Tag: china

The Wandering Earth

The movie is basically a retelling of some of the earlier parts of Genesis. The Chinese do in fact succeed in building the Tower of Babel, both physically and linguistically. They survive that which is analogous to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. They thwart the Noah’s Ark plan, reject the notion of their own intrinsic sinfulness, and save the remainder of humanity. It is the Chinese Christ figure who sacrifices himself to achieve the happy ending, thereby overturning what might be understood to be the will of God. By the end of the movie the Chinese can indeed “do anything.”

Xiao chi

Stretching from 40th to 65th Streets on 8th Avenue in Sunset Park, Brooklyn’s Chinatown is one of the best neighborhoods in New York to experience 2 unique styles of Chinese cuisine–Fujianese xiao chi and Cantonese dim sum. Because of these demographics, Brooklyn’s Chinatown has become a culinary destination for Southern Chinese cuisine, especially Fujianese xiao chi 小吃 (Little Snacks). Essentially, this covers anything that falls outside the Chinese definition of a full meal, in which rice is accompanied by several dishes of meat and vegetables. Comparable to Spanish tapas, xiao chi are small servings of dishes, most often noodles, dumplings and pastries meant to be eaten as snacks or a light lunch. This culinary category exists in every region of China. Cantonese dim sum, with its small servings of different dishes, is a type of xiao chi, although it’s considered more formal and often served in large restaurants with seafood-focused banquet dinners. Here are 5 restaurants in Sunset Park to sample this cuisine. Since the prices are affordable and the serving sizes are similar to tapas, try as many dishes and places as possible for the true xiao chi experience.

  • Lin Mini Café
  • Uncle Wang
  • San Qiang
  • Hong Kong Dim Sum
  • Park Asia

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.

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.

China Global Surveillance

Bike-Sharing Services Are Sending Personal Data To China

through the collection and analysis of this data the Chinese Government now likely have access to your name, address (yes it will track your address based on the location data it collects), where you work, what devices you use, who your friends are (yes it will track the places you regularly stop and if they are residential it is likely they will be friends and family). They also buy data from other sources to find out more information by combining this data with the data they collect directly. They know what your routines are such as when you are likely to be out of the house either at work, shopping or engaging in social activities; and for how long.

Best Wonton Soup

Be sure to ask for the coffee shop menu, available all day and labeled “Lunch,” otherwise you’ll just be handed a single menu featuring stir fries and relatively pricey seafood. On the more robust coffee shop menu, find the glorious staples of the cuisine in its commonest form: wonton soups, over-rice dishes at bargain prices, congee, and (only available until 13:00 or so when it runs out) rice noodle rolls. The wonton soup features thin-skinned wrinkly dumplings, bulging with a combination of pork and shrimp. Have the soup with noodles and duck, and enjoy the best bowl of wonton soup in the city, the broth stronger than usual to readily flavor the massed components in the bowl.

Dunhuang Library

It’s an extraordinarily demanding branch of study: the Library included documents in at least 17 languages and 24 scripts, many of which have been extinct for centuries or known only from a few examples. The collection mirrors the remarkable diversity of Dunhuang itself, where Buddhists rubbed shoulders with Manicheans, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Jews, and Chinese scribes copied Tibetan prayers that had been translated from Sanskrit by Indian monks working for Turkish khans. Given how international the materials from Dunhuang are, scholars have agreed that the methods for their study should be, too. For decades, however, they have faced real problems, both in conducting research and in sharing their findings; Stein and the explorers who followed him scattered the library’s holdings among more than 12 libraries and museums around the world.

BGP hacking

This article will show how this hijacking works, and how China employs its conveniently distributed points of presence (PoPs) in western democracies’ telecommunications systems to redirect internet traffic through China for malicious use. It will show the actual routing paths, give a summary of how one hijacks parts of the internet by inserting these nodes, and outline the major security implications.