800v vs 400v EVs...does it really matter?
Headline EV charging power specs are misleading and 800v vs 400v really matters.
The freedom of public transit
I spent the last 3 weeks in Zhuhai, the city in mainland China across the river delta from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, just north of (also technically west, east and south of) Macau. With the advent of the Northbound Travel for Hong Kong Vehicles scheme, car owners, Zhuhai has become
Ben Thompson is wrong: US frontier labs are right to be panicking
American tech blogger Ben Thompson writes today that US frontier labs should not be panicking about Chinese open source models like Kimi K3, despite them being competitive with the best models from American labs. We can "distill" (ha!) his post down to two main arguments: Anthropic and OpenAI
A phone is a whiskey flask
"a phone is a whiskey flask and humanity is drunk out of our collective minds." -me on X There's a lot to say on this topic especially with regards to the implications for things many once took for granted in their societies. For now, I'
Low standards for white Chinese speakers
"Your Chinese is very good...for a white guy." I strongly identify with this statement. Chinese is a great language to learn for many reasons. One such reason is that native Chinese speakers are incredibly supportive of you, no matter how little effort you've put in
Tesla is juicing its China sales
If you haven't heard, Chinese EVs are amazing and they're taking over the world. And as someone who was just in the market for an EV this spring in Hong Kong, I can assure you that Chinese EVs are excellent: better features, nicer interiors, better ride,
LLMs, nationalism & open source
Inkling came out yesterday - an open source LLM by an American firm. It’s supposedly not bad but also not notably good outside of its multi-modal support for audio compared to the leading open source LLMs which just happen to be created by Chinese firms. What was more interesting
Rudd on Xi...more Western naval-gazing
I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd about Xi Jinping. Rudd speaks Chinese. He served in the Australian foreign service where he met Xi earlier in his career while he was in Xiamen. Rudd later went on to do a PhD at
The big bad Chinese subsidies
This is in reply to a thread on X where Matt Stoller claims that 100% of China's success is due to state subsidies. The "China subsidized its way to success" is really just a cope shibboleth that some Americans repeat without thinking to signal group unity
Apple is winning the AI race
I don't think people realize how easy it is to make use of on-device AI models in an app on most of Apple's devices shipped in the past two years. And I'm talking about the currently shipping 26 versions of iOS and macOS.
QR code menu enabled phone addiction
Phone addiction in mainland China seems to be much higher than the already ridiculous levels it is in other places in the world. It’s very common in restaurants and coffee shops for tables of people to be ignoring each other and their kids bent over their phones. I suspect
Bryan Johnson blood tests in a Chinese public hospital
I wanted to get some Bryan Johnson-inspired blood tests for a baseline of biomarkers. He sells an expensive testing service that, as far as I know, isn’t available outside of the USA. And getting blood tests in Hong Kong means going to an expensive private lab or expensive