Notes on AI, tools, and tech.
Buy a Chinese phone in Shenzhen and fly it to Texas, and you moved the phone without moving the warranty. Coverage follows the country where you paid, not the brand on the back. Most people learn this the expensive way. Something breaks in month nine. They look up the nearest service center. The answer is … Read more
You can bind a US credit card to Alipay in about ten minutes. Whether Taobao accepts that card at checkout is a different question, and almost nobody writes about it. Every English guide I found on this is written for tourists. They answer one thing: how do I pay for dinner in Shanghai. That’s a … Read more
You can import a Chinese car into the United States. You just have to wait until the 2040s. That is the honest arithmetic behind the 25 year rule, and it covers every electric sedan built in Shenzhen or Shanghai. Two-wheelers are a different story. An e-bike can clear customs next month, provided the paperwork is … Read more
Shipping from China to the US got more expensive for one reason, and it is not freight rates. The $800 exemption that let small parcels in duty-free is gone. Every package is now a customs event. That single change moved the cost of an ordinary order more than any shipping line ever did. A threshold … Read more
One in six American households is behind on its electric bill. That is a Consumer Reports figure from late 2025, and it predates the current round of rate cases. In the first half of 2026 alone, utilities asked regulators for $18.6 billion in increases. The whole of 2025 was $29 billion. Almost all the attention … Read more
In March, Canada started taking Chinese electric cars at a 6.1% tariff, with room for 49,000 of them a year. The US rate is still 100%, stacked on a 2.5% base duty. Same cars. Same continent. One open door. Start with where these cars already are. BYD sold 557,000 battery electric passenger vehicles worldwide in … Read more
A design task that runs $1.61 on GPT-6 Astra costs about 2.3 cents on DeepSeek’s new model. Same brief, same output, one bill sixty times smaller. That single number is the whole pitch. DeepSeek widened that gap on purpose, and it did it three days after teaching its chatbot to talk out loud. Vision is … Read more
Ask a friend in the US to name the biggest phone brands in the world. You’ll hear Apple, Samsung, maybe Google, maybe Motorola. What you almost never hear is Xiaomi, which is strange, because by shipment numbers Xiaomi is the third-largest phone maker on the planet. It outsells almost everyone, and a typical American has … Read more
DeepSeek dropped a new model yesterday. No warning. No teaser campaign. Just a quiet API update and a bunch of benchmark numbers that made me do a double take. Here’s the thing about DeepSeek: they always do this. You’re sitting there, minding your own business, and suddenly they launch something that makes everyone else look … Read more
Google dropped Gemini 3.7 Flash on August 13. That’s three weeks after 3.6 Flash came out. Three weeks. I had to double-check that date the first time I saw it. Here’s what actually matters: it’s better at coding, better with AI agents, and it costs half of what 3.6 Flash originally cost. That last part … Read more