An old timer from various IEEE committees told me that it's tough to find sanction-safe ways for Americans to work with Chinese on global standards committees. This is a big problem because the Chinese companies (specifically Huawei in his case) are happy to throw a ton of engineers at the committees while western companies just drip feed them in their spare time.

Because he had a phone. Because he had the ability to connect to a local wifi in a top secret environment, or a USB cable to do it. Because his computer had open ports. Because the server with the top secret data gave him the rights to export data to a local computer. Because the local computer gave him rights to copy data via wifi or to a USB device. Because he had porn on his phone. Just little clues like that.

Exactly. I'm guessing this wasn't a high security area - probably a corporate office annex. I'm also guessing the information involved was some corporate document that he wanted to work from home etc and he didn't have a work issued home computer.

When the failure happens, they'll blame the regulations and the fix will be to change the law rather than fix the code.

If the current system is being out-competed by other economic systems, then change the system. An economic system is just a utility, it isn't something we should have an emotional investment in like a sports team.

How to start? China's five and ten year plans seem to be working pretty well. Worth a try.

The narrative was that technical education was old fashioned and those who went down that path were doomed to low wage jobs. That fitted because the MBA's were sending all the technical jobs to China, our factories were closing and the demand for technical jobs was plummeting.

China went in the other direction by designing an educational system that encouraged vocational education at the expense of low value soft degrees.

Interestingly, Russia had a vocational heavy education system that churned out trades and even had PhDs in vocational trades. Post Soviet Union they dropped that system and adopted the western system that emphasised soft degrees. Fast forward to now and Russia has returned to the old system of vocation heavy degrees.

Lawyering is a technical background. It requires a lot of critical thinking, the ability to dig in to the detail and a respect for other fields of expertise. On the other hand, MBA's invented the executive summary because they don't understand or respect expertise - in fact, they're suspicious of expertise.

I think it's important to search out the industry specific commentators. Industry specialists value add (and have the news weeks earlier), while generalist commentators just work to support their own narrative. The Taiwan based industry commentators are mostly talking about China's rapid improvement. China's plan is to reach generational parity by 2030 using 100% Chinese owned IP, but the talk is that they're on track to hit that target a year or two earlier.

I wonder if it'll even be legal to pull from a Chinese repository? If not for individuals, then certainly a legal risk for western corporations. Add to that Linus refusing to pull any Russian patches. If it plays out that way, then I suspect that 1.4bn Chinese people will produce enough patches that there'll be significant divergence, and individual users in the west will start to pull from Chinese repositories.

The Chinese government warned the quants that they're dangerously close to being parasites and that they better start to produce stuff. One of the quants got really lucky when they gave back by hiring what turned out to be the DeepSeek guys.

at my workplace - IBM with OS2, MS with whatever version of Windows first used VGA resolutions (or maybe it was extended file naming). The IBM rep talked TCO stats, the MS rep played a colourful animated cartoon. Management actually applauded the hi-res MS pitch. Unix guys sat at the back in stony silence knowing that we were doomed regardless of whether IBM or MS won the contract.

I watched one of those robot-dog-with-wheels-for-feet videos and a guy was riding one sitting on it like a horse. Chinese guy though, so he probably weighed half as much as a burger fed western guy.

• Register domain name
• Rent cheap VPS
• Serve some targeted ads - pet food, worming, cat toys etc
• User does data entry
• Profit

China has mandatory employer contributions for employee:

• Pension
• Medical insurance
• Work related injury
• Maternity
• Unemployment

There's also another mandatory employer contribution that doesn't have a direct analogue in the west - basically a contribution toward an employee's home loan.

because it was too expensive to manufacture and the tech had been leapfrogged by the Chinese brands. VW recently licensed BYD's EV powertrain and I'm guessing that'll be the one used to compete in Europe against [checks notes] BYD.