アメリカとイランが戦闘終結に合意したと発表された。覚書の中で一番気になる文言は、米国及び同盟国がイラン復興のために少なくとも3000億ドル(48兆円)の計画の提示とあることだ。イラン戦争に反対した欧州の国々より、トランプに抱きついていた高市首相の日本が払うことになる懸念だ。絶対に反対だ。

In southern China’s Foshan, dragon boats don’t just race—they brake, reverse, and drift.

People getting excited over a projection of their own social reality.

Anthropic's woowoo existential risk theatre has long gone past the point of farce. They courted this ban.

Why did private firms, not state-owned enterprises (SOEs), come to dominate China’s EV sector? My new @ChinaJournal article (co-authored with Xiao Ma @maxiaoalex) challenge the "top-down industrial policy" narrative. The real engine? Strategic alliances between local governments and private capital. 🧵 Based on 3 years of fieldwork, 60 interviews (with officials, entrepreneurs, and engineers), and rich first-hand accounts, we show how strict central regulations inadvertently drove local states to bet big on private EV players. Here is the story: (1/15)

I thought that if Israeli soldiers or settlers attacked Christian villages, the Christian world would unite in their millions in condemnation that their sacred sites were being burnt and erased.

A key idea in Chinese statecraft since ancient times is that the state has a responsibility to stabilize inherently unstable markets for essential commodities (see How China Escaped Shock Therapy). Public stockholdings like the ever normal granary participated in the market buying when prices are low and selling when prices are high for centuries with the goal of stabilizing supply and demand, prices and ultimately the value of money. Now China is doing just that with the global oil market: It has drastically reduced its imports, hence pushing down demand in a time of global supply shortages. This is possible thanks to massive public reserves and strategic redundancy (some like to call this “overcapacity”). @JavierBlas finds that the number one reason why oil prices have not shot above USD 100 is China, China and China. Imagine how much more stability the world could enjoy, if all countries engaged in such buffer stock stabilization for essentials such as grain. I have been calling for this at the G20 food security task force last year (see link below).

The end of giddy, FOMO-driven token maxxing in China as in the US, as productivity gains from AI usage fail to show up and token prices get real.

The law "law teaches, habituates, and re-forms." @Vermeullarmine The law is a teacher.

An 'altar boy' in the ritual procession, the little angel is terrified that his wings might fall off. Fengxiang County, Shaanxi, 1999. 📸 Photo by Yang Yankang.

In 1867, two groups of men were building the same railroad, doing the same backbreaking work, side by side in the Sierra Nevada mountains. One group was fed by the company. The other had to buy their own food out of their own wages. The company thought they were punishing the second group. They were wrong. The Irish workers got what the Central Pacific Railroad decided to give them: boiled beef, boiled potatoes, water, and whiskey. The same meal, every single day, prepared by company cooks with no interest in variety or nutrition. Dysentery and scurvy tore through their camps. Men got sick and died. The water was contaminated, and nobody boiled it. The Chinese workers, who made up 80 to 90 percent of the entire western workforce by 1867, were paid less than their Irish counterparts and received nothing from the company. Every meal came out of their own pocket. So they organized. Each crew of 20 men elected their own cook, pooled their wages, and sent supply orders to the Chinese districts of Sacramento and San Francisco. What arrived by wagon at the Sierra Nevada construction camps was documented by a traveler named Charles Nordhoff, who wrote it down word for word: dried oysters, abalone, cuttlefish, bamboo shoots, five kinds of vegetables, Chinese bacon, four kinds of dried fruit, vermicelli, dried seaweed, peanut oil, dried mushrooms, rice, and tea. Their cooks prepared everything on keyhole-shaped wok stoves. They kept live pigs and chickens at camp for weekends. They boiled their water every morning and dispensed it as tea throughout the day. They did not get dysentery. Archaeologists excavating the Donner Summit camp in recent years found the physical evidence still in the ground: Chinese brown-glazed stoneware jars for pickled vegetables and sauces, fragments of rice wine containers, the wok stove bases themselves. The food culture of a workforce the company tried to starve is preserved in the soil of the Sierra Nevada. In the summer of 1867 the Chinese workers went on strike, demanding equal pay and equal treatment. The railroad broke the strike by cutting off their food supply. Their demands were denied, but they went back to work. They built the railroad anyway. © Eats History #archaeohistories

DeepSeek's New Data Center Hiring Signals a Bigger Shift in China's AI Infrastructure Race Recent job postings are revealing about the directionality of the firm's AI infrastructure strategy A short thread. 🧵

As believers of open research, we are disappointed to see Anthropic silently degrading Fable 5 for AI development "Any topic related to building pretraining pipelines, distributed training infrastructure, or ML accelerator design... may have limited effectiveness through Claude via methods such as prompt modification, steering vectors, or parameter-efficient fine-tuning." Not only do they get to decide what you use LLMs for in research, but this also enables them to silently intervene in your research without you knowing. This sets a dangerous precedent. If a model refuses openly, users can understand the boundary. If a model falls back to another model, users can still evaluate the difference. But if a model silently modifies or weakens its own answers while still pretending to help, researchers lose the ability to know whether a failed result came from their own idea, their implementation, or an invisible intervention by the model provider. That is not safety. Safety policies should be transparent, auditable, and user-visible. On top of that, the people most harmed by this are not the largest labs with massive teams and proprietary infrastructure. It is the independent researchers, academic groups, startups, and open-source builders who rely on public tools to compete, innovate, and pioneer AI for everyone else.

北京の視点から見れば、自民党右派が支配する日本政府と軍事や安全保障の二国間交渉をすることほど、労力と時間の無駄はない。 日本が自前の生存戦略を持たず、防衛費43兆円の使い道から敵基地攻撃能力の運用にいたるまで、すべてをワシントンに丸投げしているダム端末にすぎないことは完全に見抜かれている。 「ラジコンの玩具（日本）と話すのをやめ、リモコンを握っている持ち主（米国）と直接交渉する。」 中国は、日本の急速な軍備拡大や非核三原則の空洞化、戦後平和主義の放棄を『新軍国主義の暴走』という国際社会向けのナラティブに昇華させ、米国に対しては 「お前の飼い犬は狂犬病になりかけている。共同で鎖をかけ直すメカニズムを作ろう」 と持ちかけることができる。 この戦略の最も意地悪で致命的な構造は、日本問題を解決するための触媒として台湾問題を絡め取るトポロジーにある。 日本の自民党や極右勢力は、台湾の民進党と勝手に結びつき、台湾有事は日本有事というチープな応援歌で踊ってきた。 北京はこれを逆手に取り、日本へのレアアースや重要鉱物の供給保証（真意は米国のハイテク防衛兵站の安定）と米国による台湾の現状維持・統一の黙認および日本の前線基地化の凍結を天秤に乗せる米中共同管理方式を提案できる。 トランプ政権のようにアメリカ・ファーストを掲げるドライなビジネスマシーンにとって、遠い東アジアの小作人（日本や台湾）の主権など、自国の経済・技術覇権を維持するための交換可能な在庫に過ぎない。 日本国内のクソリプ勢や防波堤ナラティブの受け売り小作人たちは、自分たちが西側陣営の立派な一員として中国と戦っていると錯覚している。 しかし、国際社会の冷徹な視線から見れば、日本は自ら戦後平和主義という最大の安全弁をドブに捨て、周辺国のすべて（中国・ロシア・北朝鮮）と敵対するミサイル基地へと自発的に身を投げ出した、危険で脆弱な『東アジアの火薬庫』『病人』以外の何ものでもない。 主権を放棄し、米国の拡声器として応援歌を歌い続けた結果、気がつけば米中二大超大国のディールのテーブルの上で、レアアースと引き換えに軍事的な手足を縛られて管理される対象として扱われる。 「日本に対する資源制限は、東京へのカードではない。ワシントンに対するレバレッジだ」 この北京の視点は、戦後日本の外交・安全保障ナラティブが、いかに内側からスカスカに空洞化しているかを告げている。 この米中が激突するチェス盤の上で、棄て駒にされるスネ夫の運命を拒絶する唯一の方法は、プロンプトの工夫（さらなる右傾化や軍備増強）ではない。 システムそのものからプラグを引き抜くことだ。

China Railway is one of many state owned enterprises of the Communist Party of China. With an annual revenue of $178B, $1.35T in assets, and 4 billion annual riders, China Railway accounts for 75% of the entire world’s high speed rail and is not run for profit but for people.

Addressing the most common criticism of my previous post, I have here plotted the extreme poverty rates of the US and China on the same scale, sourced directly from the World Bank. The result is the same: the extreme poverty rate ($3/day PPP) is higher in the US than in China.

Crazy that this is getting barely any coverage. This year’s European Press Prize was just awarded to an investigative report by the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant. It is entitled “What the Wounds Tell” and in it the journalists Maud Effting and Willem Feenstra document the cases of 114 children in Gaza under the age of 15 who were struck by a single bullet to the head or chest. Almost all of them died or were left severely disabled. They chose to document only the cases of boys and girls under the age of 15 (though often much younger: aged 3, 4 or 7) because these are children who can be immediately identified as such. “A single bullet in these parts of the body is a clear indication that these children were deliberately targeted“, the two journalists write. This is the article: volkskrant.nl/kijkverder/v/2…

When the Macedonian soldiers of Alexander the Great first broke into Gaza after the siege of 332BCE, they recorded what they saw and left the first eyewitness account of Gaza that survives....

Fortunately the world has an alternative to US AI.

The Dutch are attempting to provoke China on two fronts: economic (by stripping Nexperia of its management) and military (by sending warships into Chinese territorial waters and launching helicopters). This is perhaps the most ignorant and foolish act of recklessness in the world to date, demonstrating how desperate the current Dutch government is for attention, to become a news focus and a geopolitical hotspot, and to serve as some kind of "benchmark" for the West. Undoubtedly, they will pay a heavy price.