I worked in a university research spinout US-China multinational AI hardware startup, and (without getting into confidential information, but only speaking of general engineering practice) I can mention that both nations' government concerns could be barriers.
And some rules can be counterproductive for the one making the rule, even from a competitive perspective -- not even turning a win-win into a lose-lose, but turning it into a lose-win where you are the "side" who loses.
Another thing I'd like like to say, as a US person, who interfaced throughout the org chart at the multinational startup, is that my colleagues in China, as well as those who were recent immigrants, were generally very smart and knowledgeable, and also very nice people.
It's especially tragic when nations feel they have to act adversarily on tensions, because (as seen in this case) the respective individual citizens are not natural enemies, but rather, they are natural friends. They are also valuable fellow contributors, to the shared wealth of our shared world.
In recent weeks, the world is fortunate that DeepSeek has shared some of its AI advancements, even in the context of themselves being denied the latest hardware with which to work. I hope that this sharing will continue and increase, in all directions.
December, flying out of Thailand I spent one night in Bangkok. Looking for a bar late for one or two drinks after I settled into my hotel I saw two guys, one Chinese and other Russian, stumbling out of a building a few doors down from my hotel. I asked, "Is that a bar or a brothel? I'm looking for a bar." They laughed saying they were looking for a bar too and it was a brothel which is why they were leaving. The Chinese guy said he knows where to find some bars and they invited me to join them. The Russian stopped in a ganja shop on the way.
The Russian in his late twenties left a few years ago to avoid conscription. Least I could do to show my appreciation for his dedication to world peace was buy him drinks for the rest of the night. So .... A Chinese, Russian, and American walk into a bar ... and the jokes write themselves. The shenanigans and tuk tuk rides that ensued continued till the sun came up.
One of the more interesting aspects of going to Stuyvesant High School in the 90s was a very large portion of my classmates and subsequently friends were born in communist China or Soviet Union who travelled on the F Train from either direction. I was reminded of some aspects of my teenage years like hanging out with a group friends who were born in either China or Russia.
In many parts of Thailand it's really not an either/or situation
It will continue until they pass us. They're coming from behind, and releasing models as open source essentially wipes the board of hundreds of American startups.
Growth hackers and solopreneurs like @levelsio can be nipping at the heels of $300M funded companies who poured all of their points into training models, making expensive mistakes, and overpaying for compute.
Companies like RunwayML are probably doomed at this point between Hunyuan, Wan, and the half dozen other open source foundation video models. They failed to raise their last round in 2024, and they definitely face a much bleaker world in 2025.
To expound on that some more, while China might not be leading in LLMs just yet, they definitely are with media. Their video models are the best in class. This poses some significant questions.
In some years, China might be able to unseat the US as the global cultural export powerhouse. As the price of content creation drops orders of magnitude, content creation will become hyper local. That'll be another ding to US soft power.
China will want to commoditize this.
If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
DeepSeek's altruism has taken them far, but they have costs, too, and High Flyer / their personal warchest can only take them so far. And that's before any potential government intervention - it's very likely that this will become a natsec concern for all nations involved.
FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.
Your code assistant that can output a file's worth of code will pale in comparison to systems that can create entire projects in seconds. If it costs billions to reproduce the latter, who's going to do it and give it away for free?
There's a possible solution here in the form of distributed training, but that's still tentative and will always be at a lag to the centralised training the big players can do.
Why not Deepseek? Sometimes rich tech bros have billion dollar hobbies instead of billion dollar yachts or billion dollar foundations. Just takes a few not monetarily motivated but has more money then sense visionaries types willing to turn their very, very expensive hobbies into charities. Now if we enter the 100s of billions / trillions territory...
Spending way too much time trying to track down a very particular version of a GPU driver or similar just isn't going to be worth it if you can make an API call to some remote endpoint that's already done the heavy lifting.
Plenty of value in handling the hard part so your customer doesn't have to.
I don't know how much of the current focus on local models comes from privacy concerns, but at least some does. Once there's something like the gdpr but for data provided for inference, I think even more people will put down the docker containers and pick up the rest endpoints.
Good point regarding movie localization. But, there is still a network effect in entertainment - people want to watch what is popular. So the top content made with lot of money can still have a big market.
Not sure of the attribution of this quote.
> In the 1970s Julius Nyerere (then the President of Tanzania) used this proverb in a speech at the United Nations in New York. The Democratic Republic of the Congo (then Zaire) Ambassador to Great Britain used this same proverb in a talk to a group of Missionaries of Africa (White Fathers) in London. The meaning was the same: In the Cold War between the (then) two great super powers — the United States and Russia — it was the poor Third World countries such as those in Africa who suffered and were victimized.
so that's probably why we've heard it; but it's probably much older than that. i didn't dig in to it too hard because that site was really slow, i got the attribution, though.
you'll note it has a slightly different connotation - the "reeds" aren't the citizens of the warring countries - the "grass" is Africans.
The context I heard it was politics
(When the city gate burns, fish in the moat suffer disaster.)
What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.
It's for autonomous drone warfare.
Invading a neighboring nation doesn't seem too appealing if it means sending tens/hundreds of thousands of your young people (a resource that's getting scarcer and scarcer most everywhere in the world) to the meat grinder. Millions of drones though...
> Not sure if many noticed, but the English put out by Chinese teams is often perfect these days
how are these two sentences connected?
I have learnt English for over 10 years, and so have most Chinese students in the past 20 years. This is a part of the Chinese education system. For every Chinese student in top universities, there's a 99.99% chance that he/she is very good at English.
how is this connected to "Online propaganda is insanely powerful too"
what's the context?
How does this relate to propaganda? Propaganda is often posted to look like organic and natural conversations online rather than government bulletins. It's a lot easier to do that if you are perfectly proficient in the language. LLM tech enables this.
This is not particular to the Chinese by the way, all the major players are doing this. Like I said, my family is Chinese, and my intent is not to convey a negative meaning.
it is also free.
Sorry but this is alarmist bullshit. What keeps countries from going to war is not the cost in soldiers; it's the cost of retaliation on its home soil. Indeed, countries that don't anticipate the enemy to meaningfully retaliate on its civilians are quite trigger-happy to engage in various small wars around the world.
Basically the reason is because there’s so little noise in the air. If it’s black and metal and flying and doesn’t match the iff signal than simple “if then” logic can verify it’s a bogey.
I disagree you can simply automate it via IFF though... basically because IFF is easy grounds for counter drone attacks. Establishing IFF just makes your enemies job easier unless you have heavy anti drone tech which no country does yet.
Automating "this person holding a gun in a given GPS grid is hopefully not holding a stick and is hopefully not a friendly/civilian... and calculate odds they should be executed" is not something easily done by a drone. Especially when there's electronic warfare and drones don't have the luxury of spending lots of time looking.
In Ukraine for example people wear 50 different uniforms because they buy them on the internet or come from random countries. And they carry similar AK rifles. What's an LLM going to do? Kill random people with ~50% accuracy using a very finite supply of drones? Or just have humans fly them from the rear.
Which is silly, because other Chinese companies have already done that, and America is pioneering it (cf Anduril)
Thus China knows there’s activity in this area and has issued a warning. Other than that the technology isn’t vital it’s more hype.
A scientist from London visiting Berlin (and vice versa) could well expect to be surveilled by the opposite country and possibly even considered a traitor by their own.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leiden_American_Pilgrim_Museum
Who knows if Ukraine will ever play such a historic role as the Netherlands, but it's nice to dream about
Taiwan could defo step up since they are already in their Golden Age
(And where shall the asylum seekers from US stopover?)
*big for the Dutch
Yes.
But Indoubt China’s key AI CEOs that need to be warned not to travel to the U.S. will be the ones doing espionage for the Chinese government. If they were, then the govt wouldn’t need to announce not traveling publicly…they’d just pass on the message through their handlers.
The point is that the Chinese (and now, even allies) governments would be justified in thinking that the U.S. despite its reputation for a fair legal system, will arrest or detain a Chinese citizen for no legitimate reason at all.
Is the opposite also true? Should the US government be warning its AI CEOs not to travel to China? Absolutely.
But it’s disappointing that the US’s reputation has fallen so far over the past decade.
Adam Smith wasn't a big fan of IP either. He was all about owning the means of production. China was taking notes. The dog ate America's homework.
India which was at that was relatively in a good economic state, should've been a industrial super-power. Except, the "benign" British scuttled not only industrialization, but India's own traditional education and social systems.
Also, if you want something more recent, France/Airbus accused the US intelligence apparatus of economic spying to benefit Boeing in the 90's - so decades ago. "National Interests" remain the same after decades or centuries. I don't doubt France does the same for its companies.
It makes sense that this happens.
I'm curious why they haven't attempted to tighten the screws on Tesla since Elon's position has weakened and they can really put him in a bad spot if they force him to give up something to them.
Its possible they believe he will destroy Tesla left to his own devices and their best course of action is to sit back and let it happen naturally with no meddling exposure for themselves and then maybe they can even poach some of his employees in the aftermath.
Considering that the administration Elon is gleefully making himself the "chainsaw" figurehead for is actively working to cripple the EV market in the US, this doesn't seem like a bad plan to me.
From where I’m sitting, Elon is very lucky the US government is protecting his business with tariffs, but that only affects US sales. They haven’t made a new car since 2020 either (cyber truck doesn’t count).
By analogy: Apple doesn't sell the most smartphones but they are clearly the leader in the smartphone market.
https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
Pretty much every time people mention BYD EV numbers, they add hybrids.
I see it as intent to mislead.
The same applies to other sectors as well. Top talent is genuinely valued in China.
Guess why most those recently emerged Chinese high tech companies (DeepSeek, Game Science, Unitree etc) are all located in Hangzhou? Because property prices are insane in tier-1 Chinese cities like Shanghai which is just 200km away from Hangzhou. You know it is a huge ponzi scheme when even those well paid high tech engineers couldn't afford a modest apartment in those major cities.
$3m USD buys you a 3 bedroom apartment in Shanghai next to a noisy main road, you have unlimited free supply of all types of pollutions. PM2.5 pollution was about 100 yesterday, any self respecting medical professional would suggest you to wear a mask when going outdoors in such environment well known for causing lung cancer. By moving to Hangzhou, you ONLY need to pay $1.5-$2m for the same shit.
Oh, btw, prices above are after the 30% drop. Just imagine how stupid it was before the crash. Of course you can jump up and lecture me how affordable it is to just spend like $1m to secure a nice family apartment of 40square meters built 60 years ago with disgusting everything inside of it.
by paying 100 years of local average salary for a modest apartment in a not that desirable location? that is not "pay premiums", that is modem slavery.
stop spreading your misinformation, life in China is like the Nightmare mode of DOOM2.
You're deluded. Hyperbole doesn't help either. When you resort to lying or exaggeration, it shows China must be starting to get even, if not ahead in the race.
Yeah, PRC RE in T1/2 cities stupid expensive, but highly compensated PRC talent always have option to rent for dirt cheap in T1 and buy something nice in T2/T3 city with a few years wage. Many highly paid Hangzhou tech workers renting in nice districts while buying equally nice in less expensive cities close by, i.e. renting nice condos in Binjiang for $2000 USD and buying 150sqm apartments for 400k USD in Yanghzou on single salary. Let's be real shitty T2 and nice T3 cities that puts most north American cities to shame, factor in cost of living relative to wage and it's much better QoL than most tier1 north American cities if you prefer urban life. Living really well in PRC on high end tech salary (i.e."AI leaders") is babymode if you're not a retard insisting on living in tapped out T1. Granted tech wage cucks in some western cities get to live in large houses which isn't available in PRC, which has it's appeal.
Hangzhou is horrible place to live, if you check the PM2.5 of Jan and Feb 2025, a total of 5 days had PM2.5 readings below 75. That causes China to have the highest rate of lung cancer in the entire world. Interestingly, this is suddenly not even considered as "QoL".
Your entire argument that people on wages 10x to 20x times of the local average are still being priced out of the city should just buy into places further 400km out is the exact proof that there is no QoL whatsoever. Why should any "AI leader" be forced to buy in a city 400km away from his workplace if the whole propaganda is about QoL.
Smoking less good stuff than you - there's countries with way higher per capita lung cancer rates. PRC ASR higher than US, but skewed only because men smoke like chimney. Female lung cancer ASR is same as US. Not to mention life expectancy recently passed US... interestingly, this suddently not even considered as indicator for "QoL" blah blah.
Hangzhous a great place to live. Most PRC T1 cities are (well BJ boring)... if you have money. AQI is fine, it's like ~100 average... which is moderate, aka barely perceptible vs 20 years ago when urban AQI was like 200-500, i.e. actual struggle to breathe tier bad. ~100 is like bad day in Toronto, AKA it's fucking nothing.
Who gives a shit about locals average. Let's not pretend average bay area tech workers can afford nice local property. This thread is on elite earners, i.e. >2M RMB / ~300k USD per year . Of course they can afford obscene T1 property if they want to grind. But they have many great options if they chose not to. I'm merely illustrating high earners have obscenely high QoL urban easy mode if they wanted it. Like you're not going to find many countries in this world where 400k USD buys you a nice 150sqm / 3br / 2bath apartment in a nice district of a ~10m+ large modern city with world class infra and stupid cheap daily costs that one can likely retire after a few years. Oh while being surrounded in home cultural and not be treated as 2nd class citizen (if anything treated as elite).
Family friend at has this setup working at one of the giants, had nice housing allowance as part of total compensation (~3000 usd per month) where he lived downtown in nice T1 city for free, bought a sweet villa in a T2 city with ~2 years of savings (got a few million RMB of interest free housing loan from company)... it's what he chose instead of the T1 RE, which was attainable but a grind. In the meantime he's basically living for free. Like what's his comparable option in the states? Spend $6000 USD per month on rent around SF and then fuck off to pittsburgh, cleveland, buffalo, kansas etc with their 300k homes, and 2 million population that's worse than a T3 city where he's treated like a foreigner and have to deal with shit tier urban decay on the regular. Maybe if he likes SUVs and big yards. Austin also nice too.
TLDR it's batshit insane to think a high earner don't have a lot of very nice options in PRC especially once you throw in cost of living where that 300k stretches to 600-900k depending on where you go.
When I was bumming around US, I kept telling people how my best time in NA was living in a 800sq ft. apartment, in the best neighbourhood in the continent (also subjective), and I never upsized because it was subjectively the best choice for my lifestyle. Most of the responses were something like “you made yourself to believe in that”. Or “if you moved lived in X state you would have a better life”. But those were just not true for me, and will never will be. And from my personal circles, the same applies. People are just having a hard time to understand that if you make decent income, the life for some people is just better in other countries than US.
Prices are high in Shanghai because everyone wants to live there.
This reminds me of something I read recently...
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/sergey-brin-says-agi-...
What data do you have for this conclusion?
Low crime is simply not true. Most crimes are not reported or swept under the rug as local statistics are reported back to the central government and no one wants to look bad. But wow if you have Weibo you can see some pretty horrible stuff daily before it’s deleted. Nothing worse than seeing 2 woman hacked to death with an axe because of road rage. Cheap food in China comes with a lot of trade offs such as quality. Many shops recycle left over hotpot for the following day. Gutter oil is a real thing. Fake meats or meats from other animals is a real thing.
The claim was:
> Urban life in China, excluding pandemic times, is better than urban life in the states.
“Showing off main cities” is a perfectly reasonable thing to do to support this claim.
Every country has homeless people. There are truly homeless people in China. You don't need to put it in quotes, either.
Truly homeless exist, but statistically and visibly much less problem, because typical local gov very proactive/interventionist in moving them off streets... truely urban homelessness is like... not a really a social option... no right to be homeless. VS in west where homeless don't get cleaned up unless for the occassional politically motivated reasons. In PRC it's default, homeless get detected fast -> get moved into local shelter system where system ids them and tries to guilt trip family into caretaker roles -> can come with modest stipend to cover costs.
The government wouldn't allow encampments, so how can you even tell?
Not sure why we are making that mistake here.
Of course there are more rich people in China today than there were in decades past. That doesn't mean a rich kid of Red Note is good representation of the average Chinese, who is still poorer than the average Mexican, and trending in the wrong direction.
Smoking is still ubiquitous, though. "禁止吸烟" signs are just completely ignored.
I wonder if the true mark of civilization will eventually be clean public bathrooms. It cannot be that hard because some select countries have managed to do it. Too few though.
I was worried about Vietnam, but this is encouraging. I always wanted to visit.
(Don't worry, I understand what "on average" means, and I also understand it varies from location to location).
Funny, that's never on YouTube.
Meta, OpenAI employees aren’t living in Bakersfield. Google NY employees aren’t living in Clifton or something. Very dumb comparisons, obviously, but when you have a good comp in China, your quality of life is just great. There just isn’t that much of a reason to move.
Another note, it's correct that some people want to live in the states. But there's a nuance. From my personal observations, a good chunk of them don't want to live anywhere in the US, but they want the American passport/green card. It's just a hedge for the worst case scenario and to have an escape route if something bad happens. Like life in Tokyo is pretty decent if you're in top percentiles. But most people understand problems (like demographics), however until it becomes an actual issue, it's still preferable to live here.
That's the point. And who trying to lie about eliminating poverty in China (or making the US look much worse), and why are people repeating that lie?
This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.
Worse, you've been repeatedly posting nationalistic flamewar comments in recent weeks. This is bad. I understand the frustrations, but this is no way to make your case.
There's an extra burden on commenters who are representing a minority view, especially when the topic is divisive. That's arguably unfair, but it doesn't make it ok to break the rules, and it's not in your interest to do that.
I've written a lot about this over the years (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...), including this just yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43213858.
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/green-car...
And yes there are still a lot of Chinese who do want to go to US, but from other areas.
Either way the US did not kidnap her.
Since her case never went to trial we don't know if she is guilty or not.
Anyways, this is what a rule of law looks like. It's possible the original request was politically motivated but there's still a independent judicial system at work. In China there's none of that. Sometimes the rule of law gets things wrong but that's still way ahead than the arbitrary "justice" of totalitarian countries.
> random Canadian citizens(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detention_of_Michael_Spavor_an...)
> Anyways, this is what a rule of law looks like
I like the tongue
geeze i don't know how to express it that how much i like this
Yes. Everyone knows I'm referring to the two Michaels.
The party that is rogue in this whole story is China. Even if the conduct of the US authorities here is/was suspect the retaliatory arrests is how the Mafia operates. I am not a fan of the way the US and Canada behaved here but at the end of the day for the most part Meng Wanzhou was not locked up, she had a luxury wait while the slow wheels of justice grind. It's almost certain there was some funny business from the Huawei side here as well since naturally they wouldn't care less about violating US sanctions.
The law and the rule of law in free and democratic countries can be abused. But it's still way ahead of the other option.
when i said "Many Americans are complicit through their silence, denials, and defense."
i didn't expect such a combo...
I was also not silent or defensive of the specific action of arresting her. I thought that was a mistake by Canada and said so at the time. I still think so. I'm not denying anything?
I still stand by what I said though about the rogue actor here being China. That is a big picture statement. It means that even if the actions of the US or Canada were wrong, they were within what we consider the rule of law. China's retaliatory actions were not. I'll take the rule of law over a dictatorship any day with all its problems.
Not only Americans are complicit through their silence, denials, and defens
for example, i've referenced a very famous poem by a Chinese liberal:
> If I am doomed to die in war in this life, then let me be a ghost under the precision-guided bombs of the United States. - Written on the 15th day of the Iraq War.
back to the topic
> It means that even if the actions of the US or Canada were wrong, they were within what we consider the rule of law.
first, discovered foreign spys are assets just prepared for situations like this, if 'my' spys were arrested by 'your' authority, 'I' will arrest yours and make a deal to exchange, except in this situation Meng is not a spy but a important business women
second, if it's wrong, but it's within the rule of law, doesn't it mean the rule of law is 'wrong'?
and, what do you think about hunter biden and trump donald, are they guilty? is it 'the rule of law' that they are free of judgment? or did the rule of law judged they are not guilty?
I will concede this was a very high profile extradition request but if let's say Sir James Dyson is arrested on charges of fraud in the US the UK is not going to grab CIA spies and throw them in the dungeon. If he did commit fraud in the US he would likely go to jail. Maybe he'll serve his jail term in the UK. Maybe he'll be pardoned through some diplomacy.
Some Googling shows this isn't fiction: https://www.theguardian.com/business/article/2024/jul/28/cle...
What your describing is something that would have been a practice of sorts during the cold war between Russia and the US. Essentially something you do when you're at war.
EDIT: I'm not familiar enough with the Hunter Biden case but possibly something fishy was going on (e.g. this laptop suddenly appearing). Trump is... Trump. The rule of law is not perfect, people in power can get away with things the rest of us can't, but nothing is perfect. In place without the rule of law many people just disappear and you have no recourse and people in power get away with a lot more.
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Really? There have been 2 months of reasons accumulating by now. One of which being that the government is made of fascists who make nazi salutes and oligarchs.
It is insane.
Many people just talk nonsense on this topic with China vs the US. Anyone who hasn't read America Against America by Wang Huning basically has no idea what they are talking about on this subject. Of course, total ignorance on a topic has never been something to slow down the opinion of a westerner.
A WW3 may indeed come to fruition if we continue on this path. It won’t be the older folks paying for this but rather our children or grandchildren.
Future is bleak.
Or, rather, thanks to Russia.
When you read the reasoning of people that defected from UK/US to soviet with nuclear secrets it's kinda hard to grasp now, but back then I can definitely understand that a mix of "the soviets are not that bad" and "are we really that good?" could've made people switch, vise-versa.
I feel like that have for the past decades mostly been a one-way street (China to US) but given the recent trends, (chiense scientist leaving US)[1] I could kinda see how some people might start to debate that question internally.
Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.
This isn't the first time. In the 1950s, the founder of Berkeley JPL, an MIT professor who was one of the forefathers of NASA and Manhattan Project contributor, and who Theodore von Karman called a generational genius, Chinese educated Qian Xuesen was humiliated with accusations of being a communist spy and given a multi-year house arrest where he couldn't work so that his knowledge would fall behind the state of the art. He was then deported, and went back to China where he created the Chinese space program entirely from scratch. In China today, he's widely known as a national hero and the "father of Chinese rocketry". If you really want your mind blown, look up his family tree and see how many Nobels and National Science Medals are related to him.
The past few years alone has seen some really high profile scientists taking their knowledge and experience with them to China. These are people who've spent 30+ years building lives here in the US, and were initially being forced out, but now are actually being lured with better pay packages and working conditions since the first wave was treated so well. It's absolutely insane.
While some of what you write is accurate, there’s also plenty of hyperbole and omission in what you said.
According to research by Stanford: ”19,955 scientists of Chinese descent who began their careers in the U.S. but left for other countries, including China, between 2010 and 2021.”
And: ”Among the scientists of Chinese descent who left the U.S. in 2010, 48% moved to mainland China and Hong Kong, and 52% moved to other countries.”
https://sccei.fsi.stanford.edu/china-briefs/reverse-brain-dr...
You understand that a contemporary communist country had just murdered a few million of their own civilians, yes?
It’s just common sense to use Trumps own words.
Just remember that as these people drag us into a war for “peace”
Many of the people outed and persecuted for homosexuality were really gay. That doesn’t make it any less offensive.
It's cutting off your nose, face, and brain just to get a little bit of fun discrimination in.
Of those 12,000, fewer than 1000 were actually members of the Communist Party. Many of the accused (an estimated 5000) were just gay (at a time when that was still illegal).
Of those 12,000, fewer than a dozen were actually spies for the Soviets.
McCarthy leaked more classified information in his hunt for Communists than the spies actually did.
No. The US will experience a brain drain to Europe, Canada, and Australia, but not to China. Trump still has a ways to go to match the excesses of the Xi regime.
But as I read scientific paper regularly, I can't ignore how vast majority of the author names (well at least in STEM, ML/Robotics, latter is my interest) are Chinese. I don't think those young talents would mind moving to China, especially when anti-asian sentiment have been on the rise since Covid. But since many renown European universities/research center also have those bright young Chinese mind, I guess the Chinese in US can also just move to the more friendly part of Europe (Switzerland etc).
There's also HK, where you can get by with English just fine. And they're making new research centers as we speak. (although my HK friends tell me it is getting more Mainland Chinese day by day and expats are leaving).
Also, most people overlook the fact that, "any French citizen who commits a crime according to the French law, even abroad, can be prosecuted in France." So that makes extradition moot in my view.
Quote source: https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-reasoning-behind-Frances-law...
For comparison, Canada has 73k citizens living in the UK, 90k in France, and 800k in the US.
I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_diaspora
Hong Kong 300,000 Zhang and DeGolyer, 2011
China 19,990 Chinese Census 2010Why is it a good thing to put someone into a tiny cage for victimless possession crimes?
Why must I convince you why whatever I do is good to preserve my rights? Fuck all that.
Secondly, none of your points are pertinent to the day-to-day of anyone in academic research/science. Perhaps only to the irrationally paranoid.
So it turns out that with safety comes real freedom, the freedom to go on with your life without fear. Their words, not mine.
So please, tell me again why having guns is a good idea.
There are plenty of nice things about Japan. Most Americans who are capable of moving to Japan do not, for one reason or another. The ones capable of doing so generally self select because it jives with their desired way of life. I know of Japanese who moved here and are now gun toting Americans.
Perhaps the spice of life is if you value certain liberties more than life itself, maybe America is an option for you. I'm not totally convinced this is even the case with guns in the long run -- it does seem disarmament buys some short term safety for some people at the expense of long term vulnerability that their government, or external or internal forces, can exploit their disarmed state. This has happened in the US to the Indians, to the Jews in Europe, and to the Filipinos by the Japanese.
I'm saying there is a place with some of the most liberal non commercial speech and strongest gun rights in the world, certain people value this, and if they are like me they're not living their life in fear that these liberties might come with certain additional risks.
But a huge fraction of our workforce is immigrants who have given up their homeland and distanced themselves from their families and communities in search of opportunities here. The fact that we're driving them away now does not bode well for our future economy.
Did you mean creating wealth?
I'm not talking about land speculation. I'm talking about creating businesses and jobs for everyone. I'm talking about hard labor that's necessary for our society to run. We're not better off picking crops while China's tech economy becomes #1.
It's actually surprising that this point is so hard to understand.
Yet. It is not even two months in, we have not seen nothing yet.
As a practical matter, the things that affected me the most when I traveled are the great firewall, language barriers, and time zone issues.
For example, I don’t protest the government. If that was an important part of my life China would be a bad choice.
Probably another question you might ask is what are the things you’d be able to do in China that you wouldn’t in the US.
By the way, if anyone US-based is in this situation and wants to "defect" to an EU-job, send me a message, I can help you.
Sydney's beaches and weather helps a bit too.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/deepseek-engineer-...
I've worked in Australia, Europe and Canada, and the ecosystem of scientists, funding and support for develop of science into products is far much further ahead in the US it's not even funny.
https://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/visa-residence/types/e...
The politics there are a little concerning at the moment but should be stable for at least 4 years. With residency, the rest of the EU becomes a lot easier if things change.
If you own a home in your own country, please stay there. From my experience with EU it is not worth it. On the surface it looks crazy good. But west has their own share of problems.
The cultural mix is difficult, second class citizen is always going to be a thing. There won't be racism or anything like that. It just the aura of people change when they speak with natives vs non-natives.
Ask this important question before moving to EU: is it worth trading your family, culture, connection, and your ability to communicate for a foreign land where you are going to be second class citizen, your struggle will only give a glimmer of hope for your children?
Left EU for my home. Never returning there. The promise of paradise isn't appealing at all.
Experience it once in your life, but do not stay.
My impression is there's some weakness from the auto industry struggling which is flooding the job market; but there's a lot of upside. They're investing big in a lot of new industries that don't even really exist in the US (energy related).
Rheinmetall and the rest of the defense industry seems like its set to really take off over the next few years, which even if you aren't eligible for (citizenship requirements), it'll lead to other industries needing labor though.
I'm not from there and don't follow it super closely so am not an expert, but that's kindof been my read on it.
For what its worth, this started because I struggle to find 2-3 jobs in the US per week worth applying for in my field. I can find 8-10 a day over there without much trouble (had several interviews, 2 final rounds, 1 "you weren't a fit for this role, but we really want to talk to you again in May").
Not great. Its economic growth has stalled. European Commission forecasts GDP growth of 0.7 percent in 2025, the slowest in the EU. Since 2017, the German economy has grown by 1.6 percent, while the EU average has been 9.5 percent.
https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/new-atlanticist/german...
In general, it’s easy, just highly bureaucratic. If you compare to what most other countries have to go through, getting a work visa as a skilled us citizen is quick.
If you want to support some of the efforts I'm pushing hard for, check out EU Inc: https://www.eu-inc.org/
Many entrepreneurs here know what the advantages are in the US compared to EU when it comes to startups etc and understand what needs to change. There's real willingness to get it done and the trump election has been fast-forwarding through so many of the steps, giving the EU the kick it needed to wake up.
All the momentum is there, now. I'm feeling super optimistic about Europe. But the recession will be hard to weather.
EDIT: It might not be possible to flag or downvote comments. So, I recommend you to contact the moderators or your local police. You can find my name and address on my GitHub profile.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6lsUJdGLFx7OGLRQCQfH...
Anyway I’m sure people can be in whatever bubble their algorithmic news gives them. At the end of the day, today, it’s shameful to be American and many of my American friends feel that shame right now. The same cannot be said for most European countries.
> it’s shameful to be American and many of my American friends feel that shame right now. The same cannot be said for most European countries.
So you're proposing you are immune to a bubble? One of the people I referenced was _literally_ ashamed of the German government. It's happening on both sides.
I find the whole thing odd, to be honest. I had a ton of disagreements with the prior administration, and I think the way many things were handled was "shameful." However, I never once felt "ashamed" of being American. Administrations come and go. The will of the people is fickle and changes like the wind.
- You can't call people pedophiles unless it was proven in court.
- You can't say black people are inferior.
- You can't say Israel is doing a genocide.
and only one of these is a valid thing to be worried about IMO...
Please stay away from Europe.
And otherwise you simply ensure that you have more than IIRC 5? people in the photo because taking and publishing a photo of a group of people is not illegal.
Privacy and not being harassed and free speech are of course exactly where the rubber meets the road. There is an intersection and naturally people will have differing opinions as to where the line should be drawn. One can always come up with examples where favoring free speech will lead to really bad outcomes for someone and vice versa.
This is like saying the US's gun law is "reduced" to everything "viewed as" the right to keep and bear arms. I don't think you can legally own a nuclear missile anywhere in the US, even in Texas.
Which part of taking someone's picture is speech, anyway? I didn't see that in the first amendment.
US also has free speech issues. For instance, libel has civil penalties I disagree with. However not being able to post a photo I took of someone in public for me is completely intolerable and barbaric, and a harassment against people exercising right to free speech. Opinions differ so I'm pretty pleased with Germany doing their thing and me doing mine and never stepping foot on their soil.
I agree that you should stay in the USA and let everyone else go to Europe.
- You can't call people pedophiles unless it was proven in court.
- You can't say black people are inferior.
Since October 2023 it's like:
- You can't call people pedophiles unless it was proven in court.
- You can't say black people are inferior.
- You can't say Israel is doing a genocide.
And has remained there since. Is this what worries you?
Something to consider, a huge number of people feel personally alienated and under threat of harm by the current administration’s party rhetoric.
Those people may, bizarrely, value life and liberty over top dollar. The revulsion expressed on the matter of taxes may also seem odd to the people for whom paying taxes means the state can provide for their safety and wellbeing.
Sure, in America why would anyone move from State A to State B to get less paid and pay more taxes. The social conditions are (in a wide-stroke) the same.
This is ofc not the case if you move to say, Europe or SK/Japan. The amount of money you need to live a similar socio-economic lifestyle is different.
And we already know that many people don't put certain value to increased income past a certain threshold (people want to feel safe and well-off; not necessarily be a millionare). We are in the HN/US-Tech bubble so ofc it feels like "everyone want to be the next Zucc with their startup" but if you once leave that bubble, you'll notice that most people are not a over-fitted model to one metric called income.
What it does have is extremely high wages, and despite my inclinations to the contrary I'm absolutely staying for the next year or three, but taxes aren't to blame there. A small number of tech oligarchs made that possible (FANG driving up wages for certain skillsets).
Didn't mean for this to be a wall of text. Basically, money's not everything, and even if it was, it could still make sense for a lot of folks from the US to want to move to Europe.
That salary comparison was valid pre-Trump.
Is it not valid now?
And if we focus specifically on the academia, American salaries have never been that high. Sure the numbers in the paycheck are bigger than in most countries, but the cost of living is also high. Particularly because good universities are often in very expensive areas, such as California, New York, or Boston. I've worked at a foreign university where grad students on dual income could buy a starter home. Now I'm at an American university, where you need to be tenured faculty on dual income to afford a similar home.
> I've worked at a foreign university where grad students on dual income could buy a starter home.
Back when I was in the job market and looking for a permanent position, we had a rather silly government that did poorly justified budget cuts. Academic positions were scarce at the time. I was looking for a position in Europe, but I somehow ended up accepting an offer from the US. I had never thought seriously about moving to the US, but when you are in the academia, you learn to take the opportunities you can find.
That used to be the American advantage. You had a less competitive academic job market and higher chances of winning grants. The downsides were a bit lower position in the social and economic hierarchy than in Europe. And the American way of life, which is not for everyone.
When the US model used to be to attract top worldwide researchers, that's pretty much the targeted demographics.
US life is more plentiful in terms of cash but not in terms of hard value. Why do you think we get so many American tourists?
Unfortunately Europe is full of self inflicted wounds, especially around entrepreneurship, but we are working on those.
Because the US is a young country compared to most of Europe?
kind of crazy they saw all the graffiti license plate games that early
There’s no evidence that is the case.
It has been eighty years since a nuclear weapon was used in an act of aggression.
It would appear a state sort of only really comes to have nuclear weapons when it has got its act together sufficiently to be well enough behaved to not use them.
A sort of maturation process, if you will.
The meek[1] shall inherit the Earth, and all of that.
If we’ve got data, let’s go with the data. If all we have is opinions, let’s go with mine.
1. this is best as interpreted as those who have the ability to use force, but do not use it, except maybe to defend themselves.
Increasing the odds by introducing hundreds of players some willing to gas their own people is rolling the dice. The few countries that have the ability has been responsible but that does not mean that will always be the case or new players will be as responsible.
In about five billion years the sun will run out of hydrogen and expand, engulfing Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth.
In the mean time, you could respond to the argument I actually made.
The level of organisation at the state level required to build a working nuclear weapon, along with the forces working against that, eg. how difficult it’s been for Iran to get across the line, and the fact of the near miss you mentioned, allows most of us, it would seem, to sleep well at night.
If they couldn’t, then they wouldn’t be considered to have superior political power.
With enough power differential that won't even be a consideration.
if everyone had a way to completely disintegrate the planet no one would be above another
I think you might be counting on way too many decision makers to remain rational and wise enough to avoid and defuse non-trivial situations that want to escalate.
In the 8 billion times 8 billion potential nuclear exchanges that universal nuke would enable (64 quadrillion!), there is at least one scary bad one. At any time of day. That you are standing too near.
Please acknowledge my wisdom here. (Hard unblinking stare. Wiggling finger wanders toward red button… “Kind person, I have no interest in harming you, but my sources inform me you have at most one nuke. So I must be prepared to be first. Please keep those hands where I can see them while I only, and with full peaceful intent, rest my finger here.”)
more than nukes one can survive nukes the ability to completely disintegrate the planet for everyone
"John von Neumann" was a very famous and influential person defending just that.
Plus all that nonsense on replicators/celular automata in later life.
Not worthy of the hype as far as I'm concerned.
A world with only the USA would have been far worse.
bad citizen don't you want all the marines and special forces to be employed?
just wow what would jesus say we both know he hates all the savages but he loves jobs more
We Web/app programmers are a dime a dozen, unique-skills-wise.
But the loss of an individual with much more rare scientific knowledge/skill/ideas can be felt much more acutely by the country that alienates them.
(Counterintuitive techbro salaries vs. academic salaries aside.)
Many people really enjoyed Shanghai and other cities and are recipients of expansive social safety nets of China
If you’re middle class and in a big city or some of the planned cities, China is fine, not without its difficulty of adjusting to, some people sour on etiquette and difficulty founding entrepreneurial things. But an academic or programmer would be fine.
So people in the US often try to focus on political edge cases to write off an entire country but its easy to see that focus going away
can you provide more detail on what you mean by this? Are there labor laws preventing 996, for example? what kind of medical care is there?
If you work, you contribute to a fund that you have access to if you lose your job.
In terms of how well expats integrate, I've seen people from across the spectrum. There are definitely those who are meshed into the local social circles. Foreigner privilege is a thing, and I find that how you view social status is a strong determinant in how well you integrate. Those with a more egalitarian mindset seem to do well in this regard.
And yes, that’s correct.
Regarding Christianity, religious people have the choice of being in the registered religious practices there. Sometimes the registration requirements are incompatible woth the religion, such as a religious leader sent by the state, as opposed to someone chosen or independentally wants to lead/control people.
and unregistered religious practices are cracked down on. western society chooses to masquerade the unregistered issues as the state of religious practices in china. the unregistered population is just as large as the registered one.
There is no substitute for foreign language press, at a minimum add Le Monde Diplomatique, or Der Spiegel to your digest if not Al Jazeera, RT and Xinhua.
At first they'll seem propagandist with stilted English writing but you'll learn so much more about what's actually going on in the world and why countries do what they do.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/china-tells-its-ai-lea...
Text-only:
https://assets.msn.com/content/view/v2/Detail/en-in/AA1A1EdF
2. Big tech has managed to profit off of open source, yet only give the pieces they want others to maintain back. None of the value pieces are open sourced. Open source authors need to start using licenses with bigger fangs. Licenses with MAU/ARR cutoffs.
If the South China Morning Post is to be believed[1], the salaries for software engineers in AI-related fields are far lower in China than in the USA, despite already being "two thirds higher" than other software engineers in China.
[1]: https://www.scmp.com/tech/tech-trends/article/3253492/china-...
They can intercept every call and every message now, but they can’t read it all or build a file on a billion citizens. Human intelligence doesn’t scale, but AI inference does.
In the very near future (maybe the present!) every call will be listened in by an AI with a system message along the lines of “Report any anti-government or potentially rebellious behaviour. Summarise the conversation for each party and add it to their permanent file.”
See Dario Amodei's Machines of Loving Grace: https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
It doesn't take much imagination to think about how this could end poorly if it goes wrong or is controlled by the wrong party.
>concerned ... could divulge confidential information... could be detained and used as a bargaining chip in
It seems a much more realistic worry is that silicon valley folk offer them big money to relocate to the US.
Aslo, perhaps slightly off topic there are loads of Chinese crossing the Mexican border to take advantage of the recent open border situation.
60 minutes clip on that https://youtu.be/M7TNP2OTY2g
As a Brit I watched that in slight amazement and thought the Dems are going to lose the election if they keep that stuff up, which of course came to pass.
Does anybody doubt that this is a reasonable concern? The Feds would probably throw the book at those guys for every form of IP theft, "conspiracy to commit economic espionage," "theft of trade secrets," and you can't ever forget the ubiquitous "wire fraud."
If I were any of the Deepseek guys, the furthest I'd go on vacation would be Thailand or Mongolia. Even Japan would seem dangerous.
Meanwhile the folks at Meta/Anthropic/OpenAI are totally in the clear, lol. They can scrape libgen, but it's no big deal, don't worry about it.
For instance it is trivial for a country to reduce crime statistics simply by making things that used to be crimes legal
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1477370818794124?ic...
What's the point of reporting it if you know that nothing will come out of it? I had my car broken into, my phone stolen on the train, I have been harassed on public transport. Guess how many times the perpetrators were fined/convicted?
A big fat 0. And some of that stuff happened in areas with multiple "security" cameras who witnessed the whole thing.
Comparatively they are still incredibly safe countries, and the sentiment of insecurity has always been disproportionate to reality and politically exploited.
But people feeling the social climate deteriorating is also spot on, the economy not doing great and rising inequalities is largely part of it so I don't think it will improve in the short term.
In 2005 France's domestic intelligence network, the Renseignements Generaux, identified 150 "no-go zones" around the country where police would not enter without reinforcements.
I am guessing, the sentiment of insecurity must be pretty strong in these areas if the cops don't even go there anymore.
Slightly off-topic, but there are areas where cops are more in danger than the general public (visceral ACAB sentiment), and people from the higher spheres of society also won't set a foot there. These places will fit both profiles of "no-law" zone and being extremely peaceful and easy to live in.
[0] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89meutes_dans_les_banlieue...
Also, the way of counting has been manipulated in Spain at least to mask the data conveniently.
Im pretty anti-CCP, and pro-USA, but I wouldn't put anything past the Trump admin at this point. Honestly don't see how news worthy this whole thing is, as it just seems like common sense from the Chinese side imo.
and by the way how many people prepare a meal and then leave it on the table and brutally kill themselves?
If it becomes a natsec concern, the government will simply ignore or redefine the laws. The current US government has already demonstrated that the rule of law is a mere suggestion.
I recall that some states were happy to deice roads next to schools with radioactive brine, which might come back now with EPA being dismantled.
https://www.acfan.org/2020/radioactive-oil-and-gas-waste-on-...
[1] https://hoodline.com/2023/06/new-ca-income-limits-classify-s...
"Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home."
https://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
He also mentions giving a talk for YC in China in 2018:
In fairness though - this will happen. China/Russia etc. might claim they have secret "social glue" (Dugin has a whole philosophy on this), but liberalism and ergo US is still the top-dog because Communism has destroyed the "old" social-glue (Orthodox Xtianity and Buddhism/Confucianism) already. India is even worse (and likely unsaveable) because in addition to all this, the elites don't even the glue of the language (and largely identify as pan-Anglo nationalists).
US (w/ smaller allies like Japan/Korea) still largely set the social "ontology" across the world (and also why China will run into the same traps and pathologies that Japan/Korea/India and other Asian states have gotten stuck in). I doubt Robotics/AI would save them anymore than it did Japan.
Randomly picking the first author in the r1 paper, Daya Guo, he interned and was a researcher for Microsoft, a well known Chinese company. So I guess he didn't have any "overseas experience" whatsoever.
I'm sure China has plenty of talent. But an oppressive society is going to be self limiting.
The intent of the original "boast" is to somehow claim the know-how comes solely out of China. It's boasting about China's abilities to generate cutting edge technology without reliance on the west. This has nothing to do with where you physically reside.
The gp said:
> Industrial espionage by China has a long history, and China has more valuable things to steal from America than the other way.
And you were countering that by saying nonono, these guys learnt everything they know solely from some Chinese origin. They've never been overseas.
No, it isn’t. It’s likely they mean they haven’t studied aboard or have worked in the U.S., which has been long seen as a prerequisite to innovate in the tech industry there.
My original comment was merely citing what they think. It’s unfortunate that you cannot tell the difference between describing and endorsing.
>> Why does the US still allow Chinese nationals to study at its universities and work at its companies? Seems like a big risk that cutting edge research and trade secrets will go to America’s main adversary. Industrial espionage by China has a long history, and China has more valuable things to steal from America than the other way.
> I have good news for you. DeepSeek openly bragged that none of its people have “overseas experience”. They are all local talents.
...
> My original comment was merely citing what they think
Fair enough. So my comment is towards what they think? What is your position?
EDIT: Do you feel that DeepSeek open bragging about none of its people having "overseas experience" is simply to say they have not been overseas or that the technology originates in China? I'll admit I'm not down to the nuance of how studies overseas are viewed in China.
You don’t have to guess what they mean since the CEO did an interview about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845612
Since when has this ever happened? In China, yes. In the US, never!
How foolish of them. China can only look in the mirror with this.
She was detained in Vancouver on the request of the US DoJ and held in house arrest for three years - after which they dropped all the charges and let her go back to China. She was absolutely used as a bargaining chip by the US government.
iow, she committed a crime and was released after agreeing to a plea bargan. They did NOT drop the charges. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou
> The Department of Justice said it would move to dismiss all the charges against Meng when the deferral period ends on 21 December 2022…
> On 1 December 2022, the prosecution asked a judge to dismiss bank fraud and other charges against her,[58] and the judge dismissed the charges.[17]