The day started with my reading this article in the BBC app: How China fell for a lobster: What an AI assistant tells us about Beijing’s ambition.

What lobster, you might ask? Well, the HTML title tag features a different title: “OpenClaw: What China’s frenzy says about its AI ambition.” And no, I’ll never understand why they always use two different titles: one that’s mostly invisible (because it’s truncated by the browser’s tab) and the visible one under the h1 tag. This should be considered bad SEO, but apparently it’s good SEO. “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.” And bad is good. Stupid is intelligent.

My initial reaction to BBC’s report: “JESUS FUCKING CHRIST! Let me out of this planet! (And I still can’t understand the OpenClaw frenzy.)”

I even had a chat with Grok about the OpenClaw frenzy. I’m still at a loss.

🐼

As soon as I opened YouTube in Firefox, The Big Algorithm decided that I should be interested in another view of China. It was a video by a young Chinese woman—a video editor—regarding a typical weekend of hers. I ended up watching 4 of the 5 videos from her channel. In reverse order, with the oldest being watched last. But I found it just fine this way.

① A Chinese robot woman’s weekend. It doesn’t seem like she watched any movies or read any books or magazines. 11m13s:

② In northern China, everything is more modest. 12m13s:

③ From Tumen, let’s take a look at North Korea. 10m09s:

④ Apparently, “half the cars are electric because gas is expensive—even more so than in the U.S.” Try Europe, honey. But some things make sense: she watches movies during her lunch break while her coworkers nap. She makes about $3,400 a month as a video editor, which is a very good salary in China, but having a diploma from a good university helps. A lot. 10m28s:

How do you say “Brave New World” in Mandarin?