Even for Chinese people, Journey to the West is a somewhat difficult text because it belongs to classical literature. Using some children's books published in recent years, and progressing gradually, might be a better approach?
This is a simplified version: Journey to the West in Easy Chinese by Jeff Pepper and Xiao Hui Wang. Otherwise, I would definitely have waited a bit before biting off something like this.
I think the biggest impact will be on SaaS products from startups and side projects. People will think, "I can build something myself with the help of AI, so why should I pay to try your unfinished product?" The barrier to entry has become higher, requiring a more complete product.
I started blog simply to have a place to express myself; my only reader is probably myself.
I write whatever comes to mind, organize my travel photos, record my daily step count, and manage my bookmarks.
if you don't expect anyone to read it from the start, then you won't be disappointed, and you won't have to doubt whether what you've written is meaningful or mature enough, or whether it's embarrassing to show your imperfect self.
It won't be, because I assume from the beginning that no one will read it. But I still want to write, because as a freelancer who works from home all year round, I say a few words a day. I need a place to express myself, a channel for my emotions.
I think many hackers on HN are overly naive, holding a dreamlike view of authoritarian states because they're so far away from them. Therefore, articles like these appear on the front page regularly.
But for people who have lived here their entire lives, it's a different story. There's a joke that goes, "I can donate 1 million yuan because I don't have it, but I can't donate a cow because I actually do have it."
I'm a Chinese who has lived in China my entire life and am almost 40. Personally, I think the core point of this article is wrong. China has never been run by engineers, but by officials. In ancient times, it was scholars, or literati, while craftsmen were considered lowly. Even in modern times, do officials or engineers have the final say in factories? If it were the latter, there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs. Just go out and survey 100 people on the street and ask them who they think is running the country.
As a Chinese who have a lot of live/working experience in both systems just provide some clarifications for this comment: most Chinese people don't understand the difference between politicians and bureaucrats because as the country invented the bureaucracy thousands years ago there is never a clear difference between them. The parent comment is talking about the country is running by bureaucrats which IMO is irrelevant to this topic.
Bureaucrats with some numeracy skills that can focus on (rather career incentives depend on) hitting central gov quantifiable KPIs and managing public sentiment is about as close to being on engineering spectrum in terms of governance vs demographic systems where governance is referendum on incumbants ability to sell electoral rhetoric (and frequently fail) every X years.
> there wouldn't be so many state-owned enterprise closures and layoffs.
Of course there would, that's how you know cold blooded technocrats are at work. Fucking over irrelevant SOEs and iron rice bowl jobs is sterotypical based analytic trade off. Mind you there's plenty of engineer type doing policy work in the west, they just have a much more sclerotic legal layer to jump through, and frequently, don't.
Go survey 100 diasphora Chinese who lived in PRC and west and ask them how the systems differ.
> "Iron rice bowl" (simplified Chinese: 铁饭碗; traditional Chinese: 鐵飯碗; pinyin: tiě fàn wǎn) is a Chinese term for an occupation with guaranteed job security,[1] similar to life tenure. Traditionally, people considered to have such positions include military personnel, members of the civil service, as well as employees of various state-owned enterprises (through the mechanism of the work unit).
There are people who think that China is about to replace America as world's obviously dominant superpower, and there are people who think that China is about to collapse, nothing in-between.
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