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The Dutch have a saying: it's better to have stolen something well than to have invented something bad.

I'm kinda confused given that they're from China. The Chinese Internet is very different from the western Internet. The web is way smaller, and a lot of useful content is behind app-based walled ecosystems such as Wechat, Douyin and Xiaohongshu. This makes web automation much less useful. And I don't see them marketing something like Wechat automation?

I'd like to see a serious HN discussion thread about WAIC first.

Lots of fake news out there, but you don't need to speculate any longer. Key takeaways from President Xi's speech in his first ever appearance at the World AI Conference in Shanghai:

- Started the speech by referring to his signature maxim, "great changes unseen in a century are unfolding across the world"

- Said that the world has "entered an unprecedented period of active innovation on AI technology", which means "great opportunities as well as challenges for governance”

- reaffirmed commitment to open source to promote AI "openness and win-win"

- warns against "over stretching" the concept of national security as applied to AI where one country's national security is prioritised over others

- China opposes emergence of “new historical injustices” in AI (one of the most strongly worded parts of the speech)

- China in next 5 years will provide 5000 opportunities to developing countries in "AI training and seminar programmes" and "cooperation centres" - names ASEAN, League of Arab States, African Union, CELAC, SCO and BRICS

Live blog: https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3360858/chinas-xi-j...

Complete translation: https://x.com/i/status/2077984062933762450

You don't even need that, all models are susceptible to prompt injection. You already need to take extreme security precautions and assume all models can essentially behave like attacker-controlled rootkits.

There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion, opinions always contain some sort of value judgement. Besides, training data contains biases.

What is plausible is that they haven't made any attempts to explicitly steer certain opinions into a certain direction, and just let the model take over the bias of the training data, whatever that may be. Filtering in the front end is the easy, lazy way out to be legally compliant.

Furthermore we should thank the amount of fossil fuel and CO2 reduction that HSR has given, or the planet will be really in trouble.

What from I understand the issue is mainly service frequency rather than fuel efficiency.

Also, the domestic commercial jet market is still sizable, so excluding the domestic market from analyses is kinda weird.

Finally, lots of countries are spooked by arbitrary US sanctions and want to diversify.

Doesn't matter. Getting entangled up in a court case that lasts years is hassle enough by itself that it's effective as an attack.

Their terms of service already effectively attacks people for criticizing Anthropic. It says that if you use Claude to criticize Anthropic, then you've pre-agreed to pay for their lawyers going after you, and pre-agreed to lose the court case.

I can't reply to your reply so let me do that here.

In Netherlands, the government wants to reduce emission, so it incentivizes people to isolate their homes better, and to use heat pumps instead of gas heating. On the other hand, if you actually try to install a heat pump, you'll run into all sorts of regulation issues: the unit can't be too big, there are only a few specific places where you're allowed to place it, a ton of people can object to it, permitting takes years if at all. Oh and if you isolate your house, then voila, during the current heat wave it's a constant 35 C in your home. So you try to install AC and you run into permitting/regulation issues. So you then use a super inefficient portable AC that just barely lowers the temperature by 3 C and uses 4x more energy, and that's fine. facepalm

And the government and banks also want to combat money whitewashing, so they incentivize people to use digital payments and discourage cash. Police could look at you suspiciously merely for having too much cash on hand. On the other hand, NATO and also a bunch of government agencies are warning about war and encouraging people to have lots of cash at home for emergencies.

"They" do not "clearly" want one or the other. Different government branches can have different, conflicting priorities.

The Netherlands is tiny. China has 1.4 billion people, and its state apparatus is orders of magnitude bigger. Forget about coordinating the population, even coordinating the tens of thousands of local government bodies has always been a huge problem. All the previous dynasties have said that governing such a large country is a nightmare.

Xi is not personally in charge of the censorship bureau. The top government sets broad direction and KPIs, while local governments and government agencies are given a lot of leeway for implementation as they see fit. And frankly you cannot run a large organization any other way — there is no large company in the world where the CEO micromanages everything without burning out. The KPI is "social stability", and as long as this is kept and there are no grave problems like corruption, it's not the top government's job to dictate how the censorship bureau do their work. Of course, you may be of the opinion that something like "freedom of speech" is more important than "social stability", but the point is that they value "social stability" more, and that they're motivated by that, and by not some idea of "suppressing freedom". This ties directly into my point of properly understanding them.

Furthermore, many people tend to be risk averse, and would rather instinctively deny something than to take chances. There was a famous scene in the Jiang Zhemin days in which Jiang said something frank in some meeting with a foreign politician. Then the cameraman was like "uuh should we record this?" and his boss was immediately like "no, cut it away". Then Jiang said "why shouldn't we record this? of course this should be recorded!" This risk-averse attitude is still pervasive in a lot of places. It's not just DeepSeek that's "paranoid", everybody implementing censorship rules is paranoid similarly. On Xiaohongshu/RedNote they don't want you to talk about societal issues at all, even "positive" things like "I think Taiwan belongs to China" — they recently banned a Taiwanese's account for saying stuff like that, they want you to focus on travel and food or whatever. This attitude likely won't change until the current censorship bureau generation retires, and gets replaced with the next generation that's more confident.

Finally, whatever Poland did pre-1989 has absolutely nothing to do with China. There are no similarities in motives or circumstances. You can't just lazily lump random Soviet-era countries together with China just because you give them both the "communist" label. China's adaptation of and motivation for adoption of communism is wholly different from the Soviet Union.

Chinese censorship rules are not about criticizing vs praising the state. They are about avoiding any kind of social controversy or collective action. They don't care when you talk about these topics in private or small circles, even criticism is fine, they just don't want them to spread far no matter whether it's positive or negative.

The fifth book is on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/XI-JINPING-GOVERNANCE-CHINA-V/dp/7119... It's already an English translation.

For something shorter, you can see Arnaud Bertrand's recent review. https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-book-the-west-refu... The review is behind a paywall, but not expensive.

If you want to read policy documents directly (primary source), try the State Council / Chinese government policy database: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/ and https://sousuo.www.gov.cn/zcwjk/policyDocumentLibrary

They also provide official translations: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/

For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.

The Thucydides Trap mention is different from what you describe. Xi has dismissed the Thucydides Trap multiple times in the past as being hearsay and self-imposed bias (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/944179.shtml). "We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias. There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."

But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.

Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.

It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.

This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.

Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.

The standard is applied very inconsistently. Nobody accuses the local bakery of being motivated by profit, and that they don't bake bread for you out of altruism.

That's not meaningfully different from philanthropy. If Chinese AI products generate sufficient revenue with cheaper marketing strategies, then the incentives for releasing open models will go away.

Right now, there is a shortage of talented researchers, and the attention that open models generate allow them to attract good hires. But this is a fragile dynamic that can break in the future. It's not very different from commercial open source work, except it's much more capital intensive and lower volume.

When their CRM and support systems are improperly secured, it doesn't bode well for the security of their vaults. When attackers infiltrate one system, it's easier to laterally move to other systems.

Also, their marketing systems are also a mess. I've unsubscribed from their marketing emails multiple times, but to date I'm still getting marketing emails from them even though I'm no longer a customer. Even contacting their support about this issue hasn't helped.

If someone hacks you

Transactions are protected by 2FA, they have to steal your phone and know your bank password. Whereas with credit cards, you have a single shared secret (number + CVC) with all merchants. Just one merchant needs to leak it.

Things like 3D Secure only work if the merchant supports it. I still regularly encounter shops that don't trigger the 3D Secure prompt at all.

How is "money in digital form" different from money on your bank account, which is also digital?

??? Doesn't Europe already have Wero (iDEAL in Netherlands)? That's a system for making online payments. Money gets directly debited from your bank account.

I've always found credit cards stupid. You just want to pay for something, and then suddenly you have a debt. You shouldn't be in debt when you can clearly pay with money you have. Credit card companies advertise with "super easy payments" and "buy now pay later" but at the same time the government warns all the time that "lending money costs money". Also, if your credit card number and CVC get leaked, then anybody can steal any amount of money, and your only recourse is to regularly check your statements and warn the bank within a month. Whereas with Wero/iDEAL you must authorize the exact transaction at that exact amount.

Supposedly, Americans have these "credit card rewards" loyalty program things. Doesn't exist in Europe. You can only pay, you don't get any bonuses. Which makes the only reason to have a credit card is to be able to pay in web shops that don't accept Wero/iDEAL.

Web developers already have to deal with different browsers, versions and API coverage.

This makes no sense. Epoll is already non-blocking, you never waste time waiting for I/O as long as there is work to do. Io_uring only boosts CPU efficiency (batching of syscalls, for example), it does not reduce blocking.

With such ridiculously long thinking traces I'm surprised max outperforms high. After all, performance falls off a hill after a certain amount of context, and long thinking traces can fill that up really quickly.

On top of that, I see more and more people actively resisting what they call "the degrowth mind virus". For example levelsio on Twitter. He regularly complains about EU environmental regulations and the lack of AC, or inability to set it to lower than 22 C. He sets it to 18 C (which is too cold for me to sleep, but his cup of tea I guess). And regularly posts about how hot temperatures make people dumber and drive down productivity.

What I don't see is these anti-degrowth people discussing substance with pro-degrowth people. No discussions about the merits of the idea that planet's carrying capacity has been reached or exceeded. Both camps seem to treat their thesis as a given, a religion even.

Can anyone explain to me what a merge is and why that works? It seems utterly bizarre to me that you can just merge weights. You can't make a working program by just merging machine instruction pages. Aren't weights tightly coupled to a specific architecture?

I am Chinese myself, I did learn Chinese history, and I find the idea that China was — in your words, maybe not British Empire advanced, but "redeemably" advanced — and that things would have gone well if only the communists didn't ruin things, to be utterly ridiculous. It sounds like a post hoc rationalization to feed the goal of casting the CPC as bad, while ignoring the hordes of historical evidence and living experiences of people who can testify that the Republican era was pretty horrible and was in no way on track to growth and recovery without the communists. The Republic was a failed state. If those guys were so good then the population wouldn't have overwhelmingly supported the communists. Your dictinction between "the communists" and the population is entire artificial and goal-driven. The population at large were "the communists". They wouldn't have become so if everything else worked so great. Communism was chosen out of desperation in the hopes that it would save China, after everything else failed.

After 100 years of disaster, war and poverty, people needed time to figure out how to govern well, things didn't just happen and kumabaya with "freedom". If you think the Great Famine was uniquely bad, you should compare with at all the famines during late Qing and Republic.

When western allies gave Qindgao to Japan, completely violating any earlier agreements with the Republic, it enraged the population so much that support for the communists spiked. I find things really puzzling... the west helped create the communists' popularity, and when things suited the west geopolitically they would cast the communists as the good guys. Now that the west feels threathened, people happily forget the parts of history that don't suit them, and cherry-pick other parts to create a distorted narrative. Where's the intellectual honesty that they taught me at school and is supposed to be the heart of Enlightened ("western") values? Voltaire would be rolling in his grave.

Art, science, poetry, fashion, literature, philosophy, culinary arts it was all present and pretty cutting edge up until the communist party ruined things.

You are really, really overselling the state of the late Qing and the Republican era. My wife's grandparents are older than the PRC, and things pre-communism were not as you describe, to put it lightly.

I actually think this is an intentional strategy

I think you need to look into why it's the poor rural population and not the elite urbanites that overwhelmingly support the communist party.

You can actually do it. If you don't live in the US, you can probably visit visa free tomorrow and just talk to a bunch of rural elderlies to test your hypotheses.

Sorry, splitting up does not work for China, politically, geographically and culturally. Peaceful and prosperous times only come when there's a strong central government. If any current government advocates for splitting up, then they'll be toppled in no time and replaced with new guys, maybe even warlords, who strive for a united China. "The land, long divided, must unite. The land, long united, must divide."