Hong Kong (pop. 7.5m) is somewhat similar to Singapore (pop. 6.1m) which is about 2500 km away: it was a British colony, English is still an official language, cars drive on the left, the currency is also called dollar, there are streets, parks, and places with the familiar names of British queens and kings, there is an MTR and double-decker buses, and of course the way it looks: space is constrained leading to extremely high density living (4th in the world, after Singapore), creating forests of high scrapers, and it's hot an humid.
There are differences too: Hong Kong is part of China, Singapore is a city-state. In Hong Kong 88% of residents speak Cantonese at home, in Singapore 48% speak English, 30% Mandarin and 9% Malay.
For me a big difference was also in bike riding. In Singapore I saw people riding bikes, in Hong Kong - I didn't.
The view of the city from the tram descending from Victoria Peak (552 m):
Day...
...and night with cyberpunk vibes.
A flock of double-decker buses.
This looks dystopian.
It's not rich people living here...
...or here.
This is an interesting church.
Hello double-decker tram.
The only bike I saw in HK is in this photo.
Amazing roots.
This looks utopian.
Tai Chi Garden
The first SARS epidemic was a big deal in Hong Kong. About 300 people died. The second SARS virus killed over 13 thousand.
This was my third or fourth visit to Vienna (pop. 2 million). All were short. This one was the first when I was on my own. Vienna is significant for me, because two of my grandparents were born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, of which Vienna was the capital. They also met, 20-something years later, somewhere in today's Austria, back then Germany, both working for Austrian "bauers" - farmers.
As I was reading now about Vienna, I saw this 1966 photo by Herbály István, and the striking monument (Plague Column) in the middle looked familiar:
Yes, I saw it, I took a photo of it:
But, you know what, there is no road there anymore. That street is pedestrianised. I walked there. This is my photo taken from the opposite direction. You can just see the monument in the bottom left corner:
So, what is my impression of Vienna? It's a rich city. You can see that it was a capital of an empire. The buildings are grand, the ornamentations are elaborate. There is a feeling of great wealth:
Vienna World Museum
Francis I, Emperor of Austria, 1824 - in Latin, in gold letters. In the text below, the date is written in old-style Latin: MDCCCCXVI - I was taught to write it like this: MDMXVI - 1916.
Golden eagle on a pole.
Urania, named after the Greek muse of astronomy, originally opened as a public education institute and observatory under the patronage of Emperor Franz Joseph I.
I still don't like the architecture of old Vienna, because I feel uneasy, like in a maze: buildings are tall, streets narrow and curvy, I cannot see the way out, I feel trapped:
The new developments are much more human friendly (open, green, bike-friendly) from the little I saw:
The public transport network is great: trains, metro, trams, buses:
I would like to explore the new neighbourhoods of Vienna more. There is ongoing work to make the centre of Vienna better:
There is some ugliness too, mainly graffiti:
A few interesting photos:
The flag of two Austrian regions (Tyrol and Upper Austria) is the same as flag of Poland: white-red. Btw, the flag of Czech Republic used to be white-red until 1992.
In December 2011 I wrote that forgetting is the key to AI. I still stand by it. To function independently, robots will have a compact offline model (intelligence) plus, limited memory (short term and long term), and a hierarchy of goals (meaning of life). The long term memory will need to be purged periodically (sleep) and the model retrained (learning).
In January 2012 I read "Facing the Singularity", and concluded that if we cannot ensure that AI is friendly to us, we need to ban its development.
In April 2012 I wrote that I was scared by the progress in humanoid robots and AI development. Boston Dynamic's PETMAN looked like this then:
In October 2012 I read "Google Speaks" where I found this quote by Larry Page: "Google will fulfill its mission only when its search engine is AI-complete. You guys know what that means? That's artificial intelligence."
My longest running prediction, since 1999, has been the time until roughly human level AGI. It’s been consistent since then, though last year I decided to clarify things a bit and put down an actual distribution and some parameters. Basically, I gave it a log-normal distribution with a mean of 2028, and a mode of 2025. Over the last year computer power has increased as expected, and so it looks like we’re still on target to have supercomputers with 10^18 FLOPS around 2018. In terms of neuroscience and machine learning, I think things are progressing well, maybe a little faster than I’d expected. I was toying with the idea of moving the prediction very slightly closer, but decided to play it safe and keep the prediction unmoved at 2028. With many people thinking I’m too optimistic, showing restraint is perhaps wise 🙂 I can always move my prediction nearer in a year or two.
Two days ago, Boston Dynamics and Google's DeepMind announced a partnership. The prototype of the new Atlas that walks "like it’s going to steal your girl":
Boston Dynamics is planning to make about 30 thousand Atlas units in 2026.
Boston Dynamics was the pioneer and is the best known, but there are multiple robot companies planning to ramp up production in 2026. They are primarily Chinese and American. Out of a plethora of Chinese robot makers I will show these: Unitree, Xpeng, EngineAI, and UBtech:
Unitree may become another DJI (a leader in flying drones). They make multiple humanoids:
The smallest and cheapest R1: 121 cm tall, 25 kg:
Bigger and heavier G1: 127 cm tall (Basic), 35 kg:
And a full-size human H2: 180 cm tall, 70 kg:
XPeng is an electric car maker, who made a robot that many thought was a person in a costume, so then they had to cut the fabric open on stage:
IRON: 178 cm tall, 70 kg:
EngineAI introduced T800 using a video made like a movie, and subsequently many people thought it was CGI, so they released the backstage video:
T800: 173 cm tall, 75 kg:
UBtech created a stir with a video of their freshly made robots marching into shipping containers. They also were accused (wrongly) of using CGI.
Walker S2: 176 cm, 70 kg:
..........
The world changed in November 2022, when OpenAI released ChatGPT.
We, programmers, always had to cope with a constantly changing work environment: new languages, new tools, new platforms, new frameworks, new libraries. We were still coding though. With AI, we got help: first a smarter search - we no longer google or ask questions on StackOverflow - our source of solutions for all problems, not so long ago:
Number of questions asked per month. Jeff Atwood left in 2012.
Then AI was a more intelligent auto-complete, a unit test generator, an API implementer, a smart colleague who can introduce us to a new framework or concept and build a prototype for us, a senior developer who can find a bug that we struggled with for weeks, the pace accelerated so much that even the people at the bleeding edge are feeling behind:
Andrej Karpathy worked as a director of AI at Tesla, co-founded OpenAI, taught AI at Stanford.
In November 2025 Anthropic released Claude Opus 4.5, which may be a superhuman-level AGI for coding - it's better at coding than 100% of programmers who applied for a job at Anthropic.
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