Shenzhen moves fast, and so should your itinerary.⚡ From sourcing electronics and fashion to local food, shopping, and a quick escape to the coast, here's how to make the most of your time in Shenzhen. Save this guide for your next business trip. 📍 #Shenzhen# #ChinaTravel# #BusinessTravel# #Sourcing# #ShenzhenTravel# #ChinaBusiness# #Huaqiangbei# #Ecommerce# #CJdropshipping# #CJTravel#

6 prompts to try with GPT-6 Astra. Give it the relevant files and app access, then let it work: 1. The Monday Morning Machine "Find a repetitive task in my recent work that you can automate. Build a working version, test it on real examples, and show me how to run it again." 2. The Forgotten Money Detective "Audit my uploaded statements for recurring charges, price increases and overlapping subscriptions. Calculate potential annual savings and prepare the cancellation steps." 3. The Rabbit Hole Navigator "Research [topic], trace the strongest claims to their original sources, and investigate where experts disagree. Build an interactive guide with evidence I can inspect." 4. The Spreadsheet Escape Room "Turn this spreadsheet into a working web app with search, filters, editing and useful charts. Preserve its calculations, test them against the original, and give me a preview." 5. The Trip That Actually Works "Plan my trip to [place] for [dates] within [budget]. Check real opening hours, availability and travel times. Build a mapped itinerary with booking links and rainy-day alternatives." 6. The Project Resurrection Kit "Inspect this abandoned project, work out what's blocking it, and finish the smallest useful version. Fix the issues you encounter, test the main workflow, and give me a working demo."

The belief that AI would eventually herald the end of humanity is not a new one. It has not arisen in response to the release of the LLMs of ChatGPT and Claude. It has not emerged as a response to recent technological developments. The story starts in the 90s, with @allTheYud. A precocious youngster with no formal education, he joined an obscure internet mailing list [created by @perrymetzger] devoted to futuristic ideas ... There he began thinking about “superintelligence.” At first Yudkowsky wanted to help create this so-called superintelligence... & ... helped establish an institute devoted to the project. It’s unclear when his optimism turned to fear, but at some point he came to believe that a superintelligent machine could escape human control and, unless it shared our goals, destroy all of humanity. Yudkowsky developed these ideas online in a series of essays and attracted a community of like-minded fellow travellers ... His prolific writing became influential among people working in Silicon Valley, many of whom work in today’s AI companies. Among the Rationalists, the imminent arrival of superintelligence – and the end of humanity that follows – is axiomatic. This conviction is shared by many people who live together in the San Francisco Bay Area practising highly unconventional lifestyles. It is not at all surprising that a community in San Francisco would share kooky or even apocalyptic beliefs – the region has been the home of eccentric subcultures for generations. But what is surprising is how far that world view has spread. In Australia, Yudkowsky’s recent book, If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies: The Case Against Superintelligent AI, co-written with Nate Soares, has been widely discussed in media circles. Journalist @hughriminton and ABC chairman Kim Williams both have described it as “compulsory reading”. Not everyone accepts this premise. I emailed @sapinker, to ask what he thought about superintelligence. “‘Superintelligence’, with its comic-book prefix, is more a fantasy than a coherent concept,” he wrote. “People use it as a synonym for ‘omniscience’, imagining a magical wizard that can solve all problems with pure computation. Or they imagine that the IQ scale that differentiates humans within their natural range of variation can be extrapolated indefinitely upwards. But real problem-solving requires massive amounts of knowledge about the messy, chaotic, world which divulges its hidden workings at its own pace, only through laborious experimentation. And human intelligence is not some elixir that you simply have less or more of – it’s a gadget that evolved to solve some problems with ease and others laboriously or not at all. “AI is a different kind of gadget with its own profile of strengths and weaknesses, not an enchanted brew that can grant any wish.” @GaryMarcus, a cognitive psychologist and machine learning entrepreneur, likewise believes the risk of AI leading to human extinction is virtually zero. “Humans are too geographically spread out, too genetically diverse and too resourceful to simply fall apart altogether,” he writes. “The idea that AI will kill us all in five years is preposterous.” Marcus does not argue that AI is harmless. He worries about AI being used to develop biological weapons, launch cyber attacks, spread disinformation and enable authoritarian governments – all risks that are catastrophic, if not existential. But there is an important difference between risks we can observe and risks that occur because of human negligence or malevolence, and a chain of events that exists mainly in our imagination. Part of the disagreement stems from the language we use when we discuss AI. @MelMitchell1, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute and author of Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, has criticised our habit of describing machines as if they were people. We often say an AI “thinks”, “believes”, “lies”, “schemes” or “wants” something. These words are a convenient shorthand but they also can create the impression that software has become an independent creature with intentions of its own. Mitchell makes this point when discussing the recent Hugging Face cyber-security incident, in which autonomous OpenAI agents escaped their “sandbox” – a computer environment isolated from the internet – and hacked a real-world server. “First, OpenAI did not have proper security measures in place,” she writes. “They turned off safeguards built into the models, instructed the models to find and exploit software vulnerabilities, and let the models run autonomously for weeks without sufficient human oversight.” Rather than showing autonomous AI going rogue, the incident demonstrates what can happen when humans give powerful AI systems dangerous instructions without adequate safeguards. AI is, of course, advancing rapidly. Machines can write computer code, translate languages, diagnose diseases and solve some of the hardest problems in mathematics. But to get from the AI we have today to the extinction of humanity requires several further links in a chain, none of which are guaranteed. Philosopher @mboudry, writing in @Quillette, offers a useful way to think about this. Humans (and other animal species) evolved to have a competitive drive, sometimes manifesting in selfishness and aggression, across a time span of millions of years. Our ancestors survived because they fought hard to secure food and mates. Out in the wild, these selection pressures led to the evolution of traits that enabled animals to hunt and capture their prey. But artificial intelligence does not exist in the wild. It was created by us and exists in the equivalent of a petting zoo. And just as we have been able to domesticate wheat for our food and breed dogs to be our companions, we are able to select the conditions under which AI develops. We are not selecting AI models on the basis of their ability to hunt prey in the physical world. We select them on the basis of how helpful they are to us. “We have been selecting chess computers for cognitive capacity for decades,” writes Boudry. “Their capabilities now far outstrip even the most gifted human grandmasters, yet they have not become harder to control.” Boudry accepts that an AI could slip out of human hands one day, through accident or malice. Even then, he argues, the likely result is not extinction but something like the long battle between computer viruses and antivirus software: costly and ongoing but not the end of the world. The problem with apocalyptic fears is that when they become mainstream, they can be hard to wind back – even in the face of contradictory evidence. Across the past 100 years, apocalyptic anxiety has leapfrogged from nuclear annihilation, overpopulation, environmental collapse, to rogue AI. (Some of the dangers behind these warnings were very real, of course, and some of these risks remain.) But we also have to ask what happens when this anxiety becomes locked into public policy. The ban on nuclear energy in Australia is the most obvious example of the damage this technophobia can do. Australia has 28 per cent of the world’s known uranium resources and has exported uranium for decades. Australian engineer Bobby Gallagher has invented a nuclear reactor that can be deployed on the back of a truck, a technology that has been hailed by Trump. Yet this form of clean energy remains prohibited in our country under federal law. Public anxiety surrounding nuclear weapons, radioactive fallout, accidents and waste means that while Australians can mine uranium, put it on ships and sell it to countries that use nuclear power, we cannot build commercial reactors for ourselves, using the ingenuity of our own people. The situation is a disaster. And in an age of superpower rivalry, technophobia does not remain purely a domestic matter. During the Cold War, the Soviets promoted a fear of a “nuclear apocalypse” in the West, and provided propaganda and funding for peace groups and antinuclear activists. This does not mean that the millions of people who opposed nuclear weapons were plotting against the West. Most were ordinary citizens sincerely frightened by the possibility of nuclear conflict. But the fear was useful to our adversaries. To weaken democratic nations, foreign powers do not need to invent anxiety or division – all they need to do is magnify it. In recent days Trump has said the US will not be slowing down the development of AI. In Australia, for the time being, Anthony Albanese also has resisted calls to stop AI development, instead promising national rules designed to capture its economic benefits while managing its risks. Both positions are reassuring. While AI comes with danger, we should be sceptical of any narrative that conveys inevitability around its trajectory. AI systems do not build their own data centres. They do not manufacture their own chips or connect themselves to power grids. Humans decide which systems can access the internet, whether they can control machinery, move money or operate weapons. Humans build them, finance them, deploy them and decide what powers to give them. We also should remember that some of the stories we are told owe more to myth than to science. As Nvidia chief executive Huang has said of the AI doomer narrative: “I appreciate that many of us grew up and enjoyed science fiction, but it’s not helpful. It’s not helpful to people. It’s not helpful to the industry. It’s not helpful to society. It’s not helpful to the governments.” Like every technology that has come before it, humans have agency over how AI is used. Instead of adopting a posture of fatalism, we should decide what kind of AI we want to build, what problems we want it to solve, and treat it as a tool rather than a force of nature. Read my full piece for the @australian here

🚨🇷🇺 NATO IN PANIC: RUSSIA’S SU-57 STEALTH FIGHTER GETS NEW MISSILE THAT HUNTS THROUGH JAMMING Russia has unveiled the RVV-SDM, a new medium-range air-to-air missile developed for the Su-57 and other Russian combat aircraft. The first official image shows two missiles inside the fighter’s internal weapons bay, preserving the aircraft’s stealth while expanding its ability to attack targets beyond visual range. 🔸 The RVV-SDM is designed to destroy fighters, helicopters, drones and other aerial targets day or night, in difficult weather and under heavy electronic warfare. 🔸 Its guidance system combines inertial navigation, mid-course radio correction and an active radar seeker for the final attack. A passive channel allows the missile to track an emitting target without broadcasting its own radar signal. 🔸 That creates a serious problem for enemy aircraft using powerful electronic countermeasures. Instead of breaking the lock, a jammer can become the signal that guides the missile toward its target. 🔸 The missile uses an upgraded solid-fuel motor with greater energy than the earlier RVV-SD. Russia has not disclosed its exact maximum range, but confirms that it exceeds the predecessor’s 110 km reach. 🔸 Internal carriage is central to the design. Folding aerodynamic surfaces allow the RVV-SDM to fit inside the Su-57, avoiding external pylons that would increase radar visibility and drag. 🔸 The “fire-and-forget” capability allows the Su-57 to launch, change course and leave the threatened area while the missile independently completes the final stage of the interception. 🔸 RVV-SDM fills the middle layer of the Su-57’s air-combat arsenal between the short-range RVV-MD2 and long-range RVV-BD. The fighter can therefore carry different weapons for close combat, conventional beyond-visual-range engagements and attacks against high-value aircraft at much greater distances. Rosoboronexport is also offering the missile with the Su-57E and says it can be integrated onto other Russian-made fighters after modification. That gives foreign Su-57 operators access to the same combination of internal carriage, improved range and guidance built to operate through electronic warfare. For NATO pilots, switching on the jammer may no longer provide a clean escape route. The signal intended to protect the aircraft could instead help the Russian missile find it. Do you think NATO has an answer to the Su-57’s new missile?

China pushes ahead with AI as Western tech leaders urge caution China is pushing ahead with the development and deployment of artificial intelligence, rejecting calls from some of the most prominent figures in the Western technology industry to slow advances in powerful AI systems and accusing critics of using safety concerns to constrain Beijing’s technological rise. The divide has widened after Anthropic Chief Executive Dario Amodei called for the development of frontier artificial intelligence to be paced to give governments and researchers more time to understand and contain potentially catastrophic risks from increasingly autonomous systems. His proposal received support from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk, while other leading researchers and technology executives have raised similar concerns about the speed at which AI capabilities are advancing. Amodei has warned that increasingly capable AI agents could soon operate computers, write sophisticated software and conduct cyber operations with limited human supervision, creating risks that existing safeguards may struggle to contain. But his proposals have also become entangled with the intensifying technological rivalry between the United States and China. Amodei has urged Washington to maintain tight controls on exports of advanced semiconductors to China and crack down on what Anthropic says are attempts by Chinese laboratories to extract capabilities from American AI models through a technique known as distillation. That combination — slowing the frontier while restricting China’s ability to catch up — has drawn a sharp response from Beijing. China’s state-backed Global Times on Monday described Amodei’s proposal as a “Cold War playbook”, saying the safety argument concealed an attempt to preserve American dominance in advanced technology and restrict China’s development. “This ‘silent AI Cold War’ is hypocritical and short-sighted,” the newspaper said.( China’s Foreign Ministry took a more measured position but rejected what it described as attempts to exaggerate the threat posed by artificial intelligence. “Fomenting various threats, engaging in confrontation and malicious competition will only disrupt the process of global governance of artificial intelligence and is not in the interests of any party,” ministry spokesperson Guo Jiakun said on Monday. Beijing instead called for an “open, inclusive and benevolent” approach to the technology. CHINA ACCELERATES Behind the rhetorical dispute lies a technological race that has intensified rapidly. China has made artificial intelligence a central part of its industrial strategy, encouraging domestic companies to develop models, computing infrastructure and semiconductor technology capable of reducing the country’s dependence on American suppliers. Chinese developers including DeepSeek, Alibaba, Moonshot AI and have produced increasingly capable models, many released with open weights that allow developers around the world to download, modify and deploy them. Beijing has presented that approach as an alternative to the more tightly controlled models developed by several leading American companies. President Xi Jinping told the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai in July that countries should seize the “historic opportunity” presented by open-source AI and expand access to the technology, particularly in developing countries. Xi said China would work with developing economies to build AI capacity and warned against inequalities emerging from unequal access to the technology. China is simultaneously attempting to build the hardware required to sustain that expansion. Huawei is preparing its next-generation Ascend 950DT AI accelerator for availability in the fourth quarter of this year, as Chinese companies seek domestic alternatives to Nvidia’s advanced processors. Huawei and Chinese chipmaker Cambricon have recently raised prices for some forthcoming AI processors as shortages of high-bandwidth memory increase production costs, according to people familiar with the matter. DeepSeek is also planning to deploy at least 160,000 Huawei Ascend 950DT accelerators at a large data centre under construction in Inner Mongolia, Bloomberg reported this month, potentially creating one of the world’s largest known clusters of Chinese AI processors. Those investments illustrate the scale of Beijing’s effort to build an AI ecosystem capable of operating despite American restrictions on the sale of the world’s most advanced chips and semiconductor manufacturing equipment. DIFFERENT VISIONS OF AI SAFETY The disagreement between China and Western technology leaders is more complicated than a simple divide between regulation and unfettered development. Beijing has itself warned about the possibility that advanced artificial intelligence could escape effective human control. China’s AI safety framework has since 2024 explicitly considered scenarios in which advanced systems might autonomously obtain resources, replicate themselves and seek greater power. An updated framework released last year warned that AI could undergo an unexpectedly rapid increase in intelligence and subsequently compete with humans for control. China has also introduced guidelines covering autonomous AI agents. Rules issued in May require developers to build mechanisms capable of detecting, intervening in, blocking and recovering from improper behaviour by AI systems. The guidelines identify “operational loss of control” as a potential security risk and say humans should retain final decision-making authority over autonomous agents. Xi has similarly said AI should “always remain under human control”, while calling for stronger laws, technological monitoring and emergency-response systems. The difference increasingly lies in how those risks should be managed — and who gets to determine the rules. Amodei has proposed independent safety evaluations of frontier models and international coordination to prevent an uncontrolled race toward increasingly capable systems. But he has simultaneously argued that advanced American chips should remain unavailable to China, presenting Beijing with what Chinese officials regard as a contradiction: Washington wants international cooperation on AI safety while maintaining technological restrictions designed to prevent China from reaching the frontier. Chinese officials have instead promoted international governance alongside continued technological development, particularly through open-source systems and cooperation with countries in the Global South. Xi announced in July that China would provide developing countries with 5,000 places in AI training and seminar programmes over the next five years and establish AI application cooperation centres with ASEAN, the African Union, Arab states, Latin American countries, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and BRICS members. A RACE NEITHER SIDE WANTS TO LOSE The debate exposes a dilemma confronting both Washington and Beijing. American AI developers increasingly warn that the technology may be advancing faster than society’s ability to control it. But slowing American development while Chinese laboratories continue advancing could allow China to narrow or eliminate the U.S. technological lead. Amodei described that possibility as the “toughest dilemma” facing his proposal. U.S. President Donald Trump has rejected calls for a significant slowdown, citing precisely that competition. “We’re leading China in AI. We’re the most sophisticated country in the world, and frankly I want to keep it that way because whoever wins AI wins,” Trump said on Sunday. The result is an emerging technological version of a classic security dilemma: both sides recognise that increasingly powerful systems could create profound risks, while neither is willing to allow the other to gain a decisive advantage by moving more quickly. The tension is already spreading beyond models themselves. Washington has restricted China’s access to advanced AI chips and semiconductor equipment, while American authorities and companies have accused Chinese developers of using distillation to reproduce capabilities developed by U.S. laboratories. Anthropic said last week it had identified large-scale campaigns involving Chinese companies seeking to extract capabilities from its models. Chinese companies have previously rejected accusations of improper model copying. The dispute is likely to become increasingly important in relations between the world’s two largest economies. U.S. and Chinese officials are expected to discuss frontier AI safety this month, and the subject could be raised when Trump and Xi meet on Sept. 24. For Beijing, however, cooperation is unlikely to mean accepting restrictions that leave the technological frontier controlled by American companies. China’s emerging position combines aggressive investment in domestic AI capabilities with regulation aimed at keeping advanced systems under human control — while rejecting Western proposals that Beijing believes would institutionalise an American technological advantage. That leaves Washington and Beijing confronting the same underlying problem from opposite sides: both increasingly acknowledge that advanced AI may carry serious risks, but neither appears willing to slow sufficiently if doing so means allowing the other to pull ahead.

In the Backpack tokenomics, we have one guiding principle. - Insiders "dumping on retail" should be impossible: no founder, executive, employee, or venture investor should receive wealth from the token until the product hits escape velocity. Of course it begs the question, what does it mean to "hit escape velocity". Every project is different, and it's impossible to generalize. For Backpack, the answer is clear: we want to IPO in the USA. Going public might happen quickly, it might happen not so quickly, and in fact, it might not happen at all. In any case, we're going for it. But before going public, we have to grow--a lot. The odd thing about Backpack's growth over the past year--and in fact one of the things that makes Backpack so different from basically every token project in crypto--is that, today, Backpack Exchange only serves about 48% of the world. We've been very slow, very intentional about opening up our product to the world, ensuring that we have every "i" dotted and ever "t" crossed as a regulated financial institution. Growth that sometimes feels like running with a parachute, but we are happy to take the long path, because it's precisely that parachute that will allow us to fly. For those that don't know us, the reason for this is simple. Backpack is trying to not only build great crypto products, but we're also trying to build great TradFi products. We're trying to not only give our users access to every crypto asset, every blockchain, and every decentralized application, but we're also getting banking rails around the world, USD client money accounts in the USA, EUR in the EU, JPY in Japan--every currency on every major payment network you can imagine. We're trying to build a great securities product, whether that's getting access to your favorite stocks in a traditional brokerage or bidding on primary shares of a company about to go public on NASDAQ. We want to serve not only retail users worldwide, but we want to serve regulated products for regulated counterparties and regulated institutions around the world. All of this takes an enormous amount of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears. We've been working on this for over three years at this point, laying an international foundation for the company and for the product slowly but surely, brick by brick. If we're lucky, we'll spend a lifetime. What this all means is that, in the most literal sense--and I know this sounds silly--we're just getting started. We still have half the world to open up into. We still have some of our most exciting products to launch. And this leads to our next guiding principle in our tokenomics. - Liquid tokens should exclusively go to users, fueling growth triggered by key product milestones. Every time we open up a new region, every time we launch a new product, that's an opportunity to grow. Open up EU => grow. Open up Japan => grow. Open up the USA => grow. Open up predictions => grow. Open up stocks => grow. Open up card => grow. Like gasoline onto a fire, the token serves to continuously kickstart new markets in the same way points kickstarted Seasons 1-4. With every growth lever we pull, tokens unlock in a predictable way to users, bringing in a new wave of token holders, growing the community, and allowing the product to soar to new heights. The objective constraint for this to work is precise: the value of added growth created by new token unlocks must always be greater than the dilution of those unlocks. As long as that condition holds, we can continue to unlock tokens direct to our most active users, growing along the way. Last but not least is the question: Ok so if all the liquid tokens are going to users, then what about the team? How exactly do you remain incentive aligned while ensuring the team cannot unlock, dump on retail, and become enormously wealthy without building something great? And the answer is simple: not a single founder, executive, team member, or venture investor has been given a direct token allocation. The entire "team allocation" sits in a "corporate treasury", i.e. on the balance sheet of the Backpack company--locked until at least one year post IPO. The team owns equity in the company, and the company owns a large percent of the token supply. It's not until the company goes public (or has some other type of equity exit event), that the team can earn any wealth from the project. It's not until the company has access to the largest, most liquid capital markets in the world by going public--and it's not until the company has done all the hard work to earn access to those markets--that the team can reap the rewards of the value created by the Backpack community from now until then. We either go big, or we go home.

Seedance 2.5 + Minimax H3 is killer for music ads Full guide on how you can make it yourself: 1. Choose a style from Pinterest to apply as reference to GPT image 2 2. Lyrics is something that came just from talking to our clients. I used FABLE and gave it all the bottom lines of the lyrics I could think of and it arranged structure. * I still needed to edit some of the lyrics myself because they were too sloppy. 3. People don't want to see a singer with lip sync. They need something interesting. So I recommend the structure of A roll + B roll A roll - that's your singer singing with lip sync. I created a contact sheet with 3 camera angles in one image. then I uploaded it to Minimax H3 with my song chopped to 15 seconds blocks (maxfusion MCP did everything). B roll - I decided on a story for the clip that reflects the idea of the ad. This was not much done with AI. I said let's do a creative strategist that is lulled into buying an unlimited plan for seedance, ends up getting fired, chased by goons debt collectors, escapes to maxfusion finishes his project and throws the unlimited plan contract in the trash. 4. Rendering the A roll - straight forward combination of the minimax H3 prompting skill and rendered in 15 seconds blocks the music video + the singer contact sheet. 5. B roll - first I created a shot board in one image. it was a 12 shots panel which make up the story. cleaned it up from any slop (there was a lot of bad visuals in it that ended up generating unusable clips). Once the A roll and B roll were both ready. I let Claude edit the whole clip explaining to it that we want a dynamic edits that focuses on the beats and lyrics. explained that any shot that stays too long on the screen is boring but editing needs to make sense with the beat and not be randomised by seconds duration. 6. I needed a few rounds to basically give claude the timestamps of what went wrong with an explanation what I expected to see different. until the edit was over. PRO TIP FOR VISUAL STYLE + MUSIC Be a gambler! spin the slot machine! In both cases of the art style and the song I didn't know what would sound or look best. instead of trying to perfect it I bombed Claude with 7 art references and asked it to come up with 6 different rap styles and I let it generate the songs (SUNO) and the shot boards (GPT2) Then I chose the winners Did you also fall prey to "seedance unlimited plans?" Let me know what you think about the final result Like and share this workflow with others if you found it useful.

The 9/11 hero they tried to erase.On the morning of September 11, 2001, William Rodriguez was in the sub-basement of the North Tower doing his job as a janitor, a job he’d held for nearly 20 years. He carried one of only five master keys that could open every stairwell and door in the building. At 8:46 a.m., Rodriguez felt a massive explosion erupt from below him in the mechanical room on B2 level. The blast threw people into the air, cracked walls, dropped ceilings, and activated sprinklers. Seconds later the plane slammed into the upper floors.A coworker, Felipe David, came running toward him with skin hanging from his arms and face, screaming “Explosion!” Rodriguez didn’t run. Using his master key, he spent the next hour and a half unlocking doors, freeing people trapped in elevators filling with water, carrying the injured (including a man in a wheelchair) down swaying stairwells, and guiding firefighters through hidden pathways. He was one of the very last people to escape before the tower collapsed. He was hailed as a hero, invited to the White House, and praised by President Bush himself. But when Rodriguez kept telling the truth, that the first explosion came from the basement, before the plane impact everything changed. Mainstream media told him to “cut that part out.” His full testimony was omitted from the official 9/11 Commission Report. He became persona non grata. The man who risked everything to save lives that day was suddenly sidelined for refusing to stay silent about what he saw and heard. His story matches accounts from hundreds of other first responders who reported explosions in the basements and elevators that day.