jhancock

The private lending held back involved a) high interest rates b) unconventional methods of governance/collections which would be somewhat decoupled from Ant's lending platform down to the local level of collections.

An example of the ugly side of China private lending is what is termed "flesh loans". A young girl is forced to have nude pictures taken of her to secure her high interest loan repayment. Ant was going to put hundreds of billions in capital backing loans that had loosely controlled and often unethical/violent collections system.

Yes, curtailing loads of easy capital can be at odds with pressing domestic consumption growth. In this case, I think the government made a tough but decent decision.

From my perspective curtailing Ant's plans was positive regulatory action.

Political priorities and good governance is why we have government.

From a legal perspective the US may be safer than other places if the US is the one seeking your data. The US doesn't need legal process to authorize digging into your foreign server.

From a practical perspective, I'm not sure any servers are safe anywhere...depending on who may want your data.

This type of attack has been happening a lot the past 2 years. I've seen one that was very well done...the GitHub account of a fairly well known security researcher had been compromised...their identity and code was being used as part of the recruitement. I reached out to the person...who was understandably embarrassed and told me they had reported this to LinkedIn + Github but saw no action.

This is the part that really irks me: LinkedIn and Github know this is the end goal of many of the rampant supply chain attacks but they a) don't have a first class mechanism for reporting b) don't seem to be improving their systems or even warning people. I have been hit be this enough times that I follow along to get screenshots of the scammer. One might think with all the surveillance systems Microsoft/LinkedIn/Github/Google-Meet/Calendly have in place that a potential victim reporting it along with an actual picture of the scammer could get us somewhere.

Nice. How easily is the protocol categorized by an external observer? I'm noticing protocols like wireguard more commonly hitting problems as websites rely on third party systems to protect them from non-human interactions.

I hear ya. In this case, for me, there is not much diff from "govt won't let us discuss it" and "here is a misleading answer".

I’ve been using podman on Mac. It’s been a nice fit as the container build files are identical to what I use on my fedora server. I have noticed my 2 virtual core 4 gb Linode vps runs apps faster in the same container as when run on my MacBook Air M2 16 gb. I expected some performance overhead but didn’t think it would be noticeable as it is. Overall happy with podman. How might OrbStack differ?

I was told by someone in the industry that New Zealand leads the pack for travelling outside NZ and coming home to refute charges.

everything points to money

ok. maybe. I don't know. I'm asking how you know.

z.ai did go public on the HK exchange. They are under pressures similar to other public companies.

I know that China models are increasingly being trained and run using Huawei chips instead of Nvidia. I know China has a surplus of electricity from renewables (wind, solar, hydro).