Chips Policy Contest, Oslo, North Korean Remote Workers, Chinese Shoegaze, Weibo Doom Scroll
Jordan in Olso
I’ll be in Oslo next week. Respond to this email to connect — it would be great to meet up.
Also, the show we published Shakespeare and Power was excellent and is best listened to rather than read as a transcript. Check it out this weekend by clicking the links below!
Foundational Chips Essay Contest
As Jimmy Goodrich, advisor at RAND, has recently written,
China is building an immense number of legacy chip factories as evidenced in skyrocketing chip tool imports and sales. However, there are indications that China is building more supply than demand, which has stirred fears of oversupply in western capitals. Already, Chinese foundries are engaged in a price war with their domestic competitors that has spilled over to impact similar firms in Taiwan and South Korea.
Why care?
Growing Chinese capacity impacts Western firms’ future willingness to invest. Western firms are already facing calls to reduce capital expenditures in the face of projected pricing pressures.
Increased Chinese chip exports to the West raises economic and data security risks as Western manufacturers grow increasingly reliant on Chinese components.
What steps, if any, should the US take to address China’s growing global share of legacy chip manufacturing?
The Federation of American Scientists, Noahpinion, ChinaTalk, and Chris Miller of Chip War are excited to launch a policy-proposal contest to source clever ideas on how the US government should respond.
Key angles to explore:
Defining the problem: which theories of harm for China’s legacy industry are the ones the US should take most seriously?
Prioritizing remedies: which mix of potential actions, both on the supply and demand side, would most effectively address the identified concerns?
Strong submissions should run at least 2,000 words. For some inspiration on writing structure, see the memos from the Day 1 Project. Submit by July 15 for a shot at the $500 prize pool. The best submission will get interviewed on ChinaTalk about their idea and receive a write-up from Noah!
To see what people are already thinking about, check out the Rhodium Group’s recent report on the topic — it gives more market context and introduces a menu of potential policy tools the US government could deploy (though of course proposals may include others!).
Open Philanthropy is a leading philanthropic funder focused on conventionally underrated causes. They’re hiring a new member for their Innovation Policy team, which aims to accelerate scientific and technological progress. This role will be responsible for identifying and evaluating grant opportunities, and involves working with Matt Clancy, who leads the program (and writes New Things Under the Sun, one of my favorite blogs on this topic).
This role is an excellent opportunity to contribute to projects that could potentially improve the lives of billions of people. I’ve also known Matt for half a decade, and think he’d be a great boss.
The role is remote, offers flexible work hours, and provides competitive compensation and benefits. If you have experience in metascience, innovation policy, or a related field — and you like the idea of finding high-leverage ways to boost the world’s scientific output — this role could be a perfect fit for you. (Or someone you know; Open Philanthropy offers a reward if you refer someone they hire.)
Applications close after June 30 — if this interests you, apply soon!
Leo Hentschker: How to Hire a North Korean Software Engineer
Hi, I’m Jordan’s friend and the CTO of a tech startup named Column that helps governments, law firms, and businesses across the US place public notices. I also hire a lot.
Half of the candidates I spoke to over the last month for a remote software-engineering role gave fake names on their resumes, pretended to be US citizens, and used AI tools to answer our technical interview questions. Cross-referencing our experience with those of Chief Security Officers at similar companies, we were likely targeted by a known effort from the DPRK to infiltrate US IT firms. Apparently, North Korean IT workers are pretending to be Americans, interviewing for remote US tech jobs, landing as many jobs simultaneously as they can, and funneling the salaries back to the North Korean government. Every founder I’ve spoken with currently hiring for remote engineering roles is running into these fraudulent candidates.
These North Korean software engineers can apparently have up to twenty jobs at once. And I thought being a 10x engineer was impressive.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve gotten pretty good at spotting when a candidate I’m speaking to is trying to funnel money to Pyongyang. If you’re an engineering leader who wants to explore working with folks from the DPRK, here are three steps you can take:
Step #1: Define a solid ideal candidate profile
The first step of any interview process is defining your ideal candidate profile, or IDP. This will guide your search and make sure that your recruiting team is looking for candidates that align with your goals as a hiring manager. When hiring North Koreans, I suggest looking for candidates with duplicative LinkedIn profiles and debilitating medical conditions.
To get hired and pass I-9 verification, candidates need to present an actual US identity as described in this case by the DOJ. This means that there will be an actual US citizen with the same name, age, and graduation information as your candidate. In some cases, there will actually be multiple fraudulent candidates using the same identity. Ideally, if you Google your candidate’s name, you should expect to see at least one other person who lives in the same town and went to the same college but looks totally different.
Also, these candidates don’t actually live in the US, so if you ask to meet them in the location on their LinkedIn profile, they need to come up with an excuse that explains why they will never meet you in person. One candidate said he was unavailable to join a company retreat as he had just fallen off a ladder. This is perfect: the more farfetched, the better.
Step #2: Write good interview questions
Now that you know the basics of your ideal profile, the next step is to write out your interview questions. These questions should be designed to weed out real software engineers and make sure that you are left only with candidates who have no intention of actually doing any work at your company. The best way I’ve found to do this is by making up nonsense questions.
Whenever you ask North Korean candidates a question, it will take them between ten and fifteen seconds to respond and require them to look at a separate screen — presumably waiting to get an answer from ChatGPT. The bad news is that ChatGPT is good enough now that their answers will be indistinguishable from someone who actually intends to do good work at your company. The good news is that they will answer absolutely anything you ask them. You can make up web frameworks, make up places in the town they say they live in, and make up things about your company. No matter what you ask, the candidate you’re talking to will take a pause, look off into the distance, and then respond back to you with words that could logically sit next to each other.
If your candidate can explain why Travis Kelce decided to build the Tortured Poet’s Department with Haskell instead of jQuery, that’s a great sign.
Step #3: Do reference checks
When trying to get a sense of what it’s like to work with someone, nothing beats talking to a former colleague.
For North Korean candidates, reference checks will often turn up empty, with the previous employer claiming no knowledge of having worked with the candidate. But this isn’t foolproof, as it’s possible the candidate is just an American lying on their resume.
Ideally, you’ll experience what happened to my friend: the candidate submitted a reference to a company that he was actively extorting. If the CEO on the other line is telling you the candidate is actively threatening to leak their GitHub repo if they don’t send $50k in Bitcoin to an unidentified address, that’s an excellent sign that the candidate works for North Korea.
But if you hire for remote jobs and don’t want to break export controls and funnel money to the DPRK’s weapons program…
Then I would suggest revisiting your company’s I-9 verification, reference-check process, and resume-screening process. If your policies were designed in 2023, there’s a chance that the laptop you just sent to that new hire will end up reporting from Pyongyang.
Oh, but also, if you’re not based in North Korea and are looking for a job … apply to Column! We’re hiring software engineers and customer-success managers.
Alexa Pan: Wordsworth Meets Chinese Shoegaze
How would Wordsworth’s The Prelude work with Chinese shoegaze? Well, you can now answer that question. Control (控制), a FAZI cover by Dear Eloise, is the sound of Wordsworth meeting Galaxie 500 or The Jesus and Mary Chain (spoiler: it works).
Founded in Beijing in 2008 by the former vocalist and bassist of legendary Chinese punk band P.K.14, now married couple, Yang Haisong (杨海崧) and Sun Xia (孙霞), Dear Eloise is known for their lo-fi home studio recordings which traverse shoegaze, noise rock, pop, and experimental music. On this track, Sun Xia’s weightless, delicately abrasive vocals join layered, distorted guitars in a calm yet strangely cathartic ode to childhood and nature: “I count only on the fount of childlike innocence / This innocence the wellspring of adulthood / I count only on the seasons of one lifetime / Bound by reverence to nature / A rainbow in the sky comes into view / My heart leaps in joy.” (Keen observers have noted the verse’s connection to Wordsworth’s “My Heart Leaps in Joy.”) The chorus turns to the theme of control, asking, “Could time still wait for me / Still control you and I?” While what “control” means is unclear — I suspect it is not censorship — I feel content with the noise and indulgence in the question.
Weibo Doom Scroll
A Korean netizen asks, “Are there good places to go in China for mountain climbing? Looking for recommendations.”
Comments say, “Do you really need all that gear for 600 meters? I could climb that in high heels.”
“My ancestors are buried on a higher hill than 600 meters.”
A compilation of why you should never hire uni students on summer break:
I was working at YH Tang 益禾堂 [boba tea place] before and got fired for no reason. I got so mad that I ate all the fruit they were going to prep for the next day, took all the Alice merch they have, hid all the backup phone chargers in the store, and made myself several cups of free boba tea before I left.
I used to work at a spicy hotpot place, and whenever my boss isn’t paying attention, I cram extra food into all the takeout orders. I’ll throw in a giant bucket of veggies on a 20 RMB order.
Worked my summers at Good Me [boba tea place], and when they gave me my paycheck, they didn’t tell me beforehand that I wasn’t getting paid for my one-week internship. I was so mad that I ate the most expensive fruit and drank their most expensive tea every day. I’ve eaten 15 crème brûlées in one sitting.
I quietly killed my boss’s fortune tree 发财树 [a potted tree for fengshui purposes that’s supposed to bring in money].
When I was working summers at Haidilao 海底捞 [hotpot place] the year before last, my boss was a total asshole. So instead of putting down a thick layer of ice and then putting meat on top, I’d just fill plates up with solid meat. Customers would order 150 grams of beef tripe, and I’d give them 500 grams.
#Southern University of Medicine 南方医科大学 explains the situation. A teacher at the Southern University of Medicine faces severe punishment for being late to class because she was busy saving a patient.
Are human lives more important, or are lectures more important? The school’s answer is very clear — lectures are more important.
Lately, on June 16, a teacher at SUM was punished for saving a patient, and the university has since responded to this.
Last month, Professor Yu Li 俞莉 had a patient in her pediatric care who suddenly took a turn for the worse and was in critical condition, with a very high risk of death. She was required to treat what looked like a case of brain bleed. She didn’t think that this would cause her to show up late to her classes that day, and that this would be considered a major teaching incident, causing her to face fines and be publicly criticized in the school newsletter, and even have her chance to get promoted canceled.
Normally speaking, principles like “humans come first” 以人为本 and “lives are the most important” 生命至上 are enough to indicate what a doctor should do in this case. After all, in any emergency situation, a doctor has a duty to put individual lives first. What could be more important than saving lives?
But “humans first” is a double-edged sword. As a doctor, it’s her duty and responsibility to save lives. But on the other hand, she’s also a teacher. Her students are people, too. Their rights to be educated shouldn’t be ignored either.
Both sides are important, so which should be prioritized?
These kinds of cases actually happen a lot at teaching hospitals. To ensure that practice and teaching don’t become disconnected, standardized training is just an entry-level ordeal for medical students. It is painful to grow as a doctor. Once you get used to your suffering, more suffering will come your way.
When you have to deal with surgery and teaching, your double duty will become a heavy burden on doctors, who have to choose whether they’re going to forsake God or forsake their love 不负如来不负卿 [also a line of Chinese poetry]. Even worse, a lot of hospitals attached to universities are a holy trinity. In addition to performing surgery and teaching, a lot of teachers also have research KPI they have to meet. If they want to do everything well, they can only choose to slack off when it comes to teaching.
This ridiculous punishment is the spark that flies when administration and workers collide in this high-stress environment.
When thousands of threads are threaded through one needle, the stronger the pressure in an area, the more rules and responsibilities become vital. In order to make sure the needle lands on the right spot every time, you need a large amount of manpower supervising. They need to be constantly cracking their whip in order to make sure everything goes well on scene. And sometimes, they have to kill the chicken to intimidate the monkeys 杀鸡给猴看.
From this angle, the administration who issued this punishment might not have been wrong. It’s their job to follow the rules within their capabilities. It’s not a requirement of their job to interpret the spirit of the law or to make exceptions. So they very sincerely wrote down, “She didn’t deliberately skip class to save a patient, and Professor Yu Li hurried to the classroom as fast as she could once the situation was resolved, restructured her lecture, and completed her educational goals. No negative impacts have resulted from this.” And then, they continued insisting on punishing the teacher.
This sort of inflexible mindset reminds me of Inspector Javert in Les Miserables. When he saw the protagonist, Jean Valjean, on parole, he immediately began doggedly pursuing him, even making a vow under the stars to never give up, to show his loyalty towards “law” and “justice.”
In a black-and-white world, rules are rules. And even when everyone is saying that obviously, saving the patient should come first, they’ll still insist that it’s still wrong to be late. The rules already allowed for this scenario — this teacher should have called ahead first, and made some kind of backup plan for when she can’t show up to teach.
This reminds me of 1921, when a young woman went to Shanghai to apply to the Beijing Xiehe Medical Hospital 北京协和医学院, and wasn’t able to complete her final English exam because she was busy saving another girl who came down with heat stroke at the exam location. When that girl thought she’d lost her chance forever at becoming a doctor, she received an acceptance letter from Beijing Xiehe Hospital. The examiners believed that, “We can raise countless students with great medical skills, but perhaps not a single student with great medical ethics.”
This girl later became the “Mother of Obstetrics” 万婴之母, Lin Qiaozhi 林巧稚.
Exactly 100 years have passed, and I never thought that this scenario would replay itself in SUM.
I can’t even say that this is even a repeat of history. I just saw four solid walls, and in the corners of these walls are countless exhausted teachers and countless supervisors.
After all, all doctors have to worry about is saving the patient. Administrators have much more they have to think about.
Comments say, “I just think it’s ironic that this was a medical university.”
“This world’s really gone crazy.”
“What the fuck. If she’d just walked away in the middle of that surgery, what kind of incident would that be? What would be the results? How would she be punished then?”
#Southern University of Medicine teacher was teaching international students. This is a coverage of the same news story as above, covering much the same details, with the addition that,
After the incident, some netizens discovered that Professor Yu Li was teaching a class called “pediatrics” [that is, the lesson is in English] for the international students in that school. In 2019, SUM admitted a total of 229 international students, and 100 of them were in Professor Yu Li’s English class.
Red Star News 红星新闻 has called SUM, and nobody picked up the phone. After that, the reporter called SUM’s Children’s Hospital, and they said that Professor Yu Li was not at work that day and refused to answer any further questions.
Comments say, “Oh, I see, we inconvenienced our foreign masters. What a grievous sin. Don’t you know we paid out the ass to invite them here? Wasting their time is like wasting gold.”
“This school’s administration needs to reflect on exactly why they would make such an inhumane decision.”
“Board of Education: She affected China’s image overseas! [doge]”