Put the billionaires in Guantanamo Bay and then give it back to Cuba. Win-win.

HK, China, Education

Not at all. It reminds me what we’re working towards. But then I’m lucky to be in a part of the world where we’re moving forwards and working in a job where I can contribute to that movement.

Why are you spamming this as a reply to everyone in the thread?

I feel for our comrades in the US who have to live under Trump, but at the same time I can’t look at the dumpster fire that is the current US Government without feeling some measure of joy.

Couple days ago I hear that he’s moving to halt chip imports from Taiwan to have them manufactured locally. Yesterday I heard about the tariffs on Canada. This morning he appears to have axed USAID. Now this.

For all the harm he’s going to do within the US, he’s also rapidly diminishing the US’s ability to do harm to the rest of the world.

It might have legs in the Western Propaganda mill, but here in HK it’s done, and the way Asians are being treated in the West is hammering nails in the coffin of any doubts.

Because you can live in a tank, you know.

People who want to convert tanks into housing. New definition of tankie just dropped.

Oh no!

This brings joy

“Broken clock is right twice a day” but Mike Pompeo, and now Starmer? More of these, twice a day, please.

Let me add a couple more use cases, as someone working in education:

Lesson Planning: You get tasked with planning and holding a lesson about world cultures. The lesson’s conducted in English, the students are ESL students so you have to make sure all vocabulary is within their ability level. Also it’s Chinese New Year soon so one of the Vice Principals has asked you to make it about that. Also, all the classes in the year group will have the lesson at the same time, so this has to be a lesson plan that even teachers that don’t teach English can still teach, in English. Also, the government has mandated that its new ‘values education’ criteria should be integrated into all subjects, so you have to include some content about one of the 12 listed virtue categories. Also, every source material you use that isn’t pre-approved has to be reviewed and countersigned by 4 other staff members as quality control and protection against misinformation (and, given that it’s in English, Western propaganda), and there isn’t any pre-approved teaching material for this task. Also you’ve got a budget, and a deadline.

You get lesson planning tasks of this complexity at least every 2 weeks, and it’s a fucking timesuck. Deepseek cuts hours out of the process and takes it to a level that would require exponentially more research time from me. I refine the result (30-45m), take it to my colleagues for the safety checks and then we just have to prepare materials.

Music: that founder of Suno is a turd, judging by recent quotes attributed to him. But with Suno my very young students have action dance songs that mention every one of them by name. Older students are a lot more interested in creative writing when the words they write can be turned into K-Pop in the same lesson that they wrote them in.

And let me add that I work in a city where public education is well-funded. I can’t imagine how much of a godsend this kind of tool would be for underfunded schools. I often see people say Suno and image generator AIs are ‘just a toy’, and a waste of resources because they’re just toys. But they’re tools that are sold as toys, because they wouldn’t be profitable for their owners if they weren’t also used for frivolous entertainment.

Remove the profit motive, fix the wastefulness, provide patronage for the source material artists and writers. That’s the way forward.

Would you trust everyone to engage with it in good faith?

If it answers, whatever it answers, the usual crowd will find some way to spin it into drama and controversy. And they can keep asking with different prompts and seeds until they get something to work with.

If it just flat out refuses, they can still use that but it’s nothing new. It’d be nowhere near as profitable for the sinophobe press.

Someone mused

Sorry if that someone is a friend of yours but they sound like an idiot

They wouldn’t be discussing it in public without putting it past the central government first, considering how this would affect the entire country.

Could be quite good in theory!

But you’re free to be illegal.

Only until they need to top up their prison slave labour workforce.

When people talk about how great China’s healthcare is they are basically hoping to go there and get some of that

When people talk about how great China’s healthcare is they are basically lamenting that they don’t have it in their own country, and pointing out that it is achievable with the right kind of government and educated public.

And foreigners get shitty insurance because their health is not China’s responsibility, it’s the responsibility of a foreigner’s own government.

I’m answering your post 10 hours late, but at the time you asked I figure most of them would have been asleep.

I read Langston Hughes’ poetry when I get in that mood.

Doomscrolling without the doom. That’s a nice feeling.