A 2017 national intelligence law compels Chinese companies and individuals to cooperate with state intelligence when asked and without and public notice.
China has no equivalent of the whistleblower protection that enables resignations with public letters explaining why, protests, open letters with many signatures, etc. Whenever you see "Chinese whistleblower" in the news, you're looking at someone who quietly fled the country first and then blew the whistle. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/us/china-nyc-whistleblower-uf...
It's along the same lines, but an NSL can be challenged in court (the FISC is a secret and lopsided court, alas). Companies like Apple and Google have fought specific orders publicly (and possibly some secretly), and some have won.
NSLs are also narrow in scope: they compel data disclosure, not active technical assistance in building surveillance systems like the Chinese law.
The Chinese laws can compel any citizen anywhere in the world to perform work on supporting state military and intelligence capabilities with no recourse. There have been no cases of companies or individuals fighting those orders.
Not at all. If you're an employee at a company that receives a National Security Letter then you can just quit if you want to. Unlike in China, the US government can't force you to keep working there to suit their purposes.
This was my thought as well. We have a lot of shared knowledge and memories with details that are definitely not shared in any online artifact. Those would be very hard to spoof for any casual attack. We'd have to be talking state level attacks...
This is great advice and will give a good background in programming that mirrors what you would learn in a CS program.
I'd also like to suggest studying the practical side of building software that many university programs don't spend much time on. To help address this gap, John Ousterhout wrote A Philosophy of Software Design. He has retired from teaching, but captured the hard-won lessons in the book.
This type of book offers the perspective I wish I had developed more before working in software teams early on, as it would have made me a more valuable developer right off the bat. Instead, I went deep on architecture patterns and language theory, becoming somewhat insufferable to my peers (who were very tolerant and kind in return!) for the first few years. 20 years later, I can see that I was trying to hammer a CS "peg" into a business-software-shaped hole :)
I see your point about pragmatic software engineering not being valued enough in university programs. Somehow the incentives are not aligned properly, which is unfortunate. I try to be as pragmatic as possible when I happen to teach courses where this makes sense. Next semester I'll probably teach "C programming" again after a few years, which is always fun for the students, who will never see a raw pointer again in their career.
Sure. Someone on /r/LocalLLaMA was seeing 12.5 tokens/s on dual Strix Halo 128GB machines (run you $6-8K total?) with 1.8bits per parameter. It performs far below the unquantized model, so it would not be my personal pick for a one-local-LLM-forever, but it is compelling because it has image and video understanding. You lose those features if you choose, say, gpt-oss-120B.
Also, that's with no context, so it would be slower as it filled (I don't think K2.5 uses the Kimi-Linear KDA attention mechanism, so it's sub-quadratic but not their lowest).
It's a fun setup that quickly devolves into the Shakespearian! The plots don't always work, but seeing their reasoning get increasingly complex is interesting.
"When that the poor have cried, Caesar hath wept. Ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Yet Brutus says he was ambitious... and Brutus is an honourable man.
A 2017 national intelligence law compels Chinese companies and individuals to cooperate with state intelligence when asked and without and public notice.
China has no equivalent of the whistleblower protection that enables resignations with public letters explaining why, protests, open letters with many signatures, etc. Whenever you see "Chinese whistleblower" in the news, you're looking at someone who quietly fled the country first and then blew the whistle. Example: https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/27/us/china-nyc-whistleblower-uf...
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