The Standard, for anyone who needs reminding, is a free paper that largely comprises brief English translations of Sing Tao articles. It is tycoon-owned, virulently talks up the property market at every opportunity, and is resolutely pro-Beijing/Hong Kong government. But it used to have its own editorials, written by ‘Mary Ma’, which could on occasion be punchy and even funny. Then, some time ago, these were replaced by much duller pieces rehashing the government line. From today’s…
Yesterday, National Day celebrations in Hong Kong were more than just a display of flags and fireworks – they were a powerful symbol of the city’s resurgent vitality. The streets, thronged with both tourists and locals, pulsed with an energy not seen in recent years. This was not a fleeting moment of festivity, but a clear indicator of a resilient economy finding its footing amid global uncertainties. The scenes from Canton Road to bustling local cinemas tell a compelling story of recovery, reinvention and a future built on more than just financial prowess.
The visual cues of Hong Kong’s comeback are unmistakable. The re-emergence of mainland tourists shopping at luxury boutiques in Tsim Sha Tsui is a classic barometer of retail health. However, the recovery is broader and more deeply rooted. Local crowds flocking to restaurants and cinemas demonstrate a restoration of domestic confidence. This renewed sentiment has spurred the property market, with developers confidently launching new projects…
As Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu has emphasized, robust policies are designed to create prosperity that permeates the whole of society, not just the financial sector. The numbers validate this approach…
The government [sic] proactive role in incubating new industries is particularly forward-thinking. Take, for instance, the ambitious decarbonization agenda. Initiatives like green marine bunkering and producing sustainable aviation fuel from used cooking oil are masterstrokes of modern policy. They are not merely environmental imperatives but represent enormous economic opportunities. Furthermore, these emerging green industries require a vast spectrum of manpower, from top-tier professionals to grassroots workers, ensuring that the benefits of growth are widely shared across the workforce.
What – no ‘yacht economy’?
On reading this, my immediate feeling is deep sympathy for whoever has to write this stuff every day. But then it occurs to me that it takes a certain literary technique to craft such a vacuous string of words – or be so wrong. Post-property bubble Mainlanders will never go back to buying luxury garbage like they once did. Aviation fuel from cooking oil is not a ‘masterstroke of modern policy’.
It must, of course, be Chat GPT.
Which leads us rather elegantly to Ed Zitron on the case against generative AI. A long but worthwhile rant…
…if you generated a picture of a person that you wanted to, for example, use in a story book, every time you created a new page, using the same prompt to describe the protagonist, that person would look different — and that difference could be minor (something that a reader should shrug off), or it could make that character look like a completely different person.
Moreover, the probabilistic nature of generative AI meant that whenever you asked it a question, it would guess as to the answer, not because it knew the answer, but rather because it was guessing on the right word to add in a sentence based on previous training data. As a result, these models would frequently make mistakes — something which we later referred to as “hallucinations.”
And that’s not even mentioning the cost of training these models, the cost of running them, the vast amounts of computational power they required, the fact that the legality of using material scraped from books and the web without the owner’s permission was (and remains) legally dubious, or the fact that nobody seemed to know how to use these models to actually create profitable businesses.
…The problem is that most jobs are not output-driven at all, and what we’re buying from a human being is a person’s ability to think.
Every CEO talking about AI replacing workers is an example of the real problem: that most companies are run by people who don’t understand or experience the problems they’re solving, don’t do any real work, don’t face any real problems, and thus can never be trusted to solve them … leaving us with companies run by people who don’t know how the companies make money, just that they must always make more.
When you’re a big, stupid asshole, every job that you see is condensed to its outputs, and not the stuff that leads up to the output, or the small nuances and conscious decisions that make an output good as opposed to simply acceptable, or even bad.
…Large Language Models are also uniquely expensive. Many mistakenly try and claim this is like the dot com boom or Uber, but the basic unit economics of generative AI are insane. Providers must purchase tens or hundreds of thousands of GPUs each costing $50,000 a piece, and hundreds of millions or billions of dollars of infrastructure for large clusters. And that’s without mentioning things like staffing, construction, power, or water.
Then you turn them on and start losing money. Despite hundreds of billions of GPUs sold, nobody seems to make any money, other than NVIDIA, the company that makes them, and resellers like Dell and Supermicro who buy the GPUs, put them in servers, and sell them to other people.
…LLMs are an output-driven technology, but most jobs that AI is meant to replace require far more than just spitting out stuff. In reality, executive excitement over AI shows that they have little understanding of labor – they’re Business Idiots.
…The stock market has an unhealthy relationship with NVIDIA (it makes up 7-8% of the S&P 500). 55% year-over-year growth isn’t enough – even if NVIDIA sells $72 billion of GPUs in a year, the markets would punish them for not keeping up an unrealistic pace. NVIDIA got desperate, and birthed “Neoclouds,” debt-ridden data center companies selling AI compute. NVIDIA invests in them, sells them GPUs, and pays them for compute – all so they can raise money using contracts/GPUs as collateral…to buy more GPUs from NVIDIA.
…We are in the midst of one of the darkest forms of software in history, described by many as an unwanted guest invading their products, their social media feeds, their bosses’ empty minds, and resting in the hands of monsters. Every story of its success feels bereft of any real triumph, with every literal description of its abilities involving multiple caveats about the mistakes it makes or the incredible costs of running it.
(Warning: column uses ‘compute’ as a noun. It means computing power or resources.)
More here, if you like this sort of thing.
The circa-2025 SCMP isn’t much better than the subStandard when it comes to toadying, and is actually worse on local news coverage. I’ve resorted to DumDumDaily for local news… it’s crap, but doesn’t pretend to be otherwise.
“Local crowds flocking to restaurants” – if they can find one they like still open – “and cinemas” – because tickets were half-price, for one day only.
If China celebrated its 76th birthday yesterday, and America celebrates its 250th birthday next year, does that mean the U.S. is senior to China by 174 years?
I guess it does.
“datacenters” is a misnomer, they’re more like computing centers. And the amount of power and water they need is insane (they have to be water cooled otherwise the chips melt). A worthwhile 30 minutes:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhqoTku-HAA
The demise of “Mary Ma’ coincided with the decline and passing of Charles Ho.
The green fuel programme is green wash to justify the proposed massive reclamation planned on the Tuen Mun shoreline.
“New land to be created through near-shore reclamation of about 190 ha
– 145 ha at Lung Kwu an and 45 ha at TMW
It is also touted to increase our port capacity!!!!!! This as every year HK slips in the rankings and container throughport has been declineing on an annual basis.
The recent consultation paper on the plan completely ignored the reseach done by mainland experts with regard to the negative impact reclamation has on coastal defences and mitigation of climate change on the vulnerable Pearl River Estuary.
And of course the source materials for the fill in would be sucked up from some river beds in SE Asia destroying fishing grounds and the local ecology.
And for some local ‘How will they get around this one’
Ex-opposition legislator posed no threat, retired pro-establishment lawmaker testifies in 2019 LegCo scuffle trial
https://hongkongfp.com/2025/10/01/ex-opposition-legislator-posed-no-threat-retired-pro-establishment-lawmaker-testifies-in-2019-legco-scuffle-trial/
The government are 10 years behind the times. Read the room!
The green economy & manmade climate change religion promoted by the Western leftist elite is dead, dead, dead.
The only reason the CCP supports it is because it hobbles the West and they profit from manufacturing all the solar panels & wind turbines. The CCP itself opens a new coal-fired power plant every week. They’re no dummies!
HKSAR should move on already.
The Financial Times published an interview/profile of Zitron
https://www.ft.com/content/4c8d6420-d088-4660-8973-c4996cd990fb
Ed Zitron is a necessary truth teller. His podcast and live interviews are especially fun, as he is both vividly articulate and can get vividly outraged.
At what? OpenAI is planning to have the energy demand of the UK or Germany in five years and India in eight. And there’s so much more.
@Lam Bjorn Borg – the fact that the CCP takes advantage of the climate crisis does not mean it doesn’t exist. As for your talk of the “Western leftist elite”, you sound like one of Trump’s dummies.
@Low Profile
Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial. That is science.
The egotistical idea that variations in the earth’s climate can be reversed by man is religion, not science.
Forces far stronger than plastic straws have been at work for thousands of years.
The proposition that climate stasis can ever be achieved is absurd.
It’s not at all clear that climate statis is even desirable. Says who?
Climate change is the most enormous money grift in history.
Climate change is left-wing deindustrialisation masquerading as science.
Fundamentally, it is anti-progress.
Climate scientists, university professors, NGO promoters and their political supporters have mortgages to pay, so the hoax will carry on until the money runs out.
Elitist virtue-signalling is expensive, inconvenient and truth-bending.
The burden of satisfying elitist virtue-signalling falls especially hard on average people who don’t fly their private jets to UN climate conferences in exotic locations.
Most pathetic are the fan boys who worship their climate overlords.
Even Greta Thunberg has abandoned climate change for Gaza activism.
Nevertheless, the moralising left-wing omni-cause sails on.
@Lam Bjorn Borg
Many words, no facts.
@Lam Bjorn Borg
Earth’s climate has been changing since time immemorial. That is science. – I give you this one
The egotistical idea that variations in the earth’s climate can be reversed by man is religion, not science. – Reversal is not the goal, reducing the manmade impact is the goal
Forces far stronger than plastic straws have been at work for thousands of years. – Plastic straws have nothing to do with climate change, it’s about protecting our environment and food chain
The proposition that climate stasis can ever be achieved is absurd. – Nobody ever claimed that this is the goal
It’s not at all clear that climate statis is even desirable. Says who? – Says who? – Give me examples of people / scientist who said this
Climate change is the most enormous money grift in history. – That would be the current White House
Climate change is left-wing deindustrialisation masquerading as science. – A lot of jobs are created with renewables
Fundamentally, it is anti-progress. – How so? A lot of new technology is developed
Climate scientists, university professors, NGO promoters and their political supporters have mortgages to pay, so the hoax will carry on until the money runs out. – Fossil fuel companies, their employees and stockholders have mortages to pay and money to make, so they will carry on until it’s too late
Elitist virtue-signalling is expensive, inconvenient and truth-bending. – A yes, the Elitists…….
The burden of satisfying elitist virtue-signalling falls especially hard on average people who don’t fly their private jets to UN climate conferences in exotic locations. – Strawman argument
Most pathetic are the fan boys who worship their climate overlords. – Who are these climate overlords, you have names for me?
Even Greta Thunberg has abandoned climate change for Gaza activism. – Another strawman
Nevertheless, the moralising left-wing omni-cause sails on. – And here we are again with the left wing blaming
@Reader
My point precisely!
Used to be that a really hot day here was 32-33C.
Now we’ve got days where it’s tickling 40C – and not just in Ta Kwu Ling.
And winters? 40 years ago, puddles would freeze slightly at nearly sea level elevations here in the NT. A bit thicker in Shamchun. Nowadays? Instead of three other blankets plus the duvet – this year only one blanket plus the duvet. And for not very long.
As I sit here enjoying the transition to <35C inside (bit of cloud obscuring the setting sun, that I can feel on the inside through the walls as the building's fabric is dark-coloured tiles), it's good to know it's just more whacko woke leftist shite…
And that geezers don't handle heat very well.
PG, Björn – 拜拜!
Bjorn, I can’t tell anymore if your kind is pathologically homicidal or pathologically suicidal.
@MeKnowNothing
Yes, the earth’s climate appears to be changing, just like it has done for millennia. Warmer weather may even be a good thing for poorer regions.
The climate change religion has been discredited and its temples are crumbling before our eyes.
Why not devote your energy to something practical and worthwhile instead of howling at the moon?
@LmBB – surely at this point the cause of the warming is not the issue but rather how we can avoid accelerating the process?