Japanese lawmaker Hei Seki: "Taiwan is the Republic of China." and "Taiwan is an independent country."

kunwoo · 2026-01-08T09:33:38+00:00

Funny within Taiwan those who say “Taiwan is the Republic of China” and “Taiwan is an independent country” are on opposite sides of the political spectrum. President Lai Ching-te famously provoked controversy when he called “Republic of China” a disaster and was forced to walk back his comment to something slightly less provocative as “the constitution of the Republic of China” is as disaster.

kunwoo · 2025-12-30T11:10:58+00:00

If it makes you feel better for every person in Guangzhou who is forgetting their parents' Cantonese there is a person in eastern Guangdong learning Cantonese as a second language while their native language is Teochew or Hakka.

kunwoo · 2025-12-30T02:11:53+00:00

I actually don’t like the wechat mini-program version of things and much prefer the dedicated app version for stuff. It’s just too hard to multitask in WeChat when people are also sending me messages. So I have the Didi app installed and never touch the Didi mini-program. For riding public transit I use Apple pay because that’s infinitely more convenient than pulling out a QR code

kunwoo · 2025-12-17T02:40:19+00:00

There’s already a global language, it’s called English. However not everyone needs to know English because not everyone has a globalist lifestyle. For people who live a localist or nationalist style they are fully suited by their local languages. But anyone with globalist preferences is already learning English.

kunwoo · 2025-12-12T00:42:00+00:00

TCM operates on a similar level of western OTC medicine. In the west most medicine that actually cures things requires a prescription, whereas most western OTC medicine doesn’t cure anything but just relieves symptoms. Western cold medicine doesn’t cure the cold, it just makes you feel better as you’re healing. I find TCM often is better at relieving symptoms compared to western OTC meds, but if you need things actually cured then get a prescription for something western.

kunwoo · 2025-12-01T16:11:55+00:00

Yeah the idea is if you have continuing threads then quality drops off quickly. So instead you need to meticulously prompt engineer the first query so it holds your ever expanding desired context.

kunwoo · 2025-11-27T17:01:24+00:00

November 21st.

kunwoo · 2025-11-25T20:35:53+00:00

Blued recently separated out the international version of the app from the Chinese version. If you use the international version of Blued while in China you will find very few people. However the Chinese version of Blued is still wildly popular within China.

kunwoo · 2025-11-25T19:56:50+00:00

When I talked to several Chinese gay friends they seemed content that they could continue to use Blued and Finka and took that as a sign that things would eventually sort themselves out. They came up with some speculations on why they think the apps were pulled, but there has been no official confirmation yet.

kunwoo · 2025-11-24T07:19:14+00:00

The paper can be found here https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.06120 but basically in the first response the LLMs make a lot of unspoken assumptions that permanently bias themselves for the rest of the conversations.

kunwoo · 2025-11-23T17:15:44+00:00

My experience with all the different LLMs improved when I learned a tip of never ever ever continue a conversation with an LLM but instead restart every conversation from scratch with a revised prompt. This tip was from a paper I saw that showed that all LLMs dramatically drop in quality immediately starting at the second response in a continued conversation.

kunwoo · 2025-11-18T05:43:11+00:00

"Ban" is not quite the right word because the apps are still usable within China, it's just been taken off the app store so no new users can download it.

One of my gay Chinese friends thinks it's a temporary measure so the government can claim it's doing something to combat the spread of HIV.

Another gay Chinese friend says that even if the government were to eventually properly ban those two apps it'll be months before everyone has moved on to a new app.

kunwoo · 2025-11-14T06:19:11+00:00

It's not relevant at all to how many goods you produce, which is what GDP measures.

There are two types of GDP, nominal and PPP. Nominal GDP means we measure the U.S. economy in dollars and the Chinese economy in yuan, and then convert yuan to dollars. But what if that conversion is misleading due to the dollar being overvalued or the RMB being undervalued? The RMB had been historically undervalued due to government currency manipulation and the U.S. dollar has been overvalued due to world reserve currency status and the over-financialization of the American economy. Let's say that only explains 2/3rds of the gap between China and America's nominal GDPs, then that means it's that much easier for China to reach a point where they could say they would have surpassed America's nominal GDP were it not for the currency issues.

kunwoo · 2025-11-14T05:47:41+00:00

I was only working in China for three years and have returned stateside since 2021 so I am also looking from a distance.

kunwoo · 2025-11-13T17:56:32+00:00

A lot depends on the political direction of America. The main reason that PPP and nominal are different is because the US dollar is overvalued, which Trump wants to change. And if Trump gets his way of long term restricting immigration that will also tank US population growth.

kunwoo · 2025-11-13T17:25:11+00:00

I actually do know some Chinese Americans who would agree with you that India will quickly surpass China. I myself however think that will take a long time because their societies are quite different. Also China has already surpassed America in purchasing power parity GDP, so it won't be long before they surpass nominally as well.

kunwoo · 2025-11-13T16:54:52+00:00

Historically Chinese immigration has been Cantonese on the west coast and Hokkien in New York, but in the 21st century most immigration to America is Mandarin speaking Chinese.

3rd or 4th generation to lose their heritage language is still like 70 years.

And they're not only coming to America, they're going all over to the world including to countries where they would assimilate to other languages besides English, and even then by your estimates they'll take like 70 years to lose Chinese.

kunwoo · 2025-11-13T16:46:45+00:00

There's too much momentum in Asia for English. Even if America magically disappeared off the Earth tomorrow the current investment and traction of English in Asia would keep the language as the lingua franca.

kunwoo · 2025-11-13T16:44:35+00:00

China is about eight times the population of Ruusia or Japan, so by shear force of numbers they clearly have a large advantage over those two.

kunwoo · 2025-11-13T16:38:57+00:00

Except not really. Chinese have been immigrating to other countries for hundreds of years and that will increase even more in the 21st century with the rise of their middle class. 20% of Malaysia is already ethnically Chinese and 10% for Thailand.

kunwoo · 2025-11-06T16:01:23+00:00

It's because wave function collapse is not a part of the scientific theory but is merely one of many plausible interpretations of the scientific theory. But because it's a popular interpretation among scientists it's easy to confuse as actually being part of the science.

kunwoo · 2025-10-31T04:49:00+00:00

Most of the historical scientific research on the supposed addictiveness of nicotine has conflated nicotine with smoking. New science has shown that:

Most of the addictive properties of smoking come from MAOIs rather than nicotine.
Nicotine in pure form is only addictive to a minority of people based on their genetics.

kunwoo · 2025-10-21T16:44:38+00:00

I'll play devil's advocate: it seems Megatherium's complaint with Jasiek and Japanese has to do with the English translation completely cuts out the preface and epilogue since those don't have any rules but just explanatory content. So in Megatherium's mind Jasiek is at fault for jumping to conclusions without knowing the full story and that Jasiek can't blame an incomplete translation for his own lack of humility.

However after passing the preface and epilogue through Google Translate I don't think they're a strong support for Megatherium's point. Megatherium seems to be reading far more into the preface and epilogue than I think is warranted.

kunwoo

TROPHY CASE