Graham Webster

Had a lot of fun digesting my Shanghai visit with Tech Policy Press. Listen/read below.

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Missouri’s oldest Black bookstore just closed. The Kansas City Defender plans to reopen it as a newsroom and public archive. “The thought of losing that history, particularly in this political moment, was devastating.”

“The thought of losing that history, particularly in this political moment, was devastating.” www.niemanlab.org/2025/07/miss...

I also have seen nothing breaking on this front and have long understood there to be a ban.

Unpacking China's Global AI Governance Plan | TechPolicy.Press Justin Hendrix spoke to Graham Webster, a lecturer and research scholar at Stanford University and the Editor-in-Chief of the DigiChina Project.

On Saturday, July 26, three days after the Trump administration published its AI action plan, China’s foreign ministry released that country’s action plan for global AI governance. To learn more about it, I spoke to DigiChina editor-in-chief Graham Webster (@gwbstr.com):

This is a must. listen. Could not be a more lucid discussion

Much appreciated. Guarantee somewhat less false starts in speaking would be happening had the jetlag more fully resolved.

Utility wildfire risk now includes fish falling from the sky.

My take on the Shanghai World AI Conference last weekend, and the US and China AI "action plans," dueling at least in the headlines… Out now on @techpolicypress.bsky.social podcast, with a tsp of jetlag-brain but covering a lot of ground. Thx @justinhendrix.bsky.social!
www.techpolicy.press/podcast/

I file that under GFW, life behind the

China Wage Data Goes Missing as Tariffs Imperil Millions of Jobs One of China’s largest online recruitment platforms has quietly stopped providing wage data it’s compiled for at least a decade, making it more difficult to gauge the health of the world’s biggest lab...

More on disappearing employment data. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Off the grid: Chinese data law adds to global shipping disruption Ships in Chinese waters are disappearing from tracking systems following the introduction of a new data law in China, frustrating efforts to ease bottlenecks that are snarling the global economy, according to three shipping sources directly impacted.

(Brief story on a related trend. Cites Personal Info Protection Law, but Data Security Law much more likely was behind this.) www.reuters.com/world/china/...

China Is Hiding More and More Data From the Rest of the World China’s abrupt decision to pause releasing data on its soaring youth jobless rate this week was the latest sign the Asian giant is increasingly restricting sensitive information — especially when it’s...

"Bureau stops publishing youth jobless rate, which hit a record" www.bloomberg.com/news/article... cc @kairyssdal.bsky.social

How Bad Is China’s Economy? The Data Needed to Answer Is Vanishing Beijing has stopped publishing hundreds of statistics related to real estate, finance, unemployment and even soy sauce production, making it harder to know what’s going on in the country.

A propos of nothing. www.wsj.com/world/china/...

If there is an AI/“superintelligence” compute bubble, it may turn out that China is not currently behind but rather ahead at developing systems of sensible scale for a less mythic range of actual applications.

I manti you

There’s arguing that LLMs can be useful despite constantly outputting false and unmoored text. Sure. Then there’s releasing products that intentionally mislead students about their own reliability. Gross to say the least.

I read this as a four-work Picasso-Basquiat-Arbus collab that must have been mind-bending

just realized we’re all futurenauts every time we experience one more quantum of time.

Hard Fork dudes’ take on “hear(ing) out our critics” is to speak at length as usual from their own viewpoint after hearing a short recorded question solicited by a colleague.

Also, if you dig into what Zuckerberg is saying, much of the actual thrust of it is "let us monitor everything you do online and offline 24/7 and we'll use the resulting insights to make you more productive" which coming from him is downright Wallet-Inspector-esque.

A helpful reference. I had ridiculously assumed they meant by “superintelligence” something like what the famous book by that title meant. But of course: it’s just a new buzz word for the same nothing in particular.

Best LLM use, something a well crafted Google query used to but now reliably cannot solve.

Not so much as a link to The Onion’s earlier scoop

I forgot Rhodes coined the term! The old blob is dead, long live the new blob.

This kind of voice, not just this individual, is an artifact of how uncritical political horse race junkies are of “national security.” There’s an assumption that the hegemonic blob narrative is just a patriotic truth.

Aerial photograph of Stanford campus

One of the things about working at Stanford is there’s a pretty good chance of you have a window seat pilots will remind you where the office is on the way home.

Ok this is cool

What perfect album came out when you were sixteen?

The Bends was a better year.

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