"Lewandowski had, according to the memo, been accused of receiving $50,000 directly from the Chinese Communist Party as well as money from Israel’s Likud Party without disclosing the payments on his DHS background form. (A DHS official denied these claims.)"

I have not tried yet in any language, but my experience with both voice to text and machine translation suggests we’re still much better off showing each other translated bits on phones or googling photos of the object of reference.

NEW: I talked to six immigrant workers on H-1B visas who had to cancel their travel plans last minute to avoid paying the $100,000 fee Trump suddenly announced on Friday, just to learn about its reversal on Saturday. It cost them thousands of $ to rush back and also made them question the system.

Seems like someone in Berkeley must have some explanation* for a 3am equinox earthquake deep under the fraternities of Cal.

I’ll take the opportunity to once again point out: - the deal is not in fact done - there is no single “algorithm,” and “control” over the various systems is a vague concept — the implications for legality, risks, etc depend on specifics still totally absent from the public info about a “deal”

This is not the language I think Trump/his team would use if a TikTok deal was actually done. I think they'd say flatly we've done it and this is fantastic for America and stuff like that. I could be wrong, but it's certainly not clear that anything is over here.

Folks are reporting and commenting that Trump says Xi approved a TikTok deal. I'm not so sure. I think it's intentionally ambiguous, and probably suggests it's not done. Here's AP's gloss. 1/

It was only in conversation with someone yesterday about what the TikTok deal would look like that I realized, oh, there's no real certainty anything is coming today. How did so many of us convince ourselves a deal was coming this week and who does this indicate we should take less seriously now?

Update: ACLU of Northern California and EFF have sent San Francisco a letter reiterating that the sharing driver locations with out-of-state entities is illegal. It also demands proof they’ve come into compliance. Read it here: www.eff.org/files/2025/0...

I can't believe we're five years into the ban-or-not TikTok story and we're still talking about "the algorithm" as if it's a single specific thing.

This is interesting. The methodology leaves questions about whether the observed behavior is reflective of real use patterns, and as noted it’s not clear there is intention behind it. (Thus “soft influence” is a hypothesis and not a finding, in my reading.)

"Locked up in the unfinished [Texas] facility, migrants were subjected to conditions that violated at least 60 federal standards for immigrant detention, the detention oversight unit of [ICE] found earlier this month in a contractually required inspection." www.washingtonpost.com/business/202...

I didn’t see them for a couple of days in DC this visit, but boy were some folks in fatigues caught in the rain yesterday.

DC folks: I have an open time block after lunch today and before a flight. If you’d like to say hi in central DC drop me a line.

Adam, whom I met when our desks were 15 feet apart at the Center for American Progress, attacks CAP and says ACLU, which I can attest did a lot more in the fight for actual people the he did as a Fetterman staffer, was worse for Dems than conservative orgs. Jeez man. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/17/u...

Pretty confusing to work through what might happen re “the algorithm,” which of course is not one thing. “US Treasury secretary Scott Bessent said the spun off app would be controlled by American investors but preserve some ’Chinese characteristics’”

China bans tech companies from buying Nvidia AI chips www.ft.com/content/12ad...

“TikTok’s US engineers have been testing that app, which will replicate the recommendation algorithms that made the platform so popular in the first place, the person said. As part of the framework agreement, ByteDance will license the technology behind that, a Beijing official has said.”

From The Information’s Martin Peers.

Whatever happens, this is so twisted if you start from a perspective where words in laws are to be taken literally.

I am hugely looking forward to reading this.

Wang Jingtao, the deputy director of the Cyberspace Administration of China, said that the U.S. and China had engaged in “candid, in-depth and constructive” talks and that both sides had reached agreement “regarding our full respect for the will of the business as well as the law of the market.”

As operator of a fair few websites, most of which are archival and I pay to keep up for no concrete reason and which I'm lucky don't run on software that needs regular security updates... I guess 38% seems low.

Just read a news article I thought was repetitive and full of hand-wavey stats sloppily phrased. The end: “For this story, Fortune used generative AI to help with an initial draft. An editor verified the accuracy of the information before publishing.” Ugh.

parachute journalism from a Californian: WASHINGTON, Sept. 14 — The occupation of the U.S. capital appears over, our correspondent reports after entering from an airfield in the nearby Commonwealth of Virginia. No uniformed officials were visible, but a plainclothes presence could not be ruled out.

The thing to emphasize here is that this treatment is *utterly normal.* It's part of the system of detention which has existed for decades. Folkston has been like this for many, many years,

Today I was reminded of the resource fork. The old and geeky may know it’s a data structure used by Mac System 7 for sound files. Turns out when you copied those files into other file systems they became empty husks. Goodbye mildly profane error sound from 1995. I can still hear you in my skull.

Where LLMs are in the analytical pipeline, quantitative analysis results deserve such a high degree of scrutiny at this stage that my basic rule will be to disregard them.

The breadth of China's reported cyber surveillance effort labeled Salt Typhoon is remarkable. I'm surprised more accounts don't make the natural comparison with the Snowden revelations. A highly capable cyber-spying state with a portfolio of intrusions and targets. www.nytimes.com/2025/09/04/w...

In my father's poli sci classroom in 1970s Taiwan, he would always call out the 'spy students' in the back: "Take good notes! Spicy bit!" The class would titter. Even the report-maker would look a bit abashed. In this A&M student's righteous "Dear Leader" invocation, there was no shame felt at all.

A whole generation of us more or less learned what oral sex was when it was revealed Bill Clinton had an improper relationship with an intern. No one is going around worried about the honor of Bill "that-woman" Clinton.

Lots of new material from Noah Berman and @eliotchen.bsky.social on the Biden and Trump administration process around chip controls in @thewirechina.bsky.social. www.thewirechina.com/2025/09/07/w...

This type of ideological sanctioning has long gone on in Chinese universities where teachers are reported to Party officials for saying things unacceptable to CCP orthodoxy.

To anyone who wrote me an email in the last couple of months, I'm still behind from work travel and vacation. No harm, in fact I'd be grateful, if you bug me again.

All the essays about what ought not to be included in "abundance" lead to a simple thought: Perhaps "abundance," which just means "a lot of," isn't a coherent advocacy position. This seems a feature and not a bug until the people who want "a lot of" profit and f— everyone else get a hold of it.

"On the other hand, Mark E. is only forty-one (41) years old." 💀

lol

When I see people online, even in jest, suggest that people living in Republican-controlled states should be abandoned because of their politicians, I feel a deep heartache. New York CREATED Donald Trump and none of y’all are ever talk about it the way you disparage Alabama or Mississippi.

Which will make it easier for the administration to lie

Interesting short piece tarnished by the 1742th edition of a nonsensical headline. "AI" is not any single thing a country wins or loses at.

Right on cuz

making my list for a library run and honestly deflated how many of the volumes i want to take out are digital holdings.

What really motivated the US government to ban Nvidia from selling powerful computer chips to China? www.wired.com/story/chips-...

The demand side for very bad uses of machine learning is pretty fearsome. www.politico.com/news/magazin... 1/2

❗ Asia researchers, APARC has #AcademicJobs for you! We invite applications for multiple postdoctoral and visiting #fellowships on contemporary Asia to begin in fall quarter 2026. Learn more and join us ⬇️

Rahm Emanuel's novel both-sidesism*: A: Tea Party and January 6 ≈ B: Occupy Wall Street and *gasp* a lefty mayoral candidate This to argue that both parties are weirdos and real enemy China is taking advantage. *Don't worry, the next graf begins "To be sure…"

BREAKING: 5th circuit panel rejects Trump's invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to expel Venezuelan nationals, saying there has been no "invasion" or "predatory incursion." Majority Southwich (George W. Bush) Ramirez (Biden) Dissent Oldham (Trump) s3.documentcloud.org/documents/26...

It took two weeks to do a reasonably good job of emptying a mind. One morning back on email and news feeds to fill it with thorns, stubborn knots, and riddles.

AI bits from the Tianjin Declaration of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation states. Lots of attention to Xi-Modi-Putin, but Belarus, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Tajikstan and Uzbekistan also members, 16 observers+partners. Text assembled by Bert Hofman substack.com/home/post/p-...