While Americans lament their crumbling infrastructure, China is rapidly expanding high-speed rail, subway systems, and airports across the country. Chinese tech products, from autonomous vehicles to drones to addiction-inducing algorithms, have won over global consumers and put companies such as BYD, DJI, and TikTok in pole position.

China’s prowess in engineering and manufacturing is now at the center of the U.S.–China rivalry in artificial intelligence. Despite Washington’s efforts to block China from advancing in AI, the country has continued to make progress in developing chips and training state-of-the-art large language models.

Dan Wang moved to Canada at age seven from Yunnan in southwestern China. A former tech analyst at Gavekal Dragonomics, his stints in Hong Kong, Beijing, and Shanghai allowed him to closely observe China’s trajectory. In his new book, Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future, Wang compares the country’s “engineering” state, which favors large-scale manufacturing, with America’s “lawyerly” society, which he believes hinders new construction and development.

Interesting experience, this has happened twice now. When house looses power I am still online now that I have moved to Fiber.

It feels a bit eerie. My network and computers, TV, media center, etc are all on UPS so they just keep going. Things just get really quite which is interrupted by just the periodic beeps of the UPS systems.

Does anyone know why my new Fiber connection does this but my old system which was bonded DSL did not? I know back in the early days of DSL I could do this, but some where along the way it stopped being power outage resistant.

https://archive.is/Unb0m

Kagi has quickly grown into something of a household name within tech circles. From Hacker News and Lobsters to Reddit, the search provider seems to attract near-universal praise. Whenever the topic of search engines comes up, there’s an almost ritual rush to be the first to recommend Kagi, often followed by a chorus of replies echoing the endorsement.

Every October, Microsoft host an Employee Giving campaign for charities chosen by staff, with the company matching any funds they raise. During last October’s Giving month, a group of Microsoft workers organised a vigil for Palestinians killed by the Israeli military during the current invasion of Gaza, stumping up donations for organisations such as the Palestinian Children's Relief Fund, while paying tribute to fellow tech workers who’ve lost their lives in the war.

"We were honouring the likes of Shaaban Ahmed al-Dalou, who was a computer science student that got martyred in Gaza," says Abdo Mohamed, one of the organisers and a former Microsoft machine learning engineer. "We were honouring the likes of Aisha Noor Ize-Iji, who was a Washington state resident who had been killed in the West Bank. We were honouring Mai Ubeid, another Palestinian martyr who was a tech worker, and someone who worked with [Google-funded programming bootcamp] Gaza Sky Geeks. People deserved to hear their stories - the Palestinians who had been victims of the genocide deserved a space to be honoured, not to be reduced to numbers." If you’re a white secular westerner like me, you may recoil instinctively from the religiously loaded word "martyr" here – Bassem Saad has written at length about the history of the term as Palestinians use it to describe those killed by Israeli forces.

The vigil was small - "around 50 people, sitting in chairs side by side, in an open space during lunch hour" - and in line with company guidance for such events, Mohamed claims. But at around 9pm that evening he and another organiser, Hossam Nasr, received an email telling them that they had been fired, with Microsoft later claiming that the event "disrupted" work, and should have taken place outside the campus. For Mohamed, the firing reflects Microsoft’s general disinclination to give employees a "safe space" in which to air their grievances about both Israel's treatment of Palestinians, and Microsoft's alleged complicity in supplying technology to the Israel Defense Forces. Rather, Mohamed says, "Microsoft had built this culture of intimidation, retaliation and oppression for anyone who felt the need to speak about what's happening in Gaza”.

If Microsoft hoped to quell such discussion or at least, drive the issue off-campus, their clampdown on criticism backfired. Earlier this month, current and former Microsoft workers with the No Azure For Apartheid movement occupied part of the company’s Redmond, Washington campus with tents and signs, demanding that their employers cease doing business with Israel's military. Just this week, protestors held another sit-in at the company president’s office. NAFA members have even pitched up outside Satya Nadella's lakefront house in canoes. And now, the backlash threatens to engulf Microsoft's entertainment business.

When Caron Morse’s 9-year-old daughter asked for a smartphone last year, her reaction, she told me, was unambiguous: “A hard ‘Hell no.’” Morse is a mental-health provider in the Portland, Maine, public-school system, and she was firmly against smartphones, having seen how social media and abundant screen time could shorten students’ attention spans and give them new anxieties. But she wanted her children to have some independence—to be able to call friends, arrange playdates, and reach out to their grandparents on their own. She also needed a break. “I was so sick,” she said, “of being the middle person in any correspondence.”

So when her daughter turned 10, Morse did get her a phone: a landline.

For that gift to provide all the benefits she wanted, Morse had to lay some groundwork. It would be annoying if her daughters—she also has an 8-year-old—were to start calling their friends’ parents’ smartphones all the time, so she told her neighbors about her plan and suggested that they consider getting landlines too. Several bought in immediately, excited for the opportunity to placate their own smartphone-eager kids. And over the next couple of months, Morse kept nudging people. She appealed to their sense of nostalgia by sharing photos of her older daughter sitting on the floor and twirling the landline’s cord around her fingers. She wrote messages: “Guys, this is adorable and working and important.”

The peer pressure paid off. Now about 15 to 20 families in their South Portland neighborhood have installed a landline. They’ve created a retro bubble in which their children can easily call their friends without bugging a parent to borrow their phone—and in which the parents, for now, can live blissfully free of anxieties about the downsides of smartphones.

In the past few years, interest in old-school technology has been rising, driven partly by desperate adults seeking smartphone alternatives for their kids. Fairs peddle “dumb phones” to parents of tweens. On Reddit, one parent shared that they’d gone “full ’90s,” with a desktop computer installed in the living room, a Nintendo 64, and a landline. In March, after a Millennial mom posted on Instagram about getting a home phone for her kids, she received scores of comments from parents saying they’d done the same—or planned to soon.

As always, I use the term "AI" loosely. I'm referring to these scary LLMs coming for our jobs.

It's important to state that I find LLMs to be helpful in very specific use cases, but overall, this is clearly a bubble, and the promises of advance have not appeared despite hundreds of billions of VC thrown at the industry.

So as not to go full-on polemic, we'll skip the knock-on effects in terms of power-grid and water stresses.

No, what I want to talk about is the idea of software in its current form needing to be as competent as the user.

Simply put: How many of your coworkers have been right 100% of the time over the course of your career? If N>0, say "Hi" to Jesus for me.

I started working in high school, as most of us do, and a 60% success rate was considered fine. At the professional level, I've seen even lower with tenure, given how much things turn to internal politics past a certain level.

So what these companies are offering is not parity with senior staff (Ph.D.-level, my ass), but rather the new blood who hasn't had that one fuckup that doesn't leave their mind for weeks.

That crucible is important.

These tools are meant to replace inexperience with incompetence, and the beancounters at some clients are likely satisfied those words look similar enough to pass muster.

We are, after all, at this point, the "good enough" country. LLM marketing is on brand.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has axed 1,200 voice service providers from the US phone network for failing to meet the rules protecting users from malicious and illegal calls, known as robocalls.

The removal from the Robocall Mitigation Database (RMD) means that all other voice service and intermediate providers must cease accepting all calls directly from the companies that do not meet the requirements.

There tend to be three AI camps. 1) AI is the greatest thing since sliced bread and will transform the world. 2) AI is the spawn of the Devil and will destroy civilization as we know it. And 3) "Write an A-Level paper on the themes in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet."

I propose a fourth: AI is now as good as it's going to get, and that's neither as good nor as bad as its fans and haters think, and you're still not going to get an A on your report.

You see, now that people have been using AI for everything and anything, they're beginning to realize that its results, while fast and sometimes useful, tend to be mediocre.

My take is LLMs can speed up some work, like paraphrasing, but all the time that gets saved is diverted to verifying the output.

No one could credibly accuse me of being a gamer, but Steve has grown on me as a journalist over the past few years. A copyright strike for 75 seconds of the president speaking in a three-hour documentary is so firmly in fair use territory that I want some of what the lawyers were smoking.

https://archive.is/tbUhO