If weapon sales to Taiwan are openly on the table for US-China talks, then we are truly entering a new era of uncertainty. Even just Trump saying this out loud is trouble for the Lai administration and cannon fodder for American skepticism here in Taiwan. www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Workers make the world, including the Dragon Horse statue. Poster courtesy of Kaohsiung Museum of Labor

"The transformation of a dark remnant of Taiwan's authoritarian past into a venue for human rights education began in 2009, with the discovery of dozens of formalin jars containing human body parts inside an abandoned building in New Taipei's Xindian district." (CNA) focustaiwan.tw/culture/2026... 🧋

Facebook really feels like a retirement home for aging millennials.

It's pretty sad that so many of these ruined townhouse complexes you find around #Taiwan are the result of developers swindling people who are then stuck holding the bag. Anyway, here's another #urbex post from a recent bike ride... spectralcodex.com/dahu-little-...

Surface Ruptures of the 2022 Guanshan–Chihshang Earthquake Sequence, Eastern Taiwan: Implications for Fault Behavior and Recurrence Available #BSSA⚒️ Satellites, photos and field observations help scientists map surface ruptures in Taiwan. buff.ly/Pt25VXK

Cyberpunk's not "dead," but it's old-fashioned, even tenderly nostalgic, like being a poetic '50s beatnik rebel in 1985 Countercultures get assimilated. The very fact that ChatGPT can slop-out a cyberpunk with such chatbotty confident-wrongness... it's not "electronic frontier" here in 2026

You really should be tuned in to the V1 cam for Kilauea's 41st eruptive episode. Its a stunner. USGS live stream: www.youtube.com/watch?v=tk0t...

Perusing the State of the World on The WELL is one of those Old Internet customs I still follow when I happen to remember it. Just noticed Bruce is not typing 02026 with a leading zero as a typo, but presumably as a Long Now-ish futurist sort of affectation? people.well.com/conf/inkwell...

In a new #BSSA paper, scientists discuss Taiwan’s response to earthquakes and how it has evolved from 1999 to 2024. ⚒️ pubs.geoscienceworld.org/ssa/bssa/art...

The handbook you hope never to use: What Taiwan’s civil defense manual reveals about democratic resilience Jozef Huljak unpacks 🇹🇼’s national civil defense 📙 & contrasts it with 🇪🇺 preparedness handbooks, showing how threat perception shapes preparedness & public messaging. ceias.eu/the-handbook...

If you can substitute "hungry ghost trapped in a jar" for "AI" in a sentence it's probably a valid use case for LLMs. Take "I have a bunch of hungry ghosts in jars, they mainly write SQL queries for me". Sure. Reasonable use case. "My girlfriend is a hungry ghost I trapped in a jar"? No. Deranged.

Built around 1962 in central Taichung, Nanye Dance Hall (南夜大舞廳) first opened as Coffee Honolulu and was later renamed Honolulu Club. It was designed by local multidisciplinary artist Wang Shui-ho (王水河) and features an unusually expressive façade. spectralcodex.com/taichung-nan...

This chart shows the total number of Stack Overflow questions asked each month. As you can see, AI summaries in Google and AI coding tools have nearly killed the site. It is only a matter of time before the site shuts down completely. The golden age of independent web is over.

░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░░ 0.75%

you’re right! it feels mostly awful to Go Online™, these days. the internet in a sad state, for reason after reason after reason. but there is a way to fix it; to trade the voidful howling for a quiet & joyful song. here’s how to win the war for the soul of the internet, and build the Web We Want.

In Chinese #mythology, Lady Taizhen Wang, born Zhi, daughter of the Queen Mother of the West, moves through the world with an ease few immortals match. She rides a white dragon across mountains and seas, unbound and fearless. Her zither playing is said to summon flocks of birds 1/2 #art #painting

Received the presidential alert a good 15 seconds before the waves hit here in Taichung. Maybe the biggest I've experienced since the 403 quake in 2024!

Din Tai Fung in Times Square is closed today, which seems like a MBA case study in an international company lacking local cultural competence

On Christmas Eve 1968, in Lunar orbit, the Apollo 8 crew took this photo: “Earthrise." I'll never forget how inspiring the Apollo missions were to my brother and me as kids. They showed us what our country and humanity can accomplish when we work together toward a common goal.

YouBike users rotate seats 180 degrees to communicate to other users that a bike is dysfunctional. It's essentially a workaround for the docks not having a "fix me" button. www.mirrormedia.mg/story/202512...

Yesterday, I took my parents on another of my favourite Taipei day trips (well, near enough, we did it in reverse but all the ingredients were the same). We started off by taking a train to Shuangxi where we mooched around the old houses, got coffee, green bean cakes and triple peanut shaved ice.

Delulu for Labubu: are all these blind box toy shops popping up in my neighborhood just gentrified claw machine parlors and/or money laundering operations?

One of the cooler churches I’ve checked out in Taiwan. A church shaped like a ship! Jhangyuan Presbyterian Church in Changbin Township, Taitung

This is such a crux of the problem. The AI Denialist echo chamber has built a purity complex around not using the technology and so is blindsided by the fact that this is one of the fastest growing consumer products in history I mean the growth of this stuff is truly wild

The Sage of Nangang speaks! Is Taiwan now having a constitutional crisis? This: 'On a side note, one of the strangest things about this whole episode is how blasé society seems to be about it.' frozengarlic.wordpress.com/2025/12/17/c...

So the plan is Don Jr. and Eric Trump corner the market to become the biggest drug cartel in the Western hemisphere. CIA controls production, the US military kills the competition with Hellfire missiles, CBP controls drug routes into and out of the US, and ICE raids the local distributors?

This year I make a conscious decision to write more. Writing is how I deal with the world around me. Much of what I wrote is not for sharing, some is though and does not fit my blog. So I created a new place for it. dark.ronacher.eu/2025/12/13/w...

Taiwan’s population fell by nearly 97,000 YoY as of the end of November. November saw just 7,946 births—another record low. With only 98,785 births in the first 11 months, Taiwan will fall far short of the 134,856 births recorded in 2024 (a Dragon Year). www.cna.com.tw/news/aipl/20...

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

Here is the latest tsunami information for the M7.6 earthquake that just struck offshore northern Japan. The warnings are for waves up to 3 m, but the highest waves measured so far are <0.5 m. It is still possible for larger waves to arrive. 1/2 www.jma.go.jp/bosai/map.ht... ⚒️ 🧪

Yep. Many of these people would be happy to naturalize. But apparently Taiwan, with a TFR of .9, whose population is falling off a demographic cliff, would rather commit suicide than establish a path to dual citizenship for outsiders.

I thoroughly recommend reading all of Cory Doctorow's recent speech on AI skepticism, it's crammed with new arguments and interesting new ways of thinking about these problems pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

TIL about a memorial ceremony in Iceland in 2019 to mark the end of a glacier, changing the place name from Okjökull to Ok (jökull = glacier). Uncompromising wording on the bronze plaque: "This is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it".

Asking Claude for niche answers and it spits my own words back at me 😵‍💫

Searching for ruins in Taiwan on Google Maps, found this instead: very affectionate black doggo! 🐕

Taiwan’s 2025 Civil Defense Handbook marks a shift toward whole-of-society resilience and defending against cognitive warfare. From “any surrender message is fake” to gaps in shelters & self-reliance, I break it down in my latest piece for the Prospect Foundation. www.pf.org.tw/en/pfen/33-1...

Documenting another abandoned place around Taipei Basin and suddenly realized it's director Tsai Ming-liang's home! Read the full article for laksa hot takes (in Chinese): artouch.com/art-views/co...

At the risk of starting the flame war to end all flame wars... Modern LLMs (GPT-5.1, Claude 4.5, Gemini 3) produce excellent code and can be a significant productivity boost to software engineers who take the time to learn how to effectively apply them - especially if used with coding agent tools

With 42M people, #Jakarta is the world's largest city, according to new UN figures. Former #1, #Tokyo, is 3rd and estimated to decline in population still further in the future. #GlobalCities #WorldCities www.theguardian.com/world/2025/n...

Spectral Codex just surpassed 5,000 mapped locations, most of them here in #Taiwan. Historical sites, abandoned places, photo hotspots, and more. Hundreds already include photos and field notes; many others are still simple stubs, awaiting further documentation. 👁️ spectralcodex.com

Reinventing Kaohsiung: Taiwan’s port city transcends its industrial past www.scmp.com/week-asia/op...

I whipped up a new post/newsletter extra for the Hayli Gubbi eruption. First time I've had to post an extra edition! #volcano #eruption eruptions.beehiiv.com/p/eruptions-...

🌭✨️

There’s a very surreal conversation I keep having on here where people seem unable to hold two ideas at the same time, and I’m not sure why. It’s simply true that the Big AI platforms like ChatGPT are: 1. Extremely bad for society, in many ways. 2. Very genuinely popular with lots of people.

Even the down detector website is down 😆

23,857 births were registered in Hong Kong for the first 9 months of 2025, a year-on-year decrease of 10.2%. With 3 months remaining, there is a significant possibility that the total births in 2025 will be the fewest in one year since the end of World War II