oFFMeta

The daily/weekly Balaji bullposting of China or India. You’ve been preaching this the “East is rising…” gospel since forever. Libs in charge or MAGA at the helm—doesn’t matter. It’s never enough to sway you from claiming imminent sino-dominance and/or how India’s poised to become a world power on the back of media, startups, and programming. Okay, let’s test it! What’s one of India’s main exports today? And how do recent AI breakthroughs—like LLMs and the rapidly lowering cost of compute/inference/intelligence on tap—impact that segment? Will it close or materially widen the already significant trade deficit? Now focusing on China. How’d they climb this high, and become lead goose? Was it a U.S. blunder (gutting our manufacturing) or a deliberate play? Outsourcing manufacturing juiced our markets as the Cold War dwindled— allowing us to ride out our wartime economic wave; entering China also helped slow down Japan. But now we’re gearing up for conflict again (rebuilding our arsenal), and that dramatic pivot is bound to cause friction. I think you’ve written about Japan’s rise in the 80s and how the U.S. bullied/pressured them during their brief ascendancy. And this was after already having left them defanged post-WW2. If China gets the same treatment after a hypothetical WW3, what’s their fate? If the U.S. just tweaked “poor leadership” like you seem to want—status quo with a facelift—China would cement a dangerously strong position during these next crucial years. That’s why we’re not going to sit around—play nice—and let that happen. Something, more tumultuous and kinetic, has to rattle the board. And that’s what’s happening now. It might hurt us a lot in the short-term but it’s a calculated risk. This is endgame Balaji. AGI/ASI is on the horizon, and it’s a sprint to get there first. If the U.S. doesn’t win, it’s game over—not just a setback, but checkmate. China knows it too. That’s why I can see nukes or (non-nuclear) EMPs hitting power grids, satellites, data centers. Who’d settle for second place when the winner will possess omnipotent AI? You’ll never topple that sort of hegemon, short of an extinction-level reset that recalibrates the chessboard and creates space for renewed jockeying.

The hottest summer I ever spent was a winter in San Francisco

GTC 2026: The year we outgrew SJCC

only bottleneck is consuming code, so make sure to tell codex that you want just that: "write extremely easy to consume code, optimize for how easy the code is to read. make the code skimmable. avoid cleverness. use early returns."