I keep reading this article and I keep getting more and more frustrated by it every minute lol

>Even among strains of nationalism, Chinese nationalism seems to be particularly chip-on-your-shoulder. My impression is that this kind of insecurity is less in your face, but still present, in younger Chinese today. It is concerning how much Chinese AI models catching up in the AI race is entangled with this national insecurity.

investment in domestic computing and foundation models is guided by industrial policy (科技自立自强) [0]. this isn't some kind of ego issue shared across 1+ billion people, it's literally policy set up by central planninng

> "My current hypothesis is that the locally optimal message to China is in the vein of “give us your autists who feel alienated by the monoculture,” but others may prefer a more conciliatory approach that directly appeals to the dominant culture."

the lived reality of Chinese neurodivergence is not some abstract thing that's fun to joke about. it's, instead, families carrying a child through an educational system that offers minimal specialized scaffolding, navigating intense social stigma, and absorbing the terror of what happens to a dependent adult when their aging parents die. instead of seeing this population as a recruitment pool of "hyper-logical code monkeys" waiting to be drafted into an American AI safety crusade, maybe think of them as people. otherwise you're no different from the people who are just calling them slurs

also, to describe Chinese culture as 'monocultural' is just wrong. a migrant worker on a factory floor does not share the same culture as a tech worker at Baidu - and neither of them share the same culture as a factory owner. there's also like a billion subcultural niches in China - lie flat 躺平 and letting it rot 摆烂 just to name two more popular ones. it's not as if the people there are stupid to knowing their culture is exploitative - the critique of 996 is widespread

[0] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S209580992...