Jenxi Seow

@alreadydawn @growlerowl I see traffic police enforcing daily, the sheer volume tho. Checking for illegal mods, not wearing helmets. Ebikes are not road legal so they are supposed to be on the sidewalks. Hence limited to 25kmph but it's a software limit so it's possible to jailbreak and remove the limit.

@growlerowl The government needs to force all the motorbike companies to update the overly shrill horns, punish them for riding on sidewalks, and ban mopeds on some roads too. Enforce with fines.

This might seem like an crazy statement, but PRC citiens enjoy *way too much* freedom. From scooters running red lights and hogging sidewalks to taxis doing all kinds of wild maneuvers, chain-smoking in restaurants and hotels to shop staff screaming into loudspeakers raping my goddamn ears, parents beating kids in public to littering at ancient sites. It's the Wild West out here, despite the abundance of CCTVs and policemen everywhere. If only the social credit system were real. The CCP can do way more to discipline their people.

@alreadydawn @growlerowl There has been regulation on the ebikes but more for battery size and limiting top speeds for safety. Requirements for registration ie only get a license plate when the bike passes the regulations.

Here’s why you should Chinamaxx, especially when it comes to the history: There’s a strong cyclic, almost fractal quality to it. Patterns emerge. Chinese history can seem daunting from afar, but once you get a handle on it, it’s very manageable compared to the shagginess of European history. There is a main line that guides you through 3000+ years of history for an area basically as large as Europe. You’ll find archetypes, characters and tropes emerging again and again. With the same amount of effort as it would take to understand a minor European country, you can basically grasp everything that was going on for about a fifth of the worlds population for the last 3000 years. There will be always more to learn. Chinese history is something you can dedicate multiple lifetimes to. But I think ppl overestimate how much effort they need to put in to start getting incredible returns.

@alreadydawn Try riding an e-bike if you get a chance to get an idea. Besides being quiet, the other major factor imo is the acceleration. Not defending e-bikes, they are a menace but it helped me see the other perspective.

@jenxi Oh yeah, don't get me wrong, some pedestrians are either totally situationally unaware or glued to their phones. But pedestrians walking into each other doesn't cause hospital-worthy incidents (or worse).

One thing I very much dislike about being a pedestrian in many parts of China is the menace of electric scooters. They move silently, which makes it difficult to be aware of their presence, but the horns are exceedingly shrill. Riders love to use them at the very last second right before passing you by a hair. I wasn't walking in a small road shared by bikers/walkers/drivers, but these occurances happen all the freaking time on sidewalks, especially in Shenzhen. The initial instances startled me, but even after getting used to them I still find the experience unpleasant. Scooters own the roads in China, where they run red lights and cut off people as they please. If only the social credit system were real so it could disincentivize these folks from enjoying too much reckless freedom..

@ruima @TechBuzzChina I find the 酱板鸭 meme a glimpse at how things would be. It's become relatively accessible for people to prompt their take of the meme.

As we just wrote about in the latest @techbuzzchina deep dive that focused on video AI from China, short video dramas is the first industry to get crushed by the new technology. Some nuggets from an interview from JuRilu founder Jiefu (it's a one-stop-creation platform for AI anime short video, so he's not unbiased): According to Jiefu, by April 2026 AI short-drama production could reach “one person, one drama per day.” That would flip the industry’s cost structure: technical costs like compute and tokens rise from 20% to 80%, while labor costs fall from 80% to 20%. He projects commercial-quality AI short dramas will cost just RMB 5,000-50,000 (700-7000 USD) next quarter, down from roughly RMB 200,000 today and RMB 500,000+ (30K to 70K+) for traditional productions. This cost compression should create a supply glut within 2-3 months, but not necessarily market contraction. Instead, the market shifts away from chasing a handful of top-charting hits and toward serving niche audiences. Vertical content platforms built around specific hobbies, genres, or subcultures become viable because a library of roughly 5,000 titles can support a standalone platform. The balance of power also shifts from platforms looking for content to content looking for distribution. As that happens, 保底 or protective minimum-guarantee funding (that platforms pay) largely disappears by late 2026 to early 2027, except for the very top tier, effectively the 0.01% of elite creators or studios. Another major trend is interactive film-games, which Jiefu expects to take off around May-June 2026. By late 2026 or early 2027, he expects real-time branching narrative generation to become mainstream. That would make interactive storytelling commercially viable by giving users much more direct agency over plot and narrative outcomes. This transition likely favors small, fast-moving teams over large traditional studios burdened by legacy workflows and infrastructure. Smaller producers can compete through high-volume, low-cost output targeted at specific audience segments. In his view, the industry’s survival logic splits into two models: - scale model: produce something like 2,000 AI dramas (minimum) per year and make RMB 10,000-20,000 (1500-3000 USD or 3-6mm USD annually) profit per title - premium model: focus on a much smaller volume of highly differentiated creative content that can command premium pricing He also sees opportunity in both domestic and overseas markets, especially as niche platforms emerge to serve more specialized demand. I can see this happening for sure. There are lots of subculture / niches out there that are almost certainly very much under-served.

58,000 Americans died in Vietnam. Over 3,000,000 Vietnamese died. And for fifty years, American culture has centered the grief of the 58,000 while treating the 3,000,000 as a backdrop. As scenery. As context. As "the Vietnam War experience." They built a wall in Washington with American names on it. A beautiful wall. A solemn wall. Good. Mourn your dead. But understand what that wall does not say. It does not say why they died. It does not say what they were doing there. It does not say what was done in their name to the people whose country it actually was. It does not mention My Lai, where American soldiers massacred an entire village, old men, women, children, babies, and the officer who ordered it served three years of house arrest before being pardoned. Three years. House arrest. Pardoned. For five hundred people murdered in a ditch. It does not mention the 2.7 million acres of Vietnamese forest doused in Agent Orange, a chemical weapon disguised as herbicide, that is still deforming Vietnamese children today. Not in 1970. Not in 1985. Today. Children born in 2020 with bodies twisted by a war their grandparents fought. And the chemical companies that made it are still in business. Still profitable. Still un-prosecuted. And yet they send us human rights reports. They grade our democracy. They warn us about our behavior. The audacity is so enormous it becomes almost impressive. Almost.

@alreadydawn The abandoned ones are the parts that didn't survive.

@jenxi The thing is, many of the stores I saw here are completely abandoned.

I'm seeing more and more instances of demand not keeping up with supply in China: * Hotels are abundant, even at random cities like Jinan, where rates are amazingly low. You can get a decent place at below 20 usd per night. The ones I've stayed at so far seem to lack customers in general. The hotel I stayed in Yangzhou has a coffee/drinks bar that has been unmanned for quite some time and just collecting dust. * Lines of taxis waiting for riders outside of HSR stations. Some pointed out that this has been the case for years, but the number of potential riders does not match the sheer number of cars. Even at 3rd tier cities at night where few people are out and about the station, the taxi lines stretch on forever like the Great Wall. (I get that taxis around the world have been severely impacted by ride-hailing softwares like Uber and Didi, but these great wall-like taxi lines are nuts to witness.) * Malls outside of the hot ones in Tier 1 cities (ie Coco Park in Shenzhen) are quiet. The one I'm next to here in Qingdao by their Olympics sailing center is nearly deserted, with most storefronts closed. I'm sure there are many reasons for this supply/demand problem (as do most complex issues), but a big factor has to be involution (內卷), where the Chinese try to outcompete each other at the exact same thing, driving supply way up and prices down. This all reminds me of a story shared by @spandrell4 that goes: "When a Jewish businessman opens a gas station at a new town, other Jews come to the city to open various businesses - bakery, accounting firm, law firm, restaurant. When a Chinese businessman opens a gas station at a new town, other Chinese come to the city to open gas stations."

A TRIP TO THE MUSEUM Anon, are you Chinamaxxing? Well as my friend @w_t_han likes to say, "If you don't understand the history, how are you going to understand anything about China?" Today William and I went to the National Palace Museum in Taipei and I got a whole-ass education. Honestly, I now understand Chinese History at least 10% better in just one day even though I've been Chinese literally ALL MY LIFE (minus a few misbegotten years when I bought into the Taiwanese-not-Chinese brainworms.) And here's the Angelica Guarantee to You: If you read this thread illustrated with artifacts we saw at the museum today, you too will understand Chinese history at least 10% better, unless you started as a Chinese history buff. EVEN IF YOU ARE...I guarantee you'll learn something you didn't know before. China has a long history and we are going to meander all over it so its important to have a decoder ring so we don't get lost. We're going to divide China into 4 periods. It's deliberately oversimplified to keep you on track(ish). ANCIENT CHINA 夏 - Xia dynasty (possibly mythical) 商 - Shang dynasty (bronze and oracle bones) 周 - Zhou dynasty (mandate of heaven, Confucius) CLASSICAL CHINA 秦 - Qin dynasty (unification and legalism) 漢 - Han dynasty (identity and bureaucracy formation) 晉 - Jin dynasty (Three Kingdoms and ensuing chaos) PEAK CHINA 隋 - Sui dynasty (imperial exam and grand canal) 唐 - Tang dynasty (cosmopolitan cultural golden age) 宋 - Song dynasty (economic and technological boom) LATE CHINA 元 - Yuan dynasty (Mongols) 明 - Ming dynasty (Han restoration) 清 - Qing dynasty (Manchus, last dynasty) If you speak Chinese then 夏商周 秦漢晉 隋唐宋 元明清 is a super useful little nugget to remind yourself. William memorized it when he was 6 years old and I memorized it today. Of course, this "decoder" is heavily simplified: we only count the most unified and cohesive dynasties. OK. Ready? Let's go to the museum!

@alreadydawn Could've been more of an issue because we were travelling with a toddler and avoid cigarette smoke like the plague. I probably played up the smoke-free image too much as well, based on what I remember of Singapore and reality fell short.

@jenxi Is it an issue in Singapore too? The few days I was there I didn’t notice.

High speed rail connecting even the most random cities makes China feel very 1st world to me. The prevalence of strong cigarette odor in public spaces, especially inside restrooms at establishments that ban smoking, makes China feel 3rd world to me.

@alreadydawn @ChrisM79609682 There's no winter in Shenzhen, it's just autumn temps. Cold beverages are still in demand even when it's chilly.

@ChrisM79609682 I didn't find this to be the case in Shanghai or Shenzhen though. Maybe because they've adapted to foreign preferences. Although, drinking cold drinks in Guangdong has been a thing for a hot minute, or 冰室 wouldn't exist.

It's 11:30am in Jinan, China. I walk into my favorite lunch spot 3rd time in a row. 5 USD for heaps of meat, veggies, and rice. The white lamp-like object over the plate is actually a camera and scans the food. The software runs computer vision and suggests the types of food present. The cashier then updates the items as needed. Neat use of tech to speed up the process. But the fridge behind him is never on. I bought a drink every day, and it came out room temperature every time (same thing happened at many other places in this city). The juxtaposition of high tech and jankiness everywhere I go is frustrating yet amusing.

@CarlZha The irony is that people watch Dune and cheer for Paul Atreides, but then watch the nightly news and get uncomfortable when the same plot happens in real life. It’s easy to root for the “Jihad” when it’s on a 70mm screen with a Hans Zimmer soundtrack.

@alreadydawn You get better taste and aesthetics on XHS compared to Douyin

Chinese shorts creators can learn from the music choice here. Far too many videos get ruined by pompous over-the-top sinobeat techno tracks. It’s like adding mountains of salt onto a fine piece of meat.

@ruima Same happened to me. Threw the exact prompts at Qwen and Yuanbao with no issues.

I get better results from the Zhipu z.ai free agent than the Kimi Allegretto ($40/mo) paid agent who keeps on telling me it can't fulfill my request. I'm literally just running some research tasks. So weird. Just downgraded my subscription. Have also run into context window issues too. Am I missing something?!

给自己做了一个分镜拓展小工具。 上传一个分镜，可以一键拓展出 8 个有趣的相关分镜，最近自用复用率很高，很适合 brainstorm 分镜想法！ 背后的分镜拓展逻辑是自己写的 skill，画布爆炸前端是用 Codex 写的，接的自己的 Gemini api. 随着编程变得越来越简单，可能一些常用小工具创作者会自己给自己做了，那洞察自己真的需要什么就变得越来越重要，不是我去适应工具，而是我到底需要什么工具 🤔 如果大家也需要的话，我会考虑开源！

A Chinese MIT student made an app mapping 4,948 British Museum's artifacts from 99 countries. With a "Go home" button, stolen artifacts fly back to their homes on a 3D globe.

@LP1980AA @Eivor_Koy 小猫 is more like kitty. Kitten would be 幼猫

@Eivor_Koy I'm always amused by how everything is a kitten in China. On videos they call even elderly cats 小猫.

China haters: "Show me places in China other than Beijing and Shanghai, show me the villages!” Meanwhile kitten in Chinese village be like:

@AngelicaOung One of each variety and have some 小龙虾 while you're at it

When I go to Shenzhen should I get a pet lobster?🦞