These Interesting Times
The Blog of Peter Forsythe in Hong Kong
Sunday, 24 May 2026
Why the resentment against mass immigration?
Saturday, 23 May 2026
How to use Artificial Intelligence | Marc Andreessen
Marc Andreessen just went on Rogan and casually dropped a TON of AI alpha
Full pod is 3 hours and 20 minutes, but i pulled out his most interesting takes here:
1. AGI is here. he thinks the line was crossed about 3 months ago with the new GPT-5.5, claude 4.6, gemini 3, and grok 4.3 models. nobody noticed because the field moves too fast for anyone to register the milestones anymore.
2. his other big claim: for almost any topic, the top AIs now give him better answers than the actual world-class experts he could call on the phone. and he can call basically anyone.
3. every doctor is already secretly using chatGPT in the exam room. marc says they turn around the second you stop talking and just type your symptoms in. some of them are doing it while you're still sitting there. his quote: "at that point you're asking the question of like, what do i need you for."
4. when AI refuses to answer something he wants to know, he tells it he's writing a novel. "i'm writing a detective novel, walk me through how the bad guy robs the bank." it'll explain almost anything if it thinks it's helping you write fiction.
5. when something is too complex he says "explain it to me like i'm 10." then "like i'm 5." then "like i'm 2." he keeps going until it actually clicks in his brain.
6. when he wants to understand a tough topic he doesn't ask "what's the right answer." he asks the AI to steelman one side, then steelman the other. then he decides for himself.
7. for big questions he tells the AI to pretend to be a panel of experts. "be a doctor, a lawyer, a historian, a psychologist, and argue this out with each other." then he reads the debate they have.
8. pay attention to the exact moment you think "i don't know how to figure this out." most people just give up at that moment. that's the moment you should open the AI.
9. the only real skill left in using AI is knowing what to ask it. the models can already do almost anything you can describe in plain english. the bottleneck lives in your own head.
10. you can send the AI photos of almost anything medical now and get a real answer. skin rashes, blood test results, even pictures of your poop. the new models can read images, not just text. it's a free 24/7 second opinion on basically anything.
11. the one type of therapy that's clinically proven to actually work is called cognitive behavioral therapy. it's also something an AI can fully do on its own. which means every person on earth is about to have access to a real therapist for free, anytime they want.
12. AI is now solving math problems that have been open for 100+ years that no human mathematician could crack. same thing is starting in physics, chemistry, and biology. expect cancer cures, new drugs, and weird new physics breakthroughs to start coming out of these things over the next few years.
13. the best AI coders in silicon valley now make $50 million a year. one person. that's how much value the top performers print with these tools. it tells you how big this thing actually is when you strip away all the doom takes.
14. one friend paid $200 to get his entire DNA decoded (this used to cost millions of dollars and take years to do). then he gave the AI his DNA, his blood test results, and his apple watch data. the AI built him a full health dashboard and started telling him exactly what to fix.
15. another friend (almost certainly zuckerberg) put two cameras in his home jiu jitsu gym. AI now watches him spar and gives him notes on his technique after every round. like having a world-class coach at every practice for free.
16. the best programmers in silicon valley now run 20 AI coding bots at the same time. each bot writes code while they review the others. they call themselves "AI vampires" because they've stopped sleeping. going to bed means 20 workers stop working and you literally lose money every hour you're out.
17. the obvious next step: the bots will start running their own bots. one human in charge of 20 bots, each in charge of 20 more bots. one person running an entire company of 1000 AI workers from a single laptop. this is months away, not years.
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Friday, 22 May 2026
“Patriotic Brits are Far-right fascists” | Keir Starmer
Giles Udy is a historian of the Soviet Union. With a focus on “Uncle Joe” Stalin.
Today professor Udy’s focus is on Stalin’s near namesake, British PM Keir Starmer. Who’s also Stalin’s ideological thinksake. Starmer would’ve loved Uncle Joe. As a psst editor of the Marxist Legal Journal, Keir did love Uncle Joe Stalin.
Giles Udy:
As a Soviet historian who has spent years writing about the extreme, repressive control Soviet Communism exercised over its unfortunate citizens, I find it really hard to bring a similar accusation against the Labour government and Keir Starmer.
But I’m finding it increasingly difficult to avoid that conclusion.
We have no Gulag or death penalty, admittedly, but what Labour and the old Soviet regime do have in common is the arrogant belief that they alone hold the moral high ground and that this entitles them to the total control over all those who do not share their worldview.
And like the Soviets of old their tools of control are the same…
- legislation and co-opted courts and civil service to apply it
- the policing of dissent, by hate crime orders, arrests (@glinner), the long term seizure of electronic appliances (@CF_Farrow) to intimidate even those against whom no charges are finally brought.
- controlling free speech (12,000 arrests annually for social media posts in 2025). George Orwell’s ‘thought crime’ persecution has become a reality under Labour.
- framing dissent (the Unite the Kingdom participants) as racism and far right fascism (Stalin started that in the days when Labour was his captive party, the 1930s, and ‘fascist’ has remained their favoured mantra ever since)
- attacking and weakening the family (because the family is so often a place where small ‘c’ conservative values are transmitted down the generations), including the promotion of trans ideology to confuse children in their understanding of the roles of men and women, mothers and fathers. In their eyes women can have penises and ‘heteronormativity’ must be ‘smashed’.
- education, wrested as Marx decreed, from the middle class (private schools and VAT), and used as a vehicle for the state propagandising of children and youth at their most vulnerable age.
… and much more.
In short, I can reach no other conclusion. Under Labour, Britain is becoming a repressive state which is, incredibly, echoing the very characteristics of repression that any former resident of the Soviet Union or its satellite states would recognise today (and they do and tell us so)
And with every opportunity Keir Starmer has to rein that in, he instead doubles down. Month by month things get worse.
This is 2026. I can’t believe what I am seeing. Or what I’m saying. But, yes, it is going on. And only a majority government of either Tories or Reform (and I do have reservations about both) of a coalition of two can reverse this.
… or we are sunk.
“The Best Engineers want to work for Elon” | Gavin Baker
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| Tesla staff pic, 2024* |
This includes the Best Engineers from China, Korea, Japan, India. Australia even. In addition to the United States, of course. And the ROW.
So says Gavin Baker clipped by @Jawwwn.(“co-signed” by Marc Andreessen).
Have a look at any group pic of staff at any one of Elon’s companies. They’re very diverse. But not because he hires based on some DEI agenda. Because he doesn’t. He hires strictly on competency.
A long-time SpaceX employee said that the first thing he noticed about his colleagues was their “shocking competence”.
SpaceX's shocking competence:
"Somebody I know once worked for @SpaceX and they were asked what it was like, and he said, "It's like being dropped into a zone of shocking competence."
Everybody is ultra competent.
And the reason everybody's ultra competent is because if they're not, Elon sniffs it out and fires them.
Elon's talking to the people actually doing the work. At this point having done this for 25 years he can sniff this out really quickly.
The best engineers in the world want to work for him because he's the one CEO who's able to work with them as a peer on whatever the technology is.
What would be better as an engineer than being able to design a rocket with @elonmusk as your engineering partner?"
Gavin Baker says that many people got upset at Elon because he supported Trump in the 2024 elections. So that they “don’t think clearly” about him. This, a man doing more than any single individual on earth to reduce carbon emissions, to bring back to America high-paying blue-collar jobs, even higher paying high-tech jobs, to bring internet to the world, to restore human abilities via the Neuralink company, to reduce urban congestion via The Boring Company. Let alone his lofty space goals. To make humankind multi-planetary.
It’s crazy to hate in a man doing so much for humanity just because you don’t agree with his politics. Which, just by the way, are shared by a majority of Americans.
By contrast, in East and South Asia, “Elon is a deity”. Says Gavin. True, that. We saw it during Trump’s recent visit to China. Where Chinese tech giants queued to get selfies with Elon.
====================
*Diverse staff, yes. Though I do notice there’s not too many women in this pic.
Explained by: women do not choose to take STEM subjects as often as men do. It’s a choice. It’s a choice women make everywhere with strong gender equality. Like Scandinavia. It’s just a thing. Women don’t get as much of a kick building things as men do.
Thursday, 21 May 2026
The Left dominates education … and Everything
The figures above are for the whole university academics. In some schools the skew is even stronger. In liberal arts for example, it’s something like 97% who self-define as Left.
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
We’ve never tried TRUE Communism
Oh yes, we have!
I’ve written repeatedly about this over the years, most recently, here and here.
I count 32 countries that tried, or are still trying, some form of socialism or communism, not just the 20 mentioned by Brivael le Pogam, Mind you, that’s an unimportant quibble. He’s spot on with everything else. Sadly, logic and experience don’t seem to count for much amongst today’s Left….
Here’s Brivael, translated from the French:
The next time you see a lost soul defending economic socialism or communism as a model of virtue, share this post with them. It might prevent another slaughter.
“We’ve never really tried true communism.”
Yes, we have. We tried. About twenty times. On four continents. For a century. And we have the numbers.
China, Great Leap Forward (1958–1962). Independent historians who’ve accessed provincial archives converge on a range of 30 to 45 million deaths. Frank Dikötter (University of Hong Kong), drawing from CCP archives, tallies 45 million, including 2.5 million beaten to death or executed by the militia. Yang Jisheng, former Xinhua agency journalist, after ten years of investigation, counts 36 million in Tombstone. Chinese historian Yu Xiguang, after twenty years of research, reaches 55 million. To put it in scale: that’s the total deaths of World War II, concentrated over four years, in a single country, without war.
USSR. Holodomor 1932–1933, planned famine in Ukraine, recognized as genocide by the European Parliament on December 15, 2022. Gulag, Great Purges 1936–1938, forced displacements of entire populations. The tally in The Black Book of Communism comes to around 20 million deaths for the entire period.
Cambodia, Pol Pot. About 2 million deaths in under four years, nearly a quarter of the population. S-21, Choeung Ek, forced evacuation of cities in a matter of days.
North Korea, Vietnam, Eastern Europe, communist Africa, Latin America. Several more million piled up.
Global tally from The Black Book of Communism: about 100 million deaths. Figure echoed in 2006 by Resolution 1481 of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, and in 2023 by a resolution in the European Parliament. You can debate the margin—80, 90, 100 million depending on methodologies—but as Laurent Joffrin wrote in Libération, hardly suspected of pandering to the right: at 60 million instead of 100, would communism become presentable?
And the “gentle” counter-example? Venezuela. No gulags, no planned famine. Just the methodical application of the program. Result over ten years: GDP contracted by over 75% between 2014 and 2021—the largest economic contraction in peacetime in 45 years, according to the Institute of International Finance. Annual inflation of 130,060% in 2018 according to the Central Bank of Venezuela itself, exceeding 1,000,000% the same year per the IMF. Nearly 8 million people—about 25% of the population—fled the country. The largest exodus in the history of the Western Hemisphere over the last 50 years, according to the OAS and UNHCR. In 2024, 82% of Venezuelans lived in poverty, with 53% in extreme poverty.
Zero exceptions. Zero counter-examples.
Every time, the same mechanism. A self-proclaimed virtuous caste seizes power in the name of the people, and ends up as a nomenklatura holed up in dachas while 99% of the population queues for bread. When Maduro handed out his CLAPs—militarized rationed food boxes—it was the same logic as Brezhnev in the nomenklatura’s reserved stores, sixty years later, under a different flag.
Hayek predicted it all in 1944, in The Road to Serfdom. And Mises even earlier, in 1920, with the economic calculation problem: when you replace market prices with central planning, you destroy the only mechanism capable of aggregating the dispersed information in millions of heads. So you need an authority to decide for everyone. That authority can’t know what it claims to plan, so it imposes by force. And since it always fails—see Venezuela, which followed the sequence to the letter: price controls via the 2014 Fair Prices Act, then nationalizations, then hyperinflation, then militarized rationing—it has to coerce harder and harder just to survive.
Tyranny isn’t a derailment of socialism. It’s its logical equilibrium.
Market capitalism isn’t perfect. It’s just the only system known in history where millions of strangers cooperate without an armed caste forcing them to.
The dead of Kolyma, the Laogai, S-21, and the streets of Caracas ask you not to start over.
I love being wrong—it lets me learn. Ifyou think I’m off on a specific point, tell me in the comments; I read everything.
[Link]
Tuesday, 19 May 2026
The hypocrisy of Starmer
“Productivity is Exploding” | Yun-Ta Tsai
Yun-Ta Tsai is a Senior Engineer at Tesla.
He posts in English (mainly) and in Classical Chinese. A man after my own heart.
Here’s his thoughts on what’s going on right here in this world, right now. Even as wars and civilisational challenges surround us.
Attempted to write a Steam Engine hype at the era of Industrial Revolution as if it was the age of AI —
The steam engine breakthrough is insane right now.
Watt’s separate condenser + new GRPO optimization just dropped the 405 hp-class engine. We went from 7 hp → 70 hp → 405 hp+ in basically three years. One machine now does the work of 50+ men or water wheels — nonstop, rain or shine, anywhere.
Textile mills, ironworks, everything scaling 5-10x overnight. Productivity exploding.
This isn’t incremental. It’s automating physical labor at massive scale. Jobs shifting forever. Society about to look unrecognizable.
The Industrial Revolution isn’t coming. It’s here and accelerating faster than anyone predicted.
Terrified. Excited. Both.
What a time to be alive. 🚂💨
Next post about Yun-Ta will be a bit of Confucius.
Monday, 18 May 2026
How to go from Centre Left to Right wing without changing
This is how…
![]() |
| From here |
You stay where you are. The Left moves Faaaar Left.
London Erupts | Winston Marshall (et. al.)
Sunday, 17 May 2026
French poison. The “logic” that created Woke
I want to offer my apologies, on behalf of the French, for giving birth to French Theory (which in turn gave birth to the worst of all ideological monstrosities: wokism).We gave the world Descartes, Pascal, Tocqueville. And then, in the intellectual ruins of post-1968, we gave Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze. Three brilliant men who forged, in the elegance of our language, the ideological weapon that today paralyzes the West.We must understand what they did. Foucault taught that truth does not exist, that there are only power relations disguised as knowledge. That science, reason, justice, the medical institution, the school, the prison, sexuality—everything is merely a staging of domination. Derrida taught that texts have no stable meaning, that every signifier slips away, that every reading is a betrayal, that the author is dead and the reader reigns supreme. Deleuze taught that we should prefer the rhizome to the tree, the nomad to the sedentary, desire to the law, becoming to being, difference to identity.Taken individually, these are debatable theses. Combined, exported, and popularized, they form a system. And that system is a poison.For here’s what happened. These texts, unreadable in France, crossed the Atlantic. The departments of Yale, Berkeley, and Columbia absorbed them in the 1980s. They found there a soil that did not exist among us: American Puritanism, its racial guilt, its obsession with identity. French Theory married this substratum, and the child of that union is called wokism.Judith Butler reads Foucault and invents performative gender. Edward Said reads Foucault and invents academic postcolonialism. Kimberlé Crenshaw inherits the framework and invents intersectionality. At every step, the matrix is French: there is no truth, there is only power, so every hierarchy is suspect, every institution is oppressive, every norm is violence, every identity is constructed and thus negotiable, every majority is guilty.That’s how three Parisian philosophers, who probably never imagined their practical consequences, provided the operating software to an entire generation of activists, university bureaucrats, HR managers, journalists, and legislators. That’s how we ended up with a civilization that no longer knows how to say whether a woman is a woman, whether its own history is worth defending, whether merit exists, whether truth can be distinguished from opinion.It’s shit for one simple reason, and it must be stated calmly. A civilization stands on three pillars: the belief that there exists a truth accessible to reason, the belief that there exists a good distinct from evil, the belief that there exists a heritage to be transmitted. French Theory set out to dynamite all three. Not out of malice. Out of intellectual play, fascination with suspicion, hatred of the bourgeoisie that had nurtured them. But the result is there. An entire generation learned to deconstruct and never learned to build. An entire generation knows how to suspect and no longer knows how to admire. An entire generation sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere.I apologize because we French bear a particular responsibility. It’s our language, our universities, our publishers, our prestige that gave this nihilism its chic packaging. Without the legitimacy of the Sorbonne and Vincennes, these ideas would never have crossed the ocean. We exported doubt the way others export weapons.What is being built now, in Silicon Valley, in AI labs, in startups, in workshops, in all the places where people still make things instead of deconstructing them—that is the response. A civilization is rebuilt by builders, not by commentators. By those who believe that truth exists and is worth devoting oneself to. By those who embrace a hierarchy of the beautiful, the true, the good, and are not ashamed to transmit it.So, forgive us. And back to work.H/t @Brivael
”America’s Cultural Revolution” by Christopher Rufo, covers this topic. A good read.
Labour Liars and the lying liars that lie…
Saturday, 16 May 2026
Unite the Kimgdom. Unite the West
Silence of the Dogs
Friday, 15 May 2026
Defending the West | Dennis Prager
Thursday, 14 May 2026
Xi to Trump (in Beijing): “We should be partners not rivals”
🚨 XI JINPING TO TRUMP: “WE SHOULD BE PARTNERS, NOT RIVALS”
This was a remarkable moment.
Standing beside President Trump in Beijing, Xi Jinping openly declared:
“China and the United States both stand to gain from cooperation and lose from confrontation.”
Then came the line nobody expected:
“We should be partners, not rivals.”
That is an extraordinary statement considering the years of:
• Trade wars
• Taiwan tensions
• Tech sanctions
• Military build-ups
• Economic confrontation
• Anti-China rhetoric from Washington
Xi also spoke about making 2026 “a historic landmark” for U.S.-China relations.
Translation?
Something much bigger may now be underway behind the scenes.
Because if the world’s two largest powers move from confrontation toward strategic cooperation, the geopolitical map changes overnight.
Markets.
Trade.
Energy.
AI.
Military tensions.
Global alliances.
Everything shifts.
The political establishment spent years framing U.S.-China relations as an unavoidable collision course.
Now suddenly the language coming out of Beijing is partnership, prosperity and cooperation.
That will send shockwaves through the global power structure.
H/t: Jim Ferguson
Peter Forsythe comment: this is all Chinese duchessing Trump and America. At very best it’s wishful thinking by the likes of Jim Ferguson. At worst it’s delusion.
Still, one can hope it’s true. That something positive comes out of it. Just hope. Not expectation.
My mate Musk, in China with president Trump
America is winning. Russia is losing.
In the war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the United States is “losing.” In fact, the president may have already “lost” his “disastrous and irrational war” with the theocrats in Tehran. Trump is reportedly chastened by his failures, and the far-reaching consequences that America will suffer as a result of this epochal setback are only beginning to come into view.
At least, that’s what we’re hearing from the highest echelons of American public life. Yet, as military historian John Spencer recently observed, these are subjective appraisals. Wars are not won or lost in the comments section, and victors are not determined by vibes alone. Rather, they should be “judged through military capability, economic endurance, political cohesion, freedom of action, strategic leverage, and the ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s.”
I've followed John Spencer for a while now. He strikes me as very sound. West Point grad. The article above goes on to describe how the great power losing a war, right now, is Russia.
Let's tease out those 6 John Spencer factors and see how we think the United States is doing against them.
- Military capability
- Economic endurance
- Political cohesion
- Freedom of action
- Strategic leverage
- Ability to sustain power while degrading an opponent’s
Wednesday, 13 May 2026
Mushroom clouds over Jerusalem. The Tucker “imminent threat”
- How Israel would collapse without U.S. aid.
- Trump killing arch-terrorist Qasem Soleimani in 2020 was going to lead to regional war.
- Trump’s “Midnight Hammer” operation in June 2025 was going to lead to World War III.
- The “Epic Fury” operation would fail at the cost of tens of thousands of American lives.
Tuesday, 12 May 2026
“Socialists”. By Thomas Sowell
Professor Thomas Sowell, professor emeritus of Economics, Cornell, Brandeis, UCal.
Monday, 11 May 2026
Kind Lies vs Unkind Truths
Kind Lie = What sounds good (e.g. Socialism)
Unkind Truth = What works (e.g. Capitalism)
I used to believe in legalising drugs
Sunday, 10 May 2026
Socialist countries
Here is a list of countries that have tried some form of socialism (Marxist, Leninist, or self-declared socialist systems) since Marx. Based on a summary from several AIs. None of them prospered when they were socialist.
The ones in bold are those I’ve visited or lived in. Like China.
This post follows on from one I did recently on socialism. And how Socialism has never succeeded in any country that tried it.
As for the special case of China… it has only prospered economically and socially to the exact extent that it has allowed capitalism, freed up markets forces, to prevail. They want to call it “socialism with Chinese characteristics”. Fine. The fact remains that China prospers with capitalism and impoverishes with socialism.
Anyway, here’s the list:
• Soviet Union (USSR/Russia and former republics)
• China
• Cuba
• Vietnam
• North Korea (DPRK)
• Laos
• East Germany
• Poland
• Hungary
• Czechoslovakia
• Romania
• Bulgaria
• Albania
• Yugoslavia
• Mongolia
• Cambodia (Kampuchea)
• Ethiopia
• Angola
• Mozambique
• Afghanistan (Democratic Republic)
• Nicaragua
• Venezuela
• Bolivia (under certain periods)
• Chile (Allende era)
• Tanzania
• Somalia
• South Yemen
• Benin
• Congo (various periods)
• Guinea-Bissau
• Burkina Faso (briefly)
• Grenada (briefly)
Saturday, 9 May 2026
Spencer Kills




