🎞️ Life#
A bland, busy, and exhausting week
💭 Fragments#
📰 Weekly Excerpts#
Musk Denies Tesla Abandoning Low-Cost Car Plan#
[Musk denies Tesla has abandoned the low-cost car plan] Caixin, April 5 - After Musk denied that Tesla had canceled its low-cost car plan, the company's stock price recovered some losses. The stock fell 6.2% on Friday after Reuters reported that Tesla had abandoned the low-cost car plan. Musk posted on social media platform X, stating, "Reuters is lying." Musk first proposed a $25,000 model at an event in September 2020, saying that a series of innovations at Tesla gave him confidence that the company could produce such an electric vehicle within about three years. More than three years later, Tesla's product lineup still lacks lower-priced models, proving that the brand's cars are relatively expensive.
Source
WeRide Releases Autonomous Street Sweeper S1 with Nearly $10 Million in First-Day Orders#
On April 3, global autonomous driving leader WeRide held a product launch event titled "Autonomous Sanitation · Smart Future" on Guangzhou International Bio Island, unveiling its second smart sanitation product - the autonomous street sweeper S1, achieving a signing frenzy right at the launch, with first-day orders nearing $10 million. This is the world's first L4 level autonomous sanitation equipment designed for open roads covering all scenarios, and it represents another breakthrough for WeRide in the smart sanitation field, possessing enormous commercial potential and signaling a new round of advancement for WeRide's autonomous driving technology commercialization. At the launch, WeRide founder and CEO Han Xu mentioned that the newly released autonomous street sweeper S1 is another achievement of the company in the smart sanitation scenario, featuring true L4 and fully autonomous differentiated advantages, while its compact, efficient, safe, intelligent, and easy-to-deploy characteristics will empower global sanitation industry clients, achieving "autonomous sanitation, safe sanitation, and smart sanitation."
Source
Autonomous driving in specific industries is currently a compromise solution.
Douyin Plans to Acquire Payment License from Hailian Jinhui for Over 750 Million Yuan#
IT Home reported on April 3 that Hailian Jinhui announced today its intention to transfer its payment institution (Lian Dong You Shi Electronic Commerce Co., Ltd.) to the parent company of Douyin's payment license entity (Wuhan Hezhong Yibao Technology Co., Ltd.), with a transaction price based on a transfer price of 750 million yuan + net assets on the delivery date.
After the completion of this transaction, the payment institution will be merged into Hezhong Yibao. Both the transaction and the merger require approval from the central bank. After the completion of this transaction, Douyin Payment will complete its bank card acquiring business license.
Source
Lending services will start soon.
The Data from "Idiot Tieba" Turns Out to Be the Strongest Chinese Corpus#
Ten institutions, including the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Peking University, the University of Science and Technology of China, and the University of Waterloo, jointly launched a high-quality instruction fine-tuning dataset specifically for Chinese - COIG-CQIA.
In the field of large models, English has always been the most important training data language, but due to structural and cultural differences between Chinese and English, directly translating English datasets into Chinese is not ideal. Therefore, to fill the gap of high-quality Chinese datasets, researchers developed the COIG-CQIA dataset.
COIG-CQIA has almost captured high-quality datasets from Chinese internet forums, websites, Baidu Tieba, Q&A communities, etc. Using COIG-CQIA for instruction fine-tuning on Yi-6B and Yi-34B, and then evaluating the performance of large models trained on various datasets using GPT4 on BELLE-EVAL.
An interesting scene emerged: the data quality from "Idiot Tieba" significantly exceeded that of well-known knowledge communities like Zhihu, Douban, and Shifei, truly reflecting the wisdom of being foolish~
Dataset address: m-a-p/COIG-CQIA · Datasets at Hugging Face
Paper address: COIG-CQIA: Quality is All You Need for Chinese Instruction Fine-tuning
Source
In fact, this data has undergone many rounds of manual evaluation, so the quality is certainly high, especially in "Idiot Tieba," which often contains puns, polysemy, causal reversals, and homophones, many of which are designed with logical traps that even challenge humans.
China's Fertility Rate Ranks Second to Last Among Major Global Economies, with the Cost of Raising a Child to 18 Equivalent to 6.9 Times the Per Capita GDP.#
China's total fertility rate has dropped from around 6 before the 1970s to about 2 in 1990, and further down to around 1.5 after 2010, with rates of 1.05 in 2022 and only about 1.0 in 2023, ranking second to last among major global economies (only slightly higher than South Korea).
High direct costs such as housing, education, and healthcare are the three major factors suppressing fertility behavior. The "four-two-one" family structure places a heavy burden on elderly care, squeezing childbirth. The high female labor participation rate but insufficient employment rights protection leads to high opportunity costs. According to the "China Fertility Cost Report" released by Yuwa Population, the average cost of raising a child aged 0-17 across the 14 countries surveyed is 485,000 yuan; the average cost of raising a child from birth to university graduation is 627,000 yuan.
If we compare the cost of raising a child to just 18 years old relative to the per capita GDP internationally, Australia is 2.08 times, France is 2.24 times, Sweden is 2.91 times, Germany is 3.64 times, the United States is 4.11 times, Japan is 4.26 times, and China is 6.9 times, almost the highest in the world.
Source
Family planning and real estate policies are truly remarkable.
New iPad Expected to Launch in the Second Week of May, Prices May Rise#
Mark Gurman reported that Apple is preparing to launch new iPad Pro and iPad Air series in the week of May 6.
The upcoming products include 11-inch and 13-inch OLED iPad Pro models, a larger 12.9-inch iPad Air, as well as updated Magic Keyboard and Apple Pencil, with expected price increases for the iPads.
Both iPad Pro models will be equipped with M3 chips, while it is still unknown which processor the iPad Air will use.
The code in the beta version of iPadOS reveals that the new Apple Pencil will have gesture squeeze functionality, and the new Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro will feature an aluminum base and a larger touchpad, making the tablet more similar to a laptop.
Gurman also mentioned that the basic model iPad and iPad Mini will be launched later this year, although the iPad Mini is expected to have minor improvements, mainly focused on processor upgrades.
Source
Just wait a bit... If it's too expensive or the upgrades are minimal, consider switching to Android.
Shanghai Pilot Beverage Nutrition Grading#
Recently, Shanghai implemented the country's first beverage "nutrition choice" grading label. Based on the content of four components: "non-dairy sugars," "saturated fats," "trans fats," and "non-sugar sweeteners," the grades are assessed from high to low, labeled A, B, C, and D, with decreasing recommendation levels.
It is reported that before the pilot began, Shanghai's disease control department conducted nutritional analysis on some milk teas in the market, and the results were concerning. In terms of sugar content alone, over 93% of milk teas claiming "no added sugar" could be rated B or higher; nearly half of the milk teas claiming "one-third sugar" could be rated C or higher.
Source
Honestly, don't drink milk tea.
ZARA Launches New Leather Shoe Collection#
ZARA has launched a new collection of leather footwear, featuring Vibram outsoles.
The entire collection is made of leather and includes a total of six designs, such as slippers, sneakers, and boat shoes, which, combined with Vibram configurations, can meet almost all daily matching needs.
The ZARA V sole series, except for the slipper model priced at 899 yuan, has all other styles priced at 999 yuan and is now available for sale at ZARA.
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A bit good-looking.
Revealing the Story Behind Blizzard and NetEase's "Remarriage": Microsoft as a Matchmaker, National Server Returning in June at the Earliest Due to Technical Issues | Exclusive from 36Kr#
After a year and two months, Blizzard's national server has finally returned.
On the morning of April 10, Blizzard Entertainment, Microsoft Gaming, and NetEase jointly announced that Blizzard's games will gradually return to the mainland China market starting this summer. At the same time, Microsoft Gaming announced an agreement with NetEase to attempt to bring new NetEase games to Xbox and other platforms.
36Kr exclusively learned that Blizzard and NetEase signed a cooperation agreement around this year's Spring Festival, but the return of Blizzard's national server originally scheduled for April has been delayed until this summer or later due to unresolved "technical issues" with Blizzard's Battle.net.
Source
Blizzard is not dead yet.
Who is Jia Tan, the Author of the xz Backdoor?#
A major recent event in the internet industry is the backdoor found in the xz software.
xz is a compression software widely used in Linux systems; for example, the system manager systemD uses it to compress logs. It is one of the basic components of Linux, present on almost every server.
At the end of March this year, someone discovered that the new version had a strange issue that slowed down the SSH startup time by 500 milliseconds. Further investigation revealed that there was indeed a backdoor inside.
This incident shocked the industry because the new version was about to be included in major Linux distributions (like Debian and Fedora), just a few days away. By then, servers with backdoors would have catastrophic consequences.
Moreover, the entire incident was meticulously planned, spanning several years, with no flaws at any step, demonstrating a level of meticulousness, patience, and capability that is truly frightening.
Chinese Introduction
Original Details
The sociology of hackers.
DOOM Captcha#
Super fun, kill all enemies within the specified time.
DOOM Captcha - Captchas don't have to be boring
Tencent now plays a game where every time you have to click for object recognition, exploiting users for free.
📚 Articles#
Reviewing Feishu's Seven Years: The Least Douyin-like Product That Gained the Most Time#
Web Summary#
This article discusses how Chinese enterprise service products succeed, taking Feishu as an example, exploring its seven-year development history, product features, market performance, and its connection with ByteDance. As an all-in-one collaborative office tool, Feishu aims to enhance enterprise efficiency, and although it is still operating at a loss, it shows commercial potential.
Key Points#
- Feishu, as an enterprise service product, aims to enhance enterprise efficiency and features all-in-one collaborative office functions.
- Feishu has performed excellently in the Chinese enterprise service market, with software subscription revenue exceeding $200 million in 2023, but it is still operating at a loss.
- The Feishu team size once reached 8,000 people, now over 5,000, with each person generating about 280,000 yuan in subscription revenue annually.
- The value of Feishu lies in its commercial potential and its enhancement of internal efficiency at ByteDance.
- Feishu's seven-year development journey is a special attempt by ByteDance, with its detours, lessons, and changes reflecting the boundaries of ByteDance's methodology.
Original Excerpt#
In addition to the implementation deployment team, Feishu also established a customer success department to help clients truly utilize Feishu while uncovering more needs to ensure renewals and upsells. This department currently has about 100 people.
Feishu has also made a series of adjustments to its product.
At the end of 2022, former Alibaba Cloud Disk head Qi Junyuan joined Feishu as Vice President of Product. He previously founded the project management software Teambition, which was acquired by Alibaba in 2019.
Qi Junyuan led the development of Feishu version 7.0, which underwent a significant change from "people finding applications" to "applications finding people."
This is a solution for the cumbersome all-in-one. Previously, Feishu was like an "App Store," where users had to search or click through submenus multiple times to find different functions; Feishu 7.0 has transformed into a "push center," with variables coming from AI, allowing users to quickly open functions and products through conversations with an AI smart partner (a chatbot).
Original
Collaboration must have an AI steward to help improve efficiency,
summarizing, searching, and reminding you.
Here @Ruli, it’s not as good as Feishu's market.
Africa to Gift 30,000 Elephants to the UK and Germany, and They Can't Refuse: Experience Life with Elephants#
Recently, the African country Botswana has been "giving away elephants." In March, Botswana's Minister of Wildlife Dumetsevini Mtimkuru stated a willingness to send 10,000 elephants to London; in April, Botswana's President Mokgweetsi Masisi publicly expressed hope that Germany would accept 20,000 elephants, and refusal is not allowed.
Original
Seeking truth from facts.