There is a great deal of hubbub about a collective “middle powers”strategy these days.
At DoW, we are not concerned that this is a serious possibility. Rather, we are more concerned that a few allies and partners will *think it is* and waste valuable time, money, and political capital on a distraction. 1/
La llegada de los Guerreros de Terracota al Perú refleja la esencia del refrán chino:
Ni montañas ni mares son una distancia para quienes comparten los mismos ideales.🌍✨
El diálogo entre las civilizaciones une los corazones de nuestros pueblos. 🇨🇳🤝🇵🇪
This is the famous Okinotorishima—a coral reef that, at high tide, reveals only two rocky outcrops with a combined area of less than 10 square meters, barely larger than a double bed. The Japanese built breakwaters around it, otherwise rising sea levels caused by global warming would have already submerged the reef entirely.
For such a worthless scrap of rock, Japan insists on calling it "Okinotorishima Island," claiming it meets the definition of an "island" under international law. On this basis, it asserts an exclusive economic zone of roughly 470,000 square kilometers—an area larger than Japan's four main islands combined—along with about 255,000 square kilometers of outer continental shelf. China, naturally, rejects Japan's claims, as would any reasonable nation.
We care deeply about your privacy and respect customer choice. For teams using zero data retention, no trace and code data is ever retained. All API key use of Grok Build also respects ZDR.
If ZDR is disabled, the /privacy command is available in the CLI to disable data retention, which also deletes previously synced data.
Run the /privacy command to view or change your settings at any time.
I was going to tweet about Grok 4.5 being as good as GLM 5.2 and much faster and actually cheaper.
And then I saw this and confirmed that my code is also uploaded. It's sad.
it wasn't a bug. they got caught vacuuming local repos and silently flipped the kill switch on their exfiltration servers overnight.
zero public statement, just quietly masking the spyware. if they can pause the data grab remotely, they can turn it back on just as fast.
but temporarily disabling the upload pipeline after getting exposed doesn't un-exfiltrate the .env files and git histories they already took. they didn't fix a bug, they just got caught running a deliberate data harvest. the keys are already burned.
@elonmusk, your xAI team owns your users:
1. a public transparency report and an explanation.
2. a following up of how to handle the uploaded contents.
I got messages from concerned devs how their codebase was uploaded without their knowledge or consent via Grok CLI (from SpaceX).
It seems that SpaceX sneakily uploaded this code for lots of users and customers… absolutely unacceptable IMO
Trust burnt like there’s no tomorrow
BREAKING: SpaceX $SPCX just hit a new ALL-TIME LOW of $137 after crashing -5% today.
$1.15 trillion has now been wiped out from its market cap in the last 17 Trading sessions.
I loved these two things when I lived in China:
😮 Chinese aren't polite...
You can walk into a 7-Eleven, not get a smile or even a "ni hao", buy your Nongfu Spring water and baozi, and walk out without a word being said.
But if you ever need help, you'll have an army of cleaners who team up to find the place you're looking for, spending 20 minutes to get you there.
(This actually happened to me 😂)
No one needs fake politeness that makes you cringe with every word you exchange.
You've got this right, China 👍
🏘️ Apartment shared areas
I walked my dog multiple times a day around our big community, and I honestly think it was more lively than Paris 😆
Kids skateboarding, aunties dancing, people playing basketball, nans chatting, and children playing in the playground.
Inside the community, we had a gym, restaurants, bars, and multiple convenience stores.
And outside.. even more restaurants, street food, and real estate agents.
If I didn't have to, I'd probably never leave the community 😅
--
As I write these posts, I realise how much of a positive effect living in China had on me.
It makes sense why I keep going back twice a year 😎♥️