🇨🇳China Doesn’t Care How Much Money You Lose: There’s a lot going on in China at the moment, not least of which involves investors losing a shit ton of money they invested in Chinese companies. There’s the sense amongst many that it is clamping down on its tech giants and various “capital friendly” assets. What seems to be omitted despite the harsh reality of people losing money, is that this still developing country has massive ideological ambitions. Despite the growth China has generated through markets there is the very obvious fact that it still sees itself as hoping to achieve some form of Communism. The path there is another story, or more precisely, the story we are currently witnessing; a story that has seen China rise to become a state capitalist power. The question in the heads of many is one regarding how this state capitalistic power may yet achieve its utopian ambitions.
I believe things to be far more interesting than what a vast part of western media portrays this situation to be. China may be the only country that is actively theorizing and asking itself what a state should be. Many especially in the West have adopted a narrow set of viable ideological views as the norm for quite a while now. But China’s leaders seem to be actively engineering what they believe to be the ideal state for better or worse.
If you follow the quoted thread in my tweet, Balaji makes note of all the ways recent Chinese political trends defy standard political positions. It’s in many ways far more pragmatic than many would be apt to believe.
There’s also the feeling that China’s disdain for its “soft tech” sector— mostly consisting of digital entertainment companies— isn’t in line with the more long-term ambitions the nation has with regard to becoming a major industrial power and is as result receiving a large brunt of the state assault on various companies. Whatever the case may be, there’s no doubt that what is going on in the country at the moment is bound not merely to shape the country’s economy in the long term but also how we view the path to dramatic economic growth and the various ideological positions that may be adopted to get there. {896 words}
🧬Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped: As the hype around AI has increased, there’s been a greater desire to see Machine Learning applied to real problems. Covid presented such a test case and it would seem as if it failed to deliver in that regard. AI isn’t useless. In fact, it’s increasingly breaking new ground. But the areas in which it’s breaking new ground, are areas in which we already have significant preexisting knowledge. Covid-19 was novel in many ways, not least of which was the ways in which it changed our behaviors. {1866 words}
📝A new information storage and processing device: Humanity’s advance is heavily dependent on the means of information storage and transfer. Information Technology is such an important component of our day-to-day existence. The amount of information we’ve managed to generate as a result of modernity has increased many times over and existing information technology architectures are at their limits. A team of international researchers spanning NYU, UC San Diego, and the University of Paris-Saclay seem to have designed a memory architecture that makes use of quantum principles to store information. Their design also seems to bring us one step closer to neomorphic computing: the design of computing systems that mimic the human brain. {380 words}
💎Eternal Change for No Energy: A Time Crystal Finally Made Real: And as if the rapid pace of scientific progress of the past few months hasn’t seemed staggering enough, researchers at various prestigious universities believed they were able to create time crystals using Google’s Quantum Computer. Time Crystals are objects whose parts are able to change states without using energy. This in theory suggests they bypassed the second law of thermodynamics in some way. {2746 words}
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