Chinese techie chooses to live in his car for 4 years despite owning a four-storey house
A Chinese programmer has left many people stunned after revealing that, despite owning a four-storey house in his hometown, he has been living in his car for the past four years. As reported by South China Morning Post, Zhang Yunlai, 41, from Yangjiang in Guangdong province, has embraced an unconventional lifestyle that defies expectations, not for financial reasons, but because he enjoys the freedom it offers.
(Also read: Deaf-mute Chinese student defends her appearance after facing criticism over 'AI-like' look)
As per the outlet, Zhang moved to Shenzhen six years ago for work, initially leading a typical life in a rented flat. He spent around 2,500 yuan (US$340) a month on rent and commuted between his home and office. However, his perspective changed after a camping trip in a park, which led him to reconsider his living arrangements.
Four years ago, Zhang purchased an electric vehicle, and after realising the back seat could fit a mattress, he decided to test out sleeping in the car. The comfort of the air-conditioning and space inside made the idea even more appealing.
Zhang's daily routine involves eating at his company's cafeteria and showering at the gym. After work, he drives to a charging station for his car before finding a quiet park to sleep in. There, he folds down the back seats, lays out his mattress, and settles in for the night. He also praises the park's "five-star" public toilets for washing up.
With an average daily expense of just 100 yuan (US$14), including meals and other costs, Zhang's lifestyle remains remarkably cost-effective. Parking fees are modest, with a nightly cost of 6 yuan (8 US cents) and an additional 20 yuan for office parking.
Despite his savings, Zhang insists that his choice to live in his car is not due to financial hardship. "I do not have much financial pressure. Even if someone offered me free rent, I would not move. The park environment is far better than a typical flat, and it gives me freedom," Zhang shared.
Over the past three years, this lifestyle has saved him about 100,000 yuan (US$14,000). Zhang's four-storey house back home in Yangjiang remains empty, and he returns there weekly to do laundry and spend time with his family.
(Also read: Young people are opting for 'friendship marriages' to escape societal pressures, defy tradition)
Zhang, who previously worked remotely earning over 10,000 yuan (US$1,400) a month, now works as a programmer in Shenzhen, where he earns a much higher salary. However, he remains mindful of his age. "Many programmers are phased out after they reach 35. I am fortunate to still have a job in Shenzhen. I plan to work a few more years and then return home to be with my family," he said.
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Time of India
2 hours ago
- Time of India
China leaders take reins at TikTok Shop in US as sales miss goal
ByteDance Ltd., TikTok 's parent company, has been replacing US-hired staff near Seattle with leaders connected to China, aiming to replicate its e-commerce success in Asia after sales fell short in America. TikTok Shop initially set a goal to increase its US e-commerce business tenfold last year to $17.5 billion in transaction volume, but the company had to drastically lower that goal, according to people familiar with the plan who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk publicly. TikTok established its Shop business in the Seattle area near Inc., the online retail giant it was aiming to displace. Meetings that used to be held in English are now often conducted in Mandarin and managers increasingly write in Chinese when communicating on Feishu, ByteDance's internal Slack-like app, with English-speaking staff forced to rely on the built-in translation function. Play Video Pause Skip Backward Skip Forward Unmute Current Time 0:00 / Duration 0:00 Loaded : 0% 0:00 Stream Type LIVE Seek to live, currently behind live LIVE Remaining Time - 0:00 1x Playback Rate Chapters Chapters Descriptions descriptions off , selected Captions captions settings , opens captions settings dialog captions off , selected Audio Track default , selected Picture-in-Picture Fullscreen This is a modal window. Beginning of dialog window. Escape will cancel and close the window. Text Color White Black Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Text Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Opaque Semi-Transparent Transparent Caption Area Background Color Black White Red Green Blue Yellow Magenta Cyan Opacity Transparent Semi-Transparent Opaque Font Size 50% 75% 100% 125% 150% 175% 200% 300% 400% Text Edge Style None Raised Depressed Uniform Drop shadow Font Family Proportional Sans-Serif Monospace Sans-Serif Proportional Serif Monospace Serif Casual Script Small Caps Reset restore all settings to the default values Done Close Modal Dialog End of dialog window. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Elegant New Scooters For Seniors In 2024: The Prices May Surprise You Mobility Scooter | Search Ads Learn More Undo More than 100 TikTok Shop employees in the US have been fired or have left amid confusion between leaders that has worsened the work environment, according to people familiar with the company. The cultural transition taking place in the company coincides with its fight for survival in the US — due mainly to the app's Chinese ties. A national security law passed by Congress last year requires TikTok's US business to be spun off from its Chinese parent company or it will face a ban. Lawmakers warned that TikTok's ties to China pose a threat to the safety and security of American users. Live Events President Donald Trump has twice delayed the ban — with legal assurances from his attorney general — and another deadline for divestiture looms later this month, though that might also be extended, Wall Street Journal has reported. ByteDance has said it doesn't intend to sell. Discover the stories of your interest Blockchain 5 Stories Cyber-safety 7 Stories Fintech 9 Stories E-comm 9 Stories ML 8 Stories Edtech 6 Stories The TikTok Shop near Seattle in February began requiring workers to be in the office five days a week for eight hours a day, according to a memo reviewed by Bloomberg. The change is in contrast to some other major tech companies that still offer flexible work schedules, and has been particularly burdensome for employees who often join late-night calls with colleagues in Asia after they leave the office, according to former employees. US-based staff require human resources and manager pre-approval to work from home. The changes were introduced after Bob Kang, China-based global head of TikTok's e-commerce division, visited the office in Bellevue, Washington, earlier this year and found there weren't enough staff pressent on a work day, according to multiple people who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. Increasing influence Increasing Chinese influence over TikTok's fastest-growing business may raise questions about its previous corporate promise to distance the US operation from China. After Trump initially tried to ban the app during his first term, the company announced a security plan dubbed 'Project Texas' and vowed to wall off the app's US data and operations from any Chinese oversight. TikTok Shop is the biggest source of revenue for the video-sharing app besides advertising, and it has become a major investment area for ByteDance. Adding full-scale commerce to its eye-catching content and popular influencers sets it apart from rivals like Instagram and YouTube. The company still aims to challenge Amazon in major markets. To better compete, TikTok Shop recruited aggressively near Seattle over the past three years, targeting people with experience at Amazon, according to a review of Linkedin profiles and people who worked at both companies. In some corners of TikTok's Bellevue office of roughly 1,000 employees, the workflow felt like a remix of previous Amazon teams, the people said. But since January, growing tension in the teams below Kang and Nico Le Bourgeois, who oversaw TikTok's e-commerce operations in the US, became a distraction for staff who were often unsure about whose orders to follow, the people said. TikTok's uncertain fate in the US also weighed on morale. The company carried out a round of layoffs in April. A second batch followed in May. In the first round, Le Bourgeois was demoted when Mu Qing, a Chinese executive from ByteDance's e-commerce platform Douyin moved to the Seattle area to run TikTok Shop in the US. After the second bout, Mu sent an internal message saying Le Bourgeois was leaving to pursue other opportunities, according to a copy of the message seen by Bloomberg. Those cuts were intended to improve TikTok's 'efficiency,' according to former employees, though it wasn't clear to staff what factors contributed to a worker's efficiency rating. More like Douyin With these changes, ByteDance leaders are bringing in people who are familiar with what worked for the company in China, where Douyin, its TikTok clone for the Chinese market, has evolved into a $490 billion shopping phenomenon. In addition to Mu, who was the head of Douyin's e-commerce, six other leaders with Chinese backgrounds were appointed in April, according to a different internal memo from Kang viewed by Bloomberg. One challenge is that habits of many American users trend toward passive TikTok scrolling as opposed to making purchases in the app. Some US sellers told Bloomberg that they have also been reluctant to invest in the platform, given the possible ban. The final tally for 2024 sales came in at around $9 billion, according to an estimate by Singapore-based consultancy Momentum Works, far below the internal goal of $17.5 billion in transaction volume. A TikTok spokesperson previously called the $17.5 billion internal goal 'inaccurate.' TikTok Shop's US struggles haven't halted the company's global shopping ambitions. ByteDance in 2021 rolled out e-commerce services in countries including Indonesia, Vietnam and the UK. In Southeast Asia, it's already the region's biggest shopping platform after Shopee, according to Momentum Works. Last year, TikTok Shop opened in five countries in Europe, including Germany and Spain. The Europe expansion was delayed because the company first prioritised US growth, Bloomberg reported. A TikTok spokesperson did not respond to an emailed request for comment for this story. This is a crucial month for TikTok in the US. The company will host merchants and creators in Los Angeles next week for a summit featuring some of the new leaders of the e-commerce unit. The current deadline for ByteDance to sell the TikTok's US operation is June 19 and there have been several interested suitors. The company came close to a possible spin-off in April to a consortium of investors that included Oracle Corp., but the deal was scuttled in part because of Trump's trade war with China. Meanwhile, the churn of e-commerce employment continues in the Seattle area. Current and former TikTok Shop employees told Bloomberg that they get hounded by recruiting messages from Temu , another Chinese e-commerce competitor.
Hindustan Times
2 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Unnoticed, UAE may have curated workable concept for AI regulation
On a recent trip (no secret, to attend the keynote and briefings at Google I/O a few weeks ago), my ears caught the sound of a rather interesting podcast aboard an Emirates A380. Usually these tend to be about food or lifestyle — though the one with Kilian Hennessy is exceptional too — but to have one in which United Arab Emirates' Minister of State for AI, Omar Al Olama talks about his vision of artificial intelligence (AI) regulation, is quite extraordinary. Also because he is the world's first minister for all things AI, appointed in October 2017. His vision is a bit different from everything I've heard from regulators in many countries, including India. Instead of regulation being structured as a restriction, Al Olama's approach lies in a philosophy that hopes to balance innovation with responsibility. Rather than rushing to implement what may prove to be restrictive regulations, since its still early days considering the contours of the AI space evolve almost every other day, the UAE has positioned itself as what Al Olama calls 'a responsible AI nation.' There are five key tenets to UAE's approach to AI, a working blueprint that many other countries could do well to look closely at. First, the UAE aims to become a global leader in AI by 2031. Secondly, there is belief that AI will be a 'new lifeblood' for both governments and the private sector, transforming various industries. Third, the country envisions a future where individuals have multiple digital assistants, potentially reaching PhD-level capabilities. Fourth, UAE is actively seeking international partnerships and investments to strengthen its position as a global technology hub. And lastly, there is a willingness to play a key role in the framing of internationally applicable rules to ensure AI security and safety, as well as build frameworks for protection of personal data and privacy. The fact is simple, Al Olama knows what he is talking about. As far back as in 2019, during a keynote speech at Orchestrating Winning Performance in Dubai, he noted, 'Everyone is talking about AI. Whoever is going to lead in the Artificial Intelligence race will lead the future. This technology will change the world.' Fast forward to 2025, and we have AI which undoubtedly is part of many a workflow for businesses and enterprises, and individuals are learning to trust AI tools more slowly but steadily (whether being careful enough is a debate for another day). In the past few years, UAE has silently gone about meaning business. But there is a demographic change that needs to happen, sooner rather than later, if the country has to achieve its mission. According to the latest UNESCO data, 0.19% of the UAE's population are working as full time researchers in science, technology, and innovation. In contrast, Korea, which leads this metric, clocks in with 0.69%, followed by Singapore (0.66%) and Norway (0.59%). The US finds 0.42% of its population in these roles, while India clocks in with 0.02% (important to note — this percentage is looking worse than it may be, owing to a much higher comparative baseline population number). A few days ago, the UAE released a new Arabic-language AI model, called Falcon Arabic, in an effort to make AI locally relevant and accessible. This is something experts too have talked about. India is working on its own LLM, or large language model. As is Singapore. These are just some examples, in the search of an AI that understands local context and sensitivities more than a global model perhaps might. Falcon Arabic has been trained on a dataset spanning Modern Standard Arabic and regional dialects, and Abu Dhabi's Technology Innovation Institute (TII) claims this model matches the performance of models up to 10 times its size. This model may still find it difficult to match up to the likes of Google Gemini, China's DeepSeek and OpenAI as well as Anthropic's fast evolving GPT and Claude models respectively, but it is a start nonetheless. There is an understanding that isolation, and go-it-alone doesn't work. OpenAI and the UAE are working together for something called the Stargate UAE, a 1-gigawatt AI supercomputing cluster in Abu Dhabi, as part of the AI company's 'OpenAI for Countries' initiative. American tech companies like Oracle, Nvidia, Cisco, and SoftBank, as well as G42, an Emirati artificial intelligence firm, are all part of various AI projects. But it's likely you may have seen excitable headlines about all UAE residents being given free subscriptions to ChatGPT Plus — because that gets the citizens involved. The US sees this as an opportunity too. Tech companies in the US, presently develop the world's most advanced semiconductor chips. The other side of that coin has the UAE that can offer abundant, low-cost energy that is needed to power enormous AI data centres. Back to the regulation approach for a moment. The European Union has pursued comprehensive legislation through the AI Act, which categorises AI systems by risk levels and imposes strict requirements on high-risk applications. They have the GDPR as an example that their regulation methods are thorough, as it is the case here too. But then again, it can also be overly complex for tech companies to navigate, and could stifle innovation particularly for companies with limited resources. The United States has thus far taken a more fragmented approach, with a lack of comprehensive federal legislation, but that could change once the Trump administration gets down to regulating AI. India currently doesn't have rules that regulate AI just yet, but the country is in the process of formulating and implementing policy frameworks to govern various aspects of AI. The blueprint is there for other countries to look closely at, but the UAE has an advantage of geographical size, its political structure and economic positioning that may be difficult for larger countries to work with — getting a consensus may not be as easy there, as would geographic, economic and human limitations that may come into play. But AI regulation is around the bend, just that we may have differing approaches for the time being. (Vishal Mathur is the Technology Editor for HT. Tech Tonic is a weekly column that looks at the impact of personal technology on the way we live, and vice-versa. The views expressed are personal.)
Hindustan Times
3 hours ago
- Hindustan Times
Artificial Intelligence: Human advantage, not replacement
Like many of you, when I first heard the whispers about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and job displacement, a knot formed in my stomach. The headlines were alarming, filled with dystopian predictions of machines taking over. As someone building a company at the forefront of AI, even I had moments of quiet concern. But the deeper I delved, the more I realised something profound: AI isn't the antagonist in this story. It's a powerful new tool, and our relationship with it will define the next chapter of work. My conviction now is this: AI won't take your job. A person who knows how to leverage AI might. It's a subtle but crucial distinction that I believe we're not discussing enough. Cast your mind back a few decades. The introduction of personal computers, then the internet, and later smartphones – each sparked similar anxieties. Yet, what happened? New industries bloomed, new job titles emerged, and human productivity soared. We adapted, integrated these technologies, and ultimately, reshaped the world of work for the better. AI stands at a similar inflection point. Think of AI not as a competitor, but as an advanced collaborator. It's like the most sophisticated spreadsheet you've ever seen, or a super-efficient research assistant. A hammer doesn't build a house; a builder uses a hammer to build a house. Similarly, AI won't write a novel; a writer will use AI to brainstorm, research, or refine. Its strength lies in handling repetitive tasks, processing vast amounts of data, and identifying patterns – freeing us to focus on what humans do best: creativity, critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and complex problem-solving. The real challenge, then, isn't about AI replacing us, but about our collective willingness to learn, adapt, and grow alongside these technologies. The future workforce won't be defined by those who fear AI, but by those who understand it and can harness its power. This isn't solely about learning to code or understanding algorithms, though those skills are certainly valuable. It's equally, if not more, about refining our uniquely human aptitudes. Creativity, empathy, ethical reasoning, strategic foresight – these are areas where human intelligence remains unparalleled. AI can analyse data trends, but it takes a human to interpret those trends, understand their ethical implications, and chart a compassionate course for the future. One of the most exciting aspects of AI, particularly in a diverse country like India, is its potential to foster greater inclusivity in hiring. Traditional recruitment often carries inherent biases, inadvertently limiting opportunities for talented individuals from underrepresented backgrounds or Tier-2 and Tier-3 cities. When deployed thoughtfully, AI can strip away these biases, focusing purely on skills and merit. This is why VolkAI emphasises ATS-friendly resume building and skill-based job matching. It allows talent to shine regardless of their postcode or network, truly democratising access to global opportunities. However, this opportunity hinges on familiarity. If you don't understand how AI is shaping the hiring process, or how to leverage AI-powered tools to present your best self, you risk being left behind. Just as we learned to navigate the internet or use a smartphone, we must now engage with the AI revolution. So, here's my stand: AI isn't the enemy; ignorance is. If we let fear paralyse us, if we refuse to engage with this transformative technology, then we are indeed our own biggest obstacle. The future of work isn't about competing against machines. It's about learning to collaborate with them. The question isn't, "Will AI take my job?" It's, 'How can I make AI amplify my job, my skills, and my career?' The answer is surprisingly straightforward: learn it, embrace it, and make it work for you. The individuals who will truly thrive in this next wave of innovation are those who actively seek to understand and leverage AI. If you're willing to learn and adapt, AI won't just keep your job safe – it will help you forge a more fulfilling and impactful career. As we journey further into this AI era, let's shift our perspective from apprehension to aspiration. AI won't take your job; a smarter you, empowered by AI, will simply create a better one. This article is authored by Santosh Kushwaha, Founder & CEO, VolkAI.
