In Urumqi, Xinjiang’s capital, 10 people were killed by a deadly fire in an apartment building. The news said the cause of death were the heat and toxic fumes, but for everyone paying attention, it’s obvious that the fire bears no blame in this deadly accident. The true killer is the government and their zero-covid policy. Footage online as shown that a lockdown has stalled the rescue effort. In many videos of the accidents, the water from a fire hose weren’t able to reach close enough to put out the flame because of the cars parked in the area.…

In a previous post, I talked about how manufacturers for electronic products are limiting access to parts and critical informations so that they can charge their customers high prices for repairs. As it turns out, they are not the only ones who are doing it. While going down a rabbit hole of farming contents on YouTube, I found that John Deere, the largest tractor manufacturer in the U.S. is also trying to monopolize the repair service of their products.…

In a meeting this Wednesday, Elon Musk, the new owner of twitter and self-declared “free speech absolutist”, told the advertisers he wanted Twitter to “be a force that moves civilization in a positive direction.” It seems that Must still wants people to believe he is the messiah that would save twitter and maybe the internet by bringing back free speech. In reality, he is becoming one of the largest threats to free speech on the internet.…

I love Apple products. I truly do. When they works, Apple’s devices are worth every penny I spend for them. However, when one of them broke, the price to repair made me question all my decisions in life. In Apple’s own support service, replacing the battery of a iPhone14 would cost 99 dollars, and replacing the screen cost a shocking 279 dollars. To make sure the customers have to pay their ridiculous prices, Apple has been working hard to prevent individuals and third party repair shops from doing similar repairs by deliberately designing their product to be impossible to repair and taking legal actions to make important repair parts unavailable on the market.…

I’ve seen a lot of bad movies, but the only one that I truly that I truly hate is The Imitation Game, a biographical film that came out in 2014 telling the story of British computer scientist and gay icon Alan Turing. The movie mainly focused on Turing’s childhood, his work at Bletchley Park during World War II, and his conviction for being gay. It was nominated for 8 oscars including best picture and won best adapted screenplay.…

Throughout history scientists have been fighting against the physical and mental barriers to build channels of communication. Back in 17th century, a priest by the name of Marin Mersenne established some of the earliest mathematical conferences and correspondences in Europe. He encouraged mathematicians working in the same field to share their findings and even smooth their relationships. With his communication network, mathematicians across Europe were able to build a community to push forward the boundary of human knowledge.…

Han Zhong Stephen Mack Writing 340 15 October 2022 “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”, said Arthur C. Clarke, the famous science fiction writer. This statement is especially true in the field of artificial intelligence. In recent years, we have seen AI beating human champions at game of Go. We have seen them creating art and winning prizes. There’s even an essay written by AI published on The Guardian, trying to convince us that “robots come in peace”.…

To have complete control over their subject is the dream of all rulers through out history. Tighter control over people could mean better military power, stronger economy, and more stable society. More than 2000 years ago, when ancient China is dominated by the Seven Warring States， emperors of Qin state established a system that grouped households by 5. Each group must report any crimes committed by members of the group and failure to report crimes would result in execution of everyone in the group.…

In the 2017 documentary AlphaGo, the AI researchers at DeepMind complained that, the news media often associate their ground breaking AI Go player with killer robots like the Terminator. They think this association contributes to the public’s irrational fear of their work on artificial intelligence. Their frustration is very understandable since DeepMind’s AlphaGo couldn’t be more different from the Terminator. For starters, AlphaGo doesn’t look like Arnold Schwarzenegger and couldn’t turn itself into liquid metal.…

The Iranian government has been repeatedly shutting down the internet since September 19 in an effort to control the antigovernment protests. As crazy as it seems, it’s not the first time such a restriction of internet connectivity happens. In fact, it has become quite a common practice for authoritarian regimes to limit internet access to counter a protest or a potential one. Last February, during the military coup in Myanmar, a decrease in local internet connectivity has been reported by many global internet traffic monitor.…