YHK - yet another hacker news clone

When you are in the 75%ish of the US, it's very easy to make a case that life in the US is better. But we don't really talk about that because it's pretty taboo when poorer people are struggling much more than they would in Europe.

Edit - never mind, I'll do it, HDI in order:

Iceland, Norway, Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Finland, UK, US, Slovenia, Austria, Luxembourg, France, Spain, Czechia, Italy, Greece, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Portugal, Croatia, Latvia, Slovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Russia, Belarus, Bosnia, Moldova, Ukraine

To put that into context, Moldova is on par with Ecuador, Tonga and Dominican Republic.

The US is a country of roughly 340 million people with an HDI above Austria.

I'm frustrated, not bitter. Americans are acutely aware of falling behind China, and rightly concerned about it. Europe is falling behind Alabama, Mexico, and Brazil, and arrogant about it.

I wonder if this is actually true. I see very few Americans taking every possible opportunity to make bombastic statements about how their lives are better than everyone else's (at least on HN). This conversation seems quite asymmetric from my perspective.

> Maybe you're just bitter?

This comes off as psychological projection.

Freedom of speech.

> "Look at the actual practice."

The UK does not have that? The situation in the UK is very obtuse. It is confused.

Also, at least here in Brazil, the way the constitution is amended is by patching it. For instance, our constitutional amendment number 115 (https://www.planalto.gov.br/ccivil_03/constituicao/emendas/e...) patches article 5 of the constitution to add protection of personal data as a right. But we wouldn't talk about "amendment 115", we would instead talk about "article 5 item LXXIX of the constitution"; that is, what matters is the patched text, not the law that patched it.

I don't know about other countries, but it wouldn't surprise me if they take a similar approach.

DeepSeek is basically a research lab founded by a hedge fund guy, more than anything else.

Its very xenophobic of you to say China has zero intention of helping humanity, and just wants to "wage economic warfare".

Last time I checked, it was ourselves (USA) waging economic warfare on 2/3rds of the world.

I dont get this cope people have where people have this idea that its impossible for a Chinese company (that make billions of dollars) to have done something by their own merit, but instead its always some Chinese Communist Party conspiracy where the main goal is to destroy America.

Lay off twitter for a bit.

We hear this about literally every industry the Chinese excel in - that it's only because the government subsidizes them that they succeed. For chip manufacturing, for batteries, for EVs, for solar, for AI. I don't see how the chinese government can afford to subsidize all of these industries and still have them contribute to the GDP.

There is as much to criticize about American hyper scalers and AI labs and the lack of interest in helping humanity or contributing to open source, but that might not be as popular an opinions on this site.

I think the Chinese government is backing their labs by less direct means. For example cheap electricity and investing in chip manufacturers such as Huawei and cxmt.

Deepseek specifically, is known to operate with minimal resources. The entire company has around 160 employees and every model they release must break even within ten months.

As a neutral party, this characterization is crazy.

As if the AI companies - Claude and OpenAI are guardians of freedom and humanity and very charitable to the global society without any self interests… “Chinese models are subsidized by the Chinese Government, therefore they’re inherently bad for humanity” is a highly propagandist argument. The politics of US vs China may be whatever it is in reality.. You have one company releasing their models for cheap, actually open sourcing their trained weights, and publishing details of their optimizations and learnings for others to use. The other camp actively “aligning” their models, nerfing their capabilities, hyping their swarm activities from poor sandboxes, and trying their best to lock users into their harnesses and walled platforms. They are subsidized by the capitalist VCs who are essentially waiting for their payouts..

At some point, one has to see things for what they are and evaluate their own reasoning..

I’m happy to stay provider agnostic, try all models and cheer any useful progress as open as possible.

There are many other reasons Chinese companies releasing models open-source or open-weight makes strategic sense.

A really easy-to-understand example is a company who has a near-monopoly on "serving video content" releasing a video model openly.

If you can be relatively certain that video content created by a model (which you have trained, using data from your own platform) will be ultimately served on your own platform, thus generating revenue from watch-hours, it makes sense to make those models as widely-available as possible.

It's also a net-positive if people use your public research to build better video models, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-better content those new models produce will be watched on your platform.

The alternative would making models harder to access and learn from (broadly, the current western model). Many would argue that Google, in choosing to not optimise its video generation models for "availability", is directly causing less content to be uploaded to YouTube. This is the trade-off.

I don't know much about DeepSeek's financing specifically, which obviously doesn't release video models - so I don't know how directly this analogy runs, or who directly benefits from the extremely evident rising tide that the public release of DeepSeek's research creates. However, this does not negate the broader rising-tide effect of the scientific method.

It's certainly also true that it's geopolitically beneficial to be able to undercut American labs' models. If I ran a global superpower, I would probably want my country to be technologically competitive too.

But Chinese companies are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace, before even thinking about the US market, and it's overly simplistic to assume that their entire strategy revolves around economic warfare directed specifically at the US. It's more nuanced than that.

This is, of course, without even getting into opening the can-of-worms around whether US economic policy also results in the US state functionally subsidising technological innovation, how comparable that is to China's model, etc.

Why are we assuming a strong US is necessarily good? As a European, I have seen plenty of evidence against that stance lately.

I understand that Americans might prefer a strong US. But conflating them with humanity is a leap that I don't think one can make without any backing.

The government that removed restrictions on how private companies can access capital after a certain scale (the JOBS Act), that removed the need for private companies to report as if they were a public company after a shareholder threshold was crossed, superpowering the access of wealthy private investors to get in earlier in a growing company while at the same blocking the public from participating in funding growing enterprises at an earlier stage (since it required companies to IPO much earlier to access capital) which allowed retail investors to also reap the rewards on funding them early when they grew to become behemoths (like Amazon, Meta/Facebook, Google, etc.).

It's not fair in either place, the USA has its own model of unfairness, China has a completely different one. The difference is that in the USA the government allows private investors to become more powerful than the State (outside of the monopoly of violence) while plunging the rest of society into increasingly more precarious lives while in China the State is the power and its legitimacy only exists while the population feel they have a better life.

The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.

Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]

[0] https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...

Does anyone think that likely? I have no clue or bias.

Yes, because everything China does is against the US. That's all they think about day and night. God forbid they want to corner the global market or have a genuine business case. How dare they provide options for those who can't afford a measly $200 a month? How can we let Chinese labs publish research for free for the whole world so that they can benefit? The nerve! To think they can use soft power instead of military might! I mean, Anthropic and OpenAI are the last bastions of human kindness and charity. Right?

Right?

Notwithstanding that Chinese publishing methods actually does help both humanity and open-source.

You think extremely US-centric. China has a different economic model than US and your rules for a specific kind of Capitalism may not apply to them. You assume a country of 1.4 Billion people is obsessed with a couple of foreign AI companies. What if they don't care.

Charity and kindness is not a motivation, it's an outcome of what you do.

Its them who chose to outsource heavily, not US consumers.

There are no victims here however, both benefited from the arrangement. The consumers and capitalists.

A simple loophole, use the code to create an RLVR environment where the resultant code is the end goal / max reward. Technically the customer data is never trained upon, but effectively you’re using it. Even better, use the code as a seed to generate synthetic data similar to it and use that synthetic data as rewards in an RLVR model.

Unless you can host the ChatGPT model on your own servers, which I know some enterprises are doing, I don’t think there’s any hope of protecting your data / competitive advantage from these frontier companies. Better to be paranoid, than be commodified by these companies.

And yes, open weights are still behind, but are catching up.

"Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

This works fine with Opus 5.5. But it also works fine with GPT 6.1 Sol, Kimi K3 and MiMo 2.6 Pro.

It doesn't work equally well with Sonnet 5.5, interestingly.

Obviously any model will do if you use it as a better autocomplete.

I believe that there is a large gap in expectations between different workflows.

Until the AI like reads my mind and produces perfectly production ready apps with minimal intervention from my side, there is still going to be room for improvement.

This morning I elicited a microkernel operating system from Opus 5.5. Well, mostly. It doesn't implement task switching yet; we'll see if it runs into a wall at some point. But it boots in QEMU, and it's running a user process in ring 3 and serving web pages.

If Opus can’t 1-shot it, then it must rely on our human intelligence which can be complemented well enough with a dumb model as a frontier model.

I'm not actually sure Tesla is a great company from any perspective so should be easy to find another sick burn for them.

Google is going to be a little more difficult. Maybe say something nasty about advertising? Or go for the monopoly angle.