scilro

It's very hard to take his position seriously when he repeatedly refers to the Chinese Communist Party and specific Chinese ministries specifically, like some two bit China-watching cold warrior, instead of addressing China as a sovereign state actor. Imagine if any Chinese AI founder talked about the Democrats, the Republicans, about Trump or ICE etc. It's gauche.

Fireworks isn't serving Kimi K3 yet. Presumably, they ran this benchmark against the Moonshot API.

All of the Western providers with sufficient capacity will be able to make it available when the weights are released Monday.

All you need to fix that is 3:2 pulldown, which all modern TVs should be able to do.

Unfortunately this is another basic feature that tends to be "branded" on TVs. On my Sony Bravia it's split into a combination of features called Cinemotion and Motionflow.

It's most accurate to say that China is still run by folks who are committed communists. These planners, by virtue of their decades of experience, understand the social value of markets and broad based technological growth, and want to wield those even better than liberal planners.

"diversity" is an overbroad concept that covers many disparate social practices, a lot of which have nothing to do with technological progress.

I guess that the more focused question is whether China needs to import some amount of tech talent to succeed, at least temporarily. The reporting on this EUV prototype does suggest that that is what they did, giving foreign researchers special visas and whatnot.

Seconding/thirding the request for diarization! I would use this as my main transcription app if it had that.

For what it's worth, he was able to roll back. https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946240562736365809

I have to admit that the objective and historical parts of your analysis are completely correct and well researched, even though I totally disagree with you about the subjective merits and morality of the whole thing. Kudos.

I'm really glad you posted this, it's good to know that I didn't mess up the calibration of my (much humbler) 3.1 system.

US unipolar hegemony has averted an all-out war, but it has also been very bloody, or at least immiserating, for people at its periphery.

Multipolarity doesn't imply we go back to the 1910s. The idea would be to strengthen multilateral institutions that put a check on things like the World Wars.

>Even if the US and China were at parity in AI systems, it seems likely that China could direct more talent, capital, and focus to military applications of the technology. Combined with its large industrial base and military-strategic advantages, this could help China take a commanding lead on the global stage, not just for AI but for everything.

China spends 1.5% of its GDP on its military. The US spends 3.5%. I get that the two countries are engaged in competition for dominance, but why is China the bigger threat here?

Also, there are a great deal of groups and institutions out there that are pushing for more diplomacy, more cooperation, and a ratcheting down of tensions. If Dario is going to get political anyway, why not go that route?

You're not wrong, but what you're describing is referred to as "seller-side inflation" or "excuseflation."

Article from a year ago: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-03-09/how-excus...

The author failed to cite hard numbers, but they can be found elsewhere:

https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/currencies/dollar-d...

"In a Monday note, strategists Joana Freire and Stephen Jen calculated that the greenback accounted for about two-thirds of total global reserves in 2003, then 55% by 2021, and 47% last year."

You can make the argument that the decline of this number will be a lot slower than 2021-2022 going forward, or that it will perhaps bottom out at a relatively high number. But the trend is there.

Both were great

The World Uyghur Congress is not some politically neutral group made up of concerned immigrants and activists. It has US state backing and intelligence connections.

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/03/05/world-uyghur-congress-us-...

Whether you are convinced by the allegations they have made against the Chinese government or not, it's not inaccurate to call it a political entity. Its name is a bit misleading and makes one think that it represents members of this ethnic group around the world.

Clubhouse seems to attract the extraverted and narcissistic, those who live to self-promote and "hustle." So for white people, that's VCs, and then there's the analogous types of Black people.

As far as politics it doesn't seem as left-wing as Twitter, I haven't seen any socialists or communists yet. I've seen a lot of standard liberal types but then also people with idiosyncratic politics (Black people who think BLM is a Soros conspiracy for example).

I understand that's the claim, but on the other hand, the biggest Muslim ethnic group (Hui) aren't repressed.

Which makes you ask, what's the difference between Uyghurs and other Muslim minority groups like the Hui? Well, the biggest as far as I can tell is the influx of new, extremist ideologies like Wahhabism that are actually quite _incompatible_ with the indigenous culture. The reasons why that happened seem complex, but maybe you can say it's an unfortunate outcome of US and Russian meddling in the region over decades.

It's absolutely true that there's increased security and surveillance targeted at Uyghurs in the region, I've seen a lot of videos taken by travelers from the area that confirm that. There's also a coordinated and systemic program of re-education, as admitted by Chinese authorities. I'm sure there is a non-zero amount of abuses as part of this whole program, but I don't think that's the same thing as genocide. & I think the stated reason in their propaganda for _why_ this is all happening passes the smell test... Otherwise, wouldn't they be repressing Hui Muslims as well?

(Also see Tibet -- people said the same thing about Tibetan culture 20 years ago, but it's pretty well-understood now that there were foreign-funded separatist elements back then)

But the question is, _why?_ What's their incentive to apply more cruel population control on one ethnic group over others? We're talking about a repressive government, but not a race-based regime like Nazi Germany was. Indeed from their own propaganda they seem like they bend over backward to trumpet the well-being of their ethnic minorities, and you'll hear of cases of the Great Firewall censoring outpourings of nationalist/racist sentiment.

The more boring explanation is the simpler one I think; that they're bringing policies toward minorities in line with policies toward the majority -- i.e. ending a form of "affirmative action" they used to have.

You can argue that population control of _any_ kind is wrong and cruel, and I think that's a totally defensible argument, but there's a rhetorical sleight of hand going on here where people equate China's controversial population control measures (that have been ongoing for decades) with the elimination of a particular ethnic minority, Nazi-style.

But this is kind of the opposite of Chernobyl, right?

As you laid out, Chernobyl revealed the weakness of the Soviet Union and played some part in its collapse.

COVID19 has laid bare the superiority of the Chinese model in terms of quick mass mobilization. The entire world saw how quickly and drastically China acted and how slowly the US is acting. And now they're sending masks and respirators to the rest of the developing world.

Sold for 3.5 million in 2013. Undoubtedly worth more much now. https://streeteasy.com/building/75-and-a-half-bedford-street...

Because part of the contract you mention involves adhering to employment law, which generally says that companies cannot fire people for union activity.

It's totally possible to allow a counter terrorism program to run rampant with abuses while also having strong affirmative action programs.

The US definitely does it...

There are still Chinese people today who remember the pain of the Cultural Revolution. This is a history that isn't denied & only lightly censored if at all. Yet, they don't begrudge Mao for it. Probably because they realize that without having united as a country, and without having built that industrial base (as painful as that was), the good years they're seeing today would never have happened.

>You think China is going to do better?

Well... why wouldn't they? China since the time of Deng has been acutely aware of the risk of becoming an imperialist power[1]. Even if they have arguably crossed that line at some points (the South China Sea...), they're clearly attempting to take a markedly alternative path to becoming a superpower.

I think the media tends to portray individuals in the Chinese government as uniquely sinister and amoral, and the assumption is if given the opportunity, they'll commit all the same crimes the West did. But I find this to be quite a cynical view.

[1] https://twitter.com/CarlZha/status/1165122628757024768

The abuses in Xinjiang are real, but we do the Muslims there a disservice if we share actual fake news. The organ harvesting story was made up.

https://thegrayzone.com/2019/09/30/reports-china-organ-harve...

Ridicule of the government is quite common on Chinese social media.

But then a lot of Chinese folks who cross over to Western social media find the anti-CCP sentiment to overreach (no doubt bc of the geopolitical considerations involved), and switch over to a defensive posture as a result.

>Now she is thinking of giving up the citizenship she worked so hard to get, and moving back to an authoritarian China where guns and drugs are strictly forbidden – at least her son would be safe.

To quote a friend, "all 'authoritarian' states (really, all states) distribute their 'authoritarianism' unevenly. that you aren't experiencing any right now doesn't mean it isn't being done, it just means you're not part of the demographic being targeted."

The commonly understood definition of "authoritarian" is pretty insufficient, since it doesn't capture non-state actors exercising authority, control or violence over your life.

You're getting downvoted but I think it should be uncontroversial to say that mainland youth and HK youth have VASTLY different relationships to the CCP, and this particular propaganda doesn't seem to account for that. That's why I think it won't do much.

In terms of economic class demarcations, I find the Marxists' definitions much easier to follow and reason about. If you own capital, you're a capitalist. If you work for a wage/salary, you're a worker. You might be an extraordinarily affluent worker but your relationship to capital is the same. Also, some might be part-time capitalists and part-time workers.

This reminds me of people who say that we can free North Koreans by (physically) airdropping tapes and books on Pyongyang - surely the only reason they support their government is because they're heavily censored, once they see the truth they'll rise up in arms!

It's a narrative that's somewhat condescending. It makes it seem like all these people are just being held hostage by their governments. The reality is that people in China or North Korea are like people everywhere else -- either they're deeply uninterested in politics, or they are, in which case they probably have a more sophisticated view of these issues than assumed. Some information freely available via VPN isn't going to change anyone's mind.