#FloridaMan, lifelong educator, lapsed scholar (HKU PhD). 20 years in the Pearl River Delta. writing about systems, AI, infrastructure, history, and theory
Canton
Joined December 2008
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I’ve finally collected my thoughts on the Hugging Face incident: whether we should anthropomorphize it, what it means to talk about the “sociology” of an AI swarm, how I think the behavior emerged, and what it suggests about AI alignment more broadly.
🤖 Made with AI
trey retweeted
Jensen Huang doesn’t need a Chinese spy to convince him to sell chips to China. He already wants to do that
The intelligence community was run by Tulsi Gabbard until ten minutes ago
The story keeps getting crazier. To recap everything that has been reported so far:
- The US intelligence community discovered that Jensen Huang, the CEO of the largest company in the world, was sleeping with Alice Huang, a Chinese spy and an executive at Megaspeed. (FT)
- Multiple independent investigations have concluded that Megaspeed is likely a Chinese cutout, which helps Chinese companies access AI chips or circumvent export controls. (NYT and Bloomberg)
- The US intelligence community also concluded that Alice Huang’s goal was to convince Jensen to lobby the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced AI chips. (NYT)
- The intelligence community relayed this information to “a small group of top US government officials” earlier this year. (FT)
- Over the last year, Jensen Huang has repeatedly lobbied the U.S. government to loosen export controls on advanced chips. @BISgov has done so, not only by permitting the export of H200 chips to China, but also not enforcing export controls that would have required a license for exports of the most advanced Blackwell chips to Megaspeed and Southeast Asia.
- Although @CommerceGov leadership was presumably briefed on this information by the U.S. intelligence community, @BISgov has taken no actions to tighten controls on Megaspeed or Southeast Asia.
- Megaspeed remains a preferred cloud partner of Nvidia, and continues to receive Nvidia Blackwell chips despite employing a Chinese spy who reportedly is romantically engaged with the CEO of Nvidia.
- Tens of billions of dollars worth of AI chips have been exported to Southeast Asia this year alone, and Malaysia and Singapore are now two of the four largest importers of AI chips in the world.
What is going on here??? We need answers. The question of who gets the most advanced AI chips in the world is literally the defining strategic question of our time. And not only does it seem like the MSS may be directly influencing the debate on export controls in the United States, but also @CommerceGov is refusing to listen to the warnings of the IC on this issue. What is a POSSIBLE good explanation for why Megaspeed is still receiving chips? Why is there not a license requirement for AI chip shipments to all of Southeast Asia? This is beyond strange at this point.
The fallout from this story will be massive. Obviously, the motivations underpinning Nvidia’s policy views opposing export controls must now all be questioned. But also, how did @BISgov sit on this information and has still taken no actions? We need answers.
trey retweeted
reminder that 1960s cambodia had a thriving music scene that combined traditional khmer sounds with western genres (psychedelic rock, jazz, etc.) and almost every single musician died in the 1970s genocide. the singer of this record disappeared and her body has never been found.
trey retweeted
Big week for national security in Asia. Everyone feeling safer no doubt.
Thailand: Bans a textbook about the country.
Hong Kong: Sentences Josh Wong to 10 years, arrests man for importing books.
Macau: Sentences Au Kam San to 12.5 years
trey retweeted
Aggregated knowledge from a small number of debates outperforms the wisdom of large crowds
This study asked a live crowd (N = 5,180) to respond to general-knowledge questions (eg "What is the height of the Eiffel Tower?")
Participants first answered individually, then deliberated and made consensus decisions in groups of five, and finally provided revised individual estimates.
Averaging consensus decisions was substantially more accurate than aggregating the initial independent opinions. In short, small groups beat the wisdom of crowds.
Combining as few as four consensus choices in small groups outperformed the wisdom of over 5,000 individuals.
The key was reasoning together--that aspect of collective deliberation allowed small groups to make more accurate estimates than massive crowds.
nature.com/articles/s41562-0…
trey retweeted
It's something of a mystery why so many cultures have myths of the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades star cluster, when most people can only see six stars. But tens of thousands of years ago, seven stars were in fact visible. A beautiful, but highly speculative, idea: maybe the origin of these myths is truly prehistoric.
arxiv.org/abs/2101.09170
Anyone want to play with something I’m about to launch (I think)
atlas-worlds-lab.valid-anole…
reminder that the HK govt still won’t say which books are banned. Booksellers have asked. Something something “soft resistance” and something like “you should be able to spot The Various Heresies on your own when you see them by now”
Hong Kong's National Security Police have arrested a 34-year-old man suspected of importing seditious books for sale at local bookshops.
• The man is reportedly a member of prisoner support group Migratory Bird 候鳥, which operates a retail shop named As One 如一 in Mong Kok
ALT (GovHK press release) Police National Security Department arrests one man
trey retweeted
Wow
China’s marriage registrations are falling at an accelerating pace in 2026: down 6.2% year-on-year in Q1, 8.7% in Q2, and 14.9% in Q3.
Only 4.648 million couples registered their marriages in the first nine months, a 9.8% decline from a year earlier.
This points to a potentially sharp drop in births in 2027. Since marriage remains closely linked to childbearing in China, fewer marriages in 2026 will mean fewer potential parents entering the pool of births in 2027.
The demographic downturn is not reversing. It is deepening.
trey retweeted
23% of voters said that AI and data centers were "crucial" to their vote in NBC exit polls.
56% said it was a "crucial or major" factor!
How important was AI and data centers to your vote?
Crucial: 23%
Major factor / minor factor / non-factor: 77%
nbcnews.com/politics/2026-el…
trey retweeted
Corn syrup and seed oils have completely ruined the fat community. We have been completely overrun with normie casual involuntary fats (infats, if you will) incapable of choosing either thinness or fatness as a matter of will. The very concept of the volfat has been forgotten.
trey retweeted
Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security steadily implementing the ‘China-fication’ of the country…
Seeing a doctor, buying stock, topping up an e-wallet, or playing an online game in Việt Nam could soon require a check against your national digital ID.
A draft law from the police ministry would make that link mandatory for online transactions in 11 sectors. Ministers could add more. On Nov. 4, Police Minister Lương Tam Quang told lawmakers the system requires “the consent of the data subject.” The draft does not say what happens to people who refuse.
The full text has not been made public. The bill is expected to pass before the National Assembly session closes Nov. 21.
Read more: tinyurl.com/wjhbnn53
trey retweeted
Dems look like they might get 56. Rs will never get that back for a long time. You ignore primaries for years, anoint a charlatan as not just leader but God, and then mimic his retardation every day for a decade, at some point the chickens come home to roost.
trey retweeted
Republicans aren't just going to have to deal with the aftermath of a historic midterm defeat. They are going to have to deal with a problem that we have never seen in American political history. Trump is not going to let his party move on.
I wrote about the blue tsunami newrepublic.com/article/2175…
trey retweeted
The Lockheed mockup has a great view of the Trident aerospike. That spike is what allowed Tridents to fit in Poseidon tubes while still achieving greater range and payload capacity.
