What did feel the same and what turned out to be different and what was illuminating about those differences especially?

Yeah, the reason why I discovered this Chinese vibe coding capital, Liangzhu, was really because some really contrarian, interesting programmers I know, by going to this open source to meetups.

And, you know, one of those strange people says, you know, Liangzhu is a place you need to check out.

So that's why I trusted their judgment, because they're weird enough to tell me, like, where is the actual tech periphery is.

So I went to Liangzhu and I hung out with a lot of vibe coders for many days, went to their living rooms, listened to the open sharings, participated their crazy Thursdays, as well as, you know, just visiting different companies.

And they are like each one of them are are all, in a sense, very different from Alibaba or Tencent, not building super apps, but really building whimsical, interesting little things.

And I think, in a sense, sentiment-wise and on the ground, There is a lot of grimness, I think simply because China's economy is doing terribly bad.

Is the idea that Chinese people are cavalier about AI safety that they basically don't care about or don't believe in the existential risks, is that a fair characterization? What are people in these rooms that you've been in actually worried about when it comes to AI? Is risk being talked about at all? Maybe just in a vocabulary that we're not listening for or attuned to?

And so I'm curious whether have you encountered different, whether it's national, cultural, or just individual, different understandings of what counts as innovation and what kind of progress is most valued?

Yeah, yeah.

I think I want to bring up more, like I want to contextualize this conversation a little bit and just, you know, as we talk about DACO a little bit, I find the DACO situation is really similar to China's early 2000s tech industry.

It's like...

If you grew up in China in the early 2000s, you never really encountered a complete original or like a non-broken piece of commercial software.

Like everything you use is basically pirated or somehow molded or somehow broken.

And then like when you're downloading those pirated software and often you see the UI is cranked and then or the stuff on the language on the softwares are half translated.

So tell us a little bit about that as well.