"It's all a scam, but my guy fights for me" Happy election season, folks

An Austrian Tongue Choir from the Alps region of Tyrol sings ‘Moscow Nights’ with their tongue in a 1982 performance. If not for the Internet, we’d never know music videos like this existed.

Hey there @AnthropicAI I have a request for a tool I badly want: An integrated way buy and read books directly inside @claudeai. This would be massively helpful to my research workflow, which already links Claude and @obsdmd.

A remarkably cynical take on why one would want to understand the lives of other people... Perhaps I'm naïve - the originator of this take suggests the emotions are complicated - but damn

The Austrian National Team showed up to train at my gym in Shanghai!

Does AI make anyone else feel like their biological context window is too small?

Overheard in Shanghai: "I might like this more than New York"

... isn't there a Limp Bizkit song about this?

Today it's a beautiful park, part of some 60km of nearly continuous parks, walkways and mixed-use developments along both sides of the river, a large chunck of which are refurbished industrial sites

"What is wealth but the absence of distress?" - @gonglei89

When talking about automation and AI in China, especially in the context of policy and public attitudes, the details really matter. For example, we have visited one of the most highly automated EV factories in China: NIO’s F2 plant in Hefei. It has roughly 150 workers per workshop, maybe a bit more on the finishing side. By contrast, the SAIC-GM-Wuling plants in Liuzhou, which we are taking people to this time, are much less automated, with around 500 to 600 workers per workshop. The same was true of the SAIC diesel truck factory we visited. What was striking in Liuzhou was that the factories were quite direct about why automation had not gone further: jobs. They said their plants were about 60% automated and could relatively easily reach 90%, but doing so would be too disruptive to the local economy. But that is specific to Liuzhou, which is a major manufacturing city with an unusually deep pool of factory labor, something that is actually rare in China today. In Hefei, that was clearly not the case, which helps explain why automation levels were much higher there, and why there is a stronger push for it in some other cities as well. We heard something similar from autonomous driving companies working on robotaxis. They were also very blunt: the technology is more or less ready, but the pace of rollout will depend heavily on policy. It is obvious that robotaxis could displace a large number of drivers, and maintaining social stability and public acceptance is a core government concern. Drivers, incidentally, are also one of the most networked and protest-capable groups in China. At the same time, you can already see cleaning robots and delivery robots everywhere, whether bringing food to your table or delivering items to hotel rooms. But as one analyst pointed out to us, most employment is still concentrated in the service sector. That is part of why China’s automation push is more aggressive in manufacturing: labor shortages are more acute there, and the broader employment impact is smaller. So the main takeaway is that the Chinese government is clearly pushing AI and automation, but not in a uniform way. Generally, the emphasis is much stronger in manufacturing than in services, but the actual pace of deployment varies a lot depending on local labor conditions, the specific job, and concerns about social stability.

It's the most wonderful time of year in Shanghai... The two weeks when you can open the windows, but the mosquitoes haven't yet arrived 🦟

When I finally fell asleep last night, I had a dream about insomnia...

King of the Hill guys from a different multiverse