i still use emacs everyday, with the native UI. but i love the idea of this project. Personaly i never get used to the UI of VSCode. seems so hard to understand because in emacs you deal with functions not UI buttons.
> Personaly i never get used to the UI of VSCode. seems so hard to understand because in emacs you deal with functions not UI buttons.
I prefer both Vim and Emacs over VSCode, but I teach intro programming at a university and use VSCode in the lectures.
VSCode is actually quite decent if you use it as a keyboard-driven thing with a distraction-free interface. By the former, I mean that Cmd-Shift-P does the same as Emacs’ M-x, and from the keybinding hints you quickly learn any recurring useful bindings (or can change them under Cmd-K Cmd-S when they feel bad). By the latter, I mean that nearly every UI element can be disabled (activity bar, tab bar, status bar, scroll bar, most buttons, indent guides, gutters, etc.) and if you spend 30min disabling the fluff it looks as minimal as Emacs. You don’t really need the UI elements if you learn Cmd-Shift-P and basic keybindings, which as an Emacs user you’ll pick up in a week.
Not trying to sell VSCode here, as I said I don’t prefer it myself. I really tried to switch some times, but I don’t like the Microsoft monoculture nor the importance of proprietary plugins (like remote development and pylance), and an Electron app usually has some weirdness when it comes to font rendering, UI bugs, etc. compared to native or terminal apps.
But if you have to use it, it’s actually not bad if you approach it in the same way you’d approach Emacs: Call functions with Cmd-Shift-P (can rebind to M-x if you want), and invoke more common functions via keybindings instead of UI elements.
Human history is full of this ridiculous hand-wringing over nothing. some people don't actually do shit, just sit around pointing fingers and nitpicking. They skip the real work of digging into social change and fixate on surface-level bullshit.
The fertility rate mess really boils down to just two core reasons: in fancy democratic developed countries, folks are so damn self-absorbed that the whole system screws over regular people and kills their vibe for having kids. And in poorer countries, it's solar panels and TikTok exploding everywhere, giving way too many fun distractions to keep things lively. But the real root of it all? It's baked into the political systems and setups. Still, barely anyone wants to face the music and admit their "great" democracy and any other policical system is straight-up trash.
This article just flat-out refuses to face the real damn problem.
Either you're banking on robots to save the day, or you gotta crank up the birth rate. But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better. Thing is, none of those are any more doable than hoping robots magically fix everything.
For a lot of woman in "somehow develoed countries" the labour market is today more attractive than the "marriage market" as women rights etc. give them much more freedom than it was in older days (e.g. in some EU countries the woman had to ask their spouse if they allow them to work up into the 70s).
If you are for women rights etc., then you have to accept that this includes much lower birth rates (as having childrend is not the only way to survive).
Birth rates are only up in countries without any social development of women rights.
> Or maybe, just maybe,having kids just isnt that great and people (and especially women) are finally realising it.
Reproduction's a straight-up genetic instinct in humans. You're basically talking about something so screwed up that it makes people straight-up ignore their built-in drive to have kids.
> Reproduction's a straight-up genetic instinct in humans.
Sex is the straight-up genetic instinct with a strong drive. It used to correlate very closely with reproduction, so the difference between the two was meaningless. The issue is we managed to decouple them, with modern reliable hormonal birth control.
> But ramping up the birth rate? Only three ways to pull that off: straight-up tank women's rights across the board, socialize childcare big-time, or just smash the current political system to bits and build something better.
Actually it's probably more about smashing the cultural and economic system. IMHO the problem with fertility isn't so much with "women's rights" or the "political system" per se, but capitalism (including capitalism-inflected feminism that idealizes careers, which is pretty much all mainstream feminism).
Under the current system you exist to be maximally exploited to increase profits (ideally consuming all your capacity, including that which you'd use to reproduce and raise children), and childcare (socialized or no) is a foolish attempt to solve that problem with more of the problem (and of course that doesn't actually work).
The solution is a system the allocates a significant fraction of everyone's labor to cultural continuity (reproduction, child-rearing, and civic engagement), which would require a significant re-ordering of priorities.
Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".
It doesn't really fit the picture. Capitalism is about 250 years old and most of that time it correlated with a massive population explosion, not a collapse. The current world also isn't uniformly capitalist. Socioeconomic conditions and systems differ across the globe, but the collapse seems to be nearly universal.
There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school and we mostly eliminated teenage pregnancies in the developed world. Which is likely better for the socioeconomic level of the now-not-mothers, but it also has negative biological effects and sank the overall birth rate in a non-trivial way.
What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy. That is a very small subset of "capitalism", though.
> Beware of explaining everything with one reason, and I certainly noticed the tendency of contemporary Americans to explain everything with "capitalism".
Capitalism probably not the only cause, but I think it's a pretty central cause, and may be driving some of the other causes. I also think its worth pointing out because it can be one of those things that's so familiar that it can become invisible.
Birth control technology is probably the other big cause, because it would have the effect of "unblocking" the effect of other cultural trends on birthrate.
> There are more things at play. For example, we spend our most fertile years in school...
I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education.
I think a bigger factor is probably early focus on career pushing many women to try to start having children even later in their late 20s/early 30s. And that goes back to capitalist workplaces being pretty unaccommodating to parents (it's a bit better now, but work still demands your first priority to be your work).
> What is entirely new is the loneliness epidemic, though. I would blame that on the specific combination of Covid lockdowns (which killed off a lot of real-world institutions where people met in person) and the smartphone attention economy.
That's not that new though: the book Bowling Alone was published in 2000 and is apparently based off a 1995 essay. COVID and smartphones just accelerated existing trends.
"I assume you're talking about 18-22, but my impression is that historically, most women had their first children after that age, even before widespread college education."
In cities and in richer families, yes. In rural settings, everything was sped up a bit, and, until very recently, most population worldwide was rural. Even if we look at highly fertile regions today (Afghanistan, Niger, Chad...), the first-time mothers tend to be between 16 and 18 and live outside the few cities that are there.
My own grandmother grew up in a rather underdeveloped corner of Slovakia in the 1930s (no electricity, wooden huts etc.), and a peasant girl who wouldn't be at least betrothed by 20 was seen as a bit weird.
Quite a lot of our previous fecundity was driven by rural mothers having six or seven children. This was a major source of "kid surplus". The urban population was never as fertile, plus there was some extra mortality from diseases and higher cost of food.
your suggestion of "socialize childcare big-time" is tried in EU, countries like sweden offers the best support of families and yet are parley getting the numbers up without immigration, the root of the drop is the change of women role in society, finding a political sweet spot is required, if women get a salary from the government when they have more than 3 kids then it might encourage families to take the big step and the women to spend more time doing the real full time job of home care, also families needs help with bigger housing, logistics and home duties when they have more kids, normally that help came from the grandparents but it's not happening anymore because the average age of the grandparents is higher, and baby boomers and "older generations" are assholes by blocking the housing options for their kids, i can also suggest that a adults with no kids can get some money by hour from the government for helping families with many kids as it is also needed sometimes.
solve this:
- Housing issues.
- Income issues.
- Care and time issues.
It's really alarming when governments see their society collapsing and do nothing, if you have such government, remove it, it's a stupid government.
Some countries are even working against people having children. Germany introduced a new law that now if the parents have their combined salaries over a certain amount, you get 0 child care. And the funny thing is that that limit is very low for people living in a big city. This policy came from the Greens actually, which are supposed to be more left leaning. But they couldn't care about this, or women or families, for them anyone who earns a bit above average needs to be punished. In our case, just when we were actually thinking of having a baby, we realised that if we actually would do it, our income would be basically more than halved because my wife earns even more than me, so not only would we earn way less, but we would earn way less with an extra child in our family, so yeah, thanks for the support.
I mean a more radical fix. Like, some kinda government-run breeding facility where folks drop off their newborns right after birth, and the state takes over raising 'em with standardized management and training. Then, once the kids are past the heavy-care phase, hand 'em back full-time to the parents.
What the hell does Mark see in Wang? Wang was born into a family whose parents got Chinese government scholarships to study abroad but secretly stayed in the US, and then the guy turns super anti-China. From any angle, this dude just doesn't seem reliable at all.
> Wang was born into a family whose parents got Chinese government scholarships to study abroad but secretly stayed in the US, and then the guy turns super anti-China.
All I'm hearing is he's a smart guy from a smart family?
I imagine that CCP adherents would disagree. And there's no shortage of those among Chinese expats in the US.
They tend to get incredibly offended when they see anyone who doesn't toe the Party's line - let alone believe that the Chinese government is untrustworthy and evil.
he is very smart. but Mark is not. Ever since Wang joined Meta, way too many big-name AI scientists have bounced because of him. US AI companies have at least half their researchers being Chinese, and now they've stuck this ultimate anti-China hardliner in charge—I just don't get what the hell Meta's up to(And even a lot of times, it ends up affecting non-Chinese scientists too.). Being anti-China? Fine, whatever, but don't let it tank your own business and products first.
How do you know Mark isn’t smart? He’s built a hugely successful business. I don’t like his business, I think it has been disastrous for humanity, but that doesn’t make him stupid.
Man, this might be the worst timing ever. I get it's a solid start, and the visa-free policy's a nice touch for letting more foreign tourists see the real China up close. But right now, the country's biggest headaches are unemployment through the roof and the private economy going down the drain. Oh, and don't forget nationalism's surging worldwide. It's totally a step in the right direction, but yeah, expect it to fizzle out with not much bang at first.
This is called mean reversion in history. The UK and Japan are small island countries. They lack the resources and manpower to sustain long-term industrial prosperity. Everything they have is temporary. In the end these industries flow to large nations with vast resources and large pools of technical talent. It used to be the United States. Now it is China absorbing Japan and Korea. This applies not only to shipbuilding but also to automobiles and all precision industries.
Seems a naive simplistic philosophy. The UK is larger than South Korea and has a similar population size. Yet South Korea has outcompeted the UK and US in ship building. By most accounts by investing in advanced technology and ship building technologies.
Having population and talented populous is a requirement but not sufficient for achieving big things. It requires leadership as well. Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
> Look at Taiwan out competing China in silicon foundaries.
it wont last long. even china dont use military to take taiwan, china will still win on this in the the end. It's just a matter of time. A lead of a few decades doesn't mean everything from the perspective of historical dimensions, it's still too short.
also, china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.
This seems, either naive or wishful thinking. The ‘normal means’ of transferring power and status as far as I recall from most history I’ve read usually involves some sort of massive war. Sometimes this ends well for the rising power, other times they wind up finding their fortunes being reversed.
Even when things don’t wind up being so dire, it’s not very often you see complete forgone conclusions in international relations, especially between countries separated by a body of water.
So your solution to “Taiwan is outcompeting on silicon” is that the PLA Navy should take it by violent force and overthrow a peaceful nation and justify that calling that normal?
“ china will take taiwan in short times(less than 10 years), so the result wont change anyway. From a historical perspective, this is a normal means of transferring power and status.”
Japan has always been an industrious, populous and quite productive country even back then (before the colonial era). It tops rankings on historical GDP. I agree to a certain degree about the UK, but even in this era of Japanese depression, they are still the world 3-4th most productive country.
yes but for now.if you analyze Japan's industrial data in detail, you'll find that they are in an unstoppable downward trend. Basically, all the industries they excel in, just like those in South Korea and Taiwan, are being replaced by China. Shipbuilding has become a game dominated by China(>50%) and Korea; home appliances, automotive industry, steel, chips, computers, and so on. Of course, right now, like in the automotive sector, Japan still holds an advantage in terms of volume, but everyone knows that electric vehicles are the future, and the core technology for the battery industry is almost entirely in China's hands. Even Tesla initially used Japanese technology, but they were ultimately surpassed by China. Relying on native protectionist strategies from the US and Canada, Japanese cars still have many advantages. But in open markets, Chinese electric vehicles are making inroads everywhere. Vietnam is gradually banning fuel-powered motorcycles, which is one of Japan's main products, but policy changes will allow Chinese electric vehicle brands and VinFast to capture more market share. We cannot predict exactly how long it will take for Japan's industry to completely exit the historical stage, but what we see is indeed a dying man. (Of course, Germany is already dead.)
so i wouldn't say 'always', even it can be reach to 100 years(unlikely). its a great achievement, but its not 'always'.
(Moreover, when predicting industrial trends, we must note that the future trend is robots. In this regard, due to China's vast population, the per capita number of robots hasn't yet reached the top spot, falling below Singapore and South Korea. But in terms of robot technology, I believe even the United States can't compare. Of course, in large models, the United States is still leading by a wide margin. So, determining how long China can rule industry in history, first of all, it will definitely be much longer than Britain and Japan, and another core reason is the decisive role of robots. If robots lead to the end of industrial transfer, then as long as China doesn't collapse for other reasons, China will forever have industrial advantages.)
Here’s the thing though, if china keeps on alienating all of it’s export markets by variously undercutting them, monopolizing strategic resources and then embargoing them, stealing technology and dumping excess capacity from its industrial sector, it may find itself with no more export markets to sell to.
Human societies are, in general, fairly well attuned to collective action against a perceived collective threat, that’s what we evolved to do after all. And unlike the USSR, China has done a fairly bad job of building any soft power that it could use to modify public opinion.
That is simply not true. UK and Japan are big enough to compete in specific sectors. The problem is the entire world gifted China their manufacturing ability and then gave up. Climate policy, short term economic thinking and unions all worked together to destroy the west manufacturing capability.
a lot of people point back at history, with the argument of "we did it before, we can do it now!"
but whats to say it wasn't a transient? transients can last 1 year or 100 years, but in the latter case i think its 'hard' for us to believe that it was a fluke, because we view transients that last longer than a human lifespan with a bias of perceived permanence.
how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry? on virtually every objective metric, it is off by an order of magnitude. frankly it is fortunate that the UK has its much maligned financial sector - without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
>without London, the UK really would be quite doomed.
London would be considerably poorer, there is an argument that the rest of the country may well be better off. The finance sector is our equivalent to the oil industry in Dutch Disease.
How could Shenzhen possibly compete with the rest of the world in electronics?
Specialization is the answer. The bigger you are, the more fields you can be competitive in. But even regions much smaller than the UK can be world leaders in something, if they choose to prioritize that and play their cards right.
There is nothing preventing the UK from taking advantage of the talent pool, supply chain, and consumer market of an equally large economy in their chosen field. Except maybe the UK itself.
National borders are as important as you choose to make them. Small countries have always relied on diplomacy and trade to be successful. The UK just needs to accept that it's one small country among many, and start acting accordingly.
> how could the UK ever compete with China, or the US, or India, on industry?
How could Switzerland?
How could Japan?
How could the Netherlands?
And so on... The UK is still pretty good at plenty of things, but they lacked a specific USP. I think their biggest issues (from an industry perspective) were not so much scale as quality control and the willingness to improve their processes. Compare a German car from the 1970's or 80's under the hood with a UK made car and the difference could not be larger.
I don't think so. It certainly did not hurt but there is another major factor: The UK is the house where the industrial revolution was born. And they still have the scars from it. And I think that is in part why they lost it: they were ahead but with fairly primitive stuff and then others overtook them because they didn't have that heritage to maintain and keep up. Just have a look at the London subway for an excellent example of why being early out of the gate with stuff like that isn't always the best in the long run.
Some more examples: Some countries in Africa are now ahead in mobile usage for all kinds of official stuff including payments, insurance and government interaction. Countries that were late to adapt to mobile infrastructure ended up with 4G or better where as the rest is having trouble phasing out their 3G networks because they've become invisibly dependent on them.
I've read a book called Four Hundred Years In America before; I don't know if its English version is popular. It points out that one core reason for the South's defeat in the Civil War was how vital the cotton trade between the American South and Britain was to both sides. So the North used their fleet to blockade the South's cotton exports to Britain right away, leaving the South without the trade revenue to import steel and other materials needed for building railroads—basically sealing their fate. Britain just pivoted to sourcing cotton from places like India, still not relying on local production. This example really drives home how Britain's industrial foundation was way too dependent on raw material inflows from the colonies.
I haven't read the book you referenced but there are many articles which say essentially the same thing. In addition, there are some historians who claim the British created the conflict in an attempt to partition the US into north and south, a trick they used almost everywhere they went. Matt Ehret for one.
India is the most prominent example, to tiny Cyprus.
I think this kind of mean reversion is actually worse than imagined. I'm not belittling the UK or anyone else; I just want to say that the governments of these countries haven't prepared any contingency plans for this kind of crisis at all. The lost industrial capacity is almost impossible to recover, and they also have to face the impact of immigration issues. The lower classes in the US, the lower classes in China, and even the global lower classes live more miserably than people in the UK and the EU, but they work longer hours. This isn't a stable state(The UK and the EU also lack priority in military and technological aspects.), so major changes are bound to happen. It's just a matter of time—maybe just a few decades away.
well... i dont know about that. i dont think its as virtual as people think. fundamentally any industry is about people, and london is chock full of hft shops, and they're all in-office. where would they go? they are quite serious software engineers (ive met only a few) and very selective. london being an intellectual hub, i dont see that changing any time soon.
as for sanctions, i think the gov will cut out perfectly sized legal (loop)holes for the people that matter.
The real value in London - actually more accurately the City of London - is in the networks built up over the decades. By networks I mean the old boys networks where insiders share information with each other over the phone.
Software as in used in trading or other financial services is only of value if there are takers for those services.
One rapidly eroding service is insurance. The so-called "shadow fleets" are called that only by London, because they're not insured by London. That doesn't mean that they're not insured: various governments have already created vehicles to insure strategically important shipping.
England (and the Netherlands, Belgium, Northern Italy, and a few other regions) have been some of the richest parts of the world for centuries. Not quite millenia, but not far from it. That's hardly transient.
Makes no sense in economics, the whole history since industrialization is that the economy gets bigger and bigger, both in absolute terms and per capita.
The position in the world will. At its peak, Britain was truly the empire on which the sun never sets, but these colonies were not assimilated by British culture to become part of Britain. Therefore, they were ultimately lost. Britain will eventually revert to the position befitting a small island nation—insignificant in the realm of geopolitics.
As a Chinese user, I can say that many people use Kimi, even though I personally don’t use it much. China’s open-source strategy has many significant effects—not only because it aligns with the spirit of open source. For domestic Chinese companies, it also prevents startups from making reckless investments to develop mediocre models. Instead, everyone is pushed to start from a relatively high baseline. Of course, many small companies in the U.S., Japan, and Europe are also building on Qwen. Kimi is similar: before DeepSeek and others emerged, their model quality was pretty bad. Once the open-source strategy was set, these companies had no choice but to adjust their product lines and development approaches to improve their models.
Moreover, the ultimate competition between models will eventually become a competition over energy. China’s open-source models have major advantages in energy consumption, and China itself has a huge advantage in energy resources. They may not necessarily outperform the U.S., but they probably won’t fall too far behind either.
One thing to add: the most popular product in china on AI is not kimi i think' it shoud be DOUBAO by bytedance(tiktok owner) and yuanbao by tencent. The have a better UI and feature set and you can also select deepseek model from it. Kimi still has a lot of users but I think in the long term it still may not doing well. So its still a win for closed model?
There’s a lot of indications that we’re currently brute forcing these models. There’s honestly not a reason they have to be 1T parameters and cost an insane amount to train and run on inference.
What we’re going to see is as energy becomes a problem; they’ll simply shift to more effective and efficient architectures on both physical hardware and model design. I suspect they can also simply charge more for the service, which reduces usage for senseless applications.
There are also elements of stock price hype and geopolitical competition involved.
The major U.S. tech giants are all tied to the same bandwagon — they have to maintain this cycle:
buy chips → build data centers → release new models → buy more chips.
It might only stop once the electricity problem becomes truly unsustainable.
Of course, I don’t fully understand the specific situation in the U.S.,
but I even feel that one day they might flee the U.S. altogether and move to the Middle East to secure resources.
I think the most interesting recent Chinese model may be MiniMax M2, which is just 200B parameters but benchmarks close to Sonnet 4, at least for coding. That's small enough to run well on ~$5,000 of hardware, as opposed to the 1T models which require vastly more expensive machines.
That number is as real as the 5.5 million to train DeepSeek. Maybe it's real if you're only counting the literal final training run, but total costs including the huge number of failed runs all other costs accounted for, it's several hundred million to train a model that's usually still worse than Claude, Gemini, or ChatGPT. It took 1B+ (500 billion on energy and chips ALONE) for Grok to get into the "big 4".
Using such theory, one can even argue that the real cost needs to include the infrastructures, like total investment into the semiconductor industry, the national electricity grid, education and even defence etc.
> That's small enough to run well on ~$5,000 of hardware...
Honestly curious where you got this number. Unless you're talking about extremely small quants. Even just a Q4 quant gguf is ~130GB. Am I missing out on a relatively cheap way to run models well that are this large?
I suppose you might be referring to a Mac Studio, but (while I don't have one to be a primary source of information) it seems like there is some argument to be made on whether they run models "well"?
Admittedly I've not tried running on system RAM often, but every time I've tried it's been abysmally slow (< 1 T/s) when I've tried on something like KoboldCPP or ollama. Is there any particular method required to run them faster? Or is it just "get faster RAM"? I fully admit my DDR3 system has quite slow RAM...
Hard to be sure because the source of that information isn't known, but generally when people talk about training costs like this they include more than just the electricity but exclude staffing costs.
Other reported training costs tend to include rental of the cloud hardware (or equivalent if the hardware is owned by the company), e.g. NVIDIA H100s are sometimes priced out in cost-per-hour.
Citation needed on "generally when people talk about training costs like this they include more than just the electricity but exclude staffing costs".
It would be simply wrong to exclude the staffing costs. When each engineer costs well over 1 million USD in total costs year over year, you sure as hell account for them.
If you have 1,000 researchers working for your company and you constantly have dozens of different training runs in the go, overlapping each other, how would you split those salaries between those different runs?
Calculating the cost in terms of GPU-hours is a whole lot easier from an accounting perspective.
The papers I've seen that talk about training cost all do it in terms of GPU hours. The gpt-oss model card said 2.1 million H100-hours for gpt-oss:120b. The Llama 2 paper said 3.31M GPU-hours on A100-80G. They rarely give actual dollar costs and I've never seen any of them include staffing hours.
No, they don't! That's why the "5.5 million" deepseek V3 number as read by American investors was total bullshit (because investors ignored their astrik saying "only final training run")
Yeah, that's one of the most frustrating things about these published numbers. Nobody ever wants to share how much money they spent on runs that didn't produce a useful model.
As with staffing costs though it's hard to account for these against individual models. If Anthropic run a bunch of training experiments that help them discover a new training optimization, then use that optimization as part of the runs for the next Opus and Sonnet and Haiku (and every subsequent model for the lifetime of the company) how should the cost of that experimental run be divvied up?
No, because what people are generally trying to express with numbers like these, is how much compute went into training. Perhaps another measure, like zettaflop or something would have made more sense.
The source for China's energy is more fragile than that of the US.
> Coal is by far China’s largest energy source, while the United States has a more balanced energy system, running on roughly one-third oil, one-third natural gas, and one-third other sources, including coal, nuclear, hydroelectricity, and other renewables.
Also, China's GDP is a bit less inefficient in terms of power used per unit of GDP. China relies on coal and imports.
> However, China uses roughly 20% more energy per unit of GDP than the United States.
Remember, China still suffers from blackouts due to manufacturing demand not matching supply. The fortune article seems like a fluff piece.
China has been adding something like a 1GW coal plant’s worth of solar generation every eight hours in the past year, and the rate is accelerating. The US is no longer a serious competitor for China when it comes to energy production.
The reason it happened in 2021, I think, might be that China took on the production capacity gap caused by COVID shutdowns in other parts of the world. The short-term surge in production led to a temporary imbalance in the supply and demand of electricity
This was very surprising to me, so I just fact-check this statement (using Kimi K2 thinking, natch), and it's presently is off by a factor of 2 - 4. In 2024 China installed 277 GW solar, so 0.25 GW / 8 hours. First half of 2025 they installed 210 GW, so 0.39 GW / 8 hours.
Not quite at 1 GW / 8 hrs, but approaching that figure rapidly!
(I'm not sure where the coal plant comes in - really, those numbers should be derated relative to a coal plant, which can run 24/7)
> (I'm not sure where the coal plant comes in - really, those numbers should be derated relative to a coal plant, which can run 24/7)
It works both ways: you have to derate the coal plant somewhat due to the transmission losses, whereas with a lot of solar power being generated and consumed on/in the same building the losses are practically nil.
Also, pricing for new solar with battery is below the price of building a new coal plant and dropping, it's approaching the point where it's economical to demolish existing coal plants and replace them with solar.
China’s breakneck development is difficult for many in the US to grasp (root causes - baselining on sluggish domestic growth, and possessing a condescending view of China). This article offers a far more accurate picture than of how China is doing right now: https://archive.is/wZes6
I don’t remeber much details about the situation in 2021. But China is in a period of technological explosion—many things are changing at an incredible speed. In just a few years, China may have completely transformed in various fields.
Western media still carry strong biases toward China’s political system, and they have done far too little to portray the country’s real situation. The narrative remains the same old one: “China succeeded because it’s capitalist,” or “China is doomed because it’s communist.”
But in reality, barely a few days go by without some new technological breakthrough or innovation happening in China. The pace of progress is so fast that even people inside the country don’t always keep up with it. For example, just since the start of November, we’ve seen China’s space station crew doing a barbecue in orbit, researchers in Hefei working on an artificial sun make some new progress, and a team discovering a safe and efficient method for preparing aromatic amines. Apart from the space station bit—which got some attention—the others barely made a ripple.Also, China's first electromagnetic catapult aircraft carrier has officially entered service
about a year ago, I started using Reddit intensively. what I read more on Reddit are reports related to electricity, because it involves environmental protection and hatred towards Trump, etc. There are too many leftists, so the discussions are somewhat biased. But the related news reports and nuclear data are real. China reach carbon peak in 2025, and this year it has truly become a powerhouse in electricity. National data centers are continuously being built, but residential electricity prices have never been and will never be affected.China still has a lot of coal-fired power, but it continues to carry out technological upgrades on them. At the same time, wind, solar, nuclear and other sources are all advancing steadily. China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.
(maybe in AI field people like to talk about more. not only kimi release a new model, Xpeng has a new robot and brought some intension. these all happends in a few days )
> China is the only country that is not controlled by ideology and is increasing its electricity capacity in a scientific way.
Have recently noticed a lot of pro-CCP propaganda on social media (especially Instagram and TikTok), but strangely also on HN; kind of interesting. To anyone making the (trivially false) claim that China is not controlled by ideology, I'm not quite sure how you'd convince them of the opposite. I'm not a doomer, but as China ramps up their aggression towards Taiwan (and the US will inevitably have to intervene), this will likely not end well in the next 5-10 years.
I also think that one claim is dubious, but do you really have to focus on only that part to the exclusion of everything else? All the progress made is real, regardless of your opinion on the existance of ideology.
I mean only on this specific topic: electricity. Arguing with other things is pointless since HN has the same political leaning as reddit so I will pass
I don’t have one now. I used to post lots of comments on china stuff but I got banned once and every time I registered a new one it will be banned soon. I guess they banned all my ip. So I only go anonymous now
It's absolutely impressive to see China's development. I'm happy my country is slowly but surely moving to China's orbit of influence, especially economically.
"Not controlled by ideology" is a pretty bold statement to make about a self-declared Communist single-party country. There is always an ideology. You just happen to agree with whatever this one is (Controlled-market Communism? I don't know what the precise term is).
I cannot edit this now so I want to add some clarification, it just means on this specific topic: electricity, china dont act like us or german, abandoned wind or nuclear, its only based on science
Having larger models is nice because they have a much wider sphere of knowledge to draw on. Not in the sense of using them as encyclopedias. More in the sense that I want a model that is going to be able to cross reference from multiple domains that I might not have considered when trying to solve a problem.
China is absolutely winning innovation in the 21st century. I'm so impressed. For an example from just this morning, there was an article that they're developing thorium reactor-powered cargo ships. I'm blown away.
> The tech is from America actually, decades ago. (Thorium).
I guess it depends on how you see it, but regardless, the people putting it to use today doesn't seem to be in the US.
FWIW:
> Thorium was discovered in 1828 by the Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius during his analysis of a new mineral [...] In 1824, after more deposits of the same mineral in Vest-Agder, Norway, were discovered [...] While thorium was discovered in 1828 its first application dates only from 1885, when Austrian chemist Carl Auer von Welsbach invented the gas mantle [...] Thorium was first observed to be radioactive in 1898, by the German chemist Gerhard Carl Schmidt
For being an American discovery, it sure has a lot of European people involved in it :) (I've said it elsewhere but worth repeating; trying to track down where a technology/invention actually comes from is a fools errand, and there is always something earlier that led to today, so doesn't serve much purpose except nationalism it seems to me).
Jm2c, but I really dislike those winners/losers narratives. They lack any nuance, are juvenile, and ultimately do not contribute much but noise like endless of pointless "who's better Jordan or Lebron?" debates.
I don't know if how close Europe is, but I'm sufficiently whelmed by Mistral that I don't need to look elsewhere yet. It's kind-of like having a Toyota Corolla while everybody else is driving around in smart cars but it gets it done. On top of it, there's a loyal community that (maybe because I'm not looking) I don't see with other products. It probably depends on your uses, but if I spent all my time chasing the latest chat models (like Kimi K2 for instance) I wouldn't actually get anything done.
> I don't know if how close Europe is, but I'm sufficiently whelmed by Mistral that I don't need to look elsewhere yet. It's kind-of like having a Toyota Corolla while everybody else is driving around in smart cars but it gets it done.
My problem was that it really doesn't, none of the models out there are that great at agentic coding when you care about maintainability. Sonnet 4.5 sometimes struggles and is only okay with some steering, same for Gemini Pro 2.5, GPT-5 recently seems like it's closer to "just working" with high reasoning, but still is expensive and slow. Cerebras recently started offering GLM-4.6 and it's roughly on par with Sonnet 4 so not great, but 24M tokens per day for 50 USD seems like good value even with 128k context limitation.
I don't think there is a single model that is good enough and dependable enough in my experience out there yet, I'll probably keep jumping around for the next 5-10 years (assuming the models keep improving until we hit diminishing returns so hard that it all evens out, hopefully after they've reached a satisfying baseline usefulness).
Don't get me wrong, all of those models can already provide value, it's just that they're pretty finnicky a lot of the time, some of it inherent due to how LLMs work, but some of it also because they should just be trained better and more. And the tools they're given should be better. And the context should be managed better. And I shouldn't see something as simple as diffs fail to apply repeatedly just because I'm asking for 100% accuracy in the search/replace to avoid them messing up the brackets or whatever else.
I use Mistral's models, I've built an entire internal-knowledge-pipeline of sort using Mistral's products (which involved anything from OCR, to summarization, to linking stuff across different services like Jira or Teams, etc) and I've been very happy with it.
We did consider alternatives and truth to be told none was as cost-effective, fast and satisfying (and also our company does not trust US AI companies to not do stuff with our data).
My god the cost right? It's so much less than any of the competition that just feeding off of an api key (for coding, yeah) works great.
But as you say the rest of it is good too. I use it for research and to me it does a great job, all for a fraction of the price and the carbon of the U.S. players.
You have to try the latest Corolla then. Really smart. Lane and collision assistance, ... Unlike my old Corolla which is total dumb. It even doesn't turn the light off when I leave the car
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