An American perspective at the western frontier of liberal democracy, framed and focused through the lens of life in Taiwan. #NeoIdealist #TaiwanIsACountry

The Far West
Joined July 2020
Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
“At least one of the attackers could not be arrested due to diplomatic immunity.” China’s transnational repression, in broad daylight, without shame, often with impunity. How many of these incidents do we need - in 🇺🇸 🇨🇦 🇬🇧 🇪🇺- before someone is PNG’ed?
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Jimmy Lai is a British citizen. He is 78. He spent the summer in a small cell with no air conditioning, still in solitary, and he is getting weaker. His son, Sebastien Lai, told @thetimes that China gains nothing by keeping him there. "After all, a martyr never dies." Read here: thetimes.com/article/678ecd1… #FreeJimmyLai #BringHimHome
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Sickening.
Chinese officials look on as some final adjustments to the red carpet are made for President Xi.
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
This is CCP propaganda at its finest. There is no “win-win cooperation” with the world’s biggest opponent of freedom and liberty. Here’s the real truth behind Xi Jinping’s agenda @ChineseEmbinUS.
🇨🇳🇺🇸Ahead of President Xi Jinping's state visit to the United States, revisit his key remarks on #China-#US relations. Mutual respect, peaceful coexistence and win-win cooperation point the way forward. #ChinaUSRelations #MutualRespect #WinWinCooperation
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Tibetan youth from all around the world have risen in protest against China’s oppressive “Ethnic Unity Law”! China forcibly annexed Tibet
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Marco Rubio will make the history as the first U.S. Secretary of State sanctioned by the U.S. to visit China. In 2020, Beijing sanctioned him twice in retaliation for U.S. actions targeting Chinese officials believed to be involved in human rights abuses in Xinjiang, as well as those in mainland China and Hong Kong responsible for the harsh crackdown on the 2019 protests. It's a bit surprising that the Trump administration didn’t push for the removal of these sanctions against Rubio before agreeing to a summit between Trump and Xi. We'll see how this unfolds in the next few days. scmp.com/news/china/diplomac…
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
There are 56 ethnicities in China—and 55 are getting squashed. A new law passed by the Chinese legislature is a grim milestone in the Communist Party’s harder-line approach to ethnic politics econ.st/4vK4oX4
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Peekaboo.
Malaysia lets Taiwanese use the fast autogate at KLIA but covers up Taiwan’s flag on the sign to avoid drama and unnecessary tantrums. Taiwanese passport = secret access. LOL
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
"Yet it is not China that erases Taiwan, it is us -- the governments, institutions and corporations of the democratic countries who profess to share the same ideals as the Taiwanese people." asia.nikkei.com/opinion/chin…
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All day long @cursor_ai ... "CreatePlan tool failed because I wasn't providing the required parameters correctly—I need to pass a lowercase "plan" field with the detailed implementation steps, along with the name, overview, and todos array according to the schema."
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
The CCP is pursuing AI dominance by 2030. And when it cannot compete fairly, it steals. @YusufSMahmood from @A1Policy explains: "We are not prepared to secure our AI systems. If we decided tomorrow that it was a top national security priority to prevent the CCP from stealing our most capable AI software, we would face extraordinary challenges. We're starting from a vulnerable position. The CCP seeks full AI domination by 2030, and it lacks the capital and talent to win fairly, so it steals. These aren't theoretical harms right now. Chinese AI, developed from stolen American technology, is helping Iran target American warfighters."
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Remarkable episode that shows why @dwarkesh_sp is one of the best interviewers around. He admits no view on whether we should export chips to China and patiently probes Jensen Huang's assumptions. The result is a truly revealing exchange and required viewing.
The Jensen Huang episode. 0:00:00 – Is Nvidia’s biggest moat its grip on scarce supply chains? 0:16:25 – Will TPUs break Nvidia’s hold on AI compute? 0:41:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia become a hyperscaler? 0:57:36 – Should we be selling AI chips to China? 1:35:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia make multiple different chip architectures? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy!
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Here’s the one chart that shows Jensen is lying about the AI compute balance between the US and China. When measured on an apples-to-apples basis, China’s domestic production is tiny compared to the amount of compute they could access if we sell them NVIDIA chips.
Distilled recap of the back-and-forth with Jensen on export controls: Dwarkesh: Wouldn’t selling Nvidia chips to China enable them to train models like Claude Mythos with cyber offensive capabilities that would be threats to American companies and national security? Jensen: First of all, Mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity and a fairly mundane amount of it by an extraordinary company. The amount of capacity and the type of compute it was trained on is abundantly available in China. Dwarkesh: With that, could they eventually train a model like Mythos? Yes. But the question is, because we have more FLOPs, American labs are able to get to this level of capabilities first. Furthermore, even if they trained a model like this, the ability to deploy it at scale matters. If you had a cyber hacker, it's much more dangerous if they have a million of them versus a thousand of them. Jensen: Your premise is just wrong. The fact of the matter is their AI development is going just fine. The best AI researchers in the world, because they are limited in compute, also come up with extremely smart algorithms. DeepSeek is not an inconsequential advance. The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation. Dwarkesh: Currently, you can have a model like DeepSeek that can run on any accelerator if it's open source. Why would that stop being the case in the future? Jensen: Suppose it optimizes for Huawei. Suppose it optimizes for their architecture. It would put others at a disadvantage. As AI diffuses out into the rest of the world, their standards and their tech stack will become superior to ours because their models are open. Dwarkesh: Tesla sold extremely good electric vehicles to China for a long time. iPhones are sold in China. They didn't cause some lock-in. China will still make their version of EVs, and they're dominating, or smartphones, they're dominating. Jensen: We are not a car. The fact that I can buy this car brand one day and use another car brand another day is easy. Computing is not like that. There's a reason why x86 still exists. There's a reason why Arm is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace. Dwarkesh: It's just hard to imagine that there's a long-term lock-in to the Chinese ecosystem, even if they have this slightly better open-source model for a while. American labs port across accelerators constantly. Anthropic's models are run on GPUs, they're run on Trainium, they're run on TPUs. There are so many things you can do, from distilling to a model that's well fit for your chips. Jensen: China is the largest contributor to open source software in the world. China's the largest contributor to open models in the world. Today it's built on the American tech stack, Nvidia’s. Fact. All five layers of the tech stack for AI are important. The United States ought to go win all five of them. in a few years time, I'm making you the prediction that when we want American technology to be diffused around the world—out to India, out to the Middle East, out to Africa, out to Southeast Asia—on that day, I will tell you exactly about today's conversation, about how your policy ... caused the United States to concede the second largest market in the world for no good reason at all.
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
#BREAKING Trump says Iran has agreed to hand over its enriched uranium supply
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Chairman @RepMoolenaar joined @MariaBartiromo today to outline China's multi-front strategy: finance, technology transfer, and influence operations, all reinforcing one another. China continues to buy Iran's oil, enable sanctions evasion for the regimes in Moscow and Tehran, and expand its influence operations in the U.S.
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
This is the key moment between Jensen and Dwarkesh on export controls: 1. Dwarkesh asks why it’s okay to sell NVIDIA chips to China given the national security implications of AI models like Mythos. 2. Jensen gives a misleading answer, arguing that it’s okay to sell American chips to China because China already produces 60% of the world’s chips. 3. But as Jensen definitely knows, compute is measured in flops, not number of chips. 4. Dwarkesh then pushes back, pointing out that on a flops basis, China has 10% of the compute the US has, and giving them more compute would change their cyber capabilities. This exchange shows why it’s critically important for interviewers to have at least some technical knowledge, so they can push back against misleading talking points.
The Jensen Huang episode. 0:00:00 – Is Nvidia’s biggest moat its grip on scarce supply chains? 0:16:25 – Will TPUs break Nvidia’s hold on AI compute? 0:41:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia become a hyperscaler? 0:57:36 – Should we be selling AI chips to China? 1:35:06 – Why doesn’t Nvidia make multiple different chip architectures? Look up Dwarkesh Podcast on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, etc. Enjoy!
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Shockingly, KMT-aligned interests in Washington don’t like the fact that the US government is progressively waking up to the reality that for years—decades—they’ve quietly advanced CCP priorities under the cover of “strengthening US–Taiwan relations.”
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
Breaking🚨: Saghar Gholami is now in imminent danger of execution by The Islamic Regime. Only because she participated in the January protests. She’s only 19. This is pure barbarism. Share this before they kill her.
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Pacific Standard 🚜🌻☂️ retweeted
It’s an indictment of deregulation. There have been dozens of bankruptcies and liquidations in a constantly bailed out industry. But hey Wall Street gonna Wall Street.
Reorganization is one thing (still not a great look). But _liquidation_ is a clear indictment of the Kanter DOJ's misguided suit to stop the Spirit/JetBlue merger.
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