Kerim Friedman 傅可恩

Niall Ferguson is an inverse tankie. He views everything through the lens of American empire but thinks that American empire is a good thing that should be defended. In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, he teams up with former Google CEO Eric Schmidt to argue that the US better wake up ...

端傳媒 Initium Media is one of the best Chinese-language news outlets for international reporting, and they've done a good job reporting on the fires in Indonesia. I've posted some highlights in English in the thread below.

After the worst wildfires in history occurred in 2015, the Indonesian government introduced a series of remedial measures, including the establishment in 2016 of a dedicated peatland and mangrove restoration agency (BRGM). Starting in 2021, BRGM's mandate was further expanded …

端傳媒 Initium Media is one of the best Chinese-language news outlets for international reporting, and they've done a good job reporting on the fires in Indonesia. I've posted some highlights in English in the thread below.

Once these peatlands catch fire, they can smolder underground for weeks or even months, making them difficult to fully extinguish. Since the 1990s, Indonesia has dug large-scale drainage canals to convert peatlands into plantations for palm oil, pulpwood, and other cash crops…

端傳媒 Initium Media is one of the best Chinese-language news outlets for international reporting, and they've done a good job reporting on the fires in Indonesia. I've posted some highlights in English in the thread below.

about 13,500 people received treatment for respiratory infections, while on the two islands of Borneo and Sumatra, about 5.5 million people were directly exposed to the thick smoke. BBC reported on September 23 that more than 40,000 cases occurred in young children…

端傳媒 Initium Media is one of the best Chinese-language news outlets for international reporting, and they've done a good job reporting on the fires in Indonesia. I've posted some highlights in English in the thread below.

more than 200,000 hectares of forest and land across the country were consumed by fire. The satellite monitoring platform "Nusantara Atlas" pointed out that from January to August this year, nearly 900,000 hectares of land had been burned across Indonesia.

端傳媒 Initium Media is one of the best Chinese-language news outlets for international reporting, and they've done a good job reporting on the fires in Indonesia. I've posted some highlights in English in the thread below.

I recently finished reading Saramago's "Blindness." As an allegory, the novel feels even more urgent now than when it was written, but the use of blindness as a metaphor falls flat because of the way it disregards the lived experience of blind people.

I'm also not very comfortable with novels that graphically depict sexual violence to make allegorical points, something this book did as well.

I recently finished reading Saramago's "Blindness." As an allegory, the novel feels even more urgent now than when it was written, but the use of blindness as a metaphor falls flat because of the way it disregards the lived experience of blind people.

The latest OpenAI employee to quit over concerns with the industry wrote this: "This question of “alignment”—or how AI can be trained to adhere to human values—may sound touchy-feely, but the practical stakes could not be higher." What if the problem isn't a lack of alignment but a surfeit of it?

"One way to understand the class alliance that has coalesced around this project is to think of it as the meeting of those who have given up waiting for the promises of modernization to be realized, and those who have stopped pretending that the promises they made were real."

I've noticed a real change in the kinds of replies I get from customer support these days. It used to be that they would send a polite reply thanking me for the feedback and promise to look into it.