• 28 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 15th, 2023

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  • Business dangers from scraping / automation are basically of two types:

    • archival record for proof mostly for legal prosecution and contract negotiation. There’s a lot of really bad shit going on on Chinese web despite the great firewall of China and you can hide it in plain sight if it’s ephemeral. So if I sell illegal goods but it’s not archived ever no one can really prosecute me. Gray/black markets players in China just rebrand every month and get away with everything.
    • real time data for price/trend competition. Prices and trends move incredibly fast in China, people in the west don’t even understand how far ahead chinese e-commerce is, Amazon is like 10 years behind. So all that scraped info is incredibly valuable for chasing capitalism.


  • I did some js reverse engineering work on chinese websites few years ago and it’s legit industry leading tracking tech. Very few websites in the west are even remotely as sophisticated in that regard.

    Unsurprisingly China has the best tracking ecosystem but it’s not for the reasons you might think. It’s just so competitive in China that tracking and automation blocking is super important for chinese businesses.

    Have you noticed that there’s no such thing like internet archive in China? It’s because nobody wants it. It’s too dangerous to have recorded history of any sort.








  • I’ve been to China many times too and it does not rock lmao. You’ve been eating propaganda and it shows. China is extremely oppressive and it’s still incredibly underdeveloped despite LED covered cities you see on tiktok. It’s still a matchmaker and status driven society from 20th century despite EV tech.

    Also freedom is not binary, the west is more free than China ever was. At least I can type “LGBT” to my chat app which you cannot do in China because CCP autocrats deem it “western propaganda”. None of this is a worthy sacrifice for faster decision making, I’d rather be slightly poorer but live in a healthier more free society.

    You’re a fool.


  • Singapore has strict laws because it’s positioned as Switzerland of Asia but without actual country. It’s a bland “nothing happens” here haven for billionaires. They get to store their wealth and their kids there exactly because nothing happens in Singapore and if something does happen the surveillance and lawyer state will inform and protect you.

    In the grand scale of things maybe one can argue this is good for Asia? But imo it’s disgusting and unethical, it’s distilling society to it’s worst parts of indifference and grifting. The only redeeming thing is academia which in itself managed to grift of this state but that’s good, take something good back from these billionaires and their hiden bastards - maybe they can be turned into real people who actually care about the world they live in.



  • CCP is not pro anything. It’s funny how autocracy founded on explicit design documents is one the biggest real politik actors out there.

    “Oceania was at war with Eurasia: therefore Oceania had always been at war with Eurasia.” - 1984

    CCP officially justifies these as “use any means for achieving goals” and this is the entire party - just power for power sake. There’s no actual ideology or consciousness - it’s literally “The Party” from 1984. However I don’t want to discredit Chinese people who actually do make meaningful change but it’s in spite of CCP not because of it.