Larry's Weekly Newsletter - July 19, 2026

Hi friends!

Long time no write! Now that AI is taking over the world, it seems more important than ever for us (you included!) to write regularly so that we do not find ourselves among the Write-Nots.

In accordance with my AI policy for this blog/newsletter, all writing is lovingly human-crafted on my keyboard or iPhone. I edit everything myself and don't do silly things like "ask GPT how this could be better" or "claude fix my blog post."

Selfishly, I'm doing this first for me...to improve my thinking and writing. But I also keep you, my friends, in mind and hope that you will occasionally find what I write interesting.

I will periodically (tentatively every Sunday) email you with what I've written the previous week (or since I last emailed you). If you don't like this, feel free to unsubscribe. I won't be offended!

I hope that this email finds you (or your AI Email Agent) well, in good health and in even better spirits. Until next time!

Humanly yours,
Larry

A Letter to Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary on the 2025-26 Budget

My open letter to Hong Kong’s Financial Secretary on the 2025-26 Budget.

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

What to make? A sandwich?

AI makes it really easy to build things until you realize you don’t know what to build. You may think you know what you want to build until you start to build it, only to find out that not only have you not defined some of the requirements of

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

Bryan Johnson blood tests in a Chinese public hospital

I wanted to get some Bryan Johnson-inspired blood tests for a baseline of biomarkers. He sells an expensive testing service that, as far as I know, isn’t available outside of the USA. And getting blood tests in Hong Kong means going to an expensive private lab or expensive

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

QR code menu enabled phone addiction

Phone addiction in mainland China seems to be much higher than the already ridiculous levels it is in other places in the world. It’s very common in restaurants and coffee shops for tables of people to be ignoring each other and their kids bent over their phones. I suspect

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

Apple is winning the AI race

I don’t think people realize how easy it is to make use of on-device AI models in an app on most of Apple’s devices shipped in the past two years. And I’m talking about the currently shipping 26 versions of iOS and macOS...not some upcoming

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

The big bad Chinese subsidies

This is in reply to a thread on X where Matt Stoller claims that 100% of China’s success is due to state subsidies. The “China subsidized its way to success” is really just a cope shibboleth that some Americans repeat without thinking to signal group unity across political lines.

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

Rudd on Xi...more Western naval-gazing

I listened to Ezra Klein’s interview with former Australian prime minister Kevin Rudd about Xi Jinping. Rudd speaks Chinese. He served in the Australian foreign service where he met Xi earlier in his career while he was in Xiamen. Rudd later went on to do a PhD at Oxford

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

LLMs, nationalism & open source

Inkling came out yesterday - an open source LLM by an American firm. It’s supposedly not bad but also not notably good outside of its multi-modal support for audio compared to the leading open source LLMs which just happen to be created by Chinese firms. What was more interesting

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

Tesla is juicing its China sales

If you haven’t heard, Chinese EVs are amazing and they’re taking over the world. And as someone who was just in the market for an EV this spring in Hong Kong, I can assure you that Chinese EVs are excellent: better features, nicer interiors, better ride, charge MUCH

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

Low standards for white Chinese speakers

“Your Chinese is very good...for a white guy.” I strongly identify with this statement. Chinese is a great language to learn for many reasons. One such reason is that native Chinese speakers are incredibly supportive of you, no matter how little effort you’ve put in or progress you’

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra

A phone is a whiskey flask

“a phone is a whiskey flask and humanity is drunk out of our collective minds.” -me on X There’s a lot to say on this topic especially with regards to the implications for things many once took for granted in their societies. For now, I’ll just say that

Larry SalibraLarry Salibra