent of shared channels and thus even less likely to be found and taken down. Channels are often operated by automated bots that allow customers to inquire about offers and initiate the purchase, often even allowing a fully bot-driven experience without human intervention on the merchant’s side.

The other major change is the use of “dead drops” instead of the postal system which has proven vulnerable to tracking and interception. Now, goods are hidden in publicly accessible places like parks and the location is given to the customer on purchase. The customer then goes to the location and picks up the goods. This means that delivery becomes asynchronous for the merchant, he can hide a lot of product in different locations for future, not yet known, purchases. For the client the time to delivery is significantly shorter than waiting for a letter or parcel shipped by traditional means – he has the product in his hands in a matter of hours instead of days. Furthermore this method does not require for the customer to give any personally identifiable information to the merchant, which in turn doesn’t have to safeguard it anymore. Less data means less risk for everyone.

Find Netflix Freeloaders

if you’re voluntarily sharing your account with others, that’s your business. But if you see anything suspicious, go ahead and remove all the devices accessing an account, then change the password to do a deep clean. And do periodic check-ins to make sure the number of devices doesn’t snowball again.

China Science Fiction

For years, we’ve been making wonderful things. We make your iPods. We make phones. We make them better than anybody else, but we don’t come up with any of these ideas. So we went on a tour of America talking to people at Microsoft, at Google, at Apple, and we asked them a lot of questions about themselves, just the people working there. And we discovered they all read science fiction… so we think maybe it’s a good thing.

Mosque Plans

Sascha Baron Cohen put on a funny disguise and went to a small town in the United States to tell the residents of a plan to invest 100s of millions of $ into the local economy. The townsfolk were excited by the prospect until they found out the plan involved the construction of an enormous mosque. When the townsfolk complained about terrorists, Cohen told them that the worshippers would be well protected from terrorist attacks against them.

Jalsa

The city has plenty of Bangladesh restaurants, but few that represent for the food of West Bengal, India, just across the border. That’s one reason Jalsa Grill & Gravy was so welcome when it opened. Owner Nowshin Ali lived in Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, “But I grew up in Uttar Pradesh, and had to learn several languages as I grew up, including Urdu, Hindi, Arabic, English, and Bengali”. The halal food at Jalsa features several West Bengal dishes from a menu of northern Indian fare.

One highlight was a chaat featuring slices of slender eggplant fried with a coating of spiced chickpea flour, dusted with shredded coconut, and arrayed on a hump of sweet and sour potatoes. It was irresistible. Cooked in the tandoor, the outsize lamb tikka kebabs were juicy and smoky, but the ghost chicken tikka was not as spicy as the name promised. Of the West Bengal dishes, there was a chingri malaikari (butter shrimp) with plenty of creamy pink gravy, accompanied by a dish of mustard-laced chickpeas. The dum biryani came with chicken and was pleasingly subtle. “That biryani’s from Lucknow, not as spicy as the one from Hyderabad.”

Assistant Parasite

Alias is a teachable “parasite” that is designed to give users more control over their smart assistants, both when it comes to customization and privacy. Through a simple app the user can train Alias to react on a custom wake-word/sound, and once trained, Alias can take control over your home assistant by activating it for you. When you don’t use it, Alias will make sure the assistant is paralyzed and unable to listen by interrupting its microphones.

Larissa MacFarquhar

COWEN: If you’re an extreme altruist, are you too subject to manipulation by others? If you care so much about so many other people, and those people actually can be harmed pretty easily at low cost, does this mean that you, the extreme altruist, you just go through life being manipulated?

MACFARQUHAR It’s funny you say that because one thing that I have noticed about the extreme altruist . . . You know what? I don’t want to call them extreme altruists. I think they’re people with a very strong sense of duty. The people I met were very, very different from each other, but one thing they had in common is they really, really barely cared about what other people thought. They had to feel that way because almost everyone they met thought they were at best weirdos, and at worst dangerous megalomaniacs. So they were unconventional in their degree of duty but also in many other ways.

on extreme altruists