Josh Chin
@joshchin.bsky.social
Senior correspondent for WSJ covering collisions of geopolitics, tech, and power. 15+ yrs in Asia, mostly China. Co-author of SURVEILLANCE STATE: https://www.josh-chin.com/books Signal: joshchin.86. Also: josh.l.chin@protonmail.com
For nearly a century, the @washingtonpost’s foreign correspondents have been on the ground for the world’s most pressing stories. Now, our desk is facing potential steep cuts. Washington needs us. The world needs us. If you read us and need us, please watch this video and share.
This is yet another story about authoritarianism — but one that hits a little different. Phurba is resilience incarnate, a person born for these times. And his tale is bonkers. I hope you enjoy reading it as much we did reporting it. Gift link: www.wsj.com/world/asia/t...
The Daring Caper of a Faithful Tibetan Who Outfoxed China
He escaped from police and crossed thousands of miles of wilderness on a decadelong odyssey toward freedom.
wsj.com
Hi, former Foreign Service Officer here The Secretary of State might be interested to learn that visa requirements and terms are generally reciprocal. We do it to them, they do it to us.
PBS News@pbsnews.org · last yr.The State Department is proposing requiring applicants for business and tourist visas to post a bond of up to $15,000 to enter the United States, a move that may make the process unaffordable for many.
it is not the case that if you stop observing bad things, the bad things go away
NPR@npr.org · last yr.Exclusive: The Trump administration has asked NASA staffers to draw up plans to end at least two satellite missions that measure carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, according to current and former NASA employees. By @rhersher.bsky.social
LLMs are basically terrifying users by force-feeding them niche fanfic texts without context. There's a reason why fandoms congregate on small forums to talk out their inside jokes because they don't want innocent people to stumble into their space and freak out without knowing the context!!!
Katie Drummond@katie-drummond.bsky.social · last yr."AI companies used what amounts to the collective history of our species to create software that obscures its very richness and complexity." www.wired.com/story/chatgp...
As the U.S. heads toward trade talks with China next week, President Trump is increasingly focused on trying to strike an economic bargain with Beijing.
Trump Is Shifting to Dealmaking Mode on China
The White House puts a priority on doing business with Beijing as it prepares for bilateral talks next week.
on.wsj.com
The most interesting fact about Hulk Hogan is that as a kid in France, Andre the Giant sometimes got driven to school by playwright Samuel Beckett
This is shattering, must-read journalism from @leloveluck.bsky.social, Heba Farouk Mahfouz, Siham Shamalakh, Miriam Berger and @cheesemanab.bsky.social. Glad it is getting the front-page treatment it merits. Gift link for non-subscribers is here: wapo.st/3GXPS9A
Mass starvation stalks Gaza as deaths from hunger rise
Aid agencies warned for months that Israel’s harsh limits on food aid would bring acute malnutrition and widespread suffering to Gaza’s 2.1 million people.
washingtonpost.com
"Google users who encountered an AI summary also rarely clicked on a link in the summary itself. This occurred in just 1% of all visits..."
Google users are less likely to click on links when an AI summary appears in the results
In a March 2025 analysis, Google users who encountered an AI summary were less likely to click on links to other websites than users who did not see one.
pewresearch.org
i believe that at 18 every american should be entered into a draft, not for military service, but for one year of mandatory retail or restaurant work
“I violated the user directive …” “I violated the first law of robotics…” “I’m sorry Dave…”
Ian Coldwater 🧊🚫@lookitup.baby · last yr.This thread is incredible.
NEW FROM ME: new research has found millions of ex's of personal info, including credit cards, passports, résumés, birth certificates etc in 1 of the largest web-scraped datasets used to train image generation AI models. It's a major privacy violation. www.technologyreview.com/2025/07/18/1...
A major AI training data set contains millions of examples of personal data
Personally identifiable information has been found in DataComp CommonPool, one of the largest open-source data sets used to train image generation models.
technologyreview.com
Excellent move. Strong and confident regimes have no need for so-called “comedy,” which serves only to undermine socialist spiritual civilization.
The New York Times@nytimes.com · last yr.Breaking News: CBS will cancel “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” next year, retiring a franchise that lasted more than three decades.
the Grok - Mechahitler story is interesting for what it reveals not just about Elon's LLM but about how sign systems work at a pretty high level of abstraction
ryan cooper@ryanlcooper.com · last yr.I did some research and reporting to try to understand why Elon turning Grok "anti-woke" also made it into MechaHitler, some interesting stuff in the guts of LLMs. feat @theophite.bsky.social prospect.org/power/2025-0...
The leap from this to the systems Chinese police use for social engineering in Xinjiang and Tibet is exceedingly small
Joseph Cox@josephcox.bsky.social · last yr.New from 404 Media: inside ICE's supercharged facial recognition app of 200 million images. After scanning someone's face, it can query DHS, CBP, FBI, State Department, and state databases at once. An unprecedented linking of government databases into a single tool. www.404media.co/inside-ices-...
Settle in and read this extraordinary piece by Rümeysa Öztürk about her detention and marvel at her compassion for others, even in the darkest conceivable situation. We are blessed to have students like her in America: www.vanityfair.com/news/story/r...
“Even God Cannot Hear Us Here”: What I Witnessed Inside an ICE Women’s Prison
Tufts University doctoral student Rümeysa Öztürk opens up about her 45 days in a South Louisiana processing facility—and the generous and compassionate women she met.
vanityfair.com
Tiktok got banned despite massive efforts to demonstrate that Beijing wouldn't access US data. All the while, the U.S. government allowed China-based Microsoft service teams to directly access classified government systems w/ nominal supervision. www.propublica.org/article/micr...
A Little-Known Microsoft Program Could Expose the Defense Department to Chinese Hackers
The Pentagon bans foreign citizens from accessing highly sensitive data, but Microsoft bypasses this by using engineers in China and elsewhere to remotely instruct American “escorts” who may lack expe...
propublica.org
Palestinians in Gaza are facing a tough decision every day: starve or risk death while trying to get food from one of the aid distribution centers https://on.wsj.com/46JM6uT
Gazans Confront a Stark Choice: Risk Death to Get Food, or Starve
A rash of shootings has made the trek through combat zones to U.S. and Israeli-backed food aid sites a deadly one.
on.wsj.com
Some places will have to start rationing water - to enable AI slop. "A data center like Meta’s, which was completed last year, typically guzzles around 500,000 gallons of water a day. New data centers [will] require millions of gallons of water a day" Gift link: www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/t...
Their Water Taps Ran Dry When Meta Built Next Door
nytimes.com
this is a structural problem that threatens the entire industry: the financial incentives lean toward Takes but Takes ultimately depend on a bedrock of reporting that there is almost no working model for at this point.
Marie Le Conte@youngvulgarian.marieleconte.com · last yr.will add that for a lot of people it just makes considerably more financial sense to do Takes than reporting - if I could actually make a good living out of doing features etc you'd never see me write a column again, genuinely, but the industry just favours opinions now so ¯\(ツ)/¯
State-run elementary and even preschools doing the work in Tibet of the “reeducation centers” in Xinjiang. Old imperial trick… but behind every national school, hedge schools are keeping the flame lit. Important reporting by @joshchin.bsky.social et al www.wsj.com/world/china/...
China Steals Language and Home Life From Tibetan Kids as Young as 4
Beijing is building a broad network of preschools across Tibetan areas, seeking to inculcate loyalty to the Chinese Communist Party early in life.
wsj.com
As more journalists are driven out of their jobs, I keep hearing this drumbeat of "it's ok -- they can start their own newsletter or publication." Some can. But becoming your own business is a huge job, and will eliminate many talented reporters from the public sphere. Here's why. (1/5)
![Travis Kalanick, the founder of Uber who no longer works at the company, appeared on All-In to talk with hosts Jason Calacanis and Chamath Palihapitiya about the future of technology. When the topic turned to AI, Kalanick discussed how he uses xAI’s Grok, which went haywire last week, praising Adolf Hitler and advocating for a second Holocaust against Jews.
“I’ll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and I’ll start to get to the edge of what’s known in quantum physics and then I’m doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it’s vibe physics,” Kalanick explained. “And we’re approaching what’s known. And I’m trying to poke and see if there’s breakthroughs to be had. And I’ve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:qlnirjwff4ibiw3wchmleszo/bafkreiac2szurc5dnw6klquhpjmo7iafg4n6fwmrqyred7jrrph6h6mptq)