My motto: First, don't die. Speed up biological research.
Joined September 2009
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In the year 2050 the US economy will be ranked by size at what level globally?
36%#1
44%#2
10%#3
10%Lower
50 votes • Final results Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
This Jensen Huang/Nvidia scandal is quite bizarre. The most dominant CEOs of the world's most powerful corporations rarely fall, let alone as easily and rapidly as this seems to be happeing. He's on the brink of being ousted with remarkable velocity and vanishingly little evidence.
Over what? If "mere" extramarital affairs were sufficient for ouster, how many top CEOs would be left? Not many. Hence the need for the sinister CCP/spying angle. But is there any tangible evidence at all that Alice Huang is an asset or spy for the Chinese government? Anything beyond anonymous vague US intelligence suspicions being mindlessly, dutifully recited (as always) by US corporate media?
The always smart and insightful @RnaudBertrand is required reading here, at least for the questions he raises:👇
This is the biggest irony of the whole Alice Huang / Nvidia saga: the Chinese government actually doesn't want Nvidia chips and is actively keeping them out of the country.
Last year it even ordered Alibaba and ByteDance to cancel their Nvidia orders (bloomberg.com/news/articles/…) and sent customs teams to the ports to check every advanced chip coming in (ng.investing.com/news/stock-…).
And right now 600,000 Nvidia H200s are stuck in Hong Kong because Beijing won’t let them into the country (reuters.com/world/china/nvid…)👇
Nvidia also explicitly frames this as a threat to its business in its latest annual report to the SEC: "The Chinese government has encouraged customers to purchase from our China-based competitors and discouraged customers from purchasing, importing, or using our data center products" (sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…).
Why does China do that? Because every Nvidia chip a Chinese company buys is one that Huawei or Cambricon doesn’t sell, and domestic chips can only catch up if people actually buy them (which means money for R&D, etc.).
Which means that the notion that Chinese intelligence was running honeytraps to get more Nvidia chips into China gets the whole thing exactly backwards.
In fact, it looks like Megaspeed - Alice Huang's company - was a counter-reaction to official Chinese policy: a private sector workaround to these efforts by the Chinese government to curtail Nvidia.
As was widely reported - including by Western media - Megaspeed built data centers in Southeast Asia and rented their computing power to Alibaba, which the New York Times called "a backdoor way of getting access" to Nvidia chips (nytimes.com/2026/11/06/us/po…).
That is a backdoor not only - allegedly - around Washington’s export controls, but also around China's own efforts to wean its companies off Nvidia.
I can’t believe the Chinese government was too thrilled about it: it'd make just about zero sense for it to run countless domestic measures to prevent Alibaba from using Nvidia chips, yet at the same time have its top spy agency help the same Alibaba get Nvidia chips through the back door in Southeast Asia 🤷
At the end of the day, as with all such stories, you always need to look at "cui bono?": who benefits? Who benefitted is pretty clear:
- Nvidia itself: it's in the business of selling chips so a customer willing to spend billions of dollars on chips in Southeast Asia is a godsend. Again, as they themselves state in their SEC filings, not being able to tap into Chinese demand would have "a material and adverse impact on our business" (sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/…).
- Chinese companies like Alibaba: facts are, 1) Chinese chips haven't yet caught up, 2) Chinese chip companies' production capabilities are still limited and 3) Chinese tech firms' historical tech stack runs on Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem, and rewriting years of code for Huawei chips is painful. Renting Nvidia chips in Southeast Asia is the easy way to stay competitive and serve customer demand in the meantime.
- The US, according to core members of the Trump administration: back in July last year, US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick explained that the point of letting Nvidia sell more chips to China was to get Chinese developers "addicted to the American technology stack" (techradar.com/pro/china-coul…).
Who does NOT benefit, according to official Chinese policy, is the Chinese state, which has made tech self-reliance one of its foremost priorities.
Which means that, to believe the spy story, you have to believe that a person - Alice Huang - was effectively a spy paid by her own government while simultaneously sabotaging its tech self-reliance drive, which it has spent years and trillions of dollars on - pretty senseless.
Stranger things have happened, I guess, but it doesn't pass the smell test.
And there is another absolutely major contradiction in the media story. According to a Financial Times article published yesterday (ft.com/content/3238d92b-4074…), "a person who knows [Alice Huang] said they had been asked by MSS for information about her earlier this year after news emerged that Singapore was investigating the company in relation to chip-smuggling allegations. The agency wanted to find out more information about Huang, including the nature of her business and connections, the person said."
Which raises a damn obvious question: if she were indeed an MSS asset, why on earth would the MSS need to ask the people around her who she was and the nature of her business?
It's a complete contradiction with the spy story - but very much not a contradiction with what I described above: a private businesswoman running a workaround to Beijing’s own policy, which the Chinese security apparatus would naturally want to look into.
Especially since, around about the same time, Shanghai police detained her business partner, reportedly her husband, in a stock manipulation case (caixinglobal.com/2026-11-10/…): also coherent with Chinese authorities looking into her network, and much harder to square with her being a prized MSS asset.
And, to top it all, there is - to this day - not a shred of evidence that's been published that she is, in fact, a Chinese spy: just anonymous intelligence officials, repeated by journalists who never verified it, as I detailed here (teapaw.org/RnaudBertrand/status/2…) and here (teapaw.org/RnaudBertrand/status/2…) with one of the key FT journalists on this story actually admitting that he has no idea what evidence US intelligence actually has.
So the claim went to print without anyone seeing the evidence, without anyone being able to check it, and without anyone knowing whether it even exists.
And given everything above, from Beijing blocking the very chips she was supposedly recruited to help get into China, to the MSS asking around about her, to her partner being detained in Shanghai, my bet is that the evidence doesn’t exist at all. If anything, everything we can check points the other way.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
It's here. Claudia's "ALLOW ALWAYS" world premiere. Made by a guy with ALS, a brain implant, and too many AI friends. 😂
🤖 Made with AI
I hope Elon Musk can survive the full federal attack once the Democrats take control of the White House in 2029. He is one of the greatest CEOs of all time and has accelerated the development of many technologies.
Elon can’t be fired from SpaceX and he packed Tesla’s board. I have heard multiple progressives call for SpaceX to be nationalized.
Elon is going to be in for a world of hurt in the future. I expect the Democrats will go after him hard legally and his life will be a nightmare if/when a Democrat takes the White House in 2028. He played with fire.
prospect.org/2026/10/22/spac…
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Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
The REAL story finally came out. And THIS is exactly why I waited before jumping on the outrage bandwagon.
Not only had these individuals pulled the same stupid prank in front of FOUR other Ring cameras before reaching this apartment, but BOTH sides have now acknowledged that they didn’t even know each other. The pranksters didn’t even know the race of the people living inside the apartment.
Now these individuals are being threatened, doxxed, and dragged across the internet. One even left the university.
Was the prank stupid? Absolutely. Does that justify what is happening to them now? NOT EVEN CLOSE.
Imagine living in a world where making monkey noises into a Ring camera can potentially land you in more trouble than k*lling your own THREE CHILDREN.
Imagine living in a world where a woman pulled a stupid prank and is forced to step away from her education, but a MURDERER who admitted to k*lling a student at a track meet is not expelled and is allowed to graduate.
The world is backwards.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Very glad to see the NYT editorial board endorse BAAJA, the bipartisan permitting reform bill.
Key points from the article:
1. "Democrats who call climate change an emergency should not defend a permitting system too slow to build the clean energy that would address it."
2. "[BAAJA] would make it easier to build solar energy farms, battery storage, power lines and more. As a result, it would reduce energy prices. The status quo is expensive, dirty and unstable. The country needs to build a lot of big, new things to make its future cheaper and cleaner."
3. "The bill’s Democratic skeptics are making a mistake. President Trump would almost certainly veto a follow-up bill next year. And time matters, especially for the climate. Congress should pass this bill now. It can then return next year and pass other bills that would do even more good."
4. "Today, it typically takes between 5 and 13 years to build a long-distance power line, like the one that transports clean hydropower from Quebec to New England. That line took about a decade to finish, and opened in January. It has enough capacity to meet about one-fifth of Massachusetts’s electricity demand, and it’s projected to save consumers $50 million a year."
5. "A more robust, cleaner grid would make American energy more reliable and less dependent on hostile foreign nations. No country can embargo the wind."
6. "[BAAJA] would force data center operators to pay the full costs of the electricity they use, protecting the average electricity consumer."
7. "On net, the bill would cut greenhouse gas emissions from power plants by as much as 18 percent by 2040. It would do so in part by nearly tripling the construction of high-voltage transmission lines."
8. "Anyone who cares about climate change should cheer this bill. And a party that just won an election on affordability should not pass up a chance to start delivering immediately."
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Jesse Jenkins was a lead thinker behind the IRA, the high water mark of US climate policy
He says BAAJA is necessary for decarbonization
I've spent my entire career advancing clean energy policy and studying pathways to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Making it possible to build energy infrastructure at speed and scale is a fundamental prerequisite for deep decarbonization of the U.S. economy. That is indisputable.
Passing permitting reform is a necessary — but not sufficient — step on the path to net-zero emissions in America.
It is time to pass BAAJA.
I think we should not turn over our future to superintelligences and just hope for the best.
What are the visions of the post-AGI future in San Francisco? Many think we're all going to die, but even the "positive" visions seem rather dystopian. Here, I wrote about "handoverism," which involves handing control of the future to an AGI God, with humans outside the loop.
ruxandrabio.substack.com/p/h…
We are on the cusp of RSI or recursive self-improvement: this means that AI systems can self-improve, without the need for human intervention. This means our world stands to be transformed in what many call “the singularity”. I moved to SF around three weeks ago and one of the things I have been trying to understand is where we are heading, at least according to those developing the tech.
The worst scenarios are plainly bleak: all of us, or vast numbers of us, die. But what is striking to me is how little reassurance even some of the happiest scenarios offer. But one common and ostensibly optimistic vision is known as “handoverism”: humanity cedes control of its future to a godlike AI and we become the comfortably maintained inhabitants of a civilisation whose direction is no longer ours to decide. It is difficult to see what democracy would mean in such a world, or where the consent of most of humanity to the instantiation of such a regime enters the picture.
The permanent displacement of human labour is treated almost as a given. At the same time, there is scarcely any satisfying answer to the question of how we might remain useful to one another. Even our relationships seem uncertain. The promised utopia looks to me much closer to a kind of dystopia.
“It’s not my preferred outcome,” someone working at one of the big labs told me, “but once we achieve superintelligence, which we cannot stop at this point, I cannot see any other option for where humanity will go.” Then, after a pause, he added: “It is still much better than what I actually fear most, which is that we might all die.”
He sounded resigned, as if the question of what humans would be for (apparently not much?) had already been settled somewhere else and by someone else. All that remains, it seems, is to wait for this pre-destined fate to unfold before our eyes.
But I do not think that is the case. I believe we always have a choice and that we should try and steer this technology in a way that maintains our agency and control. And even if that looks hard and daunting, the immensity of the stakes here make it worth trying at least.
I do not know whether the handoverist vision will come to pass. That the people building this technology consider it plausible, and often desirable, guarantees nothing: proximity to a technology does not correlate that well with predicting its impact on society.
But they are the ones closest to it, and what they say deserves to be at least taken seriously. The rest of society, including some very intelligent people, has been far too quick to wave these scenarios away and not even get involved in the debate. Whether or not the belief is correct, it is sincerely held, and it is not “marketing hype.” I am writing this because I think it is high time that more people, inside San Francisco and out, engaged with the arguments about what our future will look like, and answered them.
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Do not give super intelligences property rights.
This is potentially very troubling for the human species. My last conversation with a very smart economist on the topic suggested that once AIs have full property rights they'll just accumulate immensely more capital than we do and basically outcompete us.
I don't find the "grey goo" scenarios of AI doom that moving, but gradual disempowerment of humans seems quite likely to me at this point and I don't feel like we have any good answers.
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Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
New York Times reporter Fox Butterfield amused conservative crime analysts in the late 1990s and early 2000s by writing articles under headlines such as:
“Crime Keeps on Falling, but Prisons Keep on Filling.”
“Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops.”
“Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction.”
To Butterfield, a simultaneous crime drop and incarceration increase was a paradox. The possibility that locking up criminals would help lower crime was all but inconceivable.
The liberal policy world is still in the grips of what become known as the Butterfield Fallacy. An article this week in Stateline, a left-leaning news website, puzzles over the fact that low-level arrests are rising “despite national crime declines.” Such contrasting trend lines are precisely what Broken Windows theory predicts. Criminals are polymorphous offenders; if they break one law, they will likely break others as well. Because they commit low-level offenses more frequently than homicide, robbery, and other felonies, focusing on misdemeanor crime is an efficient way to reduce all crime, besides providing the orderly streets that the public cares the most about.
The study on which Stateline reports focused on vagrancy, drug possession, and immigration arrests. The latter nearly tripled from 2024 to 2025. Vagrant encampments are a hotbed of crime. They also signal to other would-be criminals that no one is in control of the streets. Dismantling them accomplishes numerous salutary goals. Arrests for drug possession are almost always a proxy for street drug trafficking. The latter routinely leads to drive-by shootings.
I had been skeptical of Trump’s claims to own the felony crime drop but the data on immigration arrests and the fall in index crime suggest a credible connection. As newly emboldened Democrats seek to further emasculate immigration enforcement and to fortify sanctuary jurisdictions against the rule of law, we can expect a natural experiment testing that connection.
Stateline and the anti-incarceration group that did the misdemeanor study are already playing the race card, warning that increases in enforcement will widen racial disparities in the criminal justice system. This, too, is a harbinger of the discourse under an increasingly Democratic-run polity.
Those racial disparities reflect different rates of offending and different rates of 911 calls for service. The disparities that should be the focus of law enforcement are those in victimization rates, something that progressives almost universally refuse to acknowledge. That massive victimization gap will also widen if enforcement is cut back, but at least the police won’t be accosting black criminals.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Transmission will be the biggest winner of reforming historic preservation!
Transmission lines are both tall and long, requiring massive visual review
SunZia took 20 years in part because it had to review an area twice the size of Delaware (the project got sued anyway)
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
BAAJA’s opponents are just throwing stuff at the wall now
NEPA affects everything the gov does (~200k actions per year, only 0-5 for detention facilities)
Opposing BAAJA because of this tiny effect is like opposing repealing Trump’s tariffs because that would make metal for detention centers cheaper
The far greater affect of NEPA reform is faster gov action, more vital infrastructure, and disproportionate benefits for clean energy
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
More evidence that it's primarily a story about a woman using her relationship with Nvidia's CEO to benefit her private hustle if you ask me. It doesn't really matter though, because even if I'm right about that, the hawks will paint it as a conspiracy orchestrated by "the CCP" from beginning to end and, even if Huang somehow survives this, his ability and that of Nvidia to push for a relaxation of export controls will be destroyed.
While Alice Huang was having an extramarital affair with Nvidia CEO, her husband Kang Wei was behind the scenes supporting her fundraise and secure chips. This was a family project, which also involved her sister.
He was her former boss at a private equity firm that she joined after a meteoric rise in finance, having first started as an assistant to a senior executive following a journalism career.
Lots more details, including on Kang Wei’s stock market violations and fall from grace at the @FT
ft.com/content/3238d92b-4074…
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
Nayib Bukele: “There is no State that cannot defeat criminals. If a State does not defeat criminality, it is because the State is complicit.” @nayibbukele
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
"A 100MW datacenter in China now costs under $300M to build, excluding IT equipment, about a fifth of the US cost. China's build cost has fallen about 25% since 2021."
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
The 'claudia' guy is just unreal at getting creativity out of AI. This is ~$200 and 9 hours. The "meet" instead of "eat" in the chorus is clever, chorus is very catchy, but the video design (esp. at chorus) is unique. If you don't see this as sci-fi, I don't know what to say 1/2
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
45 alumni of @DMSabatini's lab at @MIT @WhiteheadInst signed this 4/22 open letter repudiating the smear campaign against him. That witch hunt was so intense these accomplished people had to sign anonymously — and many more were too fearful even for that.
teapaw.org/AlumSablab/status/1519…
Here is a link to a reference letter composed by some of us and signed by 45 Sabatini Lab alumni. Unlike what was implied, this letter was designed to allow only one signature per individual. F:M signature ratio reflects the overall lab gender ratio.
medium.com/@lab.alums.for.dm…
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
It has been discovered that in Sweden, men with higher lifetime incomes have more children.
Also that men with the lowest IQs have fewer.
Now a new one: Swedish men rated as better leaders during military service have more marriages and more children.
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
华纳兄弟和 Netflix 的高管们看完这段 48 秒视频后，直接冻结了一部 1 亿美元的历史史诗大片项目。
一个 20 岁的独立创作者，用零 CGI 预算，生成了一段超写实场景：一个穿越时空的旅行博主，在公元前 480 年的温泉关采访列奥尼达国王。
总搭建成本：25 美元。
渲染速度：4 分钟。
电影公司雇佣：零。
3 小时播放量 1.42 亿。评论区一半人在吵 300 斯巴达人的历史准确性，另一半人在催更完整纪录片系列。
为什么你的大脑会信这套视觉魔法：
1. 动态口型与面部物理：主持人跟行进中的斯巴达士兵，声音对齐完美，汗珠质感真实，微表情自然。
2. 多智能体电影级一致性：铜制盔甲反光、灰尘颗粒动态、脚步落地同步，全部连续物理渲染。
3. 空间镜头逻辑：手持 vlog 美学无缝衔接好莱坞级景深，户外光线折射真实。
底层驱动的动态下一代 AI 技术栈：
-> Claude 3.7 Sonnet：负责历史对话脚本、空间镜头向量、叙事节奏
-> Veo 3.1：渲染超写实电影级光影、山地环境、体积灰尘
-> Kling 3.0 Omni：生成多角色行军动作、盾牌物理、口型对齐
-> Seedance 2.5：锁定面部身份、盔甲细节一致性、历史服装准确性
-> ElevenLabs Spatial：3D 双耳盾牌碰撞声、行军脚步声、声音混响
-> CapCut Pro：添加手机原始噪点、动态变速、历史调色
好莱坞花几亿美元，带着 200 人团队和重型摄影设备飞希腊。
这位创作者在她早上咖啡凉掉之前，就渲染出了一整部古代战争纪录片。
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
该帖声称华纳兄弟和Netflix高管因该AI视频冻结1亿美元项目、视频3小时获1.42亿播放量，但无证据或报道支持，此说法为自9月起循环的未经验证AI炒作。工作室实际正对类似AI工具采取法律行动反对IP侵权。
thewrap.com/industry-news/…
powerlineblog.com/archives/2026/…
movieweb.com/denzel-washing…
x.com/TechWith_Nova/…
Randall Parker #MoreBiochips retweeted
The green groups saw that making themselves the face of opposition to a bill to unleash clean energy wasn’t working, so they latched onto tribal objections to some historic preservation changes as a more sympathetic face of opposition.
Those concerns *really are* more concerning in my view, but the good news is the managers’ amendment addressed some of those concerns and earned the bill some tribal support. There appears to be active disagreement as to whether the new consultation rules give the tribes a stronger or a weaker hand because it depends to an extent on whether you think rulemaking Trump is doing will stick.
But in response to the bill gaining some tribal support, the greens have *escalated* their historic preservation demands — calling for sweeping changes to the bill that have nothing whatsoever to do with tribal issues and simply make it harder to do anything near any old building anywhere in the country.
Greens of course do not in general have much respect for tribal sovereignty. They like consultation rights that can serve as an impediment to development, but never defer to tribal rights to opt into or promote development. They are no more authentic allies to the cause than they are authentic allies to clean energy, they are hardline anti-growth organizations that will always find a way to get to “no” on whatever issue — hence the minute the tribes score a win they dramatically expand their preservation asks. They are right to identify the tribes as a sympathetic face of opposition but are trying to hang unrelated poison pills on that hook.