It’s funny because westerners actually seriously believed that. I had a teacher years ago tell us that China would never become the #1 economy in the world when they were starting to close in with the US. There seemed to be a generational divide because I feel like everyone in class had a “what are they talking about” look on their face.

Remember when China was “never going to” innovate beyond 14nm?

In a way it sharpens the contradictions. We live in the time of our very own steam engine, the question is can we seize the moment.

These ghouls should not even be giving speeches at any educational facility in the first place; it’s because the US associates being rich with being educated/intelligent that they get any place in the spotlight (and the huge speaking fees the college is probably all too happy to pay).

This is what happens when economists think they know anything outside of their field. In the socialist republic they will be reminded of their place daily: you just crunch the numbers, that’s it.

I think KeePass is basically the only other one that’s consistently recommended in actual organic guides

Comrade the same could have been said of coal back in Marx’s day, or even its use today in the global south. And refusing to think about it or entertain contemporary questions doesn’t solve them, it’s putting our heads in the sand (the ostrich technique) and hoping the rolling storm passes over us unscathed. LLMs are means of production, many professionals are using them already in many different ways. Whether they lower the socially necessary labor time and rate of profit is not entirely calculated yet, but this isn’t necessary to count as MoP. And AI has entered our relations of productions already.

I have an essay here on the question https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Essay:Intellectual_property_in_the_times_of_AI.

The conclusion is these 2000s new atheist figures are actually very dumb individuals and should fade into irrelevance but instead we let them poison the discourse for an entire generation instead

chat help with my macroeconomy I’m not very good at this. Is it good to lock myself out of a 1.5 billion people strong market or nah?

I would have said the same thing as the author if I’d written that, counting ‘beating’ as being exceedingly cheaper while delivering comparable results, and doing it under sanctions. Deepseek makes a lot of sense for hobby projects because of the price, though I’m hearing about professional devs ditching Claude for V4-pro - but before deepseek, there was no reasonable solution for agentic at home, and you were stuck on debugging on the web interface.

Mind you speaking of benchmarks I have no idea what these things are actually supposed to represent lol. I found v4 good at recall and memory, but when talking to it (doing research, clarifying questions etc as opposed to just having it code), I found its overall output pretty diminished, like an old GPT 3.5 “you’re so right - and here’s why you are”. You can gloss over it but they had found a great mix by late 3.2 imo.

The 4-bit quantized GGUF for granite 4.1 is sub 5GB, so it’s probably going to run on any modern machine even if it’s not particularly built for Vram… 6 gigs is what I had on my old 1080 gpu.

https://huggingface.co/unsloth/granite-4.1-8b-GGUF/tree/main

Deepseek v4 pro! Top up your credit as you go and they’re having a sale until May 31st, but even without the sale 1M output tokens is “only” 3.48. Flash is only 0.28 per 1M output.

lmao I never saw the second one before

It’s pretty much the only thing I still use Gemini for, vision and image creation when I need a dumb meme like this:

but google hates when people use VPNs and fingerprint-scrubbing extensions so half the time it doesn’t work. Since deepseek upgraded to agentic search shortly before v4 I don’t even use perplexity anymore. I also noticed you can run web code (html css and js) in a sandbox on the web interface directly if it writes you some code, but it’s no replacement for proper agentic software imo.

Incidentally gemini’s vision was very good, so I’m excited to try deepseek’s when it comes out for me. It understood AI-generated abstract paintings just fine, AI-generated being the keyword here because it’s never seen it before, since I had just generated it with an SD model (unless there’s super deep cross-contamination where it somehow intuitively understands the output of another neural network).

And of course deepseek is completely free and has no paid tier or throttling whatsoever.

Example found on twitter:

that’s pretty impressive tbh.

Only some people were invited to test it, I wasn’t 😢

if they can integrate it wholly with the base model so that you can use it in agentic this would be huge. If you think about it, how many times in a week do you tell people “I have this problem” and send them a screenshot without further context? That’s what vision would do in agentic, it could see the graphical result of its code and instantly know what it needs to fix, it’s like adding a whole new dimension to solve problems with basically.

If you like AI China is doing a lot for local inference.

If you don’t like AI China is accelerating the death of western tech companies.

Basically thank China and Mr. President Xi Jinping.

People just get accustomed to the system they live in and don’t quite question it. This is why doubters are dangerous - both in capitalism and in socialism.

When I was talking to French people they never once questioned that their institutions were “democratic”. A republic where elected officials in parliament pass whatever law they like, and where the president can also pass any law with the so-called 49.3 law, thereby broaching from the executive into the legislative, which are supposed to be separate. The president needing to get elected in just two rounds too, and if there is no absolute majority they just take the top two candidates and offer a choice between them only for the second round. The fact that the president picks the prime minister, prime minister picks the cabinet, and if the president doesn’t like someone in the cabinet, he just fires the prime minister to set up a new cabinet.

Anyone listening to this would say this is not democratic whatsoever, it’s autocracy masquerading as giving you a choice. And yet they don’t question it. They will still say they have “democratic institutions” over there. None of that counts as “democratic” by any stretch of the word but here we are.

It’s the same in the US. All US Presidents are criminals against humanity, all of them. Don’t come at me with the “but what about this guy-” you know it’s true. And yet, USians will keep saying “we wouldn’t be at war under Biden!” yes you would. You were at war under Clinton, Obama, you were at war or engaged in conflicts under 275 of your pitiful 293 years existence. “But they didn’t start the wars, they just inherited them from republicans!” no, they did. Obama bombed Yemen because fuck Yemen. Clinton bombed Yugoslavia because fuck Yugoslavia. Kennedy started the invasion of Vietnam, with boots on the ground. He did. Don’t weasel your way out of it - you know he did. You learned about this. He sent US troops who had no business being in Vietnam. Carter continued destabilizing Haiti under the Duvaliers dictatorships.

But the people that need to hear it will not be receptive to it initially, because throughout all of this, they just live okayish under this system. It’s party A versus party B in that colony, and people inherit this superstructure, beamed straight into their brains from the youngest age. That’s all there is to it: you just don’t question the system as long as it runs okay.

In Germany men aged 18-45 apparently can’t leave the country for more than 3 months without submitting documents. It’s a new law.

Shortly before (in 2025) they apparently approved a ‘hybrid’ system where 18 year olds are pre-drafted. Prior to that they had a fully volunteer force since 2011. There is also a mechanism in that law that the federal gov can introduce conscription if enlistment targets are not met.

It’s getting really dire. they’re preparing for WW3, I’m not sure how else to interpret it. But this time it’ll be against anti-imperialism.

If it starts getting too real skip the country and never ever come back tbh. Tell them you’ll come back in 3 months lol.

Under the terms of the self-defense force, are they not technically barred from doing exactly this?