Travel Across China and Make New Friends
Week June 10 to June 16, 2023
This week we continued our trip across China. It was the first time after the pandemic restrictions were lifted that I and my friend were able to visit. My first time here was in 2019, for only a week, in Changsha, a large city in the central part of China. I was really strongly impressed by mystery, the vastness and the distance that China kept from the world. It did not allow free movement of people, information and goods across it’s borders as most other countries that are open. It’s isolation from the world, at the same time as it’s amazing development in economic and technological areas, was astonishing and unique in the world. It was something that will make one wonder, what will be in the store in the future, how a rapidly growing closed society will engage with the world. Historically this is a recipe for conflict, this fact will cause anyone that is conscious of history highly alarmed. For someone like me, that is from a highly diverse background and a global perspective, it may cause to wonder about the future.
Wuhan has a population of 11.08 million. It is several times bigger than New York City. It has a river running through it and a seemingly endless landscape of skyscrapers.
On Saturday we attended a local developer community meetup. It seems it was previously a Web3 community that opened up to Ai as most of the world attention has turned to this, rightly so, as it is truly transformative on an epic scale. A local developer, entrepreneur and lecturer, presented in Chinese about an open source game with Ai agents and what the philosophy behind this is. I was able to understand some parts from my Google Translate app of the slides. At the end we had some conversations about this in English and I joined the discord and got some links about more information for this project. It sounded really futuristic, of epic proportions, very sci-fi and just like the kind of thing I am interested in. It is an approached based on first principles thinking of human collaboration based on intrinsic motivation of Open Source Software and of human interaction with Ai in new ways.
On Sunday we took a bullet train to Beijing. Unfortunately we miscalculated the departure time and missed it by a few minutes. Luckily there were other trains in the day. We ended up paying extra, but this mistake had a silver lining by giving us the opportunity to talk more on the train and exchange views and philosophy about future plans for development, entrepreneurship and startups.
We arrived on Sunday night. On the next day, we had the typical routine of going to the gym and then lunch and co-working from a cafe.
Our hotel was in an area where there was a lot of Embassies. I went on a morning run and saw the US embassy, with a long line of applicants for the Visa. Nearby was also a nice river, with people fishing and swimming. Alongside there was a path. I went walking along it.
The malls are very big, clean and seem very futuristic. It is a joy to be here. The food was great. I tried to set up WeChat Pay but didn’t manage to do it in time before I had to leave on Wednesday morning. From online research it appears it may be possible to link it to an international bank account, like a Visa or MasterCard Credit Card.
On Tuesday I met with a developer friend I had met online and worked with on a project. He saw my Twitter post about being in Beijing and reached out since he was based here. We met up in a cafe and caught up. It was great to meet someone here and hear a story about an Expat making Beijing their home for 15 years! I love the stories of people that come from various backgrounds and end up in diverse places around the Earth. Our planet is so big and our technology allows us to live and travel anywhere, there are so many adventures awaiting those that haven’t travelled abroad yet!
On Wednesday morning I set off to catch a plane to Kuala Lumpur. My time in Beijing was balanced between focused work on my coding for my freelance contract work and exploring the city. It was truly an unforgettable experience and I wish to come back soon for longer!
I had a quick stop over in KL and spent a night in a friends apartment in the city. How amazing it is to have friends in different parts of the world! In the cab and on the plane I caught up on my work. I read code when offline.
On Thursday I landed in Ho Chi Minh City. I was happy to be back here. The first two times I came here everything was new and I was amazed. This time I am much more familiar with this city. It is a good place to spend a month dedicated to deep work on a budget.
My hotel is in District 1, in a backpacker area, where there is a lot of good local food, cafe’s and nightlife. The hotel is $97 USD per week for a private room.
The plan for this week and weekend is to write a lot of code on my startups and freelance work, train in Muay Thai Kickboxing, drink good coffee and meet up with friends.
How is Ai Changing Us?
One of the most amazing things I have experienced in the last six months was using this app Lensa Ai to generated fantastic images of me in different kinds of scenes. There is a first principle that ‘seeing is believing’ if you see something, then your mind believes that it is true. Athletes that practice their sport, visualize themselves performing their moves. Our minds don’t differentiate between imagined, real or generated images. Therefore images generated by Ai can extend our sphere of what is possible. Since Ai is advancing at an exponential pace, if we now have the ability to generate these images that are so realistic of our selves, then soon we will be able to generate hyper realistic videos, sound and full text content. Soon there will be whole tripe A films with you in the starring role generated from prompts and a few pictures of yourself. How will this change us? I think it will expand our minds to be open to new possibilities and new kinds of evolution of our lives and our work. This is really exciting and really not something you want to miss out on if you are a developer. This happens with each new paradigm, when a new technological frontier is opened up, and new applications are made possible that can make our lives better. This is the role of the entrepreneur developer, to create tools that make people’s lives better and be rewarded for this.
What are the applications of this right now? I think a major one is for Ai generated social media images. This is a major opportunity for developers. Some examples of solo-preneurs that have had success with this are Pieter Levels, who I already wrote about as being my model for creating startups in my first post. His new startups that he created within the last 6-8 months PhotoAi and InteriorAi generate $55K and $48K monthly recurring revenue respectively. This is still a very early area and there is a lot of space here for solo-preneurs to create startups that leverage this technology in new ways for the public.
