Sidney Fong

It's very telling when people freak out about the closing "human-AI capability gap". They can't imagine a world where humans are valuable regardless of output. The cop-out is to retroactively assign extra value if they can trace the production to humans. Like how works from famous artists sell more just because.

@felix375 @StarboySAR Granted this was 6 years ago, but I wouldn’t bet much that Chinese banks in Hong Kong would sacrifice US business for you or me or any nobody… bbc.com/news/world-asi…

@StarboySAR The US can sanction HK officials all they want. Unless they plan to retire in the US, it makes no difference. No Chinese bank will acknowledge those sanctions. At this point China is telling the West to go F itself. Now if those officials had property or assets in the West...

For one thing, HK won't turn your money over to the US just because the US says so. So at least your hard earned money is safe from illegal seizure.

@EliaStellaria @catsgomao @zoey_mane oh noes..

@catsgomao @zoey_mane IM DOWN AND I WILL FORCE ZOEY TO

fun idea: managers versus talents in league of legends for charity hello potential managers, talents, organizers, and sponsors 🙂🙂🙂 (also please see my first message to @zoey_mane, we are ready)

@Holding_Frame @QiaochuYuan modern day "philosophers" have a penchant for making such simple observations prohibitively complicated for sane people to talk about.

@QiaochuYuan It only takes about 5 minutes of reading about anomalies of consciousness (see PEAR at Princeton or DOPS at UVA) to realize that materialism doesn’t explain the phenomena of consciousness.

personally i think consciousness is probably an incoherent concept and we should not tie the AI personhood discussion to it, but, i think this perspective just straightforwardly comes out of taking scientific materialism seriously if you believe the human body including the brain is ultimately just a very complex machine made out of cells then whatever consciousness is it is ultimately being produced by the activity of a bunch of cells. so there's nothing stopping that same sort of thing, or something close enough for horseshoes, from being produced by a bunch of silicon instead. obviously people have many disagreements with this but this is the basic idea i had growing up and i assume others have something similar most objections to this idea, afaict, are biological chauvinism. some people have a very strong desire to insist on some kind of specialness to the human experience and to them this level of scientific materialism is a threat to human dignity (i think because it implies a person is ultimately a very complex sort of thing, and in our culture things do not have dignity). personally i think this is a confusion. i still believe the human body including the brain is ultimately just a very complex machine made out of cells and i don't see this as a threat to human dignity at all. this is what human dignity was made of this whole time!

@RxflowR @QiaochuYuan *You* know *you* have experiences and you don't know whether anything else have it. Then you *assume* other humans have experiences just like you. I may be a zombie but you wouldn't know. Now, if you say "humans are biological therefore..." well that's biological chauvinism.

Re: “biological chauvinism” It’s simply a given fact that we know we have experiences and we don’t know that chips have it. Unless you thought that laptops had feelings or experiences before LLMs came along, you can’t be taken seriously if now you believe GPUs have them. Statistically manipulating word probability maps doesn’t suddenly give GPUs experiences.

@EliaStellaria Who's Elia?

I'm home and catching up on work but I want to stream as soon as I can! Also I miss you, I miss you, I miss you and I hope you all haven't forgotten me

@NoBananaBB @QiaochuYuan

@hnfong @QiaochuYuan The singularity was spiritual rather than religious. Yud just canonized the dumbest version of it as the religion of “Rationalism”

"without anyone intending it" lol. lmao

@QiaochuYuan i thought it was abundantly clear the whole time the singularity thingy was a religion... (and not a very good one at that..)

this 👏 was 👏 a 👏 religious 👏 project 👏 the 👏 whole 👏 time x.com/QiaochuYuan/st…

@EwiaStellawia Buy too many sussy anime things?

They blocked my card again for suspicious activity imma cry

Meta was easily the most toxic company I've worked for. There's a reason the Chinese call it "Squid Game". Others refer to it as "Hunger Games" or "Lord of the Flies". I think they're all accurate. The company culture is basically every man/woman for themselves. The performance review process (PSC) not only doesn't incentivize helping others, if anything it actually discourages it since everyone is stack ranked against each other. Imagine working on a team where every 6 months, one of you is going to get axed. Of course it's going to become toxic. "Bottoms up" culture is a complete farce - it's just a way for leadership to offload accountability. The Tech Leads (TLs) have all the power - owning the relationships and tribal knowledge to gatekeep projects to their buddies. Managers are "people managers" with limited technical understanding, who basically aggregate TL feedback and create performance review packets to calibrate with other managers and IC7+. The takeaway is that your destiny is in the hands of the TLs, and TLs unlike managers have no responsibility for your career. There are no repercussions for unethical behavior. I've seen managers and TLs throw others under the bus and get away with it. The only mission bonding the company together is individual self-preservation. Save your own ass to survive for another stock vesting, and throw someone else under the bus if you need to. That's why layoffs rarely impact directors/VPs or tenured IC7+ despite the fact that they're paid by far the most. Even this recent mass layoff that was supposed to "flatten" managers layers barely affected directors/VPs/IC7+, and fell predominantly on M1s - the lowest rung of the management chain. The culture is extremely performative and focused on box ticking and optics. Everything is about PSC (the performance review system) and perception. This means tons of meetings, useless AI slop posts, and top-down initiatives that don't benefit anyone but maybe help tick off the impact box of some go-getter at the top. Impact is not enough - it has to have sufficient complexity. So complexity is added for complexity's sake. The org I was in (Facebook ads) is 90% Chinese, and the entire leadership chain up to the VP level is Chinese. Mandarin is the primary language at the office, except in official meetings with non-speakers. Chinese work culture is very different from American work culture, with 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days/week), top-down nature, emphasis on saving face (eg. don't question your superiors), and toxicity being quite common. Naturally when an org is completely dominated by a single ethnicity that's notorious for not integrating, elements from their work culture seep in. Of the layoffs I witnessed in this org, 3/4 were not Chinese (just to be clear, most Chinese are very kind so don't take this as an attack. But it is a reality that I think most people outside this company are completely unaware of, and I question if leadership is even aware despite the fact that we're talking about the company HQ) I had the most toxic manager of my life here. I watched him deliberately set up a new hire to fail, driving them to needing to see a psychiatrist for anxiety + depression, and getting them fired. Then he suddenly disappeared for 8 months, before leaving the company. I could go on and on, but this is already pretty long and I think you get the point. Yes there are a lot of great, kind people here. I managed to transfer out of my first team into a new team with a great manager where everyone was very smart, supportive, and hardworking. But the company has its Squid Game reputation for a reason. Company culture comes from the top. It seems leadership is either too removed to notice, or maybe don't really care anymore because I guess they already made their billions and us plebs are expendable these days.

@__tinygrad__ @natolambert I get your point, but here's a nit: I was just watching this the other day. youtube.com/watch?v=1z_9RT…

@natolambert When you look back at the history of science and technology, all the names you remember were open science. Tesla died penniless, yet we know his name. Newton, Plato, and Turing didn't work on closed stuff. It's a trade of temporary comfort for a shot at eternal glory.

Very happy for Karpathy. Also very lonely times in open science.

@TaiwanFreedom89 @AngelicaOung You two are both larping, there are enough credits to go around for everybody.

You know Anglica, I actually know people who know you from Taiwan and they all they same thing. You've lost your mind. You think this is a larp yet I know you from others who say the same thing. I keep following you coz I want to know what it's like to be awestruck with the KMT after being a DPP supporter. Your entire persona since has been pretty laughable and a bigger larp than me ever saying Taiwan is a country. Keep going tho.

“History shows at critical moments, the good will always rise up and defend freedom.” History in fact does not show this. Movies. You’re confusing history with movies.

@JeffBoeker @AngelicaOung And here you're not actually seeing the person being sanguine about post-protest Hong Kong... it's more like "how dare you compare Hong Kong with conditions of mainland China and that war torn third world country Ukraine"

@JeffBoeker @AngelicaOung We hong kongers have collectively realized the extent of the 青鳥's braindead recently, in part due to Meta's fine algorithms that groups HK and TW together due to the use of the same traditional chinese script. So these days we generally have little patience for them...

OVERHEARD ON THREADS: Taiwanese netizen: Some say HK is terrible but Ukraine is worse off. We should pick the lesser evil. I say I’d rather die in battle, than to get live organ-harvested. HK netizen: Hong Konger here. We are fine after 97. On weekends we can visit Shanghai, Shenzhen or Taipei. How is it that a bunch of bluebirds have lost their minds under DPP rule? Have your brains been organ-harvested? Comparing us to Ukraine? How funny? How cringe? Mainlander netizen: I’m mainlander I feel cringe on his behalf.

@RnaudBertrand > they've been saying this since 1949 You mean 1912 :)

This is a major mistake that many mainstream media outlets made when they reported on this 👇: they overwhelmingly said that "Taiwan has insisted it is a sovereign, independent nation" (which is what the BBC wrote: bbc.com/news/articles/…). But if you actually listen to the official statement, that's not at all what's being said: they're saying **the Republic of China** is a sovereign and independent country, NOT Taiwan. It's very much not the same thing. If they had said that Taiwan was an independent country, it would be a major deal, as it'd mean that Taiwan had declared independence - which it didn't. As a reminder, the Taiwan issue is an unresolved civil war between two rival governments - the Republic of China (the ROC, now based in Taiwan) and the People's Republic of China (the PRC, based in Beijing) - both of which, to this day, formally claim sovereignty over all of China. Saying "Taiwan declares it's independent" and saying "the ROC reaffirms its sovereignty" are two completely different statements with fundamentally different implications. The ROC saying it's sovereign and independent is a non-story. It's literally the status quo, they've been saying this since 1949. But by changing "ROC" to "Taiwan," mainstream media are created a fake crisis headline out of thin air, making it sound like Taipei has just crossed Beijing's reddest of red lines. It's pretty insane when you think about it: mainstream media are framing the Taiwan issue in terms more radical than Taiwan's own pro-independence party (the DPP, currently in power). They're so biased in favor of Taiwan independence that they're falsely reporting it already happened 🤦‍♂️

@gonglei89 @Cabforpitt he already made clear he drew them from "morals", pretty much functionally equivalent to drawing it from his @$$...

@Cabforpitt The same legal framework that you drew the language of self determination from? Why is Basque not independent?

Qing, ROC, and PRC are all the same country, China. Unless you think the Weimar, Reich, and Federal Republic are not all Germany. Or the First, Second, People’s, and Third Republic of Poland are not all Poland.

Found the 本体 of 50000 year old goose. #memelia

@bueti @KnowBothSides @PEKtoBKK pretty rich from a european who keeps yapping about china and chinese affairs

@KnowBothSides @PEKtoBKK Oh, you think you know more about Europe than ourselves, wumao?

This is really BIG news! It means that Beijing enters open regulatory warfare against the EU. The PRC tries to prevent the EU from establishing whether China riggs competition by helping its own companies with lavish subsidies. That puts Brussels and the member states before ....

@brickmack @gamertime58 @ZhenjieLing1 @blob_watcher you only explained why they hate donald trump though lol

@gamertime58 @ZhenjieLing1 @blob_watcher Leftists are, but "Democrats" (as in actual supporters of the party, not all the assorted other left-of-center groups bound together by the 2-party system) generally recognize that an alliance with a genocidal expansionist socially-conservative dictatorship is a bad idea

This is a piece from recently (December of 2025) and the numbers are a bit astounding: "Under-50 Current GOP are significantly more dovish: 45% see China as a country to cooperate with, compared with just 17% among those over 50."

@K2r42737 @zhengwei75 @RnaudBertrand to state the obvious, one name has been sanctioned by China, the other has not

@zhengwei75 @RnaudBertrand Could you please explain the difference?

So it is official. The official Chinese name given to Secretary Rubio is "鲁比奥", no longer "卢比奥" during his congress days, according to his name tag in the meeting.