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1) Let's talk about the question of 'how should we think about Chinese tech'

What do we talk about when we talk about Chinese tech? Who is 'we' here? How do you pronounce Elema?

I've hit 10k in followers and it's time to earn my stripes as a thinkboi.

 2) Chinese tech is a loaded term. The very fact that we have to say 'Chinese' tech rather than tech demotes its otherness.

So what does a place of origin signify? The different market conditions, political context and imo most importantly, the development stage of the country.
3) I think @benedictevans and @ToniCowanBrown's podcast on 'How to think about Chinese tech when you know fa about China' (my title, not theirs), lays some of the groundwork here.

China's different market conditions and political context often means a parallel tech world
4) This means a fundamental rethinking of first principals that's hard to stomach for most Western tech folks
- Copy is not wrong, in fact, it shows you've picked a de-risked business model
- There are no unscalable resources, esp when labour is cheap
https://t.co/TeWzeTV2Wm
5) But I think the most important factor that gets overlooked is that China tech demotes something very particular. It is coming from a developing country. The life stage of a country is different from its cultural context.

What happens when a developing country is innovating?
6) What happens when technology isn't augmenting existing institutions but instead, creating it?

A lot of phenomenons of Chinese tech makes more sense once you consider it through a developmental lens on institution creation.
7) Why did China have super apps? Because there was enough space for them to expand into adjacencies and do well.

Chinese Mobile payments happened not just because credit card didn't take off, but because governments never created the institutions called credit agencies
8) I think Chinese tech has shown a parallel world of tech-enabled institution creation in a more obvious way.

I think China's also more upfront about the fact that tech giants are institutions and should therefore be held accountable to the same level.
9) So with that framing, I think it needs to be asked who's 'we' when we talk about Chinese tech. Benedict and Toni talk from the perspective of Europeans but with the implication being that western tech companies will be affected and then the rest of the world through them.
10) But I think the true beneficiaries of Chinese tech's innovations are other developing countries who are also embarking on their own journey of technology-enabled institution building.

Whether it's Grab or SEA in south-east Asia or Rappi in South America
11) To take a global 'we', Chinese tech's innovations are going to profoundly shape the lives of the next billion as they come online.

In the West, you'll just be getting Substack 10 years after paid WeChat official accounts
12) Last thing, Elema's Chinese name is 饿了吗 (literally translated as Are you hungry). To hear how it's pronounced, press the sound button below the box.

https://t.co/MRIfXWCPCZ饿了吗
13) Last Last thing. If you're looking for good resources on Chinese tech I recommend:
- @TechBuzzChina - great primer
- GGV's 996 podcast backlog (it's now called The Next Billion)
- Acquired podcast on PDD, Tencent and Alibaba
- My newsletter?
I'll be writing threads like this for the rest of Jan, follow me if you like these to spam your TL

More from Lillian Li

Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about a key part of the Chinese creator economy. The creator management and incubator agencies known as Multi-Channel Networks (MCN). We''ll summerise key lessons for the western creator economy.

And know how Li Ziqi got her 12m YouTube subscribers

2) MCNs are modern-day talent agencies (but more) who target influencers and creators as their clients. It originated in the US but has proliferated in China, with industry estimates of 5k-7k Chinese MCN operating as of 2020.

3) Typically, as creators gain enough following, they find it difficult to be an-all-in-one content creator, editor, customer support rep, accountant, lawyer, and marketing guru that the job demands.

Enter the MCNs who offers the creator the following:

4) Audience and traffic growth, PR management, monetisation through ads & e-commerce and support with retail fulfillment.

Their services are more holistic than western MCNs, who's offerings are more domain-specific.

5) Agreements between Chinese MCNs and creators can get into guarantees of the number of followers provided, copyrights, subtitling and distribution help, as well as providing analytical feedback on their content.
ECONOMY
Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about how Alibaba has achieved the holy grail of big data - a holistic view of the consumer - through a plethora of product offerings and investment.

This is their overarching moat. And Amazon's got nothing on them.

2) To the outsider, Alibaba's product range is confusing af. It's all over the place and there seems to be no core competency they are focusing on.

A few divisions - Taobao (B2C marketplace), Tmall (High-end B2C marketplace), Alibaba (B2B marketplace, Cainiu(logistics)..

3) ...Elema (Food delivery), Autonavi (maps), Youku (streaming) and Feizhu(travel booking)

Also the promotional strategy is weird, In the lead-up to singles day, half the time they were promoting some cat rearing in-app mini game.

Wtf?

4) When we view Alibaba's strategy as working to create a full view of a consumer's life, including their preferences, social network and spending capacity (and ability). Then everything starts to make sense.

4) Whether a consumer buys on Tmall or Taobao tells Ali about their preferences and budget, delivery address for packages and food lets Ali know where they live and where they work (also cross-referenced with property data to infer wealth level + occupation).
BUSINESS , BUSNIESS
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Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about my favourite video platform Bilibili. What is it, what it isn't and and how it makes money. It's been called the Chinese YouTube that that framing lacks imaginary.

The $bili stock also 5x in 2020 - who knew weebs could be so lucrative

2) Grossly simplified, it's the Chinese equivalent of Youtube. Except it's not. It's like if Youtube, Twitch, Steam, Patreon, TokyoPop and Netflix had a CRISPR-baby, and that baby was a weeb, but that weeb is also super down with Chinese Gen Z

3) Bilibili was founded in 2010 by avid Anime, Gaming and Comics (AGC) fan Yi Xu from a frustration that the mainstay Chinese anime platform kept crashing with no consistent access to his beloved vocaloid Miku

4) Serial entrepreneur Rui Chen went from an angel investor to CEO, having obtained Yi Xu's trust by correctly identified the origin of Bilibili as from the anime "A Certain Scientific Railgun". Anime knowledge is life.

5) Currently it's the biggest mainstream portal for the Chinese Gen Z with user-generated video sharing, live streaming, mobile gaming, online comics and event ticketing. It’s also diversified its content coverage with coverage on beauty, e-sports, pop culture and many others.
TRADING
Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
"By creating the concept that data is a factor of production, China Inc. has formalised and legislated the stance that data itself is valuable rather than the algorithms it helps train.

The Chinese leadership has subtly but deftly implied that data's value to a nation is underpriced and currently subjected to market distortions."

I think China's making money moves in the area of data. Read about it
BABA
Lillian Li
Lillian Li
@lillianmli
1) Let's talk about Tesla's China strategy. There's a few questions here - why did the Chinese government actively encourage them to set up in Shanghai? What's in it for Tesla? Why is Tesla continously discounting their cars?

Spoiler alert: $TSLA go brrr

2) Our story starts all the way back in 2013, when smog was so bad Beijing didn't see any blue sky for months. Policy pivots were in order, and new energy bills with specific support for electric vehicles (EV) were introduced.

3) Over the next few years subsidies from the government were handed out to any car companies that said they were going electric. A single EV could get up to $22k worth of subsidies (provided they could drive for 250 km).

Sales increased and the EV market steady grew

4) However at the end of 2017, there was no standout Chinese EV company. Far too much of the subsidies went to fraudsters and the Chinese EV market was lagging behind the EU market.

Chinese government hardened their resolve.

Similar to Baidu, complacency was a killer.

5) The aim was to have a thriving worldclass EV market in the long term.

Similar to how introducing Apple and Samsung brought up Xiaomi, One Plus and Oppo, they decided to introduce foreign competition from the best EV brand there was - Tesla.
TRADING

More from Tech

James Felton
James Felton
@JimMFelton
Butt plugs were originally sold as a miracle cure for headaches, acne, and insanity

Thread, article here and h/t: @qikipedia :
https://t.co/Ts84xnmWKJ


For a long time, medicine was pre-occupied with the question "can this be solved by putting something in the butt?"

Take, for example, tobacco smoke enemas, in which 18th Century physicians saw drowning victims and attempted to de-deadify them by blowing tobacco smoke up their rectums with a pipe.


Despite having no medical benefit whatsoever, the practice was popular, and enema kits lined the Thames like lifebelts, ready to be used as one final humiliation for somebody who was crap at swimming.

This practice ended sometime after 1800 when it became apparent that it didn't really work, given how the anus famously isn't really connected to the lungs, but doctors weren't quite finished with having a poke around in the old anus to see what happens just yet.
TECH
Mrkhtake2
Mrkhtake2
@mrkhtake2
Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.
TECH
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Patrick McKenzie
Patrick McKenzie
@patio11
Torn between "I think losing $100 million when someone beats you at security research is pretty much exactly what you signed up for doing yield farming" and "Maaaaaaaybe not the future of finance you were expecting, huh."

How to put this in regular finance terms...

Suppose hypothetically you have an account at a brokerage with some valuable asset in it. You take a margin loan against that asset to fund your normal spending, or pay a tax bill, or maybe buy something at another brokerage.

For reasons known only to the brokerage, they don't denominate your loan in dollars. They denominate it in shares of a money market fund, which are worth $1 +/- epsilon and basically never deviate from that.

And you think "Hmm, I have a large equity cushion against this loan."

One day, a computer system at the brokerage reports, sorta-kinda erroneously, that the value of the money market fund is actually $1.30 per share. The equity cushion is gone. Your valuable asset is sold, at timing you didn't choose, at wrong price, to pay an inflated phantom debt

And your recourse is... probably tweeting at patio11 saying he finds too much joy in this.

Which I don't; I just feel like this is why you don't trust a CPU built out of redstone to build reliable financial infrastructure on top of.
TECH
Radek Osmulski
Radek Osmulski
@radekosmulski
THREAD: How is it possible to train a well-performing, advanced Computer Vision model 𝗼𝗻 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗖𝗣𝗨? 🤔

At the heart of this lies the most important technique in modern deep learning - transfer learning.

Let's analyze how it


2/ For starters, let's look at what a neural network (NN for short) does.

An NN is like a stack of pancakes, with computation flowing up when we make predictions.

How does it all work?


3/ We show an image to our model.

An image is a collection of pixels. Each pixel is just a bunch of numbers describing its color.

Here is what it might look like for a black and white image


4/ The picture goes into the layer at the bottom.

Each layer performs computation on the image, transforming it and passing it upwards.


5/ By the time the image reaches the uppermost layer, it has been transformed to the point that it now consists of two numbers only.

The outputs of a layer are called activations, and the outputs of the last layer have a special meaning... they are the predictions!
TECH
HankHeIl
HankHeIl
@HankHeil
So we had to develop technologies like this to barely manage control over limited areas in Iraq's few urban centers. Only ~8 in 100 Iraqi adults owns a personal vehicle. That rate is > 1 car/adult in America yet I have never seen any doctrine paper or work of fiction address this


We've seen and struggled in civil conflicts with instant, local, universal, distributed communications (cell phone era, basically every conflict since 2000). We've seen and struggled in conflicts with instant, global, universal distributed communications (everything since 2011).

The world's most overfunded military and glow in the dark agencies struggle and largely fail to contain conflicts where fhe vast, vast majority of people are locked into a ~5mi radius of their home.

How can they possibly contain a conflict in a nation with universal car ownership and the most developed road network in the world? The average car can travel over 400 miles on one tank of gas, how can you contain the potential of that kind of mobility?

I think that's partially why the system was so freaked out by 1/6. Yes, most of it is histrionics but you don't decide to indefinitely turn your capital into the Baghdad Green Zone with fortifications and 25k troops over histrionics alone.
TECH

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1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did.

This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.

2/ I remember being 26 and writing about reading 52 books a year. I wrote blog posts about it. They got copied. It became "a thing." Now it's in Twitter bios. It looks impressive but it's insanely useless and I shouldn't have done it.

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Of course you can find this out too late if you are chasing the dragon of Ted talks etc

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Trump is gonna let the Mueller investigation end all on it's own. It's obvious. All the hysteria of the past 2 weeks about his supposed impending firing of Mueller was a distraction. He was never going to fire Mueller and he's not going to


Mueller's officially end his investigation all on his own and he's gonna say he found no evidence of Trump campaign/Russian collusion during the 2016 election.

Democrats & DNC Media are going to LITERALLY have nothing coherent to say in response to that.

Mueller's team was 100% partisan.

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They looked high.

They looked low.

They looked underneath every rock, behind every tree, into every bush.

And they found...NOTHING.

Those saying Mueller will file obstruction charges against Trump: laughable.

What documents did Trump tell the Mueller team it couldn't have? What witnesses were withheld and never interviewed?

THERE WEREN'T ANY.

Mueller got full 100% cooperation as the record will show.
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