That’s an interesting thought, but maybe Neuralink. I don’t know.

No.

I haven’t been to Singapore. I can’t answer that.

Well, the Daoist isn’t quite opposed to anything. That’s the thing with Daoists, right? We’re always making space so that opposition can grow into common values and innovation. I think that’s something that a Confucian approach works, too, except for the Confucianism that is by coding, essentially, the rites, the ...

Well, that’s a really good question, isn’t it? Well, I don’t know. I’ve read, of course, An Anarchist FAQ, the anarchists’ handbook online, and also The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which may or may not count as anarchist. That, of course, has really left an impression to me. I think the main ...

Well, of course, I watch the artwork done within the Taiwanese renaissance of filmmakers and books and so on, but I wouldn’t say that any of them influenced me to such a high degree as the classics have. So I’ll probably have to say that of course I’m influenced one ...

I enjoyed The Three-Body Problem trilogy. That’s contemporary Chinese fiction, isn’t it?

Of course, there’s not only the Tao Te Ching, there’s this whole literary tradition that began with Laozi. Chuang Tzu, of course, is of a lot of influence to me. The collection of poems the Shih Ching, also, and of course also the I Ching, the original binary thinking. Of ...

I just read again the Mandarin translation of Ted Chiang’s novel, collection, Exhalation. I already read the English one, but the translation book just arrived, so I read that again. And so, that’s on the margins. I learned about The Lifecycle of Software Objects and so on. I think that ...

Well as of now, of course. But of course, I’m also growing, like a distributed ledger.

The Amis because I think they’re a matriarchy and so quite useful to remind people that in Taiwan, with more than 20 national languages, there’s various different gender stereotypes going on. And once you have 20 different stereotypes, it becomes a rainbow, and it helps people to break out of ...

I really feel liberated from a written culture, that this orally preserved culture really takes me out of this human-centric point of view, in the view that the mountains and rivers are long-lived spirits and we’re just transient stewards that work with them. I think that really has influenced my ...

The indigenous communities that I’m more familiar with is the Atayal and the Amis, the former because I spent quite a few months actually, if not a year, right after dropping out of the middle school, because my mom was co-founding experimental primary school in the Atayal mountains in collaboration ...

Well, I think the rough consensus is that you can consult the Michelin Guide, which operates in Taiwan in a lot of municipalities. But of course, being an oyster vegetarian, the majority of which is I don’t really pursue. You have to be your own guide.

Well, maybe the food is good, and bubble tea helps too.

Well, of course, that means that we see democracy as a set of technologies, social technologies. To us, technologies are not always industrial; it could also be social. The set of constitutional amendments, of which another one or few is going on right now, shows that even the constitution, the ...

If you think only of the cryptocurrency applications, I don’t think that it will overtake the central bank anytime soon in Taiwan. I think it only is of value in the cryptocurrency sense if the people have very low trust in the fiat, in the central bank. If you mean ...

That’s exactly right. Blockchain is just one implementation of a broad swath of technology known as distributed ledgers or DLTs, and relational databases, again, could be distributed. If people want easy accountability or auditability, they can use some of the technologies originated from blockchain. In that sense, Git is a ...

What’s the killer app for relational databases, again?

Well, it will just keep growing, I guess.

Well, it is, of course, comedic. It makes fun of people. But to me, humor is makes fun with someone or makes fun of oneself.

I don’t think that’s humor, by the way.

We know that humor is not the same as sarcasm, for example, or as toxic attacks that make fun of someone. A humorist makes fun of oneself or makes fun with someone, but it’s never a kind of aggression. When I say humor, I mean specifically humor and not any ...

The idea is that before people go to sleep, even if they see both the conspiracy theory, they also see this humor because it travels very quickly, go viral. By the time that they go to sleep and form long-term associations in their minds with the keywords such as masks ...

For example, this one is about mask, and this says, “Why do you wear a mask?” “Well, to protect yourself from your own unwashed hands.” Say that’s a very individualistic incentive. Or, “Why do you observe social distancing when you find it hard to measure?” “We’re measuring it in terms ...

The trending rumors are met with fact-checkers almost immediately. And our ministries, who has teams of participation officers who talk to hashtags . . . The Ministry of Health and Welfare participation officer literally lives with this dog and so can meet the rumors within a couple hours, and wrote ...

In Taiwan, whenever there’s a trending, even end-to-end encrypted channels disinformation campaign, there are people who voluntarily report that, just like flagging email as spam — dedicated not to the government, certainly, but to the social sector, with a crowdsource fact-checking mechanism called Coach facts and also the Taiwan FactCheck ...

Use humor over rumor.

Well, first of all, I’ve done a tremendous amount precisely because I design the spaces for the people who care about things to make things happen. Certainly not me, personally, that have done those things; I just hold the space. The second is that laziness also means that you do ...

Laziness.

Well, I think the better parts of themselves are shown much more visibly. That is to say, if they have an agenda that benefits humankind or the planet or the cosmos, they are much more likely to share it because it’s also performative. They understand that people from the future ...

Well, these two are certainly orthogonal. I can imagine being radically transparent but deliberately moving in a very slow fashion and only act on the lowest of the lower-hanging fruits, I can see merits in that too. I can also see, of course, this slow-moving part being non–radically transparent, and ...

But it could also be directed into co-creation — that is to say, make new institutions so that the old problems that provoked your rage in the first place do not happen again. That’s how democracy grows. I’m also pro-outrage, actually.

I don’t know, because outrage is the beginning of social movement. The thing is, where do you direct the outrage to? If it’s directed to revenge — that is to say, hurting imaginary or real people — or if it’s directed to discrimination, which is lowering other people’s social status ...

Well, going into a rage may also be cathartic.

What’s a personality type at all? Like horoscopes?

I don’t know. You can check the Pugs.hs repository to see them.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Yes, I think so, because when I was 20 years old, I would wake up, log in to the Perl IRC channel — that’s Internet Relay Chat — and type “riverrun”, and then a bot will just paste a random paragraph, literally a random paragraph from Finnegans Wake, which would ...

Well, because it’s very complex and complicated, and I can enjoy it without understanding it, just treating it as lyrics like a notebook, literally a book of notes.

Just like the example I mentioned of the Singaporean app with Filipino workers in Taiwan buying grocery for their families. It’s by its very nature, three different overlapping jurisdictions, and all have a governing interest in it. It’s a reality, and GDPR is part of that reality.

The other view, of course, is based on the infrastructure where the data is collected, where the data is used, and the name of data localization and even sovereignty. We have heard that word, too, when used on data borders.

Right, theoretically, it’s even extraterrestrial. For these European astronauts, and so on, they’re still regulated by the GDPR. I think there’s two things going on here. One is about the data norm. For the EU citizens, it extends by the framework of human rights, and therefore, of course, travels with ...

I’m saying that all of society deliberation, the style of the 2014 Sunflower, needs to happen for the society to come to a common value about these sort of things, and this is what we call data norm. Do you think it is normal for facial recognitions and such data ...

We decided, eventually, that making the infrastructure components in the PRC while they’re a state subsidy looks quite lucrative. Amortized is actually a higher overall cost of ownership because you have to reassess for each upgrade whether the state have already taken over that so-called private phantom.

Take a systemic risk system approach. Do what the Taiwanese people did in 2014, which is, people on the street deliberated with their own experience working with people who are from the PRC, coming to a consensus on the street, that there’s no pure private-sector companies in the PRC, and ...

I think, again, this is not about excluding people from participating in work. It’s about expanding the idea of face-to-face meetings and the empathy and rough consensus that we can form and scale it to the more remote places. It’s not a replacement. It is an augmentation to the face-to-face ...

I’ve never been to Cupertino, so all my work with Apple for six years were telework, so I’m biased. I think it’s pretty smooth, and if we don’t like the tools that we’re using for telework, we just make the tools better. That’s the main idea about open innovation, in ...

Well, working from a distance does not mean that you don’t meet people face to face. It only means that we transcend space boundaries when we’re talking to each other. If it is something that you can opt into, then, of course, there are places and ways of work that ...

Well, that may be the case because in Taiwan, the most popular Reddit equivalent is the PTT. It’s still terminal-based. It’s like a late ’90s version of the bulletin board system. We do see that it leads to better discourse qualities.