Would you be willing to pay a small sum per piece of content? Maybe 10c per video or article? Maybe 1c for a short or something? Assume that it’s anonymous and frictionless (big assumptions, but this is just a thought experiment).
This has been brought up since the first banner ad went up 30 years ago, and rehashed to death on a variety of forums. The fact that no one has implemented a successful product tells me all I need to know. If that isn't convincing enough, consider that Spotify does the same thing with music, and from what I've read, Spotify is the only one making any money with that scheme. Because your "1 cent" is generous: try 0.001 cent.
Spotify rigs their system to benefit the large label companies and anyone with a critical mass so the people that "matter" say 'good enough' and the people with no voice get screwed.
I suspect an honest implementation could actually work - that is, only if all the people that "matter" would not boycott this fair implementation and go off and do their own thing.
Plenty of us are simultaneously far and near sighted. I can't drive without glasses, but until I got progressive lenses I couldn't use my phone with my glasses on.
If you cannot drive without glasses, the sensible thing is to keep a backup pair in the car. After all, glasses can fall off and get lost under the seat, get stepped on, etc.
Similarly, if a FAA-licensed pilot requires glasses to fly, it becomes a legal requirement that they carry a readily-accessible second pair while exercising the privileges of their license. This even applies if they use contacts (and, no, extra contacts don’t count :).
It is also a requirement for international flight operations under ICAO regulations. I’m pretty sure this regulation (or something close to it) is enforced by just about every flight-licensing authority worldwide.
It’s plain good sense and I’m glad it’s in there. A plane cannot pull over to the side of the highway while the pilot fumbles around trying to dig his glasses out from under the seat :)
(As a side note, this rule isn’t just for dropped spectacles: there have been cases where they literally get sucked out of the airplane if a cockpit window fails or where a bird strike causing facial injuries also damages the pilots glasses).
Still doesn't address the fact that if the glasses fail mid drive it poses a serious security risk if you can't pull over to switch glasses. Doing so in a highway in a moving car is inadvisable regardless of the technology behind the glasses.
On the contrary, if you are a perfect driver and only reach for you glasses, that adds a small risk. But this is a complex system, driving and multitasking, so added complexity surely compounds, maybe even exponentially. If you are texting, then talking to your kids, then your brother next to you starts blasting loud music on the radio, adding another task like changing glasses increases the risk of an accident a lot, because less and less you are concentrated on the traffict.
That's a smart idea, similar to how I keep a little cash in the car just in case. For example, I could get something in my eyes and have to remove my contacts, and an old pair of glasses would let me get home.
According to the article the technology can be incorporated into normal prescription lenses, and when the battery is empty, it would behave as that lens without any adaption for when focusing near stuff.
It's not a crisis if you cannot read your dash. How often do you look at the oil pressure gauge, for example? As for speed, just move with the traffic.
I had a car with a broken dash. The only thing I missed for the month until I fixed it was the fuel gauge. I probably didn't estimate my speed very accurately but I was close enough to not get a ticket.
Yes, with my old cars I've had broken dashes, too. I discovered I maintained speed by the engine pitch - because when I drove a silent car, I couldn't seem to maintain a consistent speed!
As for the gas gauge, the trick is to reset the local odometer at every fillup, and you'll have an indication of the remaining fuel. Some older cars don't even have a fuel gauge, they just have a lamp that glows when it gets low.
I my case I tore the dash apart because the speedometer wasn't working, and the odometer is connected to that. Only after tearing the dash apart could I see the cable to the transmission wasn't turning. Until I found the real problem there wasn't a hurry as I removed the cable several times before I found what was really broke.
Yes, it is a problem. There should be no controversy about saying that clear vision reduces distractions and confusion when operating something.
If you want to talk specifics, you’re supposed to be able to see your speed and how your car is performing. You should be prepared for contingencies, like your temperature changing or a yellow/red warning on the dash. You may need to deal with a problem in the car, like grabbing something that could slide under the pedals.
The same goes for farsighted driving. Yes, in most cases you could just follow traffic and you wouldn’t need to read street signs or look at traffic a mile ahead. But you need to be prepared for unexpected situations, and you’ll generally do worse just mentally managing your reduced vision.
I’ve driven without my glasses and tested an unexpectedly bad trial prescription in a car, if it matters.
I think the car is 100% a use case. There are plenty of driving bifocals - they address the need to see the road, but also see the dashboard and controls.
Also, lots of older people get cataract surgery and can be perpetually farsighted (distance iol chosen)
Basically - building video games is (or seems from the outside) fun and cool, and so there are lots of people who want to do it. In effect, people are willing to be paid in fun, rather than in money. Also, games just generate a lot less revenue overall than boring, run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen SaaS apps. By a wide mile. When you look at these SaaS companies they're generating maybe $1M/yr in revenue per employee (not just developer). Some blockbuster games can achieve that, but not many.
So basically, high supply of labor and relatively lower demand for it in games than in boring business/SaaS software.
99.99% of SaaS could only dream of the revenue of GTA5, and this post is about GTA6. It generates more revenue than famous SaaS unicorns like Notion and Figma.
China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't - but if they keep building power infrastructure and the US doesn't, then it will no longer require subsidy from them. It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.
China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
I'm not sure how much of it is subsidies. If the open weight models are anything to judge by, China is taking price performance seriously, and the US model vendors are looking for performance at any cost. Like any other Pareto optimization, we end up paying 10x more for the last few percent improvement on benchmark scores.
Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.
Also, of course, China's way ahead of the US on things like renewables, batteries, and electrification of their economy. All of that feeds into cheaper power to run the models, but I suspect it's a second order effect vs. "improve the software".
They also banned crypto mining which previously was using the free to cheap electricity, so if AI data centres are using those now under utilised supply, very possible subsidies are very low.
This is my read as well - Chinese labs don’t really seem to believe in AGI and instead the focus is on optimising the transformer architecture so it can be actually useful for specific tasks, ideally at a low cost
not just renewables, also massive nuclear capacity and huge modern coal plants. They can really crank up capacity if they want to. How long will it take to get a new nuclear power plant operational in the US?
I agree with that too. Whilst we here in the "Land Down Under" (Australia) seem to have a fixation on NOT wanting to go down the nuclear energy route and we seem rather keen on tearing down our last remaining coal-fired power stations and 'trying' to rely on so-called renewables. From direct experience, our energy costs have gone through the roof and regardless of what our 'wonderful' politicians tell us, that is not going to change any time soon. We seem to want to just give our uranium to USA, Japan, France, and South Korea so they can make cheap energy, whilst we send our best coal to Japan, China & India. Go figure...
> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.
Eh? The entire CPU & GPU wars for the last 30 years consistently rewarded the top performer above all else. Price/performance has always been the consolation prize of the loser of any given generation, and sitting in the price/performance pit for several generations in a row results in being essentially out of money in a fringe position. Like, for example, AMD's GPU division currently but also AMD's CPU division before Athlon 64 and also Phenom up through Ryzen.
This has been a meme in Chinese tech/startup world lately, as it's now the main problem they are trying to solve. They largely consider 1 to 100 solved, and have set their sights on the new goal.
> Of course, like literally every other time this has played out in computing history, the companies focused on price performance will end up with more economic resources, and get to turn the upgrade crank more often and for longer.
The iphone is the best selling computing device in history and is among the most expensive in its category.
For most people Apple's main selling point is about showing off the cute devices and battery life, but that's not going to play a role when users are free to choose the tool that will call the models.
That Apple serves as a "Veblen goods" lifestyle brand is well established. Your amusement is what's weird.
Of course people show off their iPhone. It's a big reason of owing one, it's also a big reason behind slight/major redesigns (people are able to show they have the latest model).
Perhaps you take "show off" literally, like someone going "hey, look, I have an expensive phone"?
It's way more subtle than that, only someone totally crash would do it that way. It's done the same way people buy expensive sneakers and clothes, or how people buy Teslas (or used to) and similar stuff. As a consumer identity that signals you afford a higher cost lifestyle.
It's also one of the better performing. Is the value line (currently, the 17e, I guess) typically much more expensive than an android with comparable battery life, CPU performance, and OS support lifespan?
This year, things look pretty comparable according to this shopping guide. You can get slightly worse or last year's line for about $100 less, or something with comparable specs (some better, some worse) for about the same price:
> China may be subsidizing this for now in a way that US companies can't or won't
They're subsidizing this in many ways - Huawei chips, new DDR5 memory fabs, etc.
Ultimately, DeepSeek's architecture is significantly more cost effective than anything from Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic.
Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs...
They need to actually make money, though, so that might still not give them enough room to make enough money.
Ultimately, hardware depreciation is like 80% of total spending. So power is not as big of a deal in cost. The bigger problem is if you can get the power at all, not how expensive it is.
If you want to bring down inference costs, using less hardware is far more effective than getting cheaper electricity.
Google is in a sweet spot, because they aren't paying 80% margins to nVidia for hardware. So they're probably paying half as much deprecation as everyone else is (or maybe 1/4th for inference - which is now the biggest percentage overall).
The US is subsidizing in exactly the same way through the US Chip Act (as well as state level tax subsidies):
> The act includes $39 billion in subsidies for chip manufacturing on U.S. soil along with 25% investment tax credits for costs of manufacturing equipment, and $13 billion for semiconductor research and workforce training
> Presumably, they'll incorporate DeepSeek's MLA* architecture to get all the benefits for next year's releases (if not this year's upcoming releases) which will bring down their costs.
You can be sure the frontier labs all have similar approaches, but they just don't talk about them. That's why eg Google Flash (the old versions!) were do cheap.
I mean Google published MTP a month or so ago and it has sped up Qwen models by 1.7 times.
If that is what they still publish you get an idea of what they aren't.
It feels like the US for years has operated under the assumption that homeostasis for the global economy would always be “designed in California, assembled in China.”
Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.
But China it seems doesn’t need the US to produce great cars, devices, robotics, or AI. We absolutely need China to help us build all of the above.
The one major area they are still behind in is CPU tech, but they are hungry and thus moving quick.
Looking at Loongsons processors for instance. About 15 years ago they coudl barely compete with a Pentium 2. Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. Further behind on some more specific work loads (SSL decoding for example) Not great but that is a decent jump. The jumps between generations are pretty decent.
LA446 was a decent enough processor core but had an awful memory controller that held it back as soon as it needed to reach outside of cache. As such it was SLOW.
But they learned the lesson and now the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.
They are launching the LA864 later this year and are touting some decent performance gains. That is just marketing so far but something to keep an eye on.
Considering that these chips are using their own ISA, own designs, domestic manufacturing and they aren't terrible is a big thing.
I suspect in the next 5 years they have the chance of completely closing the gap. But it can also go the other way that they end up stalling as smaller nodes get much more difficult to attain.
> Now they are about 4-5 years behind Intel/AMD. [..] the LA664 almost entirely fixed that issue. I think a big part of performance issues is that they are working domestic 5 to 7nm processes, so a good 5-7 years behind.
Who knows but any 'answer' anyone could give is pure speculation.
You could be right! But I do see this claim come up every time Chinese tech comes up. It might be a valid concern but it might also just be folks attempts to try and undermine the technology gains of the nation.
The ISA they have developed with based off years of with with MIPS and RISC V, so it isn't entirely new but they are definitely pushing it forwards. I have no idea if any of their developments could be back ported down the RISC V.
Might be more far to say: they needed the US until they caught up. The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here. Though theft might be too strong since a lot of companies knew what they were getting in to
> The massive straight up IP theft helps a lot here
I think this is vastly underestimating what "catching up" means. All my life, people have been saying "China copies". Now they are objectively better at many things (including robotics), and... well it seems that we cannot "just copy".
I saw western companies trying to "copy" superior Chinese technology, talking to brilliant engineers explaining how much they were learning by actually trying to copy.
The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.
Growing up moving around both conservative and liberal parts of the US, from middle school to college, I distinctly remember several US history classes where I was taught the exact same narrative about Samuel Slater. About how he was an American hero and the Father of the American Industrial Revolution because he memorized a bunch of industrial patent blueprints and brought them over to the US.
It got told as: the evil English made it illegal to even import blueprints for factory machinery, to keep the colonies in resource-extractive poverty, so they'd have to send raw materials overseas to get processed, then import the finished goods. (My other history teacher, the Anno / Dawn of Discovery video game series, also cemented this bit about resource extraction in my head at a young age.) But then thanks to heroic ingenuity and cunning, I was told, the US was able to outwit the colonizers and process its own raw materials, eventually gaining full economic, military, and political supremacy.
Producing great products is a game at which every player wins, because sellers must find willing buyers. It only fails if one participant panics and jumps out of the window, or if a significant number of people are not participating (this is always the case when wealth inequality is involved).
> The lesson I got from that is that China did not "copy"; they learned. And it took time, and now they are better. Now the western world has to learn from them, I guess.
And Apple played a huge role in teaching them. We should all thank Tim Cook and team for almost single handedly bootstrapping China 2.0, the China that runs circles around the west in terms of production and development.
Peter Zeihann really got it wrong in his latter books.
Ok, not my favorite narrative, but assume asymmetric application of intellectual property rights was a big factor. Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story? It still feels like a short-sighted own goal. The US abandoned its ability to manufacture. Maybe dark factories and robotics can bring it back, but manufacturing supply chains are just so much more advanced in Asia than in the US.
> Wouldn't the US exploiting asymmetric labor wages, rights, and conditions be the even bigger story?
Yes, but "the US" is reductive. The exploitation wasn't done by the towns having their tentpole industries shipped overseas, it was done by the people shipping them overseas and pocketing the profit. US capital owners made a deal with the Chinese Communist Party that was good for both of them and bad for the US.
1. Treats low margin industries like mining and utilities as areas to focus investment and come up with incremental improvements, making those available to all companies. The West, by contrast, allows private companies to handle those industries, who logically don’t bother investing in them since their investors consider those basic industries to be low-value segments of the production chain. But now we see those advantages in China where investments have been made (e.g., the best battery chemistries and mining/refining, the cheapest power (when was the last time your local utility company focused on reducing pricing?)).
2. Because all companies in China have access to the same excellent infrastructure, they must compete furiously on quality/features/price of their products.
3. China allows foreign competition so long as they operate in China (see: Tesla) further insisting that their domestic products be globally competitive and that foreign products sold in their country benefit their local ecosystem.
Lol it was not ip theft it was American and European companies building factories in China themselves teaching them how to manufacture use their cheap labour. Well they learned and as they were the dong the manufacturing got better at it. I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.
> I believe the current aerospace industry which the US leads in is also result of IP theft from the British then out innovating them.
Jet engines, proximity fuzes, radar, how to make a nuclear weapon, etc. are all examples of British / Commonwealth technology "gifted" or "traded" to the USofA during the WWII years in exchange for production.
So, not IP theft .. but absolutely foreign ideas taken in by the US and built upon.
HN hates non competition clauses in contracts unless it involves Chinese workers.
But I think we underestimate the Chinese diaspora. They had been running factories, shops and banks from Singapore to Suriname for generations and answered the call from the PRC to share that knowledge base.
Sure but I think what people are actually concerned with today is China copying a product and dumping cheaply back in the country it was taken from. That scale and speed is not what was happening in the 19th century.
I personally have little issue with countries doing that for domestic use (I hate using term "IP theft"), but to re-export so quickly you can't run a viable business in your own country is not fine.
> Samuel Slater ... known as the "Father of the American Industrial Revolution", a phrase coined by Andrew Jackson, and the "Father of the American Factory System". In the United Kingdom, he was called "Slater the Traitor" and "Sam the Slate" because he brought British textile technology to the United States, modifying it for American use.
> He learned of the American interest in developing similar machines, and he was also aware of British law against exporting the designs. He memorized as much as he could, and departed for New York City in 1789. Some people of Belper called him "Slater the Traitor", as they considered his move a betrayal of the town where many earned their living at Strutt's mills
Because USAs military literally stole his IP? He had patents for GPS systems that US military took (by making his very expensive US lawyer making a silly ”mistake” and oops he lost against US companies and they suggested ”let’s forget about the money if you just hand us over that patent that the US military wants”
Well, I did, and to save others the time, the most relevant resource I found appears to be the book "Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America” (2013) by Peter Andreas
IP theft may only be part of the story though. it’s a question of priorities. US optimizes for profit which can place limits reinvestment. China seems to optimize for ubiquity and dominance, and has the capital to throw at those goals. when you’re beholden to the shareholder/ceo/investor, you make concessions to stay within their will. when you’re beholden to the state, you do the same.
Wait until you hear about the history of US industrialization. This trope of 'they stole our ideas' needs to fade away, it's a coping mechanism based on the assumption of inherent superiority of American society rather than the natural wax and wane of civilizations due to varying structural factors.
This so much. You can also read up about when Germany sent industrial spies to Great Britain. And the first documented case of industrial spionage was against... China.
It plays this way: you're behind, you ignore IP rules. You're ahead: you create them to defend your newly-gained status.
Also please no moralizing here on IP when the entire OpenAI/Anthropic playbook has been "massive straight up IP theft". The irony.
Can we stop this crying baby already. Every country has stolen from the other. Did you really expect countries to settle on sewing closes and ship all profits to foreign companies for eternity? The IP is just an artificial concept that participants follow for so long as it benefits all parties.
There's nothing special about anything we design in the US other than time and money commitment to create it. China did have some espionage of course going on, but the vast majority of shit isn't some secret. And with the US shitting on China with restrictions, we increasingly caused them to invest time and money into things they otherwise would have passively accepted as coming from the west. ASML sees the writing on the wall for themselves in particular.
The US has generally resorted to propaganda rather than addressing the self-inflicted structural conditions responsible for the erosion of our dominance. China also conducted a broad, sustained, large-scale campaign of IP theft across almost every industry.
Obviously there is no natural law preventing China from innovating (We have treated political liberalism as a prerequisite to innovation in a way that was always partly self-congratulatory), but it's also obviously true that the speed of the gap closure is due in significant part to theft.
That doesn't change the fact that they are now a legitimate competitor who has gotten a lot of things right (and among these, some things that we get very wrong) and probably actually leads in some areas.
I like this take a lot and agree with it. The US for too long has been asleep at the wheel on many areas, power generation one of them. China with no doubt has conducted very deep and sustained espionage campaigns and even with LLMs there is enough evidence that most of the initial gains was training off of western models. Again no complaints here but I think it’s important to acknowledge both which can be true at the same time.
> Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China
In most Americans' eyes, unfortunately, there was. It was just known by the name "American Exceptionalism". Yes, it's nonsense, but unfortunately it is nonsense that has historically been used by most empires throughout history, and believed just as fervently by said empires' populi since it's one of the central elements of imperialism as a whole.
Downvoters are being silly. If you want to make a case for American Exceptionalism being a hoax, that's fine. But don't use deepseek 4 pro (which is at 100 ELO or so below top models) to make that case. You have stronger arguments elsewhere.
Downvoters aren't being silly, it's about you not considering the context of the discussion when writing your first reply. Deepseek wasn't mentioned once in this thread before your second post and AI was mentioned once in a list of different industries. Those should have been a clue to why your first post was downvoted. Basically, you wrote a non sequitur post and are surprised that it is being downvoted.
Um, take a break between bong hits to read the thread title pal: "DeepSeek makes the V4 Pro price discount permanent". I don't know what you thought we were discussing, puff the magic dragons perhaps? Lol.
Seriously though, take a hike if you can't be bothered to read things.
DS4 is open weights so it could even be run free in quantized forms, is 10x cheaper than Opus and performs basically as well in most real world tasks. No one cares about benchmarks. In practical terms, it’s obviously a better option in most cases.
You’re defining “better” is “absolute best at any cost” instead of the more balanced price/performance considerations consumers actually take, so you can declare America #1 again. In a practical sense DS4 is so much cheaper at similar quality that it’s better in most cases. If i can throw 10x the tokens at the same problem at slightly lower quality, i can probably do a better job.
ELO is an absolute rating. You could make a claim about some unknown GM being "better" than Magnus Carlsen because his appearance fee is cheaper, but obviously nobody would take you seriously.
There is a best model, and then there is what you can afford. Call that the "better value" or something if you must, but calling it the "better" model is clearly spreading a falsehood.
>Like there was something in the American DNA that was lacking in China and innovation would always need to happen here.
There is (was): attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society. Trump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.
> attracting the best minds around the world to a free and stable society.
China is comprised of ~91.5% ethnically Chinese citizens. [0]
> Tump voters threw it all away because they couldn't stand non-whites coming to America and doing better than old stock Americans.
The U.S. is more diverse than it's ever been [1], and under Trump we're still below the deportations of Obama's terms.
Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago. Coincidentally, when we arguably had our best economic opportunities for citizens. Who'da thunk.
Clearly, the only solution to our fading relevance is opening the border again and importing 500 million more ""doctors and engineers"" all the while China is investing in their *actual* doctors and engineers, and has extremely strict immigration policies [2].
You're conflating Mexican border hoppers with skilled immigrants.
I'm absolutely opposed to illegal immigration and have a more extreme position on how to deal with it than most Americans.
What I'm irked by are Trump's attacks on legal immigration and the general worsening of the environment. ICE's kidnappings, the 100k H-1B fee, and the recent Green Card thing have deeply eroded America's attractiveness to legal immigrants.
I think when MAGA came after H-1Bs, it became pretty clear that it's not about law and order, it's just a race thing.
And if you want to go gloves off, I'll just say it: the main problem in America is that its 3 major ethnic groups are infected by anti-intellectualism and slothfulness, whereas the Chinese and various other cultures are not. The direct benefit from skilled immigration is so that we can increase the ratio of people who actually value education and hard work vs the failing old stock Americans whose broccoli-headed kids dream of becoming YouTube influencers instead of astronauts.
H1-Bs are the most egregious example, because they're 100% used as a way to undercut/replace American talent. The irony is that the typical border hopper is working jobs Americans don't want, for wages Americans wouldn't take, and they keep a low profile to avoid getting deported.
The desire to be influencers isn't as boneheaded as you think, in a future where AI is solving the hardest technical challenges, the ability to get attention and create community is the last frontier. Influencers and salesmen will be eating good when scientists and engineers are derelict.
> The U.S. is more diverse than it's ever been [1], and under Trump we're still below the deportations of Obama's terms.
Ethnic diversity is neither really here nor there in terms of the measurable needs that immigration fulfills. Immigration keeps economic and population growth rates trending up. Having high skilled immigration to bolster science and research is nice, but it's still mainly about the growth.
Yea, Obama deported lots of people, but even then we still had net positive migration. Now under Trump, we have net negative migration for the first time in decades. The very public terror campaign waged by the Trump admin was in part to deter immigration in the first place.
> Sounds like open-borders immigration was never necessary in the first place, given that we're being beat by a country with a similar demographic skew that we had like 80 years ago.
1) Economic growth is possible with stagnating/declining population levels if you overcome those deficits with commensurate increases in productivity per capita. Otherwise, you're cooked.
2) The US is actually far more productive per capita than China - in fact, the US is one of the best in the world, as far as that goes.
With those points in mind, we can begin to see why China has an easier time growing economically with little immigration. The US has a much harder time doing the same. We need more population, since it's just harder to squeeze more productivity out of our already very productive workforce.
Once China achieves similar productivity levels, they will need to rely more on growing the population.
We were actually on track to catch up to China's population levels in a few of decades (thanks to immigration). So unless China successfully pivoted to mass immigration or expansionism, the US was likely to remain dominant - easily so - for the foreseeable future.
That's why the MAGA anti-immigration push is so tragically stupid and suicidal (if it persists). They're killing America's golden goose.
As an aside: I wish the "open borders" canard would die. We've never had open-borders immigration in recent history. Definitely not since 9/11. Not even under Biden. Border laws were enforced. Biden has the same apprehension rate at the border as both Trump and Obama.
First of all, the only group of immigrants targeted by the admin are those critical of certain middle eastern regime.
Republican racists mainly care about the immigrants that do not take their middle-class jobs anyways.
Anti-Indian hate is restricted to a minority of software engineers and anti-Chinese hate is virtually non-existent.
I do believe it is idiotic to have your universities full of Chinese, your manufacturing in China and, at the same time, treat China as a geopolitical enemy.
people might not wanna admit it because it feels politically incorrect - but that belief is massively due the idea of "western (white) supremacy".
cz if you're smart & pragmatic - then you will know innovation can come from anywhere - but western elites choose to continually bury their heads in the sand.
As john oliver said on conan many years ago: "an inflatable barbecue!".
China can certainly design an inflatable barbecue. China can certainly biuld an inlfatable barbecue. But will the chinese people ever want and buy an inflatable barbecue? ... never. That is why the US will remain the premier consumer economy.
Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you. Funny that you talk about being afraid of your own shadow.
I have some exposure to utility regulation and from what I can tell some of the AI companies are "good actors" and willing to shoulder some of the burden. But others are pretty adversarial and want a free lunch.
> Put another way: if the average US citizen doesn't subsidize the costs of these trillion dollar companies, China is gonna come get you.
The future is blatantly going to be electric. Between cars, heat pumps, ranges, etc, the quantity of kilowatt hours consumed will rise dramatically per capita because they are replacing burned fossil fuels.
We don't need to subsidize the trillion dollar companies, we can settle for just not cancelling wind and solar projects, and generally updating the grid infrastructure.
A rising tide lifts all boats. If the subsidies go to common infrastructure, that's good for everyone. There's no need to complain about a road being paved because it will benefit FedEx in addition to everyone else.
All public infrastructure benefits the public but the role of our governance is to correctly prioritize. $100 billion spent on nuclear power plants is $100 billion being withheld from other critical social services.
No, the money is not coming from a fixed box. When the US wants to do something (typically starting a new war), they never ask where the money is coming from. This tells you everything about how the decisions are made, if it is a priority for them, they will spend the money first and ask questions later. If green infrastructure was a real priority they would invest the money and later find ways to pay for it.
But those wars are typically fought to maintain the US status, to preserve its ability to debase the national currency effectively siphoning wealth from the world economy. Self-preservations comes first. I'm just describing the system.
All of them. Afghanistan as a response to 9/11, Iraq as a regional power flex and entrenchment. The first certainly preserved US status more than letting 9/11 go unanswered, the second to remove a hostile regional power and replace it with a friendlier government.
Now in Iran, the intention was to repeat Venezuela and effect regime change in a hostile country, bolstering America's military status.
Whether these wars have the effect they intend is beside the point; you're asking why they were fought, not whether they resulted in "Mission Accomplished".
> $100 billion spent on nuclear power plants is $100 billion being withheld from other critical social services.
What? No it isn't.
There are many places the government could use to appropriate funds, not just social services. The military, for example. Other subsidies. Tax credits. Simply increasing the debt.
I believe you are right. These models are at worst a 6 month lag to the costly frontier models, but the ability to scale energy production is years ahead of where the US is. That advantage is often under appreciated
Their cost of energy is what matters vs the US as much as speed buildout.
I'm still not entirely clear on the problem <-> capability matching. E.g. it seems like Kimi K2.6 with good context would already be able to solve a huge chunk of problems. What share of prompts require frontier models?
> then it will no longer require subsidy from them
Is there actually a huge Chinese consumer market for these products? If not then I'm not sure how you ever actually achieve this endpoint. Chinese wages and American wages are not nearly the same thing yet.
> It will simply be absolutely cheaper (including profit margin) to serve tokens in China.
It will simply create more pollution and environmental destruction too.
> China is building for the future
That's the plan. Whether that's true requires an honest analysis.
> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future
Developed nations take fewer risks than undeveloped ones. Do you assume this pitched dichotomy will naturally sustain itself?
> and of their own shadow.
Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.
We start logically. Do you presume your handful of cases exemplify the entire Democratic system? Do you assume that "China" is best understood as a single centralized entity?
You completely walked past the argument to pick at a meaningless nit.
Handing out lessons in democracy from the record-holder country in foreign intervention (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...) had equal civil rights only in the 1960s, pardoned the perpetrators of Jan 6, has its supreme court in entirely political hands, and has the awesomest repressive force in the world, together with the incarcerated population to go with.
Maybe I picked like 4 meaningless nits as in: US politicians respect so much democracy that they constantly reweight "one person, one vote" to suit the interest of the incumbent, they do not have their outrageously expensive campaigns financed (legally) by private interest groups, the popular vote is represented, and elections are uncontested (unless the wrong candidate wins, where the Supreme Court promptly fixes the issue), and it has room for more than two (quite similar I may say) viewpoints in representation.
Maybe.
But please don't call “Yea, it's funny what having open and fair elections can do for a country.” an argument.
Please don't take one sentence out of a larger context and pretend it represents the argument.
Which, again, you've managed to completely ignore.
The argument, ironically in black and white, so you can sense it, "this isn't a black and white scenario and seeing it as China vs USA blinds you to the complex differences and global geopolitical forces involved."
I get that you don't personally like America, for whatever reason, but you've blinded yourself to sense in your rush to convey your rather negative and absolutely common sensibilities.
Yes, I don't like the US'* self-congratulation we're the good guys-beacon-of democracy bullshit
(The USA, I am fine with the continent of America).
And it's for a reason: I am from one of those countries where US-american meddling buttressed a dictatorship that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.
Benchmarking the kind of cost savings I'm seeing moving from sonnet and gemini flash to local models, inference runs at least 90-95% gross margins. So they are probably still gross margin profitable.
BTW form my benchmarking, open weigh models are good enough for many agentic tasks starting with Qwen 3.5/6 family and Deepseek v4 family, so it's likely we'll see displacement of api usage from the premium priced providers. Yes trainingis expensive, this isn't training
In the last 40 years, China has been building while the US has been wasting money and lives fighting wars. Can we learn to really put America first for once?
Yea, I really don't see how much longer the US economy can hold on. The baby boomers are working overtime to rob multiple future generations of opportunity to feed their profits now.
The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.
> The formerly "fiscal conservatives" that I know are working overtime explaining how the debt isn't a bad thing and we can just move numbers.
Sounds like they're just catching up to what Democrats always used to say whenever a Democrat was in the White House and some Republican would complain about the national debt. "A government isn't a household, debt doesn't work the same way, you don't get it."
It's not really a bottleneck. US capital is building data centers in South Asia, MENA and SEA. Many of these countries offer tax breaks because they want US data centers, and they have abundant equatorial land for solar.
You might say that US would prefer sovereignty but that's a separate argument vis-a-vis strategic competition with China in particular.
Wonder if they are finally exploring installing anti air defenses on these datacenters given they are massively expensive and devastating targets of extreme opportunities.
> China is building for the future, while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
Yes, countries where compromise is not required, where social, capital and human costs are non-factors and where regulations are bendable at will by who's in power can be more effective at achieving some goals.
The 96 million members of the CCP and the entrepreneurs incentivised to make decisions based on the policies they introduce?
Who are the decision makers in western democracies?
I'm being slightly facetious - there are many answers to these questions.
The one that actually matters to me though is "do the people that are making the decisions do so in the interests of society?" Not in my 'democracy', that's for sure.
> while Western Democracies are afraid of the future, and of their own shadow.
Well, yeah. This is a technology that has the potential to make large chunks of the population unemployed.
Chunks of the population that took on debts prior to late 2022 with the understanding that there would be a way to pay those debts back with their labor.
> Chunks of the population that took on debts prior to late 2022 with the understanding that there would be a way to pay those debts back with their labor.
I’m calling it now, the future is indentured servitude.
"Build American AI, a nonprofit linked to a super PAC bankrolled by executives at OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz, is funding a campaign to spread pro-AI messaging and stoke fears about China."
In reality Xi has warned of AI bubbles. If China was really pushing it they'd be equal or ahead because so many researchers are Chinese anyway. Instead, China is building real stuff instead of focusing on hot air like a16z ("crypto", "AI", you name it). Maybe China should sponsor that PAC to accelerate the demise of the West.
I do wonder how most Chinese employees at OpenAI and Anthropic feel about their employer constantly spreading anti China propaganda to decrease competition. Perhaps money solves almost all things so they go along with it.
This is the next phase of the OpenAI deception: give us as much money as we want or you'll be labeled anti-US and pro-China (guaranteed by the propaganda arm of openAI).
It's not western democracies. It's western capitalism, and more poignantly, western billionaires. They're feeding the narratives. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg - they're the ones with bunkers and exit strategies. They are the lunatics buying seats at the political table and spreading FUD and meddling in our elections. They are the ones destroying the west's chances at a competitive future, instead: "capitalism".
They wanted the division, they're getting it and one side is raping and pillaging the masses.
I have not fully seen or appreciated most of the negativity. Obviously there are exceptions to that but in my eyes it has largely exposed how vulnerable the west is due to poor infrastructure constructs and a lack of building out generation and transmission.
To be honest, I’m sort of annoyed that the datacenter around the corner from my home closed. It was a five minute walk on 3rd street and I know of it because we used to have so many cages there 15 years ago. Now I have to drive to Fremont.
The original Antigravity editor is/was just a light reskin on VSCode. My normal workflow - even before the 2.0 update - was to run VScode and AG at the same time, on the same local codebase. AG would do the work, which I would then review in VSCode.
Why not just download and run the IDE you want, alongside the agentic dev tool you want?
Must I beg to have an acronym spelled out a least once, the first time it's used? Even if you assume 90% of readers already know, the other 10% (including me, in this case) will thank you, it doesn't take much effort, and it expands the reach of your communication or idea.
Exceptions for cases where the acronym is just so well known that a lot of people don't even know what it stands for even though they know the concept well. I recall one corporate training I was sitting through and they used the term "Border Gateway Protocol" and it took me a half beat to think through "oh, you mean BGP?"
Which acronym do you mean? CTF? I think that acronym, just like BGP, is more well known by itself than what it stands for.
More generally, not every piece of writing is meant for every audience. Like if someone writes a blog post about CTFs aimed at people who like CTFs, nobody in the target audience needs to have CTF explained to them. Ultimately HN is a link aggregator, but sometimes its a bit like eavesdropping on a conversation. When you are just listening in you don't get the full context sometimes.
Yes, i would argue that people writing articles about niche interests aimed at other members of that niche are under no obligation to clarify it for people outside the niche.
They aren't your teacher. They aren't trying to send the content to you. They are just blogging on their own website for their own audience.
And its hardly unique to this article. If you are writing about the nitty gritty of linux networking, you probably aren't defining what TCP or UDP means. If you are writing a super detailed article comparing and contrasting plot structures of different animes, you probably aren't going to start by explaining what the word anime means. Etc
I'm not saying the world should be all RTFM, but if you are reading some sort of specialized content, then yes i think its a reasonable assumption that the reader has some basic background knowledge on the topic at hand, or is willing to do the research themselves.
Especially when you can literally just paste the top paragraph into your LLM of choice and ask it to explain it to you. In the time it took the OP of this thread to write out their complaint they could have just solved it themselves
If it means capture the flag, then it means a completely different capture the flag for almost everybody. I searched for it, read the first paragraph, and I still don’t know what the fuck is the topic. According to Wikipedia it’s a very new meaning. I could figure out only because of searching for “HCKSYD” and others.
The commenter above replied to me, who checked what it is, which is clearly stated in my comment. So your comment cannot be applied to the guy who came up the first with "learned helplessness" in this thread, who replied to me. That guy clearly just wanted to shift the topic from that the article is shit, because they cannot do anything with it.
Also yes, search for CTF is not simple regarding security, because first you need to know that you are searching something in the topic of security. Because every other usage of this is way more frequent. Especially that there is an other way more frequent computer related usage. And the article doesn't make this clear in its first 173 words for laymen. Even I had a problem with this, who is not at all layman, just never cared about this part of security. It's a bad article.
My search results for "open CTF format" beg to differ. Absolutely nothing even remotely related to "capture the flag".
Bear in mind that Google search results, just like ChatGPT output, are highly personalized and non deterministic, so "it's there if you do a Google search" means almost nothing these days.
In fact, I have no idea what's going on, so I came back to HN comments. Turns out it's "capture the flag" which I actually know, just not familiar with the acronym.
Which is why I am 100% with the top level comment here.
There is so much wrong with this beginning with the fact that it would be correctly 170 °C (the degree is important because it implies an arbitrary scale)
Additionaly Bake Cake in 170 is very not clear, especially considering you have two major Temperature Scales in use in the Kitchen.
Best practice in writing about technical concepts is to spell out acronyms like this on their first use. There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before.
It doesn't help that the linked article never bothers to explain this either.
This article was written for a specific audience who follows this blog because they know the term. If you start spelling out fundamental acronyms it makes the content look more basic and general.
This always upsets the general audience who stumble upon the article (like this) but it wasn’t meant for a general audience. CTF is extremely well known and the people who would be interested in this topic would wonder what’s happening if it was spelled out. It would be so odd that it would probably attract accusations of ChatGPT writing.
It's the common practice in technical writing. Even when you are writing for other experts in the same field, your target audience never shares as much context as you would prefer. The world is much weirder and more varied than you would think.
Informal writing about technical topics is another story. There you can assume a lot more shared context, as you are only writing for a specific subculture within the field. It doesn't matter much if other people in the field fail to understand you.
But this isn't "technical" writing.
This is member of a community talking about the state of that community. Jargon is expected. Even more, this what I look for, even as a foreigner.
Does spelling it out help? From memory, it is a security competition where participants compete to gain certain objectives. I think capture the flag may explain how scoring is kept, but it wouldn’t help me find out what it is, given that capture the flag is also just the name of a game people play outside by running, or in laser tag or in certain video games.
> There is a ton of stuff I learn about here on HN that I didn't know anything about before.
But that is about you right? Its a little entitled to expect every piece of content on the internet to have a 101 explanation attached. If they were specificly aiming to have the blog post appear on HN that would be one thing, but they (presumably) weren't.
When I encounter new terms, I look them up. Just like any other new word. Been doing it since I was a kid with a dictionary. Now, it’s too easy not to. There is literally no excuse.
It’s just bad writing. There is no such thing as a universally understood acronym. Even within fields. The cost of clarity is zero. Not elucidating means that over time the writing rots as meanings change and new “universal understandings” supersede old
ones.
The annoying thing is even if you know what it means, multiple groups will use the same initialisms for different terms. So without more context you can’t know what it means.
It isn’t common but I feel it would be best when posting to HN to just expand the initialisms even if the source title didn’t.
CTF stands for Capture the Flag. So with that definition you have exactly zero more information about the article then without it. So I assume next you want a short description of what it actually means, like "CTF (Capture the Flag) are security competitions where the objective is to break...", which is completely ridiculous to include in an article aimed specifically at the CTF crowd.
It is easier to search for keywords (Capture the Flag) vs acronyms (CTF) which likely resolve to other terms as well. Child trust fund is the first result when I put CTF into Google. Admittedly searching CTF security solves that issue. A quick link to an article on CTF to make the post digestible by outsiders seems reasonable enough.
Why should the author care to make it digestible to the crowd who is clueless on the matter? Their goal is to capture attention and start discussion within the community.
To me it doesn't seem reasonable at all. It's just entitled at best.
I read it as a suggestion vs a demand but I can see why you felt it was entitled. The author doesn't need to care and can take or leave the advice. In many ways it is a shame we don't have the concept of the Semantic Web as an extension to simple Hyperlinks.
CTF is a game mode for popular online games like halo (or at least, that's how I know it), so paragraphs like
> My first CTF was HCKSYD, a 48-hour solo CTF. I full solved it and won in 2 hours. I was completely hooked. That led me to win DownUnderCTF, Australia's largest CTF, with Blitzkrieg multiple times. Blitzkrieg was one of Australia's strongest teams at the time. I later joined TheHackersCrew, an international top-tier team that was consistently ranked highly on CTFTime, the main global ranking and event calendar the scene uses as its scoreboard. With them, I competed in some of the most prestigious CTFs in the world, consistently placing well within the top 10 until the end of 2025.
Are still completely nonsensical to even those that understand the acronym
It's also a game people play in person as well. It's the same as the Halo version except you tag each other instead of shooting. It's really fun to play in big open areas with large teams.
As I remember it (and this was decades ago): Two teams, opposite ends of a large field. Each end gets a "flag". (We used t-shirts.) In our case, we split the field in half — our field happened to have a natural feature (a change in elevation, so like two separately flat areas separated by an incline) that worked well for this. If you were tackled¹ in the enemy's side, you were "captured", and "jailed". An uncaptured player could spring the jail by tagging those within it. Returning to your flag with the opposing team's flag was a win.
We played at night, so stealth was a large part of the game, but it was also fair to illuminate the area around the flag. (Which made approaching a guarded flag … tricky.)
I'm sure there's probably a million variations on the specifics.
¹…flag football flags would probably work nicely for this.
though this is not what the author is talking about. Theyre talking about a hacking competition, where you compete to get a secret word or something contained on some running server connected to a network protected with various means. They're complaining about AI agents removing a lot of the fun from this.
People are mad because we're literally on "hacker" news, so there is some expectation that people might be familiar with hacking or computer security.
Yeah, but we have AI now, we don't need our blog posts to over explain or state what it all means to general audiences.
The author name-drops a bunch of CTF events hosted by a variety of independent organizations and name-drops well-known teams.
To help everyone, this Capture The Flag is specifically Cybersecurity adjacent, there is a Wikipedia article on it as the top Google search result for me when searching "CTF". This is why the acronym is used, because searching for the full will get you to the wrong "sport" vs the cybersecurity one.
I don't want to explain what a CTF is. look at the Wikipedia article. It is there for a good reason.
Just to give the actual answer, CTF in this context means a computer security competition. Generally the way they work, is you get some programs, and you have to hack them to get some string called the flag (e.g. maybe the server has a root owned file called flag, so you have to get root somehow to read the file). Team with the most flags at the end wins.
In this context, CTF is almost exclusively referred to by the initialism, i think to help distinguish from other uses of the term.
Apart from everything else people have said in response to this, it's rude to presume that an article has HN as an audience simply by dint of it being available for us to link to. It's totally reasonable for people to write for an audience they know understands these terms.
So, in fact, you must not beg to have authors include courtesy definitions for you. That's not reasonable. Instead, you should simply ask here, on the thread, without complaining about the article.
I think so many acronyms have meaning that isn’t explained by the words that the stand for. The other day I was explaining what CI is and they asked what it stood for; I realized that Continuous Integration is almost completely useless for someone trying to understand what CI actually is
The comments are annoying. No matter the niche, it is always good to write the abbreviation the first time it is used, in fact, W3C recommends it[0]. Anyone who does not follow this either are not informed well enough, or has ableism. Most replies in this thread shows the latter.
An acronym is a specific type of abbreviation formed from the initial letters of a phrase and pronounced as a single word. I was being more specific. And the ones you are pointing out are from the header.
> An abbreviation whose expansion is provided the first time the abbreviation appears in the content
Content is the main body of the article (press tab ones you land the page, it will take you to the main content if you don't know what that is), which contains only one Acronym, “SC 3.1.4” → which is a link that take you to a place with its definition. I don't understand what you are fighting over. But I'm not going to reply more to someone who defends people who do not know how to write articles that are more friendly towards the reader.
We live in the goddammed future. Huamnity's knowledge is at your fingertips. Right clicking the Nth word of the article and putting in any semblance of effort to learn on your own is too much to ask?
I don't know everything, there's tons of stuff I don't know about, but when I'm at my web browser, the least I can do about something is ask Google about a word or phrase or subject that isn't familiar instead of being spoonfed information like I'm a baby.
As someone who spent years reading academic journals where spelling out acronyms on first occurrence is mandatory, the comments here are jarring. Think about it -- those are academic journals where most people do know what those acronyms mean.
It's such a small but immensely helpful thing to do.
This isn't an academic journal or general purpose news article though. It's a small blog about a subculture. It'd be like spelling out GPU on a blog for building custom PCs, or BDSM on a kink blog.
Spelling it out when 99.9% of your audience doesn't need it actually is the opposite of in-group signaling, it makes it feel like it's aimed at a wider audience, when it's not.
If you wish to explore a new concept, perhaps ask duckduckgo "what is ctf" an you may well get a response such as:
CTF stands for Capture The Flag, which is a cybersecurity competition where participants find hidden "flags" in vulnerable programs or systems to test and develop their security skills. There are two main types of CTFs: jeopardy-style, where teams solve various challenges for points, and attack-defense, where teams defend their systems while trying to exploit their opponents'.
I think you only wanted clarification of CTF (Capture the Flag) and not AI (Artificial Intelligence) and not GPT-4
(Generative Pre-Trained Transformer version 4) and not CLI (Command Line Interface) and not MCP (Model Context Protocol) and not LLM (Large Language Model)
Quoting TFA (The Fucking Article): “just adapt bro”
At the same time, I did a search for "what is a ctf to play" and got the answer. We know how to find answers to these problems. I agree the blog post was poor form.
I had no idea "security" is the keyword to add, even after reading the leading paragraph and the first paragraph under "What makes me qualified to say this?".
In fact, I know what "capture the flag" is but am not familiar with the acronym. Still, the article confused the hell out of me, so I came back to HN comments for more context.
> Asking AI to explain the article
That's how we are expected to consume content these days?
i try not to over feed tangents but this is precisely how i feel every time i speak to someone who is recently enlisted in the military. i have to constantly stop them and be like “i have no idea what you just said” over and over and over again. it’s like trying to make sense of a random bowl of alphabet soup.
Yes, that's what I meant, but I'm an idiot and just used the word that came to mind: GBP symbol -> "pound" -> "lb". And I don't have a quid (GBP) button on my keyboard.
It may amuse you to know they're both essentially the same thing. GBP is formally Pound Sterling, formerly 1 pound (tower pound / 20 troy ounces) of Sterling Silver. Which is why £ is a stylised L.
Honestly - the first thing that came to my mind is that the papers got stapled back together wrong, and her original correct answer was swapped with someone else's incorrect one. And instead of simply explaining that, she decided to just erase what was there and re-submit. But who knows?
Sure, ETA for a nuclear power plant is ~15-20 years from now, wind is ~5-10, solar is 2-6, natural gas is 2-4 years. Data centers take 18 - 24 months. Even if build out for power infrastructure needed had started when the demand became apparent (which, it’s not clear that it has done). You should still expect electricity costs to inflate due to the ~100GW of additional demand that has been announced, because there is no way to build the power infrastructure in less time than it takes to build the additional data centers. It’s also not clear that there would be enough elasticity in the supply chain for building any of these generation methods that you even could strike ground on increasing us electricity production by the ~10% needed over the given time frame. The reality is, there is no way to build all the additional data centers without significant inflationary pressure, that will be borne by everyone except the well connected hyperscalers with excellent lobbyists unless average people actually realize that fact and force their dealing with the relevant municipalities and grid operators to be transparent.
Fine! So let's get started then! I don't care about data centers. I don't care about AI. Maybe it's here to stay, maybe it's a passing trend. I care about humans, and human prosperity.
Human prosperity - ours and our grandchildren's - is to a large degree determined by how much power we produce. So let's get started producing more.
The best time to have built a power plant was 20 years ago. The second best time is today.
Oddly from your comment I can't quite tell which end of the political spectrum you're on. I think I agree with you, but I'm not sure until I know which team you're on.
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