Decided not to post a single link as there are tons of different articles about different aspects of it on Wikipedia. It's a whole thing!

• Exclusive mandate - Republic of China (Taiwan) and People's Republic of China

• Administrative divisions of Taiwan

• Kuomintang

• Kuomintang's retreat to Taiwain

• 1992 consensus which established semi-official dialogue between ROC and PRC

It seems like this is a leftover from the Chinese civil war and/or Chiang Kai-shek's authoritarian and murderous rule because one of the above articles does mention that these territorial hopes haven't been worked towards for many years:

Originally placing high priority on reclaiming the Chinese mainland through Project National Glory, the KMT now favors a closer relation with the PRC and seeks to maintain Taiwan's status quo under the Constitution of the Republic of China. The party also accepts the 1992 Consensus, which defines both sides of the Taiwan Strait as "one China" but maintains its ambiguity to different interpretations.

It goes further back than that though, probably to 1966 when Project National Glory was abandoned:

[invasion of mainland China] as the initial stage of reunification was effectively abandoned after 1966, although the Guoguang planning organization was not abolished until 1972. The ROC did not abandon the policy of using force for reunification until 1990.

Thought this was all quite interesting, so I wanted to share! It is not exactly light reading though so I also wanted to ask for documentary recommendations about this, and of the Chinese civil war in general, if anybody knows of any good ones?

Don't mind me, just finding myself going into a lot of Wikipedia rabbit holes lately 😊

The New Yorker has a provocative article asking the question "Can We Talk To Whales?" It boils down to utilizing language learning models to process a dataset of sperm whale clicks, their codas, and crossing one's fingers to see if "ClickGPT" can produce actual sperm whale language.

Which makes me wonder if a language learning model been given a library of Chinese sounds and ideograms, without context, then communicated in workable Chinese?

Using a language learning model to learn to speak to whales is an interesting idea, but I'm thinking any LLM assigned the task will wind up chunking out a word salad or something akin to Prisencolinensinainciusol. I'd like to learn more.