Tootfinder

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Urban Setting 🤳
在路上 - 去西安/ 城市设置 🤳
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Uspol, genocide
In case you're wondering whether "political violence" is escalating in the U.S.A. right now, of *course* it is as we move into an era of concentration campus and domestic military deployments. But both domestic genocides and purges as well as political violence targeted at individual prominent figures has been a *constant* throughout American history, from gun duels fought between political rivals to massacres of Native Americans in order to steal their land, to pogroms against Catholics, to literal wars on local Black success and political participation, all dating back before the American Revolution to the beginning of colonization. Thanks to Wikipedia, here's a *small sampling* where I attempted to whittle things down to about one event per decade before recent times.
Sources:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_the_United_States
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Indian_massacres_in_North_America
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_presidential_assassination_attempts_and_plots
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_incidents_of_political_violence_in_Washington,_D.C.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_racial_violence_in_the_United_States
Killings, woundings, and plots against political figures:
Aaron Burr killing Alexander Hamilton in 1804
Sam Houston beats Rep. William Stanbery in 1832
Attempted Assassination of Andrew Jackson in 1835
Fight between Representatives Churchwell & Cullom in 1854
Caning of Sen. Charles Summer in 1856
Brawl on the House floor in 1858
Assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865
Assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881
Assassination of President William McKinley in 1901
Attempted Assassination of William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in 1909
Wounding of former President Theodore Roosevelt in 1912
Bombing of the U.S. Senate reception room in 1915
Attempted Assassination of President Herbert Hover in 1928 (in Argentina)
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1947
Attempted Assassination of President Harry S. Truman in 1950
The United States Capitol Shooting in 1954
Planned Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1960
Attempted Assassination of President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1963
Assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963
Assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968
Weather Underground bombings in 1970, 1971, and 1975
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1972 (Alabama Governor George Wallace was targeted & injured instead)
Planned Assassination of President Richard Nixon in 1974
Planned Assassination of President Gerald Ford in 1974
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Gerald Ford in 1975
Wounding of President Ronald Reagan in 1981
Attempted Kidnapping of Federal Reserve Board members in 1981
Planned Assassination of President George Bush in 1993 (in Kuwait)
Attempted Assassinations (x3) of President Bill Clinton in 1994
Attempted Assassination of President Bill Clinton in 1996
Anthrax attacks on US senators in 2001
Attempted Assassination of President George W. Bush in 2005 (in the foreign country of Georgia)
Planned Assassination of President-Elect Barrack Obama in 2008
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2009 (in Turkey)
Attempted Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2011
Shooting of Rep. Gabby Gliffords in 2011
Planned Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2012
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Barrack Obama in 2013
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2015
Attempted Assassinations (x2) of President Donald Trump in 2017
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2018
Pipe bombs mailed to Democratic leaders in 2018, including former President Barack Obama
Planned Assassination of President Barrack Obama in 2019
Attempted Assassination of President Donald Trump in 2020
Kidnapping plot against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer in 2020
Planned Assassination of Former President George W. Bush in 2022
Planned Assassination of Former President Barrack Obama in 2023
Attempted Assassination of President Joe Biden in 2023
Planned Assassinations (x2) of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Wounding of Presidential Candidate Donald Trump in 2024
Massacres and other mass killings, mostly with genocidal motivations:
The Acoma Massacre in 1599
The Paspaheg Massacre in 1610
The Wessagusset affair in 1623
The Mystic Massacre in 1637
The Pound Ridge Massacre in 1644
The Susquehannock chiefs massacre in 1675
The Apalachee Massacre in 1704
The Massacre at Fort Narhantes in 1712
The Norridgewock Massacre in 1724
The 1745 Massacre at Walden (in 1745)
The 1756 Massacre at Walden (in 1756)
The Killings by the Paxton Boys in 1763
The Yellow Creek Massacre in 1774
The Gnadenhütten Massacre in 1782
The Canyon del Muerto Massacre in 1805
The Battle of Tallushatchee in 1813
The Philadelphia Nativist Riots in 1844
The Bloody Island Massacre in 1850
The Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857
The Sand Creek Massacre in 1864
The Opelousas Massacre in 1868
The Chinese Massacre in 1871
The Election Riot of 1874
The Haymarket Affair in 1886
The Buffalo Gap Massacre in 1890
The Wilmington Massacre in 1898
The 1906 Atlanta Race Massacre (in 1906)
The Ludlow Massacre in 1914
The Elaine massacre in 1919
The Tulsa Race Massacre in 1921
The Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921
The Bonus Army Conflict in 1932
The 1937 Memorial Day massacre (in 1937)
The 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in 1963
The Kent State shootings in 1970
The Greensboro massacre in 1979
The MOVE Bombing in 1985
The 4 O'Clock murders in 1988
The Oklahoma City bombing in 1995
The September 11 Attacks in 2001
The Fort Hood Shooting in 2009
The Holocaust Memorial Shooting in 2009
The Isla Vista killings in 2014
The Charleston Church shooting in 2015
The San Bernardino attack in 2015
The Orlando Nightclub Shooting in 2016
The Pittsburgh Synagogue Shooting in 2018
The El Paso Walmart shooting in 2019
The January 6th Capitol Attack in 2021
The 2022 Buffalo Shooting (in 2022)

Urban Composition III 🫟
都市构图 III 🫟
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1995
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
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"Mehr als 100.000 #Exchange-Server sollen in den USA betroffen gewesen sein, in Deutschland mehrere Zehntausend. Das Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (#BSI) ging davon aus, dass alle Exchange-Systeme, die nicht abgesichert waren, mit einer

Sources: Alibaba and Baidu have begun using their own internally designed chips to train their AI models, partly replacing AI chips made by Nvidia (Qianer Liu/The Information)
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alibaba-baidu-adopt-ai-chips-m…

Alibaba and Baidu Adopt Their Own AI Chips in Major Shift for Chinese Tech
Chinese tech giants Alibaba Group and Baidu have begun using their own internally designed chips to train their artificial intelligence models, partly replacing AI chips made by Nvidia, according to four people with direct knowledge of the moves. The move is the latest sign that a decoupling of ...

A look at MicroCo, a Hollywood startup aiming to tap into the micro drama craze, as Chinese apps gain US traction with millions of downloads, per Sensor Tower (Brooks Barnes/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/1…

A Hollywood Start-Up Targets the Micro Drama Craze
A new app will focus on super-short TV shows shot for phones, a bit like Quibi, an earlier app aimed at quick content.

According to the latest annual Nature Index, which tracks research institutions by their contributions to leading science journals,
the single remaining U.S. institution among the top 10 is Harvard,
in second place, far behind the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
A decade ago, C.A.S. was the only Chinese institution to figure in the top 10.
Now eight of the 10 leaders are in China.
If this does not constitute a Sputnik moment, it is hard to imagine what would.

Opinion | We Are Watching a Scientific Superpower Destroy Itself
As China threatens to overtake U.S. leadership in science and technology, America has responded by sabotaging its own engines of progress.

This is completely crazy if you think about digital sovereignty....
#spain

Spain awards Huawei contracts to manage intelligence agency wiretaps
Huawei will manage and store judicially authorized wiretaps in Spain, under a contract that bucks the trend of Western governments restricting use of the Chinese tech company's products and services.

Absolutely incredible photos in this article:
https://mastodon.energy/@jonshell/114837642341286945

Each week, Metacurity offers our free and paid subscribers a weekly digest of the best long-form (and longish) infosec-related pieces we couldn't properly fit into our daily news crush.
This week's selection covers
--Satellite jamming and spoofing set back global shipping,
--AI is inherently janky,
--Salvadoran gender freedom advocates fight oppression with digital training,
--A new sector arises to fight AI false positives in Chinese universities,

Best infosec-related long reads for the weeks of 6/28/25 and 7/5/25
Satellite jamming and spoofing sets back global shipping, AI is inherently janky, Salvadoran gender freedom advocates fight oppression with digital training, Sector arises to fight AI false positives in Chinese universities, Uncovering the venality of a nudify app, so much more

City Features 🌆
城市特征 🌆
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

douban: Douban friendship network (2009)
A friendship network among users on Douban.com, a Chinese website providing recommendations for books, music, and movies.
This network has 154908 nodes and 327162 edges.
Tags: Social, Online, Unweighted
https://networks.skewed.de/net/douban…

Chinese company Zinwa is reviving BlackBerry Classic with Android #Android

BlackBerry Classic is being revived with Android, and it can be yours for $400
A Chinese company is reviving the decade-old BlackBerry Classic with new hardware and installing Android on it for a modern experience.

VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding
Zhaowei Liu, Xin Guo, Haotian Xia, Lingfeng Zeng, Fangqi Lou, Jinyi Niu, Mengping Li, Qi Qi, Jiahuan Li, Wei Zhang, Yinglong Wang, Weige Cai, Weining Shen, Liwen Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09641

VisFinEval: A Scenario-Driven Chinese Multimodal Benchmark for Holistic Financial Understanding
Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) hold great promise for automating complex financial analysis. To comprehensively evaluate their capabilities, we introduce VisFinEval, the first large-scale Chinese benchmark that spans the full front-middle-back office lifecycle of financial tasks. VisFinEval comprises 15,848 annotated question-answer pairs drawn from eight common financial image modalities (e.g., K-line charts, financial statements, official seals), organized into three hierarchical sc…

Chinese drones, Russia's failure, and the split in OPEC — consequences for Ukraine: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/11/chinese-drones-russias-failure-and.html

China's vision for its autonomous vehicle industry, backed by state support and infrastructure investment, is driving its lead in ADAS and robotaxi deployment (Yi-Ling Liu/Rest of World)
https://restofworld.org/2025/china-ai-powered-self-driving-cars/

China’s vision for a driverless future is miles ahead of everyone else’s
Strong government backing and strict regulatory oversight of the Chinese autonomous vehicle industry contrasts sharply with the piecemeal laws and slower adoption in the U.S.

Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at the attempted extradition by the US of an alleged Chinese hacker of vaccine secrets who was arrested in Italy last week, and fast-fashion ecommerce company Shein’s plans to go public
https://www.

Accused Chinese hacker claims mistaken identity - Asian Tech Roundup
Welcome to Computing's weekly roundup of tech news in Asia. This time we look at the attempted extradition by the US of an alleged Chinese ...

Chinese National Pleads Guilty to Exporting Protected Turtles (US Department of Justice)
https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-pleads-guilty-exporting-protected-turtles
http://www.memeorandum.com/250812/p8#a250812p8

The thing about US tech executives signing up for the US military, is how it looks outside the US.
The US would certainly regard a Chinese company, with an executive who is in the army, as untrustworthy.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/us_army_techies/

US Army signs up Band of Tech Bros with a suitably nerdy name
: Execs from Palantir, Meta, and OpenAI join Detachment 201

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/11/politics/chinese-hackers-suspected-law-firm-hack Chinese hackers hacked into the most powerful telecom and communications law firm in DC and maybe the world. Founded by former FCC chairman and true gentleman Dick Wiley.

Chinese hackers suspected in breach of powerful DC law firm
Suspected Chinese hackers have broken into the email accounts of attorneys and advisers at a powerful Washington, DC, law firm in an apparent intelligence-gathering operation, the firm, Wiley Rein, told clients this week in a memo reviewed by CNN.

Yep https://mastodon.social/@Theblueone/115187021623766270

HISPASpoof: A New Dataset For Spanish Speech Forensics
Maria Risques, Kratika Bhagtani, Amit Kumar Singh Yadav, Edward J. Delp
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09155 https://

HISPASpoof: A New Dataset For Spanish Speech Forensics
Zero-shot Voice Cloning (VC) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) methods have advanced rapidly, enabling the generation of highly realistic synthetic speech and raising serious concerns about their misuse. While numerous detectors have been developed for English and Chinese, Spanish-spoken by over 600 million people worldwide-remains underrepresented in speech forensics. To address this gap, we introduce HISPASpoof, the first large-scale Spanish dataset designed for synthetic speech detection and attribut…

There’s another name for that…
Analysis | The U.S. Marches Toward State Capitalism With American Characteristics - The Wall Street Journal https://apple.news/AX_EJXTACTMSc4TPv3huykQ

Some talk locally about what the persistent carrier signal is at 7.235 MHz that often (but not always) interferes with one of our local ARES nets. I'm convinced it's the North Korean station that transmits a few hours weekly, in Korean, Chinese and English. My gut feeling is that they transmit a bare carrier when there is no program, to hold the frequency.
Any other ideas? It's a huge signal; I suspect it's not in any way local to California.

It is very revealing that @… has received money from the fascist Chinese government to publish their propaganda article “explaining” why Taiwan allegedly belongs to #China and why recognising Taiwan's struggle for independence from the totalitarian-ruled Chinese empire…

Yes, please give me a physical keyboard again.
https://www.androidauthority.com/blackberry-classic-revive-android-3587932

BlackBerry Classic is being revived with Android, and it can be yours for $400
A Chinese company is reviving the decade-old BlackBerry Classic with new hardware and installing Android on it for a modern experience.

LLMs vs. Chinese Anime Enthusiasts: A Comparative Study on Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing
Lanlan Qiu, Xiao Pu, Yeqi Feng, Tianxing He
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06388 https…

LLMs vs. Chinese Anime Enthusiasts: A Comparative Study on Emotionally Supportive Role-Playing
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in role-playing conversations and providing emotional support as separate research directions. However, there remains a significant research gap in combining these capabilities to enable emotionally supportive interactions with virtual characters. To address this research gap, we focus on anime characters as a case study because of their well-defined personalities and large fan bases. This choice enables us to effectively ev…

"‘I don’t expect to live a normal life’: how a Leeds teenager woke up with a Chinese bounty on her head"
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2025/aug/11/leeds-teenager-china-chloe-cheung-democracy-p…

Research on Quality Measurement and Dynamic Transmission of Higher Education in China from the Perspective of Dual Circulation: An Empirical Analysis Based on Entropy Weight-TOPSIS and PVAR Models
Zhangming Yang, Xiaoting Yin, Dahai Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09216

Research on Quality Measurement and Dynamic Transmission of Higher Education in China from the Perspective of Dual Circulation: An Empirical Analysis Based on Entropy Weight-TOPSIS and PVAR Models
Drawing on the new pattern of 'dual circulation', an evaluation system for the development level of China's higher education has been constructed, utilizing data from Chinese provinces over the period 2020 to 2022. Initially, the evaluation model is established, followed by the screening of initial indicators through correlation analysis. Subsequently, an entropy weight-TOPSIS model are employed for static quantification, and the PVAR model is introduced for the first time to describe the dynam…

On The Road - To Xi’An/ Silhouette 👤
在路上 - 去西安/ 轮廓 👤
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Moonshot's Kimi K2 uses a 1T-parameter MoE architecture with 32B active parameters and outperforms models like GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek-V3 on key benchmarks (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/moonshot-ais-kimi-k2-outperfor…

Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2 outperforms GPT-4 in key benchmarks — and it’s free
Chinese AI startup Moonshot releases open-source Kimi K2 model that outperforms OpenAI and Anthropic on coding tasks with breakthrough agentic capabilities and competitive pricing.

"Mr. Market is counting on more TACO trade with Trump’s dissing of Canada and a score of other countries. The betting is his new deadline will come and go, or be paused, amended or ended. A Chinese government official said days ago that 47 changes his mind as often as his shoes. Seems about right. (By the way, those guys now have a lux EV that charges in five minutes. Suck that, Elon.)"
--Garth Turner

We were walking along Queens Blvd and there was a freshly dropped chinese food noodle dish on the sidewalk (no container, just a pile of noodles). I told the 13yo that it was "VERY low mein".

Artificial Intelligence, Domain AI Readiness, and Firm Productivity
Sipeng Zeng, Xiaoning Wang, Tianshu Sun
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.09634 https://arxiv.…

Artificial Intelligence, Domain AI Readiness, and Firm Productivity
Although Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds great promise for enhancing innovation and productivity, many firms struggle to realize its benefits. We investigate why some firms and industries succeed with AI while others do not, focusing on the degree to which an industrial domain is technologically integrated with AI, which we term "domain AI readiness". Using panel data on Chinese listed firms from 2016 to 2022, we examine how the interaction between firm-level AI capabilities and domain AI re…

From Platform Migration to Cultural Integration: the Ingress and Diffusion of #wlw from TikTok to RedNote in Queer Women
Ziqi Pan, Runhua Zhang, Jiehui Luo, Yuanhao Zhang, Yue Deng, Xiaojuan Ma
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07579

From Platform Migration to Cultural Integration: the Ingress and Diffusion of #wlw from TikTok to RedNote in Queer Women
Hashtags serve as identity markers and connection tools in online queer communities. Recently, the Western-origin #wlw (women-loving-women) hashtag has risen in the Chinese lesbian community on RedNote, coinciding with user migration triggered by the temporary US TikTok ban. This event provides a unique lens to study cross-cultural hashtag ingress and diffusion through the populations' responsive behaviors in cyber-migration. In this paper, we conducted a two-phase content analysis of 418 #wlw …

🫧 Rare deep-sea hydrothermal system discovered in western Pacific produces massive hydrogen emissions
#geology

Rare deep-sea hydrothermal system discovered in western Pacific produces massive hydrogen emissions
Hydrogen-producing hydrothermal systems in the deep ocean are rare but critical to understanding Earth's internal processes and the conditions that may have fostered life's origins. Now scientists from the Institute of Oceanology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (IOCAS) have discovered a massive hydrogen-rich hydrothermal system beneath the western Pacific seafloor, offering a new glimpse into deep-sea serpentinization—a process in which iron- and magnesium-rich rocks chemically react with …

In the Air - Outside of the Window II ✈️ ☁️
在空中 - 窗外 II ✈️ ☁️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️FOMAPAN Action 400
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Yiding Cao Geld mit PayPal.Me senden
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Sources: Tencent recruited prominent AI researcher Yao Shunyu from OpenAI; Chinese media says he got a CN¥100M, or ~$66M, pay package (Pei Li/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-12/tencent-hires-openai-…

Ukraine detains two Chinese nationals for attempted espionage: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/09/ukraine-detains-two-chinese-nationals.html

The German foreign ministry has summoned the Chinese ambassador in Berlin after a Chinese warship used a laser to target a German aircraft taking part in an EU operation helping to protect shipping in the Red Sea.
“The endangerment of German personnel and disruption of the operation are completely unacceptable,” the ministry said on X.

baidu: Chinese online encyclopedias (2011)
Four networks from Chinese online encyclopedias Baidu (百度百科, http://baike.baidu.com/) and Hudong (互动百科, http://www.hudong.com/

On The Road - To Xi’An/Human Intervention 🚶
在路上 - 去西安/人类遗迹 🚶
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

Malaysia reins in data center expansion amid power and water shortages, hindering Chinese companies that use the region as a backdoor to access US-made AI chips (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/malaysia-reins-d…

https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-valley-uyghurs-tech-xinjiang-8e000601dadb6aea230f18170ed54e88
“Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built …

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

JD.com: sales of the iPhone 17 series in the first minute after pre-orders opened in China surpassed the first-day pre-order volume of 2024's iPhone 16 series (Coco Feng/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article

Strong appetite for new iPhone in China as pre-orders break record
The numbers underscore Apple’s brand loyalty in China despite growing competition from the likes of Huawei, analysts say.

MultiJustice: A Chinese Dataset for Multi-Party, Multi-Charge Legal Prediction
Xiao Wang, Jiahuan Pei, Diancheng Shui, Zhiguang Han, Xin Sun, Dawei Zhu, Xiaoyu Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.06909

MultiJustice: A Chinese Dataset for Multi-Party, Multi-Charge Legal Prediction
Legal judgment prediction offers a compelling method to aid legal practitioners and researchers. However, the research question remains relatively under-explored: Should multiple defendants and charges be treated separately in LJP? To address this, we introduce a new dataset namely multi-person multi-charge prediction (MPMCP), and seek the answer by evaluating the performance of several prevailing legal large language models (LLMs) on four practical legal judgment scenarios: (S1) single defenda…

Dynamic Chunking for End-to-End Hierarchical Sequence Modeling
Sukjun Hwang, Brandon Wang, Albert Gu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07955 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07955 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.07955
arXiv:2507.07955v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Despite incredible progress in language models (LMs) in recent years, largely resulting from moving away from specialized models designed for specific tasks to general models based on powerful architectures (e.g. the Transformer) that learn everything from raw data, pre-processing steps such as tokenization remain a barrier to true end-to-end foundation models. We introduce a collection of new techniques that enable a dynamic chunking mechanism which automatically learns content -- and context -- dependent segmentation strategies learned jointly with the rest of the model. Incorporating this into an explicit hierarchical network (H-Net) allows replacing the (implicitly hierarchical) tokenization-LM-detokenization pipeline with a single model learned fully end-to-end. When compute- and data- matched, an H-Net with one stage of hierarchy operating at the byte level outperforms a strong Transformer language model operating over BPE tokens. Iterating the hierarchy to multiple stages further increases its performance by modeling multiple levels of abstraction, demonstrating significantly better scaling with data and matching a token-based Transformer of twice its size. H-Nets pretrained on English show significantly increased character-level robustness, and qualitatively learn meaningful data-dependent chunking strategies without any heuristics or explicit supervision. Finally, the H-Net's improvement over tokenized pipelines is further increased in languages and modalities with weaker tokenization heuristics, such as Chinese and code, or DNA sequences (nearly 4x improvement in data efficiency over baselines), showing the potential of true end-to-end models that learn and scale better from unprocessed data.
toXiv_bot_toot

Across China, tens of thousands of people tagged as troublemakers are trapped in a digital cage,
barred from leaving their province and sometimes even their homes
by the world’s largest digital surveillance apparatus.
Most of this technology came from companies in a country that has long claimed to support freedoms worldwide -- the United States.
⚠️ Over the past quarter century, American tech companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state,…

How Silicon Valley enabled China's digital police state
An AP investigation reveals that U.S. technology companies to a large degree designed and built China’s surveillance state, playing a far greater role in enabling human rights abuses than previously known. Firms including IBM, Dell, and Cisco sold billions in technology to Chinese police and government agencies, despite repeated warnings that such tools were being used to quash dissent, persecute religious sects and target minorities. Critically, American surveillance technologies allowed a b…

Peek 🔲
窥 🔲
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

China says it opposes 90-day US visa limits for Chinese journalists, compared to 240 days for others, and does not "want to see a new round of 'media warfare'" (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

Ukraine sanctions 5 Chinese firms for supplying components used in Russian drones: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/08/ukraine-sanctions-chinese-firms-for.html

In the Air - Outside of the Window ✈️ ☁️
在空中 - 窗外 ✈️ ☁️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️FOMAPAN Action 400
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2025/09/pakistan-mass-surveillance-and-censorship-machine-is-fueled-by-chinese-european-emirati-and-north-american-companies/

Pakistan: Mass surveillance and censorship machine is fueled by Chinese, European, Emirati and North American companies
Pakistan’s unlawful mass surveillance and censorship expansion is powered by a nexus of companies based in Germany, France, United Arab Emirates (UAE), China, Canada, and the United States, Amnesty International said today in a new report “Shadows of Control”. The year-long investigation was carried out in collaboration with Paper Trail Media, DER STANDARD, Follow the […]

Chinese chip equipment supplier E-Town sues Applied Materials in the Beijing IP Court over alleged trade secret theft; Applied Materials hired two E-Town staff (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-13/u…

On The Road - To Xi’An 🌫️
在路上 - 去西安 🌫️
📷 Pentax MX
🎞️Lucky SHD 400
#filmphotography #Photography #blackandwhite

baidu: Chinese online encyclopedias (2011)
Four networks from Chinese online encyclopedias Baidu (百度百科, http://baike.baidu.com/) and Hudong (互动百科, http://www.hudong.com/

Chinese open-source AI models from DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen, and others gaining global traction spurs US policymakers and companies to respond (Raffaele Huang/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/chinas-l…

Among the vast number of characters in the Chinese language
— around 100,000, by some estimates
— there are hundreds that no one alive knows how to pronounce.
They are written down, plain as day, in old books, but their sounds, even their meanings, have been lost.
Sitting in his office, wondering at how something seemingly immortalized in print could be forgotten, Dr. Mullaney went down a mental rabbit hole.
It would have been physically impossible to build a t…

A Professor’s Search for the MingKwai, a Lost Chinese Typewriter
A historian went down an 18-year rabbit hole in search of obsolete machines. But there was one he thought he’d never find.

Ukraine detains 2 Chinese nationals suspected of spying on Neptune missile technology, SBU says: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/09/ukraine-detains-chinese-nationals-suspected.html

From Detection to Mitigation: Addressing Gender Bias in Chinese Texts via Efficient Tuning and Voting-Based Rebalancing
Chengyan Wu, Yiqiang Cai, Yufei Cheng, Yun Xue
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07889

From Detection to Mitigation: Addressing Gender Bias in Chinese Texts via Efficient Tuning and Voting-Based Rebalancing
This paper presents our team's solution to Shared Task 7 of NLPCC-2025, which focuses on sentence-level gender bias detection and mitigation in Chinese. The task aims to promote fairness and controllability in natural language generation by automatically detecting, classifying, and mitigating gender bias. To address this challenge, we adopt a fine-tuning approach based on large language models (LLMs), efficiently adapt to the bias detection task via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA). In terms of data …

How Chinese AI companies bypass US chip restrictions by transporting hard drives with AI training data to Malaysian data centers housing advanced Nvidia chips (Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/tech/china-ai-chip-cur

Urban Solitude V 🈳
城市孤独 V 🈳
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Jensen Huang says Chinese military is unlikely to use Nvidia's AI chips, citing the risk of the chips being "limited at any time" due to US export restrictions (Ian King/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

China launches probes into alleged US discrimination against Chinese chip companies and suspected dumping of US analog chips used in devices like Wi-Fi routers (Ryan Woo/Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-

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Russia damages Chinese consulate in Odesa as Chinese drone parts found in Kyiv following similar attack: https://benborges.xyz/2025/07/04/russia-damages-chinese-consulate-in.html

Lenovo reports Q1 revenue up 22% YoY to $18.8B, vs. $17.4B est., and net profit surged 108% YoY to $505M, vs. $307.7M est., despite challenges from US tariffs (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinese-pc-maker-lenovo-q1-prof…

City Snaps - Chengdu / A Rain in Park ☔️
城市抓拍 - 成都 / 雨中的公园 ☔️
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https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/09/suspected-chinese-operation-aims-recruit-former-feds-job-postings-research-shows/407970/
Suspected Chinese operation aims to recruit former feds wi…

Urban Solitude IV 🈳
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https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2025/09/suspected-chinese-operation-aims-recruit-former-feds-job-postings-research-shows/407970/
Suspected Chinese operation aims to recruit former feds wi…

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A look at the looming DJI drones ban in the US, as some say the ban will be disruptive; no federal agency has undertaken a mandated security risk assessment (Farah Stockman/New York Times)
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/08/business/dji-chinese-drones-ban.html

DJI’s Chinese Drones Face U.S. Ban
Farmers, builders and police officers use drones made by DJI, a Chinese company. President Trump and his allies want to stop all imports.

Leaked docs: Chinese network-monitoring provider Geedge Networks has sold Great Firewall-style censorship systems to at least four countries, including Pakistan (Zeyi Yang/Wired)
https://www.wired.com/story/geedge-networks-mass-censorship-leak/

Massive Leak Shows How a Chinese Company Is Exporting the Great Firewall to the World
Geedge Networks, a company with ties to the founder of China’s mass censorship infrastructure, is selling its censorship and surveillance systems to at least four other countries in Asia and Africa.

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Test Roll No. 2 of an Ilford HP4 120, ceased production at 1976, Super Ikonta 533/16, “scanned” by my iPhone
一卷用蔡司超级伊康塔533/16拍摄的Ilford HP4 120, 1976年停产。用iPhone翻拍玩玩，扫描仪扫不了120
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Chinese startup Moonshot AI releases Kimi K2, an open-source model that the company says has enhanced coding capabilities and excels at general agent tasks (Reuters)
https://www.reuters.com/business/media-tel

Sources: Chinese authorities urge local companies to avoid using less advanced chips, particularly Nvidia's H20, for government or national security work (Bloomberg)

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City Snaps - Chengdu 🌠
城市抓拍 - 成都 🌠
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On The Road - To Xi’An 🗿
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Ant Group unit Robbyant showcases its first LLM-powered humanoid robot, the R1, at a conference in Shanghai, joining an intensifying effort by Chinese companies (Lulu Yilun Chen/Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/20

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The team behind AI agent Manus has relocated its HQ to Singapore and started recruiting there, while parent company Butterfly Effect reportedly remains in China (Hannah Wang/South China Morning Post)
https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-t…

Chinese start-up Manus AI relocates to Singapore amid US chip curbs
Manus AI has begun recruiting in the city state, offering positions such as data analyst and AI agent engineer.

Urban Snaps II 📸
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On The Road - To Xi’An ⛑️
在路上 - 去西安 ⛑️
📷 Pentax MX
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The UK Electoral Commission says it took three years and over £250K to recover from an August 2021 hack that exposed private data of 40M voters to Chinese spies (Joe Tidy/BBC)
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c80gl8yvj9go

Elections watchdog admits 'painful lessons learned' after Chinese hack
In the first interview about the hack, the commission's new boss admits that huge mistakes were made, but says the organisation is now secure.

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Shenzhen-based humanoid startup X Square Robot raised ~$100M led by Alibaba, bringing total funding to ~$280M, and released a foundation model for embodied AI (Evelyn Cheng/CNBC)
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/09/08/alibaba-leads-100-mil…

Alibaba leads $100 million investment in Chinese humanoid robot startup
Capital is rushing into humanoids — X Square Robot has completed eight fundraising rounds in less than two years since the startup was founded.

Life Sample 🈚️
生活样本 🈚️
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The controversy involving Tokyo Electron over alleged TSMC IP theft comes at a low point for the company, after order cancellations and a lull in Chinese demand (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-08-07/t…

City Snaps - Chengdu / Freeze Frame II ⌛️
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On The Road - To Xi’An 🏮
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City Snaps - Chengdu / Freeze Frame ⏳
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Facade 🏢
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Raining Sessions ☔️
雨 ☔️
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Raining Symphony 🎷
雨奏鸣曲 🎷
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