Larry's Weekly Newsletter - July 26, 2026

American tech blogger Ben Thompson writes today that US frontier labs should not be panicking about Chinese open source models like Kimi K3, despite them being competitive with the best models from American labs. We can “distill” (ha!) his post down to two main arguments: Anthropic and OpenAI likely have

I spent the last 3 weeks in Zhuhai, the city in mainland China across the river delta from Hong Kong and Shenzhen, just north of (also technically west, east and south of) Macau. With the advent of the Northbound Travel for Hong Kong Vehicles scheme, car owners, Zhuhai has become

Headline EV charging power specs are misleading and 800v vs 400v really matters.

Hong Kong-based BitMEX announced it’s closing its doors on the 23rd of September of this year. I had the good fortune to know the founders and follow their journey from before they launched in December of 2014. It was amazing watching them go from an idea to a

The high rate of cigarette smoking in mainland China has been one of its major downsides for the ~23 years I’ve been around. And the progress on this has been very slow. I’ve heard theories about this having to do with the tax revenue generated by the State

In the past week, I’ve come across half a dozen comments saying that the poster wants to use the search engine Kagi but cannot in good conscience because Kagi apparently sources some results from the Russian search engine Yandex. To spend $5 a month on Kagi would mean the

China energy expert David Fishman penned a masterful analysis and refutation of the theory that China is closing the path that earlier generations of developing countries took to industrialization. This theory is all the rage in western policy circles and most recently espoused in a wildly shared article in Foreign