What DeepSeek has done is to eliminate the threat of “exclusive” AI tools - ones that only a handful of mega-corps can dictate terms of use for.
Now you can have a Wikipedia-style AI (or a Wookiepedia AI, for that matter) that’s divorced from the C-levels looking to monopolize sectors of the service economy.
And now people exchange one American Junk-spitting Spyware for a Chinese junk-spitting spyware.
LLMs aren’t spyware, they’re graphs that organize large bodies of data for quick and user-friendly retrieval. The Wikipedia schema accomplishes a similar, abet more primitive, role. There’s nothing wrong with the fundamentals of the technology, just the applications that Westoids doggedly insist it be used for.
If you no longer need to boil down half a Great Lake to create the next iteration of Shrimp Jesus, that’s good whether or not you think Meta should be dedicating millions of hours of compute to this mind-eroding activity.
Not really a question of national intentions. This is just a piece of technology open-sourced by a private tech company working overseas. If a Chinese company releases a better mousetrap, there’s no reason to evaluate it based on the politics of the host nation.
Throwing a wrench in the American proposal to build out $500B in tech centers is just collateral damage created by a bad American software schema. If the Americans had invested more time in software engineers and less in raw data-center horsepower, they might have come up with this on their own years earlier.
TSMC just finished building out a foundry in Arizona, so there’s a nativist argument that we don’t need the island’s original facilities anymore.
Democrats and Republicans have been shoveling truckload after truckload of cash into a Potemkin Village of a technology stack for the last five years. A Chinese tech company just came in with a dirt cheap open-sourced alternative and I guarantee you the American firms will pile on to crib off the work.
Far from fucking them over, China just did the Americans’ homework for them. They just did it in a way that undercuts all the “Sam Altman is the Tech Messiah! He will bring about AI God!” holy roller nonsense that was propping up a handful of mega-firm inflated stock valuations.
Small and Mid-cap tech firms will flourish with these innovations. Microsoft will have to write the last $13B it sunk into OpenAI as a lose.
Well Mastadon is good for screaming into the void and hope someone shouts back.
It’s good for small hobbyist communities that get built up from IRL spaces or broader online collaborations. If I’ve got a school group or hobbyist club and I want a bespoke “members only” social media space, Mastadon works great. Like Discord without all the obnoxious pop-in “Would you like to give us $40/mo for glittery icons?!” nitro ads.
Lemmy is kind of like a forum type community where you already know someone is going to
like your topic if it’s in the right subcall you an idiot for doing things a different way and throwing up a bunch of dumb memes in your technical sub.
Reddit-brain is all over Lemmy. This is a far cry from the technical focused communities you’ll find on Github or StackExchange.
europe which has better competition in every way
M&A is coming for Europe in a big way as the neoliberal policies of the states seep in through all the cracks. 2025 is gearing up to be a big year for Euro bank consolidation. We’ve already seen a lot of the industrial sector hollowed out of the Southern EU states and consolidated in Germany. Crackups like what happened in Yugoslavia in the 90s and border wars like what we’re seeing with Ukraine/Russia have also immolated domestic industry in a way we haven’t seen since the Years of Lead.
Even ads are better here than in the US.
We’ll see how long that lasts. If the UK is a bellweather, it looks like the Elon-ification of your economy is just a matter of time.
Is this really up for debate?
Florida bans lab-grown meat, adding to similar efforts in three other states
Much like with the fossil fuel industry squeezing out renewable energies at every opportunity, I suspect we’re going to see the powerful agricultural lobbies shut down competitors until the owners of these big businesses can insert themselves as the sole proprietors of the lab meat industry.
On the flip side, retailers are going to want to drive down their costs, so they’ll only switch when the price drops below the current floor set by firms like Tycoon and Cargill. But once it does… you’ll be foolish to assume what you’re eating isn’t lab grown if it means a business increasing its profits.
The end result will be people who want lab meat finding themselves prohibited from buying it and people who don’t want lab meat unwittingly consuming it.
I’m willing to believe he asked ten of his VPs and nine of them agreed with him. Also, that he’s currently looking to fill a newly opened tenth position.
Amazon policy is to stack rank all of its employees and regularly fire anyone in the bottom tranche. So any kind of deliberate slowdown would need to be incredibly well-coordinated. Even then, there would inevitably be a ton of attrition as the automatic Fire Everyone triggers started kicking in.
Its not enough to play by the rules with a company as vast and encompassing as Amazon. You need to take it a step further and start sabotaging the anti-organizing functions of the company. Start shoving monkey wrenches in the employee monitoring systems. Start dismantling the automation that allows the business to function at such a breakneck pace. You’ve got to get in there and break the machine before it breaks you.
the party standing for freedom
That died with the Hayes Administration.
it is just becoming possible to have an infinitely persistent entity
You’re just describing a library. And we’ve had those for millennia.
That said… we’ve had libraries for millennia! Imagine all the alternative universes in which Euclid’s Elements or Plato’s Republic or The Analects of Confucius or Naturalis Historia or On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres were lost before they could become cornerstones of human understanding.
Imagine a world in which we never developed the capacity for language or the faculty for written text.
And yet, despite stockpiling weapons for the next eight decades, never again.
Maybe that’ll change in the next decade, but hopefully we can keep 1945 as the last year nuclear weapons were used for a bit longer.
They killed Lincoln but they couldn’t kill the abolitionist movement. Congress ratified three of the most progressive laws written in a century and the Freedman’s Bureau took to the job of enfranchising and rehabilitating millions of black ex-slaves in the subsequent decade.
Pick up a copy of W.E.B DuBois’s “The Souls of Black Folk”. What he describes is, at it’s heart, a revolution in how our country treated men and women of African descent. It set the foundation for the next century of civil rights and paved the way for a modern era in which the core racist underpinning of the country are totally upended.
That kind of fundamental change would not have been possible under a Breckinridge administration, nor would it have been possible if the Union had been crippled into submission at Gettysburg or Antitem.
Lincoln was the tip of the abolitionist spear and critical to what came after. But he was not alone. And he was by no means the most radical voice within his party. His martyrdom became the bloody shirt that Republicans rallied under long after the war had ended.
Still amazing how AI can’t do words good. Computers have been doing word art practically since the first GUI.
That’s not even on the table. The only thing Americans care about is the potential for Chinese surveillance. The potential for American surveillance and corporate surveillance (particularly for insurance companies) is considered a huge windfall that they’ll fight to continue.
Hell, I can see a future in which your car won’t even start without an internet connection.
Teach her to order something off a foreign-language menu, invite the family out to dinner, and see if she can place her order fluently.
Doing the “Five year old white girl shocks waitress by ordering Orange Chicken in perfect Mandarian” bit IRL would be pretty funny and adorable.
Can’t believe they got Weird Al to do “Dare to be Stupid” for that film. What a moment in history.
Jfc, imagine bringing a life in to this world for the sole purpose of them being a vehicle for your ambition
Its more that humanity is a long line of tragedy and triumph echoing through eternity, and being able to extend your accumulated wisdom to the next link in the chain is both exciting and challenging in a way nothing else in life really is.
when your kids don’t want to any contact with you anymore
That’s a weird thing to say, because I’ve found my parents and in-laws and siblings/cousins to be absolutely invaluable. I think the modern western lifestyle may have seriously fucked this generation. And if you’ve become alienated from your parents AND your kids, that’s definitely a shit existence.
But I would present an alternative. Don’t. Stay in contact with the people you love, whether that’s blood relatives or found family. Be nice to people and try to make the time together pleasantly memorable.
Then maybe your kids will want to share that experience with their kids, and you get to add another link in the chain of existence.
Not that demand will go down but that economic cost of generating this nonsense will go down. The number of people shipping this back and forth to each other isn’t going to meaningfully change, because Facebook has saturated the social media market.
The efficiency is in the real cost of running the model, not in how it is applied. The real bottleneck for AI right now is human adoption. Guys like Altman keep insisting a new iteration (that requires a few hundred miles of nuclear power plants to power) will finally get us a model that people want to use. And speculators in the financial sector seemed willing to cut him a check to go through with it.
Knocking down the real physical cost of this boondoggle is going to de-monopolize this awful idea, which means Altman won’t have a trillion dollar line of credit to fuck around with exclusively. We’ll still do it, but Wall Street won’t have Sam leading them around by the nose when they can get the same thing for 1/100th of the price.