Josh Chin

Thank you so much for taking the time

The Daring Caper of a Faithful Tibetan Who Outfoxed China He escaped from police and crossed thousands of miles of wilderness on a decadelong odyssey toward freedom.

This is yet another story about authoritarianism — but one that hits a little different. Phurba is resilience incarnate, a person born for these times. And his tale is bonkers. I hope you enjoy reading it as much we did reporting it. Gift link: www.wsj.com/world/asia/t...

At this point, we’d all be much better off if we spent our days thinking and writing about nature

Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here

The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.

it is not the case that if you stop observing bad things, the bad things go away

abc news post with headline radioactive wasp nest found at site where u.s. once made nuclear bombs

sure fuck it, whatever. we deserve this

What a great, great farewell note

LLMs are basically terrifying users by force-feeding them niche fanfic texts without context. There's a reason why fandoms congregate on small forums to talk out their inside jokes because they don't want innocent people to stumble into their space and freak out without knowing the context!!!

This is a really crazy thing to do.

Hmm, where have I heard this bef…oh, right:

Trump Is Shifting to Dealmaking Mode on China The White House puts a priority on doing business with Beijing as it prepares for bilateral talks next week.

As the U.S. heads toward trade talks with China next week, President Trump is increasingly focused on trying to strike an economic bargain with Beijing.

The most interesting fact about Hulk Hogan is that as a kid in France, Andre the Giant sometimes got driven to school by playwright Samuel Beckett

Your moment of joy today.

Mass starvation stalks Gaza as deaths from hunger rise Aid agencies warned for months that Israel’s harsh limits on food aid would bring acute malnutrition and widespread suffering to Gaza’s 2.1 million people.

This is shattering, must-read journalism from @leloveluck.bsky.social, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Siham Shamalakh, Miriam Berger and @cheesemanab.bsky.social.

Glad it is getting the front-page treatment it merits. Gift link for non-subscribers is here: wapo.st/3GXPS9A

Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.

"Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits..."

i believe that at 18 every american should be entered into a draft, not for military service, but for one year of mandatory retail or restaurant work

Hey WHCA -- u up?

“I violated the user directive …”

“I violated the first law of robotics…”

“I’m sorry Dave…”

A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.

NEW FROM ME: new research has found millions of ex's of personal info, including credit cards, passports, résumés, birth certificates etc in 1 of the largest web-scraped datasets used to train image generation AI models.

It's a major privacy violation.

www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...

Excellent move. Strong and confident regimes have no need for so-called “comedy,” which serves only to undermine socialist spiritual civilization.

When we were doing the U.S. tour for Surveillance State, we got barely a handful of questions about the lessons China held for democracies despite that being a central theme of the book. Could never decide if it was complacency or denial, or more likely some mix of both

the Grok - Mechahitler story is interesting for what it reveals not just about Elon's LLM but about how sign systems work at a pretty high level of abstraction

The leap from this to the systems Chinese police use for social engineering in Xinjiang and Tibet is exceedingly small

“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk opens up about her 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility—and the generous and compassionate women she met.

Settle in and read this extraordinary piece by Rümeysa Öztürk about her detention and marvel at her compassion for others, even in the darkest conceivable situation. We are blessed to have students like her in America: www.vanityfair.com/news/story/r...

you can get this exact same result with a reasonable sized edible

A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers The Pentagon bans foreign citizens from accessing highly sensitive data, but Microsoft bypasses this by using engineers in China and elsewhere to remotely instruct American “escorts” who may lack expe...

Tiktok got banned despite massive efforts to demonstrate that Beijing wouldn't access US data.

All the while, the U.S. government allowed China-based Microsoft service teams to directly access classified government systems w/ nominal supervision.

www.propublica.org/article/micr...

Gazans Confront a Stark Choice: Risk Death to Get Food, or Starve A rash of shootings has made the trek through combat zones to U.S. and Israeli-backed food aid sites a deadly one.

Palestinians in Gaza are facing a tough decision every day: starve or risk death while trying to get food from one of the aid distribution centers https://on.wsj.com/46JM6uT

Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door

Some places will have to start rationing water - to enable AI slop.

"A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day. New data centers [will] require millions of gallons of water a day"

Gift link:
www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...

this is a structural problem that threatens the entire industry: the financial incentives lean toward Takes but Takes ultimately depend on a bedrock of reporting that there is almost no working model for at this point.