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.
A lot of bars in Asia will have working girls. I used to go to a Russian bar in Beijing called Chocolate Bar (ya, that was its actual name), which had a Russian stage show that is kind of cool if you’ve never seen one before. There were a bunch of girls in the back from Ukraine (or Russia), Mongolia, and China. Beijing had a lot of that actually, but I think Xi cracked down, although I stopped going to bars after getting married.
> I hope that this sharing will continue and increase
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.
It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but I'm not sure we'll see this applied to AI going forward. These training runs cost a lot of money - at some point, every player in the game will realise that they need to charge something or they'll left without enough chips to play in the next round.
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.
There are models with open training as well as weights. It's not chatgpt, but that trained model can be fully audited and reused without further training. I think for most daily use I'd be fine using a greatly outdated model. Open source has always relied on contributors eating costs—even just the opportunity cost of contributing time.
FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.
It'll get increasingly difficult for open models to keep up with proprietary frontier models as the costs involved increase. Yes, there will always be older open models available, but at some point, they just won't be as competitively useful.
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...
facebook has also taken the approach of undercutting and betting on subdizing their other products. It's a risky bet to assume the llm tech itself will last long as a moat.
Depends on if DeepSeek is llm business foremost VS hobby founder is willing to sink obscene resources into simply for personal fulfillment and the lulz. Maybe deepseek will become the core business / primary money maker vs highflyer hedgefund. Or maybe Deepseek continues to be expensive yacht or car collection where protecting the moat doesn't matter. Maybe founder gets more fulfillment doing the work and inspiring others i.e. Liang was pretty explicit he wanted to see a world where PRC innovates and contributes to global standards instead of merely following. In the meantime, seems like Deepseek isn't loss-making, so it's not even prohibitive hobby yet. But it's not outside of realm of possiblity that rich bro simply dgaf about returns on passion project funded by his primary income stream.
Yeah well, but you should add OpenAI to that "altruism" first. They're the ones burning money like crazy that could find themselves in the end of their runway quite quickly. Isn't crazy to think DeepSeek could break even and make a good profit before OpenAI goes broke, if they don't find another investor with even bigger pockets.
I think there's always going to be somebody that doesn't want to bother with the complexities of setting up a model to run locally.
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.
That, and they tend to not let things like copyrights and patents stand in the way of innovation. It’s hard to imagine how much better off consumers, and how many more advancements in technology there would be, if we had reasonable time limits on copyrights and patents. Instead, we have things like “I drew a mouse and now you can’t for the next 100 years” and “I was the first person to change this equation slightly, so you can’t compress video like this for the next 20 years.”
Most startups are not building foundation models, but using them as an input. So commoditizing their complement can actually lead to more opportunities. Similarly, web hosting which required big investments previously is now commoditized after emergence of AWS and other cloud providers.
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.
Chinese companies have been diligently releasing a lot of models. I guess they could try shoving the genie back in the battle, but if it works out for them, I doubt they will just stop when/if they get ahead of everyone else.
I got this off a .ke domain site that has an "African proverb of the day":
> 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 interesting thing in this article isn’t that China is telling people to avoid the US for national security reasons. Many states, including the US have similar guidance to people who work in jobs sensitive to national security.
What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.
The real reason why states are pouring billions into AI isn't to generate silly emoji, help people rewrite their emails, or make a web app without learning how to code.
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"
I've lived in china for nearly a decade. My family is Chinese. Just because some Chinese have great English, does not mean that all Chinese have great English, and you'd often see releases with fragmented or otherwise poor English. Now with LLMs, everyone can correct the English in their posts no matter their proficiency level.
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.
Online propaganda since 2014ish led the US to its current state, which is incredible. It turns out you can destroy a country with nothing more than words.
I think that the autonomous drone warfare is more of a near-term milestone than the goal. The goal itself seems to be AGI and the advances in the basic research and engineering that it brings.
Bro ai via programming with people is already good enough to fight wars with drones in the air. You don’t even need LLMs or machine learning black boxes.
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.
This is partly true, Automated object detection already exists. If LLMs haven't fundamentally shifted Ukraine war yet then it's plausible it has limited value in progressing drone warfare.
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.
Building 1000's of drones capable of taking out armoured vehicles from disposable commodity parts is more important than a 4% improved detection rate of hotdogs.
Surely it'd be a lot more cost-effective to train up people to fly drones remotely, or is the issue more that they can't secure the communications to control them remotely?
It seems to not be about national security, as much as personal security. You know like when America tells it's citizens not to go to Burkina Faso because it's dangerous.
I used to work for an American startup that dealt with quite some PII. We were forbidden from traveling to a laundry list of countries with work devices and were required (expected? I am not sure now) to inform the company if we travel to those countries even w/o work devices.
This reminds me of the historical period when London and Berlin were the two technology centers of the world, in intense competition to develop the next generation of math, science, and applications to military. Most scientists in one country did not read the output of the other country, although in some cases, the Danes or the Dutch would translate interesting research.
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.
Unsurprising considering the U.S. has been arresting and imprisoning Chinese and American academics with highly prestigious positions in well known universities because they forgot to mention a conference in China they were paid to speak at a decade ago.
Are the Chinese carrying out espionage in the U.S.?
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.
The US stole it's IP as well when it was behind. Sam Slater was known as "The Founder of the American Factory System" in the US. In the UK he was known as "Slater the Traitor", because he stole some very important IP.
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.
As has been shown by what the US has done repeatedly to other countries — and what has now been done to them — you don't need much to derail a country's progress and have them spiral into regressive regimes...
Do you think morals have changed over the past century? Even back then, Slater knew what he was doing was criminal (in Britain), and immoral (to the British). IP laws weren't invented after Sam Slater; American industrialists knew Britain's laws, but they still welcomed Slater because they wanted to move up the value chain. American morals haven't evolved since Slater - the only thing that changed is that they are no longer the upstart but the incumbent. The same will happen to China in 50-100 years: they too will become very concerned about losing IP to whatever ambitious upstart country.
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 is not a crime in China and morality is relative and no one has the moral high ground (unless god shows up). That being said, lots of IP was transferred to China willingly to access its market. It’s shortsightedness not theft that broke the empire.
In my opinion, all developing countries could do it and should do it. You either stay in line or push up, that's the unfortunate fate of developing countries. Rules are not set to protect the poor, they are set to keep poor people in places.
I don't think they are asserting morality or blame. That's just what the game is. We specialized into intellectual property while de-industrializing. The product we make as a country is information, which can be copied across a legal barrier. They products they make are necessary to operate in this world.
I worked at a well-known company that told us we couldn't bring any work electronic devices to China, because there was a risk malware could be installed on it. They advised us not to bring any personal electronic devices either, like phones because they could be confiscated at the border and returned with malware installed on it.
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.
Why would they need to? They have direct Chinese competitors to Tesla who are selling more units for far cheaper prices and innovating far faster. Tesla has a bunch of political baggage with a now drugged out and unstable CEO and nothing they are providing has a leg up on Chinese alternatives. People who can't even legally buy chinese models in their own country want Chinese cars now because they are so cheap and modernized.
> 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.
It's not in their interest to do so. Tesla is the EV leader and exports many vehicle from China to other countries. Additionally, Elon has a direct line to Trump, it makes no sense to burn bridges.
In what sense is Tesla the EV leader? BYD sold 4.3M EVs last year and is up 40% from 2023. Tesla only sold 1.8M and is down from 2023.
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).
No, this is just about keeping people from defecting and taking secrets / cash with them. Many Chinese people working for state controlled companies or similar (schoolteachers were one ridiculous example I think) in super mundane jobs have their passports taken away or exit bans for "national security" reasons.
One note, if you’re working for a top AI company in China, your quality of life other than work hours is already good enough to not to want to leave. It’s not 1990s/2000s anymore. Urban life in China, excluding pandemic times, is better than urban life in the states.
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.
I’m not sure there’s any point in arguing, because everyone’s priorities are subjective. Public safety, convenience, unlimited amount of options for basically anything are stuff that people pay premiums for. I still consider Tokyo superior to T1 Chinese cities, but Shanghai is really not that far behind.
> Public safety, convenience, unlimited amount of options for basically anything are stuff that people pay premiums for.
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.
dude, being able to order takeaway junk food 24/7 to your significantly over priced high rise apartment completed 3 years ago with a designed life span of 30 years is not quality of life.
Do you think everyone in China lives in 50 floor apartment buildings, and they don’t have ever-growing suburbia problem? I’m just gonna assume you don’t live in east Asia.
> 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.
TIL hangzhou/new tier1 is a "modest" city. It's a sick world class city.
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.
I don't know what you are smoking but that thing must be pretty strong.
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.
Feels like too many mid westerners expat from 2000s-2010s who never got taste of premium expat life don't realize how a well compensated PRC employee can live real fancy, more so since they're not trapped in expat bubble.
I don’t even think most of the commentators are even expats. It’s just a lot of people are hell-bent on the idea that outside of the US everything else is crumbling, is on fire, and will blow up the next month.
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.
Great public transit. Affordable housing. Huge variety of delicious food. Low crime. People who care enough about the social good to wear masks in crowded places during a pandemic.
600m people in China live in poverty despite claims of the CPC eliminating it. Traveling around China you see this. Showing off main cities is not proof that people don’t live in poverty.
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.
Irrelevant argument because how rich people (subjects we're talking about) live in rich areas (i.e. main cities) =/= how poor people live in poor areas. Frankly average Chinese poverty in T4+ villages is pretty quaint compared to seeing junkies everywhere. It's more humbling, not disturbing. Of course you can find statistical outlier crimes on social media, but daily life is not filled with the levels of social decay and shithole experiences in western urban areas that PRC diasphora frequently makes comparisons to on social media. It maybe a bubble, but it's a cozy bubble that rarely gets pierced in daily life for the well off.
One of the benefits to China is the low drug use. But you’re blind if you can’t find insane amount of homeless people in Beijing or shanghai. Or that most people there are struggling. If you want to live with tunnel vision then it’s an amazing place to live. (Shanghai cos I didn’t live in any other city. Only travelled)
Lots of people are struggling but you won't find many truely "homeless", you'll find a lot of migrant/informal workers who has homes in rural areas slumming it in the big city to save $$$ so they can remitt more back home. Most with remotely sound mind / physically able can scrounge up $500 rmb for a shared bunk in a T1 shitbox. It elicits a different kind of sadness vs actual homeless. Generally state makes effort to "dump" the truly homeless due to feeble body/mind back with family. Not to be crass, local govs has been doing a very comprehensive job keeping "riff raff" out of sight out of mind etc... it's just a different type of experience/problem vs addicts and unsound people getting in your face downtown or stinking up transit every day. I'm not saying Chinese cities don't have their seedy side, or that a lot of regions still trigger developing country feels, but they are largely avoidable for the privileged - don't even need tunnel vision when local gov NIMBYs it for them. Like functionally PRC apartheid / hukou society, but major cities don't feel like your customary actual apartheid rich middle eastern city full of poor migrant workers everywhere. Or even many part of North American where it's painfully obvious some minorities are doing all the low end service work.
Who said there was no homeless? The reply was in context of major cities where one will very rarely see true urban homeless in major urban areas where well off spends there time. The migrant workers naive expats thinks are "homeless" are generally not - they have homes, they're just willing to occasionally slum it while working "abroad" - it's like saying backpackers who camp on side of road to save $$$ are homeless. They're manifestly not the same thing. Hence quotes.
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.
Drive around at 2am. I haven’t lived in China since pre-covid but back then you would see in the early morning police coming to wake them up and move them along. But middle of the night you can drive around see people sleeping under bridges, doorways, alleys, tunnels. Never somewhere permanent. As there is an image to maintain in the cities.
I think a good chunk of America had their "Soviets seeing an American supermarket" moment on Red Note when they got to see what city life is actually like in China from the perspective of regular people.
Try actually traveling outside the US. It's eye opening. The rest of the world has been developing and the US has been backsliding. It's impossible not to notice.
Kind of seems like you are avoiding my point, or throwing up a straw man to argue against instead (with a dig at US for good measure).
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.
Instagram is Instagram for rich kids, I know. But like I am ostensibly also a rich kid (probably) by your metric. And I have a very nice looking aesthetic social profile, I know how it translates to what real life is. At this point, that's just basic media literacy.
You are missing my point. The average Red Note influencer is not the average Chinese citizen. I guess you could say the same for IG, but not one is holding up rich kids on IG as the typical American.
Public bathrooms are getting much better in China. There's been a very noticeable improvement recently, I think tied to a government inspection program.
Granted I was mostly outside of the urban core of tier 1 cities, but most places I went people were constantly smoking in bathrooms, had to BYOTP, and floors were often covered in urine. In some second tier cities like Harbin it was basically squat toilets everywhere, even in the airport lounges.
Public bathrooms can be disgusting in many first world countries.
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.
Cultural, if I’ll be honest. Until kids are taught and indoctrinated in school that public cleanliness is net good for everyone, hard to see it change.
Honestly, no real data just working with a lot of Chinese on a daily basis. It’s not like they don’t talk about their daily economical or political struggles. Everyone weighs pros/cons, and less and less people have been moving out. Pandemic broke their spirit, but from what I’ve heard, the benefits of living in the US are getting slimmer and slimmer every other day.
Top talent, whom the government advices to not to go to the states aren’t living in the slums, or areas where there’s nothingness. They don’t live like in Ordos or something.
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.
If you leave major cities in California you see a lot of empty space that's mostly brown-grey dust, with occasional small towns where everyone is very poor and came from Mexico. Your point?
Yes and I see a lot of YouTube videos about all the poverty in California, I see exactly none about the extensive and overwhelming poverty of rural China (and when I mean rural I mean 20 min outside Shanghai).
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?
I did. When I lived in China and traveled outside of Shanghai it was eye opening. People living in slums with no running water or toilets. No trains. No buses. No taxis. The nicest people ever but makes you realise that the whole eliminating poverty claim is utter BS.
They were talking about people with good paying jobs living in big cities, not China in general. There are people living in extreme poverty in first world countries, and rural areas are always different to big cities.
This would be the only answer, if it wasn't for the all ICE's history, official threats against non US individuals and how reliable the current US gov is.
This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.
Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Swipes like "Lol, keep dreaming man" are against the site guidelines, and getting into nationalistic spats is not what HN is for. When you post like this, you're just inviting even worse from others (unintentionally of course). That's how we end up with degraded responses like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226552.
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.
You will be surprised to learn then that it's fallen dramatically. Like in just the last 5 years the perception is completely different, especially among young people.
There are 1.4B Chinese. Like obviously some will want to move away. The question is, per capita, what is the rate of locals fleeing away from each country.
Sure, but this is a statistic Beijing is not even trying to improve: at least during the last 10 years, Beijing sees Westerners as a threat and rarely offers them citizenship or permanent residency.
I doubt people who work in cutting edge areas want to leave, not because of national security but because China is now pumping a lot of money into the areas. Those are the people who are willing to work on a 997 schedule anyway.
And yes there are still a lot of Chinese who do want to go to US, but from other areas.
Attacking another user like this, no matter how badly they broke the site guidelines themselves, is absolutely not ok on Hacker News. Please don't do it again, and please stop posting flamewar comments to HN generally.
Meng Wanzhou was roaming in beautiful Vancouver BC while awaiting judgment on the extradition request. Meanwhile China was keeping random Canadian citizens it arrested in retaliation in some dungeon.
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.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
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.
I am not an American. So that's one off your 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?
Everyone spies on everyone but when an American businessman is arrested the UK or when a Spanish businessman is arrested in Australia, something that I'll bet you has happened many times, generally speaking the US will not grab British "spies" and throw them in the dungeon pending the release of their businessman.
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.
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.
You've been using HN primarily (even exclusively) for nationalistic battle. You've also been breaking the site guidelines in all sorts of other ways. Since we've asked you repeatedly not to do this and you've ignored those requests, I've banned the account.
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.
I mean every country has their epstein. western media likes to pick the chinese ones cause they make a good china bad story.
Hundreds of chinese like myself travel from and to china each year, I'm surprised it's hard for you to imagine regular chinese people can enjoy life in china.
I hear this type of statement often, but people rarely mention the scope or who the brain drainees are. In my experience, it's exceptionally rare that American talent comes to Europe compared to the opposite, and I see little reason why that would change in the near future. When it comes to Chinese individuals returning to China from the US, this isn't exactly traditional brain drain, and it's also something China has actively, sometimes aggressively, been pursuing the past decade or so.
> and I see little reason why that would change in the near future
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.
Imagine 30 years ago if someone said the country of Wittgenstein would not have a large language model of its own, let alone the EU.
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.
China has just developed to the extent that top STEM professionals can have a good quality of life at home. Chinese immigrants were pouring when the US was far less welcoming. The US used to also get hordes of migrants from Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea before they developed.
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
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.
Why would a moral loss cause a defection to China, that's fucking hilarious bro. China, the place with a national firewall, subjects you can't speak about, try asking questions about certain things to a taxi driver and they'll call the ccp police on ya.
Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.
It's already been happening for years. Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics. Of course, the vast majority of those cases were bogus and was just a guise for racism.
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.
> Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics.
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.”
That's going to be a little skewed because the initial years was primarily scientists fleeing to Europe, Australia, Canada. The last few years has been heavily China.
So we lost twenty thousand scientists of Chinese descent over roughly a decade, half of which went back to China? That seems horrible. Where’s the hyperbole?
The term for them is useful idiots not assets. The democrats did enormous damage to the Ukrainian cause pushing the russia hoax in 2017/18. Steele assumed there was competent intelligence analysts to analyse what he collected but instead it was politicians.
I think the complaint is with the government hearings to investigate individual citizens political views. Doesn’t seem especially aligned with the supposed values of the country.
Many of the people outed and persecuted for homosexuality were really gay. That doesn’t make it any less offensive.
It's just not even good security policy, and in some cases will do irreparable harm. These are incredibly smart and valuable people who are leaving and no longer under your sphere of influence, and where their work will now massively benefit your perceived adversary, eg China wouldn't have a nuclear program today if it weren't for the 50s episode.
It's cutting off your nose, face, and brain just to get a little bit of fun discrimination in.
Even if they were communists or had communist sympathies, who cares? I am pretty sure Oppenheimer did way more for the country than McCarthy. We should persecute/prosecute for illegal things they do, not for their political leanings.
McCarthy accused 12,000 people of being Communists.
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.
I never liked him. It's just a fact that America was full of communists before the liberal-tankie split when it no longer was socially acceptable to be a communist since they started pasting protesters with tanks.
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
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).
Most of Europe (notable exception france), Canada, and Australia will happily betray their own citizens to extradition to foreign countries. If things get bad enough that science immigration becomes 'defection' they'd be safer from the US in China.
Are you OK with a person committing a violent crime in a foreign country, then returning home to a country that "protects" them against extradition? I never understand the pushback against extradition. You can extradite carefully. Also, "most of Europe", Canada, and Australia are highly functional democracies. If extradition is so bad, why haven't they outlawed it?
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.
I wouldn't rule it out iff the other candidates can't stump up the resources to play the game. I very much doubt AGI will come out of Canada or Australia; Europe is making some overtures, but it'll take some time to get the machinery rolling to the same extent.
Language? What about principles of freedom, democracy, and science? I would think that those things would be why US scientists choose Canada and Europe first. I doubt language is really high on the list.
Language and ease of immigration are going to be very important to the decision of where to move. Naturally, those things you mentioned are important, but so is language.
Where I live now you can 3d print an unregistered and unserialized pistol then stuff it under your shirt (loaded) and walk into the unsecured part of a public airport without breaking the law, all with zero paperwork or licenses or checks. Can I do that in Switzerland?
Well for one, Europe has a history of gassing disarmed people and those on registries, for two locking your gun up to pick someone up from the airport just presents an unnecessary opportunity for it to be stolen.
Why 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.
Europe is a pretty big place with a lot of disparate governments. Abstracting it to merely "Europe" is ignoring how the world operates. Many European governments have been actively expanding and enshrining rights of individuals.
Secondly, none of your points are pertinent to the day-to-day of anyone in academic research/science. Perhaps only to the irrationally paranoid.
Look, I am from Spain, currently living in Japan, two very safe countries with some of the lowest rates of crimes in the world. I have met plenty of Americans living in both places, and do you know what they told me? 1) They love having a functional healthcare system that won't bankrupt them, and 2) they also love being able to walk around, specially at night, without the fear of being shot by a random asshole.
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.
I'm absolutely open to the idea that some people find more freedom with less liberties and more safety.
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.
I don't think we'll see born-in-the-USA Americans moving to Shenzhen anytime soon.
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.
If the immigrants that we've allowed to come here are so fickle that they would leave for China if China presents better opportunities, I would prefer that they leave now and get it over with. My country is not an economic zone for extracting value. It's my home.
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.
If someone said "Americans do X", there would be some pushback about "not all Americans". But somehow it's normal (expected even) to bunch all immigrants together into the "they were all desperate and decided to jump the fence" pile.
It's actually surprising that this point is so hard to understand.
Those who stood in line as you say also want to take people out of today's queue. Legality doesn't have much to do with it. In Britain it's called pulling up the drawbridge.
OTOH we’re educating engineers and then not letting them stay. Like chinas worried about having talent poached (or controlled in some way) and here’s Australia providing
world class education and demanding they go back afterwards.
in sydney, you face property prices not cheaper than the bay area, but the same tech job is going to pay you 30-40% of what you'd expect on the other side of the world.
As a scientist I'm not going to handicap my career by going to Australia or EU when the US is doing science light years ahead of those countries.
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.
What’s your take on near-term stability for American immigrants in Europe? I was looking at options for moving last year but the work visa situation seemed fairly precarious (although that’s a relative thing in comparison with what may end up happening here in the US).
As someone who has been looking; the EU Blue Card through Germany seems pretty stable and straightforward, with a 21/27 month path to permanent residency, depending on language ability:
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.
I want to be vocal about it for third world country people like me.
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.
Thank you for the link. How is Germany looking RE economic stability for the next couple of years? I was looking into Sweden but even the Swedish citizens I know there are having a difficult time finding / keeping engineering jobs as the economy has been doing poorly.
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").
> How is Germany looking RE economic stability for the next couple of years?
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.
Personally I’m pushing my (Belgian) government hard to provide a streamlined path for American immigrants, especially tech workers.
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.
As one of the many Americans who wants to contribute to a society whose values match their own, thank you. Is there somewhere to follow your efforts in that front?
A lot of it is small-scale lobbying, so not much to follow :)
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.
I would have loved to come work for imec but the only immediate internship budget they had was a studentship with accompanying stipend and visa. They told me it would have taken too long to sort out the employee route.
One doesn't preclude the other, but I have serious doubts about free speech concerns. There are moderate and extreme movements in Europe. They all express themselves freely within the law.
Of course, we’re probably seeing the normal amount of movement when administrations shift. I work for a global company and have only witnessed the EU to US movement. I’m sure both are happening.
What's normal? You just offended a whole group of people and probably had no intention of doing it. You're proving the point on why the whole thing doesn't work. You should get your comment removed if you seriously believe this to be true and want to avoid being hypocritical.
I'm sorry if you feel offended. My comments will be removed by HN moderators if they think it's necessary. You can flag and downvote them meanwhile. You can also contact the moderators or your local police if you think it is necessary.
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.
I have no interest in pressing charges against you or getting you in trouble. That would be hypocritical of me and contrary to my beliefs. I was simply pointing out how easy it is to offend people on the internet and why it simply doesn't work at scale. If no one has the right to say something potentially offensive on the internet, then the whole thing needs to be shut down.
Thank you for explaining your point of view on the interest of this conversation. Here's mine, I consider an offense to be something quite subjective sometimes. In some cases, it's possible to offend someone without meaning to. The solution to this problem is to apologize and offer to talk about it. If that doesn't work, and the offense is in some way "forbidden", then the offended person can simply defend themselves by going to the “authorities”.
I sincerely apologize if you found my response offensive. It was not my intention and I try to respect the moderation rules on HN. I just wanted to give my point of view, as a person living in the EU.
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.
> Anyway I’m sure people can be in whatever bubble their algorithmic news gives them
> 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.
How about I see an interesting street hustler in Munich and put a photo of him on my blog? If something like that is illegal I'd quickly find our two cultures are absolutely incompatible with my continued residence.
Cool so now free speech is reduced to anything not viewed as harassment. I think I will take your advice, that's dystopic and far worse than just your prior bullet points.
You can also just ask him if it's OK to do that and they're probably going to be OK with it.
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.
Uh, it's reduced to things that are not harassment. Who said "viewed as"? Are you trying to make everything subjective, so you can argue all opinions about harassment are equally valid?
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.
Ban on nukes is an infringement but not as egregious as the ones in Europe. In another comment I admit for instance Yemen and Idlib have a stronger right to bear arms than the US. I absolutely acknowledge this.
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.
Well, according to the two sources I'm familiar with, it's not necessarily the _current_ laws that are the most concerning, but rather the _direction_ things are heading.
History proves limiting free speech is a slippery slope. I can't speak for my EU friends, but for me, yes, it's very concerning to begin justifying why some speech is not OK.
It’s an odd phenomena to see someone refute personal observations.
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.
I'd say this is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the American social structure.
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.
I've run the numbers a few times for every EU tech-adjacent job I'm eligible for. Except for some opportunities in France, I'd have a lower proportional tax rate (and, except for in France, I'd have enough of a lower proportional tax rate that the free healthcare makes up the difference). The US doesn't actually have low taxes.
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).
Economics are not the only considerations at play. Even if economic considerations do dominate, the social safety nets of many European countries offer attractive alternatives to their US counterparts, even as they existed before Trump. For instance, in the deeply flawed US health-care system you risk medical bankruptcy in the case of serious illness or accidents even if you do have insurance due to policy limits. Insurers will fight tooth and nail to prevent paying out claims. Some folks with chronic illnesses don't want to be tied to their high-paying jobs just so they can have good insurance and some healthy folks want a health insurance policy that won't disappear when they need it most.
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.
Salaries must be weighted by risk. Right now, there is a high risk that researchers funded by grants or working in government labs will lose their jobs and faculty will lose their grants and labs. Industry researchers are in a more stable situation, even though layoffs may be more common than on the average.
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.
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.
Listen I'm not a supporter of this administration but what is this argument? As if there aren't also tons of tourists coming to America. Tourism has little to do with getting people to immigrate.
if only one side has nukes slavery will be much more widespread if everyone has them all the slave traders competing with each other will be at least mitigated
kind of crazy they saw all the graffiti license plate games that early
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.
It has been threatened recently by a few nations. It almost got set off by mistake.
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.
This seems like a tautology. By definition someone with superior political power can grind down someone else with less, if they were maniacal enough about it, or at least negate their efforts.
If they couldn’t, then they wouldn’t be considered to have superior political power.
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.”)
A lot of developed countries like across Europe and Singapore dont have the same geopolitical history with China as the US does, as such the Sinophobia isn’t really there
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
To me, the big three of "social safety net" is education, medical care, and retirement pension. For normies, I doubt any of those are better than other highly developed democracies.
China has never been a place, historically, that has welcomed foreigners as anything other than short-term visitors. To the extent that it has, those foreigners have become Chinese (Manchu, Mongol - and the "welcome" there is uh… being used pretty liberally). From a legal and policy perspective, there are very few paths to long-term residency in China for people who are not of Chinese descent, and of the nominal few there are, there are only a tiny handful of foreigners who live there for longer than a decade or so. By law you can't become a citizen of the PRC without being of Chinese descent. Chinese people are wonderful and on an individual level are incredibly warm and open to all the depths and facets of human relationships with non-Chinese foreigners. As a society, China has, in general, never been a particularly welcoming place for folks who aren't Chinese. I don't see any indication of that changing any time soon. Would love to be wrong.
My impression with the visa situation is that while technically green card is very difficult, in practice most expats have no issue renewing their work visas, so effectively living as long term residents - buying properties, getting married, and sending their kids to (mostly international) schools. I've also seen quite a few who worked for a few years and then started their own businesses.
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.
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.
As a general rule if your only source of information about contemporary China ( or Ukraine/Palestine wars) is from English language press and analysts, you should consider yourself disinformed or possibly misinformed.
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.
It seems a bit strange. This isn’t like nuclear weapons researchers in the 1940s, where only a small group had the knowledge to build the bomb. There are a LOT of AI researchers out there, and it’s more a battle of resources rather than rare knowledge at this point, it seems.
There are many researchers, but a limited number with the ability to make the revolutionary leaps necessary. To take your analogy: there were many physicists who knew an atomic bomb was possible, and many who even attempted it, but the Manhattan Project was the first to succeed through a combination of the right people and the right resources.
But AI researchers are one of the resources currently needed! Even though there are lots of them, it's undeniable that if half of the best 1000 AI researchers in either US or China were to move to the other country it would be a massive boon to AI research in the country they moved to and have a negative impact on AI research in the country they left, even though it wouldn't destroy the scene in that country.
China could broaden the message to “tells anyone to o avoid U.S. travel...” and that would be right thing to do because of the far-right happening here now.
1. There isn't anywhere. DeepSeek is open source to salt the earth and gain ecosystem advantage. It's a ridiculously smart move that yanks the leading players back to the ground right as they're about to take off into the stratosphere.
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.
The article leaves it until the very end to point out the risk of high-performing employees being poached, but I'd say it seems like a huge liability for China. The USA would be well-placed to identify vulnerable Chinese individuals working in AI development and offer them a large sum of money to 'defect'. It would be both a propaganda win for Trump's administration and a relatively cheap way of removing these individuals from the Chinese economy.
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.
The end goal is something capable of human-level intelligence in most, if not all, fields, and from there, it's not that difficult to continue scaling it up across speed / scale (and perhaps intelligence.)
It’ll enable mass surveillance, and hence it is the wet dream of authoritarian governments like 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.”
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.
The latest autopsy came down pretty firmly on it being a suicide. Even if it could've been an assassination, there isn't much motive: his claims were about copyright violation, which neither OpenAI or the government would much care about in an arms race.
the autopsy that his mother says was really strange and done by the police who acted in a bizarre manner? or has there been another one? and as for motive, you are literally incorrect. if there is a massive copyright precedent set in the courts the intelligence community would not be able to overturn that. and its likely to happen because its legally sound… if i were the cia i would be doing everything in my power to stop that from happening.
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.
> They also worry that executives could be detained and used as a bargaining chip in U.S.-China negotiations, in an echo of a fight over a Huawei executive held in Canada at Washington’s request during the first Trump administration.
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.
I often say states behave as mafias. It is a matter of becoming influential enough so that they treat you as a criminal. In the meantime, the streets every day less and less safe, at least in Europe, bc of real criminals, the ones that kill or systematically steal even in organized crime and they do very little about it.
In the European countries that I've bothered to look, crime statistics are actually down. It's just the perception of crime that is up. Think about who might benefit from creating this kind of misleading perception.
There is so much petty crime that is no longer reported in France because people know the cops won't do anything about.
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.
We saw NYC and SF do this to disastrous effects. Journalists had to start looking at privately collected victimization rates to get an accurate picture since crime stats were clearly being juked.
That goes both ways. Crime statistics can also be inflated by making things people already do illegal, eg the various facets of prohibiting different substances that people use.
I looked at France and Germany, there was a clear downward trend for a long time, yet it bumped before the pandemic, got super low for the 2-3 years of it, and is steadily rising again.
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.
> Comparatively they are still incredibly safe countries, and the sentiment of insecurity has always been disproportionate to reality and politically exploited.
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.
Yes...but I'd argue these zones always existed [0] and aren't going to disappear anytime soon. That's where looking at how much the insecurity perception goes up or down can be more relevant that how many of these exist in total.
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.
Crime stats are down in parts of America too, and it doesn’t mean a thing. Trust your eyes, not stats that can be gamed. These days a lot of crime stats are influenced by soft on crime laws, victims too jaded to report crimes, and more. The perception that crime is increasing is more right than wrong in my experience.
When my american kids are slagging my Belgian half brother he shuts them down by offering a visit to the school he went to, you know, through the unlocked non bulletproof front door. Their schools have vestibules with intercoms and such.
> Does anybody doubt that this is a reasonable concern?
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.
Yeah this seems perfectly reasonable. While the targeting of Huawei was legitimate, I'd be pretty disappointed in the blatant corruption of targeting AI leaders that do the same thing as people in the west.
With inflation and the terribly high cost of housing in places like the Bay Area, “seven figures is the new six figures” is an apt observation. I make six figures, yet I can’t afford to buy a home within a reasonable commute from my job, and even finding a decent rental near my job is challenging. Seven figures is indeed the new six figures.
"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."
That particular quote seems to come up every once in a while, and I still don't quite get why people feel it's profound or important. China has a very public and well-known list of things that you are not allowed to talk about (Tienanmen Square, a few others). SF doesn't (or didn't) because what was offensive or violated whatever new rule the way-too-online wasn't codified as part of some legal apparatus, it was/is very dynamic. One does not need to actually go to China to recognize this.
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.
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.
The last time I talked to our local embedded CIA guy in my previous US company, he was very proud of their efforts to keep all the Chinese scientists out of the major hacking conferences. And he was very keen to get access to all Arab and East Asian critical infrastructures. Talking about industrial espionage efforts
And as we all know the Russians, oops the Chinese, invented LLMs and transformers.
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.
Your snarky tone aside, “overseas” usually means outside of one’s country. Microsoft has research teams all over the globe. You don’t have to be in the U.S. to work for Microsoft.
I know what overseas means and I realize Microsoft has teams all over the globe. But Microsoft is a US company and by working there as a researcher you are trained and have access to know-how that is technically American in origin.
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.
> The intent of the original "boast" is to somehow claim the know-how comes solely out of China.
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.
Agreed, who needs engineering talent when we can just hire some H1Bs and let them and Copilot do all the work? Unlike the Chinese, H1Bs don't want to be sent on a plane back home to their 3rd world country so they'll always do as they are told. When we tell them to work 80 hours, they work 80 hours.
Why shouldn't every other nation treat us the same way? Based on our criminal history of invasion, back-stabbing, and genocide should US citizens be banned around the world? Why should the racist "yellow peril" narrative be credible the 1000th time?
Really not sure if you're joking or not, but Meng Wanzhou (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou) was a major turning point for China-US and China-Canada relations.
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.
>>...under the indictment of bank and wire fraud regarding financial transactions in violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran by Skycom, which had functioned as Huawei's Iran-based subsidiary. On 24 September 2021, the DOJ announced it had reached a plea bargain with Meng to resolve the case through a deferred prosecution agreement...
The charges were dismissed. Her “plea bargain” had her deny all the key charges and simply admit to one false statement - which did not amount to any criminal wrongdoing.
> 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]
https://archive.ph/0RLxN
This is unfortunate, but understood.
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.
> they are natural friends
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.
> Is that a bar or a brothel
In many parts of Thailand it's really not an either/or situation
A lot of bars in Asia will have working girls. I used to go to a Russian bar in Beijing called Chocolate Bar (ya, that was its actual name), which had a Russian stage show that is kind of cool if you’ve never seen one before. There were a bunch of girls in the back from Ukraine (or Russia), Mongolia, and China. Beijing had a lot of that actually, but I think Xi cracked down, although I stopped going to bars after getting married.
> I hope that this sharing will continue and increase
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.
I think this is the best economic function of open source—it forces innovation by elimination of rent seeking.
If you sit on your laurels, someone will make a solution thats at least 70% as good for free.
It's a nice sentiment and I agree, but I'm not sure we'll see this applied to AI going forward. These training runs cost a lot of money - at some point, every player in the game will realise that they need to charge something or they'll left without enough chips to play in the next round.
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.
There are models with open training as well as weights. It's not chatgpt, but that trained model can be fully audited and reused without further training. I think for most daily use I'd be fine using a greatly outdated model. Open source has always relied on contributors eating costs—even just the opportunity cost of contributing time.
FLOSS software is slow, much slower than VC-funded explosive growth, but it's hard to compete with in the long term.
It'll get increasingly difficult for open models to keep up with proprietary frontier models as the costs involved increase. Yes, there will always be older open models available, but at some point, they just won't be as competitively useful.
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.
That assumes optimistic scaling behavior between money spent on training and performance. Surely there are diminishing returns.
>who's going to do it and give it away for free
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...
facebook has also taken the approach of undercutting and betting on subdizing their other products. It's a risky bet to assume the llm tech itself will last long as a moat.
Depends on if DeepSeek is llm business foremost VS hobby founder is willing to sink obscene resources into simply for personal fulfillment and the lulz. Maybe deepseek will become the core business / primary money maker vs highflyer hedgefund. Or maybe Deepseek continues to be expensive yacht or car collection where protecting the moat doesn't matter. Maybe founder gets more fulfillment doing the work and inspiring others i.e. Liang was pretty explicit he wanted to see a world where PRC innovates and contributes to global standards instead of merely following. In the meantime, seems like Deepseek isn't loss-making, so it's not even prohibitive hobby yet. But it's not outside of realm of possiblity that rich bro simply dgaf about returns on passion project funded by his primary income stream.
Yeah well, but you should add OpenAI to that "altruism" first. They're the ones burning money like crazy that could find themselves in the end of their runway quite quickly. Isn't crazy to think DeepSeek could break even and make a good profit before OpenAI goes broke, if they don't find another investor with even bigger pockets.
I think there's always going to be somebody that doesn't want to bother with the complexities of setting up a model to run locally.
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.
or they will regulatory capture, that seems more likely
That, and they tend to not let things like copyrights and patents stand in the way of innovation. It’s hard to imagine how much better off consumers, and how many more advancements in technology there would be, if we had reasonable time limits on copyrights and patents. Instead, we have things like “I drew a mouse and now you can’t for the next 100 years” and “I was the first person to change this equation slightly, so you can’t compress video like this for the next 20 years.”
Most startups are not building foundation models, but using them as an input. So commoditizing their complement can actually lead to more opportunities. Similarly, web hosting which required big investments previously is now commoditized after emergence of AWS and other cloud providers.
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.
I find this a good thing as the end consumer. Not sure why I get a negative vibe from your comment but maybe I have misread?
Chinese companies have been diligently releasing a lot of models. I guess they could try shoving the genie back in the battle, but if it works out for them, I doubt they will just stop when/if they get ahead of everyone else.
When nations attack each other, often innocent people are the ones that end up suffering.
"When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled"
Not sure of the attribution of this quote.
I got this off a .ke domain site that has an "African proverb of the day":
> 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.
I know it as: If the elephants are fighting or fucking the ants are scared
The context I heard it was politics
Chinese equivalent: 城门失火，殃及池鱼
(When the city gate burns, fish in the moat suffer disaster.)
Not often, but always.
[dead]
The interesting thing in this article isn’t that China is telling people to avoid the US for national security reasons. Many states, including the US have similar guidance to people who work in jobs sensitive to national security.
What’s interesting is that China is viewing AI tech as a technology vital to their security.
The real reason why states are pouring billions into AI isn't to generate silly emoji, help people rewrite their emails, or make a web app without learning how to code.
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...
Online propaganda is insanely powerful too. Not sure if many noticed, but the English put out by Chinese teams is often perfect these days.
> Online propaganda is insanely powerful too.
> 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?
I've lived in china for nearly a decade. My family is Chinese. Just because some Chinese have great English, does not mean that all Chinese have great English, and you'd often see releases with fragmented or otherwise poor English. Now with LLMs, everyone can correct the English in their posts no matter their proficiency level.
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.
Online propaganda seems to have been using AI since circa 2020. There’s no way all of those comments were natural, particularly the pro-US ones.
Elgin AFB and Reddit
Better Chinese propaganda than the lying machine that sold the nonexistent Iraqi WMDs lie for a decade.
Which propaganda led the US to the Iraq War?
Online propaganda since 2014ish led the US to its current state, which is incredible. It turns out you can destroy a country with nothing more than words.
propaganda + 2014 + destroy a country
ukraine: so true, dude, so true
Ukraine was destroyed with guns and bombs.
because there is something called AI - you put your crap into it and ask the AI to do all corrections and improvements for you.
it is also free.
I've only seen billions be poured in LLMs and with those you're not going to control your drones.
Those are to identify who should be targeted with drones.
I think that the autonomous drone warfare is more of a near-term milestone than the goal. The goal itself seems to be AGI and the advances in the basic research and engineering that it brings.
Bro ai via programming with people is already good enough to fight wars with drones in the air. You don’t even need LLMs or machine learning black boxes.
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.
This is partly true, Automated object detection already exists. If LLMs haven't fundamentally shifted Ukraine war yet then it's plausible it has limited value in progressing drone warfare.
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.
Building 1000's of drones capable of taking out armoured vehicles from disposable commodity parts is more important than a 4% improved detection rate of hotdogs.
Surely it'd be a lot more cost-effective to train up people to fly drones remotely, or is the issue more that they can't secure the communications to control them remotely?
This. The Chinese AI is called DeepSeek FFS -- think about that one for a minute.
I've thought about it and don't understand what you're saying
I assume the implication is that they'll build AI capable of automated drone surveillance.
Which is silly, because other Chinese companies have already done that, and America is pioneering it (cf Anduril)
Maybe the comment is implying something along the lines of seeking missiles or seek and destroy? I don’t think it is very obvious though.
Is it any different than the US? The US considers AI national security too, which is why they banned chip exports to China.
And US workers from working in PRC semi... something PRC will probably eventually do for strategic tech.
It seems to not be about national security, as much as personal security. You know like when America tells it's citizens not to go to Burkina Faso because it's dangerous.
I used to work for an American startup that dealt with quite some PII. We were forbidden from traveling to a laundry list of countries with work devices and were required (expected? I am not sure now) to inform the company if we travel to those countries even w/o work devices.
No it’s most likely the US sees it as vital and has thus exercised its espionage and other resources in this area and China has compromised an asset.
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.
They are concerned that maybe they will remain to work in USA
This reminds me of the historical period when London and Berlin were the two technology centers of the world, in intense competition to develop the next generation of math, science, and applications to military. Most scientists in one country did not read the output of the other country, although in some cases, the Danes or the Dutch would translate interesting research.
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.
The Dutch make a big deal* out of the Mayflower cohort having done a significant transit in their city.
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
There was also something like that with glassmaking in Florence hundreds of years ago.
Unsurprising considering the U.S. has been arresting and imprisoning Chinese and American academics with highly prestigious positions in well known universities because they forgot to mention a conference in China they were paid to speak at a decade ago.
Or they show up video taping airbases because they easily get lost
Are the Chinese carrying out espionage in the U.S.?
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.
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The US stole it's IP as well when it was behind. Sam Slater was known as "The Founder of the American Factory System" in the US. In the UK he was known as "Slater the Traitor", because he stole some very important IP.
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.
Indeed.
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.
India has had many decades of independence. Their failings are their own.
As has been shown by what the US has done repeatedly to other countries — and what has now been done to them — you don't need much to derail a country's progress and have them spiral into regressive regimes...
Yeah they spend money on space launches meanwhile UK taxpayers pay for aid to help starvation in areas in India.
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Do you think morals have changed over the past century? Even back then, Slater knew what he was doing was criminal (in Britain), and immoral (to the British). IP laws weren't invented after Sam Slater; American industrialists knew Britain's laws, but they still welcomed Slater because they wanted to move up the value chain. American morals haven't evolved since Slater - the only thing that changed is that they are no longer the upstart but the incumbent. The same will happen to China in 50-100 years: they too will become very concerned about losing IP to whatever ambitious upstart country.
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 is not a crime in China and morality is relative and no one has the moral high ground (unless god shows up). That being said, lots of IP was transferred to China willingly to access its market. It’s shortsightedness not theft that broke the empire.
In my opinion, all developing countries could do it and should do it. You either stay in line or push up, that's the unfortunate fate of developing countries. Rules are not set to protect the poor, they are set to keep poor people in places.
Well IP is social construct. It is literally only illegal if your country’s laws says it is.
That's true of all law, including all property law. It’s not a distinct feature of IP.
I think it’s a category error to suggest IP law has anything to do with morals.
If your country is founded on a principle then it is pretty hypocritical to tell others they should not share that principle as well.
I don't think they are asserting morality or blame. That's just what the game is. We specialized into intellectual property while de-industrializing. The product we make as a country is information, which can be copied across a legal barrier. They products they make are necessary to operate in this world.
It stinks of hypocrisy and "pulling the ladder up". See also: per capita carbon emissions, exterminating the natives.
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I worked at a well-known company that told us we couldn't bring any work electronic devices to China, because there was a risk malware could be installed on it. They advised us not to bring any personal electronic devices either, like phones because they could be confiscated at the border and returned with malware installed on it.
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.
Why would they need to? They have direct Chinese competitors to Tesla who are selling more units for far cheaper prices and innovating far faster. Tesla has a bunch of political baggage with a now drugged out and unstable CEO and nothing they are providing has a leg up on Chinese alternatives. People who can't even legally buy chinese models in their own country want Chinese cars now because they are so cheap and modernized.
The leg up is the teslas don't explode all the time and you don't see thousands of Tesla's parked in a field to make it look like the sales are great.
What explosion are you referring to?
> 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.
I worked at a well-known company that told us we couldn't bring any work electronic devices to the USA.
This makes sense given that even American citizens have been detained at the border until they divulged passwords for their laptops or phones.
It's not in their interest to do so. Tesla is the EV leader and exports many vehicle from China to other countries. Additionally, Elon has a direct line to Trump, it makes no sense to burn bridges.
In what sense is Tesla the EV leader? BYD sold 4.3M EVs last year and is up 40% from 2023. Tesla only sold 1.8M and is down from 2023.
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).
They have the best technology and the highest EV margins.
By analogy: Apple doesn't sell the most smartphones but they are clearly the leader in the smartphone market.
Most of those BYDs are sitting in a field rotting, it's just to make sales look good. They just go park them in a field. Total waste.
The numbers I am quoting are sales, not numbers produced. Are you saying people are buying their cars but not using them? If so, who, and why?
Most of those BYD numbers are hybrids.
58.5% of BYD vehicles were PHEV in 2024. BYD still made more pure EV than Tesla in 2024.
https://www.statista.com/chart/33709/tesla-byd-electric-vehi...
Those aren't the numbers here though.
Pretty much every time people mention BYD EV numbers, they add hybrids.
I see it as intent to mislead.
https://cleantechnica.com/2025/01/02/rebirth-of-the-phev-wha...
I'm not disputing the BYD lead. Just numbers that add hybrids.
No, this is just about keeping people from defecting and taking secrets / cash with them. Many Chinese people working for state controlled companies or similar (schoolteachers were one ridiculous example I think) in super mundane jobs have their passports taken away or exit bans for "national security" reasons.
One note, if you’re working for a top AI company in China, your quality of life other than work hours is already good enough to not to want to leave. It’s not 1990s/2000s anymore. Urban life in China, excluding pandemic times, is better than urban life in the states.
The same applies to other sectors as well. Top talent is genuinely valued in China.
Are you kidding?
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.
I’m not sure there’s any point in arguing, because everyone’s priorities are subjective. Public safety, convenience, unlimited amount of options for basically anything are stuff that people pay premiums for. I still consider Tokyo superior to T1 Chinese cities, but Shanghai is really not that far behind.
> Public safety, convenience, unlimited amount of options for basically anything are stuff that people pay premiums for.
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.
Do you live in China or Asia? Again we’re talking about top talent.
dude, being able to order takeaway junk food 24/7 to your significantly over priced high rise apartment completed 3 years ago with a designed life span of 30 years is not quality of life.
Beyond basic survival quality of life is 90% about the integrity of our human relationships and 10% other stuff.
Do you think everyone in China lives in 50 floor apartment buildings, and they don’t have ever-growing suburbia problem? I’m just gonna assume you don’t live in east Asia.
> 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.
TIL hangzhou/new tier1 is a "modest" city. It's a sick world class city.
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.
I don't know what you are smoking but that thing must be pretty strong.
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.
>highest lung cancer
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.
I honestly think many Americans have not updated their perceptions of T1/T2 Chinese cities since like 2005.
Feels like too many mid westerners expat from 2000s-2010s who never got taste of premium expat life don't realize how a well compensated PRC employee can live real fancy, more so since they're not trapped in expat bubble.
I don’t even think most of the commentators are even expats. It’s just a lot of people are hell-bent on the idea that outside of the US everything else is crumbling, is on fire, and will blow up the next month.
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.
Your comment reminds me of the Yogi Berra quote, "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded."
Prices are high in Shanghai because everyone wants to live there.
> your quality of life other than work hours is already good enough
This reminds me of something I read recently...
https://arstechnica.com/google/2025/02/sergey-brin-says-agi-...
> Urban life in China, excluding pandemic times, is better than urban life in the states.
What data do you have for this conclusion?
Great public transit. Affordable housing. Huge variety of delicious food. Low crime. People who care enough about the social good to wear masks in crowded places during a pandemic.
600m people in China live in poverty despite claims of the CPC eliminating it. Traveling around China you see this. Showing off main cities is not proof that people don’t live in poverty.
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.
> Showing off main cities is not proof that people don’t live in poverty.
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.
So it's the Dubai argument. "The city life is great, especially for ex-pats, don't mind what's being swept under the rug over there".
Irrelevant argument because how rich people (subjects we're talking about) live in rich areas (i.e. main cities) =/= how poor people live in poor areas. Frankly average Chinese poverty in T4+ villages is pretty quaint compared to seeing junkies everywhere. It's more humbling, not disturbing. Of course you can find statistical outlier crimes on social media, but daily life is not filled with the levels of social decay and shithole experiences in western urban areas that PRC diasphora frequently makes comparisons to on social media. It maybe a bubble, but it's a cozy bubble that rarely gets pierced in daily life for the well off.
One of the benefits to China is the low drug use. But you’re blind if you can’t find insane amount of homeless people in Beijing or shanghai. Or that most people there are struggling. If you want to live with tunnel vision then it’s an amazing place to live. (Shanghai cos I didn’t live in any other city. Only travelled)
Lots of people are struggling but you won't find many truely "homeless", you'll find a lot of migrant/informal workers who has homes in rural areas slumming it in the big city to save $$$ so they can remitt more back home. Most with remotely sound mind / physically able can scrounge up $500 rmb for a shared bunk in a T1 shitbox. It elicits a different kind of sadness vs actual homeless. Generally state makes effort to "dump" the truly homeless due to feeble body/mind back with family. Not to be crass, local govs has been doing a very comprehensive job keeping "riff raff" out of sight out of mind etc... it's just a different type of experience/problem vs addicts and unsound people getting in your face downtown or stinking up transit every day. I'm not saying Chinese cities don't have their seedy side, or that a lot of regions still trigger developing country feels, but they are largely avoidable for the privileged - don't even need tunnel vision when local gov NIMBYs it for them. Like functionally PRC apartheid / hukou society, but major cities don't feel like your customary actual apartheid rich middle eastern city full of poor migrant workers everywhere. Or even many part of North American where it's painfully obvious some minorities are doing all the low end service work.
Gosh that's some propaganda.
Every country has homeless people. There are truly homeless people in China. You don't need to put it in quotes, either.
Who said there was no homeless? The reply was in context of major cities where one will very rarely see true urban homeless in major urban areas where well off spends there time. The migrant workers naive expats thinks are "homeless" are generally not - they have homes, they're just willing to occasionally slum it while working "abroad" - it's like saying backpackers who camp on side of road to save $$$ are homeless. They're manifestly not the same thing. Hence quotes.
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.
I guess I must be blind, I've never seen anyone identifiably homeless.
The government wouldn't allow encampments, so how can you even tell?
Drive around at 2am. I haven’t lived in China since pre-covid but back then you would see in the early morning police coming to wake them up and move them along. But middle of the night you can drive around see people sleeping under bridges, doorways, alleys, tunnels. Never somewhere permanent. As there is an image to maintain in the cities.
Making homeless people illegal doesn't mean they don't exist.
Could say the same about Vietnam, or Thailand, or anywhere in SE Asia.
Housing is definitely not easily affordable. But the other points are valid.
For top talent it might be.
I think a good chunk of America had their "Soviets seeing an American supermarket" moment on Red Note when they got to see what city life is actually like in China from the perspective of regular people.
Red Note is Instagram for rich kids. If China managed to frame their upper class as ordinary, good for them. Propaganda win for their regime.
Not sure why we are making that mistake here.
Try actually traveling outside the US. It's eye opening. The rest of the world has been developing and the US has been backsliding. It's impossible not to notice.
Kind of seems like you are avoiding my point, or throwing up a straw man to argue against instead (with a dig at US for good measure).
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.
Instagram is Instagram for rich kids, I know. But like I am ostensibly also a rich kid (probably) by your metric. And I have a very nice looking aesthetic social profile, I know how it translates to what real life is. At this point, that's just basic media literacy.
You are missing my point. The average Red Note influencer is not the average Chinese citizen. I guess you could say the same for IG, but not one is holding up rich kids on IG as the typical American.
Apart from public bathrooms being much dirtier on average, they’ve modernized quite a bit. So, you can take me as 1st hand anecdotal evidence.
Public bathrooms are getting much better in China. There's been a very noticeable improvement recently, I think tied to a government inspection program.
Granted I was mostly outside of the urban core of tier 1 cities, but most places I went people were constantly smoking in bathrooms, had to BYOTP, and floors were often covered in urine. In some second tier cities like Harbin it was basically squat toilets everywhere, even in the airport lounges.
Public bathrooms can be disgusting in many first world countries.
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.
Vietnam is arguably less developed than China, but their bathrooms are way cleaner on average.
Cultural, if I’ll be honest. Until kids are taught and indoctrinated in school that public cleanliness is net good for everyone, hard to see it change.
Honestly, no real data just working with a lot of Chinese on a daily basis. It’s not like they don’t talk about their daily economical or political struggles. Everyone weighs pros/cons, and less and less people have been moving out. Pandemic broke their spirit, but from what I’ve heard, the benefits of living in the US are getting slimmer and slimmer every other day.
Try YouTube. Just use your eyes.
I did. When I went to China and left the major cities all I saw was rows of high rises next to train stations with nothing around them.
Funny, that's never on YouTube.
Top talent, whom the government advices to not to go to the states aren’t living in the slums, or areas where there’s nothingness. They don’t live like in Ordos or something.
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.
If you leave major cities in California you see a lot of empty space that's mostly brown-grey dust, with occasional small towns where everyone is very poor and came from Mexico. Your point?
Yes and I see a lot of YouTube videos about all the poverty in California, I see exactly none about the extensive and overwhelming poverty of rural China (and when I mean rural I mean 20 min outside Shanghai).
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?
I did. When I lived in China and traveled outside of Shanghai it was eye opening. People living in slums with no running water or toilets. No trains. No buses. No taxis. The nicest people ever but makes you realise that the whole eliminating poverty claim is utter BS.
They were talking about people with good paying jobs living in big cities, not China in general. There are people living in extreme poverty in first world countries, and rural areas are always different to big cities.
This would be the only answer, if it wasn't for the all ICE's history, official threats against non US individuals and how reliable the current US gov is.
This year China's advice just sounds reasonable TBH.
Can US arrest the head of Chinese startups who have bought banned NVidia chips from the black market? Is buying a crime?
This was commonplace in the Soviet Union.
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Can you please not post in the flamewar style to HN? Swipes like "Lol, keep dreaming man" are against the site guidelines, and getting into nationalistic spats is not what HN is for. When you post like this, you're just inviting even worse from others (unintentionally of course). That's how we end up with degraded responses like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43226552.
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.
Maybe visit your nearest US consulate to see how many are trying to get into the States, despite all the ** things in recent years.
You will be surprised to learn then that it's fallen dramatically. Like in just the last 5 years the perception is completely different, especially among young people.
The green card queues for employment based green cards for China born applicants tell another story
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/green-car...
There are 1.4B Chinese. Like obviously some will want to move away. The question is, per capita, what is the rate of locals fleeing away from each country.
Even per capita more Chinese are leaving the country for US than the other way round.
Compare past to present and you’ll see a large drop.
Sure, but this is a statistic Beijing is not even trying to improve: at least during the last 10 years, Beijing sees Westerners as a threat and rarely offers them citizenship or permanent residency.
I doubt people who work in cutting edge areas want to leave, not because of national security but because China is now pumping a lot of money into the areas. Those are the people who are willing to work on a 997 schedule anyway.
And yes there are still a lot of Chinese who do want to go to US, but from other areas.
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Please let's not make such assumptions about other users, and certainly not as ammunition in an argument.
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Here, read it on Wikipedia:
'https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_Initiative
Attacking another user like this, no matter how badly they broke the site guidelines themselves, is absolutely not ok on Hacker News. Please don't do it again, and please stop posting flamewar comments to HN generally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
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Meng Wanzhou was roaming in beautiful Vancouver BC while awaiting judgment on the extradition request. Meanwhile China was keeping random Canadian citizens it arrested in retaliation in some dungeon.
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.
> we don't know if she is guilty or not
> 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
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here.
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.
> Even if the conduct of the US authorities here is/was suspect the retaliatory arrests is how the Mafia operates
when i said "Many Americans are complicit through their silence, denials, and defense."
i didn't expect such a combo...
I am not an American. So that's one off your 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.
thanks for correcting
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?
Everyone spies on everyone but when an American businessman is arrested the UK or when a Spanish businessman is arrested in Australia, something that I'll bet you has happened many times, generally speaking the US will not grab British "spies" and throw them in the dungeon pending the release of their businessman.
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.
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You've been using HN primarily (even exclusively) for nationalistic battle. You've also been breaking the site guidelines in all sorts of other ways. Since we've asked you repeatedly not to do this and you've ignored those requests, I've banned the account.
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.
I mean every country has their epstein. western media likes to pick the chinese ones cause they make a good china bad story. Hundreds of chinese like myself travel from and to china each year, I'm surprised it's hard for you to imagine regular chinese people can enjoy life in china.
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https://www.statista.com/statistics/1068495/china-number-of-...
I don't even get why I'm downvoted or why you linked this. The number is in the millions obviously so what is the point?
Really just unbelievably stupid that the US has decided to brain drain itself for no reason at all.
I hear this type of statement often, but people rarely mention the scope or who the brain drainees are. In my experience, it's exceptionally rare that American talent comes to Europe compared to the opposite, and I see little reason why that would change in the near future. When it comes to Chinese individuals returning to China from the US, this isn't exactly traditional brain drain, and it's also something China has actively, sometimes aggressively, been pursuing the past decade or so.
> and I see little reason why that would change in the near future
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.
Imagine 30 years ago if someone said the country of Wittgenstein would not have a large language model of its own, let alone the EU.
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.
China has just developed to the extent that top STEM professionals can have a good quality of life at home. Chinese immigrants were pouring when the US was far less welcoming. The US used to also get hordes of migrants from Europe, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea before they developed.
The increasing isolationism amongst all countries is concerning and depressing.
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.
Europe is more united than ever, thanks to Ukraine.
Or, rather, thanks to Russia.
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
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.
[1]https://youtu.be/voUcv7ydC9o?feature=shared
Why would a moral loss cause a defection to China, that's fucking hilarious bro. China, the place with a national firewall, subjects you can't speak about, try asking questions about certain things to a taxi driver and they'll call the ccp police on ya.
Absolutely hilarious opinion man, why not suggest the UK or hell, a defection to New Zealand. China on a moral basis? Comedy.
It's already been happening for years. Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics. Of course, the vast majority of those cases were bogus and was just a guise for racism.
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.
https://www.justsecurity.org/82948/anti-asian-prejudice
> Award winning faculty and scientists are fleeing US universities and institutions and setting up shop in China, often with more funding and talent available, and no McCarthyism accusations of being spies. It started officially in 2018 with the US Department of Justice's "China Initiative", which basically just allowed anyone to go on a witch hunt of Chinese and Chinese American academics.
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...
That's going to be a little skewed because the initial years was primarily scientists fleeing to Europe, Australia, Canada. The last few years has been heavily China.
So we lost twenty thousand scientists of Chinese descent over roughly a decade, half of which went back to China? That seems horrible. Where’s the hyperbole?
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HN comments trying to argue that the cold war red scare was righteous is very on brand for 2025.
> red scare
You understand that a contemporary communist country had just murdered a few million of their own civilians, yes?
You know when the cold war ended the archives briefly opened up. It's not a moral case, merely a factual one.
As is the case that Trump, Musk, Vance and Thiel are Russian assets.
It’s just common sense to use Trumps own words.
Just remember that as these people drag us into a war for “peace”
The term for them is useful idiots not assets. The democrats did enormous damage to the Ukrainian cause pushing the russia hoax in 2017/18. Steele assumed there was competent intelligence analysts to analyse what he collected but instead it was politicians.
The other guy's point is that Russia is not a hoax and we'll see that when the files are opened up.
I think the complaint is with the government hearings to investigate individual citizens political views. Doesn’t seem especially aligned with the supposed values of the country.
Many of the people outed and persecuted for homosexuality were really gay. That doesn’t make it any less offensive.
It's just not even good security policy, and in some cases will do irreparable harm. These are incredibly smart and valuable people who are leaving and no longer under your sphere of influence, and where their work will now massively benefit your perceived adversary, eg China wouldn't have a nuclear program today if it weren't for the 50s episode.
It's cutting off your nose, face, and brain just to get a little bit of fun discrimination in.
Even if they were communists or had communist sympathies, who cares? I am pretty sure Oppenheimer did way more for the country than McCarthy. We should persecute/prosecute for illegal things they do, not for their political leanings.
McCarthy accused 12,000 people of being Communists.
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.
...and? it's a free country, not a paradise for William F. Buckley
I never liked him. It's just a fact that America was full of communists before the liberal-tankie split when it no longer was socially acceptable to be a communist since they started pasting protesters with tanks.
I wonder if given the recent "moral" loss of US, we will see a post-WW2 Soviet vs USA style defection of scientists & engineers between USA and China?
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.
That would be my guess too.
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).
It's not a brain drain - it's not Americans moving into China. It's Chinese people getting educated and doing stuff themselves.
Most of Europe (notable exception france), Canada, and Australia will happily betray their own citizens to extradition to foreign countries. If things get bad enough that science immigration becomes 'defection' they'd be safer from the US in China.
Are you OK with a person committing a violent crime in a foreign country, then returning home to a country that "protects" them against extradition? I never understand the pushback against extradition. You can extradite carefully. Also, "most of Europe", Canada, and Australia are highly functional democracies. If extradition is so bad, why haven't they outlawed it?
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...
I wouldn't rule it out iff the other candidates can't stump up the resources to play the game. I very much doubt AGI will come out of Canada or Australia; Europe is making some overtures, but it'll take some time to get the machinery rolling to the same extent.
I'm Canadian, we have an estimated 250k-300k citizens living in China. All the ones I've spoken with were pretty impressed with the place.
For comparison, Canada has 73k citizens living in the UK, 90k in France, and 800k in the US.
Do you count Hongkong as part of Mainland China? Most surveys do not. (The line is certainly more blury than 5 years ago.)
I found this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_diaspora
Yeah this feels right, Americans will choose leveraging their English before seeking out needing to learn a non-Romance language, I feel.
Language? What about principles of freedom, democracy, and science? I would think that those things would be why US scientists choose Canada and Europe first. I doubt language is really high on the list.
Language and ease of immigration are going to be very important to the decision of where to move. Naturally, those things you mentioned are important, but so is language.
What freedoms would they lose?
Right to bear arms (only Yemen and Idlib is stronger here) and some of the loosest regulations on non commercial speech.
Right to bear arms? How about Finland or Switzerland? It is pretty easy to own guns in both places.
Where I live now you can 3d print an unregistered and unserialized pistol then stuff it under your shirt (loaded) and walk into the unsecured part of a public airport without breaking the law, all with zero paperwork or licenses or checks. Can I do that in Switzerland?
And why is that a good thing?
Well for one, Europe has a history of gassing disarmed people and those on registries, for two locking your gun up to pick someone up from the airport just presents an unnecessary opportunity for it to be stolen.
Why 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.
Europe is a pretty big place with a lot of disparate governments. Abstracting it to merely "Europe" is ignoring how the world operates. Many European governments have been actively expanding and enshrining rights of individuals.
Secondly, none of your points are pertinent to the day-to-day of anyone in academic research/science. Perhaps only to the irrationally paranoid.
It was relevant to Einstein.
Look, I am from Spain, currently living in Japan, two very safe countries with some of the lowest rates of crimes in the world. I have met plenty of Americans living in both places, and do you know what they told me? 1) They love having a functional healthcare system that won't bankrupt them, and 2) they also love being able to walk around, specially at night, without the fear of being shot by a random asshole.
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.
I'm absolutely open to the idea that some people find more freedom with less liberties and more safety.
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.
Please just avoid Europe. There is no need to argue. You can stay in freedom-loving America, and the rest of us can move to Europe.
Remember though, China is still a totalitarian dictatorship at least as bad as the USA. It's not the same situation.
I don't think we'll see born-in-the-USA Americans moving to Shenzhen anytime soon.
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.
You should visit Shenzhen. Plenty of born-in-the-USA Americans (+ European etc) there.
If the immigrants that we've allowed to come here are so fickle that they would leave for China if China presents better opportunities, I would prefer that they leave now and get it over with. My country is not an economic zone for extracting value. It's my home.
> extracting value
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.
A lot of immigrant communities actually voted for Donald Trump this time though. I don’t understand it. But it happened.
Analysis: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/americas-immigrant-voters...
If someone said "Americans do X", there would be some pushback about "not all Americans". But somehow it's normal (expected even) to bunch all immigrants together into the "they were all desperate and decided to jump the fence" pile.
It's actually surprising that this point is so hard to understand.
It is very simple. Nobody hates queue jumpers more than the people that stood in line.
Those who stood in line as you say also want to take people out of today's queue. Legality doesn't have much to do with it. In Britain it's called pulling up the drawbridge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drawbridge_mentality
> It's not the same situation.
Yet. It is not even two months in, we have not seen nothing yet.
I think a more practical framing is to ask what you enjoy doing in the US that you wouldn’t be able to do in China.
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.
Out of the two, now China seems to benefit from keeping global peace more, since USA is checking out from global trade with tariffs.
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As an EU-based employer, I'm seeing a post-WW2 soviet vs usa style defection of engineers between USA and Europe.
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.
My hiring manager mates are seeing this in Australia too.
Sydney's beaches and weather helps a bit too.
OTOH we’re educating engineers and then not letting them stay. Like chinas worried about having talent poached (or controlled in some way) and here’s Australia providing world class education and demanding they go back afterwards.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/am/deepseek-engineer-...
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What are you talking about?
in sydney, you face property prices not cheaper than the bay area, but the same tech job is going to pay you 30-40% of what you'd expect on the other side of the world.
In London we have higher property prices, lower wages, no sunshine and no beaches.
where is london?
As a scientist I'm not going to handicap my career by going to Australia or EU when the US is doing science light years ahead of those countries.
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.
What’s your take on near-term stability for American immigrants in Europe? I was looking at options for moving last year but the work visa situation seemed fairly precarious (although that’s a relative thing in comparison with what may end up happening here in the US).
As someone who has been looking; the EU Blue Card through Germany seems pretty stable and straightforward, with a 21/27 month path to permanent residency, depending on language ability:
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.
I want to be vocal about it for third world country people like me.
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.
Thank you for the link. How is Germany looking RE economic stability for the next couple of years? I was looking into Sweden but even the Swedish citizens I know there are having a difficult time finding / keeping engineering jobs as the economy has been doing poorly.
Like anything, really hard to say right now.
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").
> How is Germany looking RE economic stability for the next couple of years?
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...
Personally I’m pushing my (Belgian) government hard to provide a streamlined path for American immigrants, especially tech workers.
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.
As one of the many Americans who wants to contribute to a society whose values match their own, thank you. Is there somewhere to follow your efforts in that front?
A lot of it is small-scale lobbying, so not much to follow :)
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.
I would have loved to come work for imec but the only immediate internship budget they had was a studentship with accompanying stipend and visa. They told me it would have taken too long to sort out the employee route.
Check out the companies they fund, instead. Those will have an easier time hiring you. And then there are paths to working directly with Imec.
Thanks for the advice - maybe I will have more questions in near future about this
Funny, I’m literally seeing the opposite. Had two people move from the EU last year due to free speech concerns.
One doesn't preclude the other, but I have serious doubts about free speech concerns. There are moderate and extreme movements in Europe. They all express themselves freely within the law.
Of course, we’re probably seeing the normal amount of movement when administrations shift. I work for a global company and have only witnessed the EU to US movement. I’m sure both are happening.
blink... They outlawed silent prayer.
The UK left EU some years ago.
No worries though, Germany is raiding peoples houses for offending people online. Please spare me the "only for Holocaust deniers" thing.
I'm sorry but it's normal. You don't have the right to offend people online or not.
What's normal? You just offended a whole group of people and probably had no intention of doing it. You're proving the point on why the whole thing doesn't work. You should get your comment removed if you seriously believe this to be true and want to avoid being hypocritical.
I'm sorry if you feel offended. My comments will be removed by HN moderators if they think it's necessary. You can flag and downvote them meanwhile. You can also contact the moderators or your local police if you think it is necessary.
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.
I have no interest in pressing charges against you or getting you in trouble. That would be hypocritical of me and contrary to my beliefs. I was simply pointing out how easy it is to offend people on the internet and why it simply doesn't work at scale. If no one has the right to say something potentially offensive on the internet, then the whole thing needs to be shut down.
Thank you for explaining your point of view on the interest of this conversation. Here's mine, I consider an offense to be something quite subjective sometimes. In some cases, it's possible to offend someone without meaning to. The solution to this problem is to apologize and offer to talk about it. If that doesn't work, and the offense is in some way "forbidden", then the offended person can simply defend themselves by going to the “authorities”.
What you just said offends my beliefs in fundamental human right to free speech.
Who do I call to press charges?
I sincerely apologize again if you found my response offensive. You can contact your local police to make a complaint, I suppose.
I find this extremely offensive.
I'm sorry. I'm open to discussion if you can explain what is offending to you
You can’t have free speech without being able to offend. And you can’t have democracy without free speech.
Yes, but in this case, there's nothing to stop you from apologizing and possibly discuss the offending point so that it doesn't happen again.
[flagged]
I sincerely apologize if you found my response offensive. It was not my intention and I try to respect the moderation rules on HN. I just wanted to give my point of view, as a person living in the EU.
This might seem unrelated. I pray you decided to watch the first yt link.
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6lsUJdGLFx7OGLRQCQfH...
And how are they doing now?
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.
> Anyway I’m sure people can be in whatever bubble their algorithmic news gives them
> 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.
Last year is a bit different to this year no ?
Free speech concerns in the EU go 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 only one of these is a valid thing to be worried about IMO...
How about I see an interesting street hustler in Munich and put a photo of him on my blog? If something like that is illegal I'd quickly find our two cultures are absolutely incompatible with my continued residence.
I see - you think harassment and privacy violation is free speech.
Please stay away from Europe.
Cool so now free speech is reduced to anything not viewed as harassment. I think I will take your advice, that's dystopic and far worse than just your prior bullet points.
You can also just ask him if it's OK to do that and they're probably going to be OK with it.
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.
Uh, it's reduced to things that are not harassment. Who said "viewed as"? Are you trying to make everything subjective, so you can argue all opinions about harassment are equally valid?
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.
Ban on nukes is an infringement but not as egregious as the ones in Europe. In another comment I admit for instance Yemen and Idlib have a stronger right to bear arms than the US. I absolutely acknowledge this.
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.
Do you find that not being able publish a book someone else wrote is an infringement on free speech?
I agree that you should stay in the USA and let everyone else go to Europe.
The interesting things is how that list is growing, not shrinking.
Well, according to the two sources I'm familiar with, it's not necessarily the _current_ laws that are the most concerning, but rather the _direction_ things are heading.
In the past it was like:
- 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?
History proves limiting free speech is a slippery slope. I can't speak for my EU friends, but for me, yes, it's very concerning to begin justifying why some speech is not OK.
In the USA you can't say "I want to blow up this plane" in an airport, so the slope has already begun.
Not many will take a massive pay cut only to pay more taxes
It’s an odd phenomena to see someone refute personal observations.
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.
I'd say this is a self-fulfilling prophecy of the American social structure.
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.
I've run the numbers a few times for every EU tech-adjacent job I'm eligible for. Except for some opportunities in France, I'd have a lower proportional tax rate (and, except for in France, I'd have enough of a lower proportional tax rate that the free healthcare makes up the difference). The US doesn't actually have low taxes.
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).
If you have kids the math works out in favour for many European countries.
Economics are not the only considerations at play. Even if economic considerations do dominate, the social safety nets of many European countries offer attractive alternatives to their US counterparts, even as they existed before Trump. For instance, in the deeply flawed US health-care system you risk medical bankruptcy in the case of serious illness or accidents even if you do have insurance due to policy limits. Insurers will fight tooth and nail to prevent paying out claims. Some folks with chronic illnesses don't want to be tied to their high-paying jobs just so they can have good insurance and some healthy folks want a health insurance policy that won't disappear when they need it most.
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.
There's bigger problems in the US for a researcher than just the salary in the US nowadays.
That salary comparison was valid pre-Trump.
> salary comparison was valid pre-Trump
Is it not valid now?
Salaries must be weighted by risk. Right now, there is a high risk that researchers funded by grants or working in government labs will lose their jobs and faculty will lose their grants and labs. Industry researchers are in a more stable situation, even though layoffs may be more common than on the average.
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.
Finland.
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.
On top of those issues there's also a wave of anti-intellectualism and xenophobia from the Trump government.
When the US model used to be to attract top worldwide researchers, that's pretty much the targeted demographics.
Not anymore no, the research environment is even more important than the salary itself.
You’re incorrect. Many will and do.
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.
Listen I'm not a supporter of this administration but what is this argument? As if there aren't also tons of tourists coming to America. Tourism has little to do with getting people to immigrate.
> Why do you think we get so many American tourists?
Because the US is a young country compared to most of Europe?
if only one side has nukes slavery will be much more widespread if everyone has them all the slave traders competing with each other will be at least mitigated
kind of crazy they saw all the graffiti license plate games that early
If everyone has them they are more likely to be used over minor issues.
When?
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.
It has been threatened recently by a few nations. It almost got set off by mistake.
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.
What does any of it matter?
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 power is not more or less evenly distributed then only the strongest really have rights.
This seems like a tautology. By definition someone with superior political power can grind down someone else with less, if they were maniacal enough about it, or at least negate their efforts.
If they couldn’t, then they wouldn’t be considered to have superior political power.
It's more than that.
With enough power differential that won't even be a consideration.
Even perfect equals in an ideal spherical cow world can still engage in a 1 v 1 drag down fight.
Spherical beef is better than Wagyu!
If you wanted to be ironic via literally meaningless comments, then that is pretty clever.
don't believe everything the slavers tell you :)
if everyone had a way to completely disintegrate the planet no one would be above another
All we need is nukes?
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.”)
you my digital friend have never met slavers and it shows :)
more than nukes one can survive nukes the ability to completely disintegrate the planet for everyone
Sounds like a very strong incentive for us to find a way to leave the planet and settle elsewhere.
And those settlements will be not be full of exactly the same human beings?
nah jesus says that's a sin we can only stay here with our heavenly chosen barons or go to heaven or hell
We have the test case for this. When one power had nukes and no one else did they weren’t used…
They were on Japan and plenty of people pushed for a preemptive strike on the USSR.
"John von Neumann" was a very famous and influential person defending just that.
Smart guy, von Neumann. We should've listened to him.
Converted to Catholicism in his deathbed and made serious errors in his Book on QM.
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.
lmao think of all the jobs the CIA would have had to cut
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
The people of Nagisaki and Hiroshima would like a word.
famously they were very much used
i’m pretty sure he was being sarcastic
if you ignore WW2 for some reason?
history is pick and choose these days the blight is spreading everywhere :(
well it was always pick and choose but i had high hopes for the tech barons sigh
I'm thinking most of new and established STEM PhDs, who'll decide where in the world to settle in, or relocate to, to do research or R&D.
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.)
People can be become indifferent, which is a win for China.
A lot of developed countries like across Europe and Singapore dont have the same geopolitical history with China as the US does, as such the Sinophobia isn’t really there
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
> expansive social safety nets of China
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?
To me, the big three of "social safety net" is education, medical care, and retirement pension. For normies, I doubt any of those are better than other highly developed democracies.
Excellent medical and dental care for ridiculously cheap. On par with countries like Germany
If you work, you contribute to a fund that you have access to if you lose your job.
China has never been a place, historically, that has welcomed foreigners as anything other than short-term visitors. To the extent that it has, those foreigners have become Chinese (Manchu, Mongol - and the "welcome" there is uh… being used pretty liberally). From a legal and policy perspective, there are very few paths to long-term residency in China for people who are not of Chinese descent, and of the nominal few there are, there are only a tiny handful of foreigners who live there for longer than a decade or so. By law you can't become a citizen of the PRC without being of Chinese descent. Chinese people are wonderful and on an individual level are incredibly warm and open to all the depths and facets of human relationships with non-Chinese foreigners. As a society, China has, in general, never been a particularly welcoming place for folks who aren't Chinese. I don't see any indication of that changing any time soon. Would love to be wrong.
My impression with the visa situation is that while technically green card is very difficult, in practice most expats have no issue renewing their work visas, so effectively living as long term residents - buying properties, getting married, and sending their kids to (mostly international) schools. I've also seen quite a few who worked for a few years and then started their own businesses.
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.
Sure, just don't practice Falun Gong or be a Christian or an Uyghur.
Exhibit A
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.
As a general rule if your only source of information about contemporary China ( or Ukraine/Palestine wars) is from English language press and analysts, you should consider yourself disinformed or possibly misinformed.
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.
Works where archive.ph is blocked:
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
meanwhile deepseek has been releasing absolute fire open-source all week long...
It seems a bit strange. This isn’t like nuclear weapons researchers in the 1940s, where only a small group had the knowledge to build the bomb. There are a LOT of AI researchers out there, and it’s more a battle of resources rather than rare knowledge at this point, it seems.
There are many researchers, but a limited number with the ability to make the revolutionary leaps necessary. To take your analogy: there were many physicists who knew an atomic bomb was possible, and many who even attempted it, but the Manhattan Project was the first to succeed through a combination of the right people and the right resources.
But AI researchers are one of the resources currently needed! Even though there are lots of them, it's undeniable that if half of the best 1000 AI researchers in either US or China were to move to the other country it would be a massive boon to AI research in the country they moved to and have a negative impact on AI research in the country they left, even though it wouldn't destroy the scene in that country.
China could broaden the message to “tells anyone to o avoid U.S. travel...” and that would be right thing to do because of the far-right happening here now.
Deepseek is great. What fundamentally prevents an open source coalition from producing great AI systems for everyone?
Access to training hardware. Both in terms of the money involved but also the availability of suitable devices.
In the west, there is almost no money for open source.
1. There isn't anywhere. DeepSeek is open source to salt the earth and gain ecosystem advantage. It's a ridiculously smart move that yanks the leading players back to the ground right as they're about to take off into the stratosphere.
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.
Is there elsewhere?
ROI?
The article leaves it until the very end to point out the risk of high-performing employees being poached, but I'd say it seems like a huge liability for China. The USA would be well-placed to identify vulnerable Chinese individuals working in AI development and offer them a large sum of money to 'defect'. It would be both a propaganda win for Trump's administration and a relatively cheap way of removing these individuals from the Chinese economy.
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-...
And breakfast costs the equivalent of 20 cents, from the seller on the street. Buying power comparisons are complicated
Back in the real world, people from China are able to do something we call "immigration."
Is what they call “AI” actually dangerous or is just some common misconception about how powerful language models imply skynet taking over the world?
The end goal is something capable of human-level intelligence in most, if not all, fields, and from there, it's not that difficult to continue scaling it up across speed / scale (and perhaps intelligence.)
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.
It’ll enable mass surveillance, and hence it is the wet dream of authoritarian governments like 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.”
Just recall what the United States did to Huawei's CFO Meng Wanzhou at that time, and it will be very understandable now.
Do you think Canada shares any blame? And do you think she is guilty of her crimes (trading with Iran)?
>instructing top artificial-intelligence entrepreneurs and researchers to avoid visiting the U.S.
>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.
This should be universal advice to everyone.
Given that most jobs in the US pay 10X or more what the same job pays in China, they are probably concerned that trips to the US will be one way.
That would be nice, but I’m pretty sure it’s a complete pain in the ass for anybody to move to the United States no matter how valuable they are
There are usually ways the the US really want them. O1 visas for example - my Chinese friend got one of those.
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.
it only becomes more obvious that AI is being treated as an arms race. thats why the federal government assassinated suchir balaji.
The latest autopsy came down pretty firmly on it being a suicide. Even if it could've been an assassination, there isn't much motive: his claims were about copyright violation, which neither OpenAI or the government would much care about in an arms race.
the autopsy that his mother says was really strange and done by the police who acted in a bizarre manner? or has there been another one? and as for motive, you are literally incorrect. if there is a massive copyright precedent set in the courts the intelligence community would not be able to overturn that. and its likely to happen because its legally sound… if i were the cia i would be doing everything in my power to stop that from happening.
and by the way how many people prepare a meal and then leave it on the table and brutally kill themselves?
Yes: https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/02/14/autopsy-openai-whistl...
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.
Cold war 2,0
> They also worry that executives could be detained and used as a bargaining chip in U.S.-China negotiations, in an echo of a fight over a Huawei executive held in Canada at Washington’s request during the first Trump administration.
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.
I often say states behave as mafias. It is a matter of becoming influential enough so that they treat you as a criminal. In the meantime, the streets every day less and less safe, at least in Europe, bc of real criminals, the ones that kill or systematically steal even in organized crime and they do very little about it.
In the European countries that I've bothered to look, crime statistics are actually down. It's just the perception of crime that is up. Think about who might benefit from creating this kind of misleading perception.
It can be misleading in other ways
For instance it is trivial for a country to reduce crime statistics simply by making things that used to be crimes legal
Or in the case of Russia, murders go down, and unidentified bodies that are dead for no particular reason go up by the same amount.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1477370818794124?ic...
There is so much petty crime that is no longer reported in France because people know the cops won't do anything about.
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.
We saw NYC and SF do this to disastrous effects. Journalists had to start looking at privately collected victimization rates to get an accurate picture since crime stats were clearly being juked.
That goes both ways. Crime statistics can also be inflated by making things people already do illegal, eg the various facets of prohibiting different substances that people use.
It can be, but it's easy to check wheter it's true or another fascist dream, right
I thought we were talking data and security, not ideology.
Compared to when? Compare 14/15 years ago to now... it is way worse.
Also, the way of counting has been manipulated in Spain at least to mask the data conveniently.
I looked at France and Germany, there was a clear downward trend for a long time, yet it bumped before the pandemic, got super low for the 2-3 years of it, and is steadily rising again.
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.
> Comparatively they are still incredibly safe countries, and the sentiment of insecurity has always been disproportionate to reality and politically exploited.
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.
Yes...but I'd argue these zones always existed [0] and aren't going to disappear anytime soon. That's where looking at how much the insecurity perception goes up or down can be more relevant that how many of these exist in total.
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...
Crime stats are down in parts of America too, and it doesn’t mean a thing. Trust your eyes, not stats that can be gamed. These days a lot of crime stats are influenced by soft on crime laws, victims too jaded to report crimes, and more. The perception that crime is increasing is more right than wrong in my experience.
When my american kids are slagging my Belgian half brother he shuts them down by offering a visit to the school he went to, you know, through the unlocked non bulletproof front door. Their schools have vestibules with intercoms and such.
Since there us actually bo government above countries, yhe international stage is a practice of true anarchy.
[flagged]
> Does anybody doubt that this is a reasonable concern?
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.
Yeah this seems perfectly reasonable. While the targeting of Huawei was legitimate, I'd be pretty disappointed in the blatant corruption of targeting AI leaders that do the same thing as people in the west.
It happened in the first season of the show, so they are being careful.
no pity license plate queued lmao
The sweet spot: Good enough at AI to make 7 figures. Not good enough to personally be a geopolitical pawn.
Apparently 7 figures is the new 6 figures...
With inflation and the terribly high cost of housing in places like the Bay Area, “seven figures is the new six figures” is an apt observation. I make six figures, yet I can’t afford to buy a home within a reasonable commute from my job, and even finding a decent rental near my job is challenging. Seven figures is indeed the new six figures.
My colleague makes mid 6 figures in the bay area and just scrounged enough money together to buy a house from the 1950s with asbestos.
Did they pay premium for asbestos?
Yea, 10 years of his life.
Certainly a steep price to pay.
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-...
And to put it more concretely: directors at Google are pulling close to 7 figures in total comp. It's wild.
$150,000 USD is around ¥1,092,00 CNY, so that might explain it. :p
I thought it went without saying, but being good enough at AI to make 7 figures isn't attainable for most people.
I mean "low income" is 6 figures in the silicon valley [1]. So 6 figures really isn't much anymore.
[1] https://hoodline.com/2023/06/new-ca-income-limits-classify-s...
You can’t really buy/do anything interesting until making 8 figures. What meaning could life have if you can’t even build a small apartment complex.
When did Sam Altman last visit China?
As recent as 2017.
"Earlier this year, I noticed something in China that really surprised me. I realized I felt more comfortable discussing controversial ideas in Beijing than in San Francisco. I didn’t feel completely comfortable—this was China, after all—just more comfortable than at home."
https://blog.samaltman.com/e-pur-si-muove
He also mentions giving a talk for YC in China in 2018:
https://blog.samaltman.com/idea-generation
That particular quote seems to come up every once in a while, and I still don't quite get why people feel it's profound or important. China has a very public and well-known list of things that you are not allowed to talk about (Tienanmen Square, a few others). SF doesn't (or didn't) because what was offensive or violated whatever new rule the way-too-online wasn't codified as part of some legal apparatus, it was/is very dynamic. One does not need to actually go to China to recognize this.
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What did he do to you?
Lose 5B$/year
Embarass humanity with crypto garbage: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_(blockchain)
He’s in a gang with MElon.
Ah, how the tables turn.
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.
Now the EU just needs to do the same. And not for AI, but for "everyone".
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.
The last time I talked to our local embedded CIA guy in my previous US company, he was very proud of their efforts to keep all the Chinese scientists out of the major hacking conferences. And he was very keen to get access to all Arab and East Asian critical infrastructures. Talking about industrial espionage efforts
I have good news for you. DeepSeek openly bragged that none of its people have “overseas experience”. They are all local talents.
Weren’t some of them educated abroad?
And as we all know the Russians, oops the Chinese, invented LLMs and transformers.
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.
Your snarky tone aside, “overseas” usually means outside of one’s country. Microsoft has research teams all over the globe. You don’t have to be in the U.S. to work for Microsoft.
I know what overseas means and I realize Microsoft has teams all over the globe. But Microsoft is a US company and by working there as a researcher you are trained and have access to know-how that is technically American in origin.
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.
> The intent of the original "boast" is to somehow claim the know-how comes solely out of China.
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.
Here's the sequence:
>> 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.
I don’t have a position. I’m simply very curious how this will play out.
You don’t have to guess what they mean since the CEO did an interview about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42845612
You'd rather they do all of the cutting edge research back in China?
Agreed, who needs engineering talent when we can just hire some H1Bs and let them and Copilot do all the work? Unlike the Chinese, H1Bs don't want to be sent on a plane back home to their 3rd world country so they'll always do as they are told. When we tell them to work 80 hours, they work 80 hours.
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How about, instead, we call it national security.
Why shouldn't every other nation treat us the same way? Based on our criminal history of invasion, back-stabbing, and genocide should US citizens be banned around the world? Why should the racist "yellow peril" narrative be credible the 1000th time?
>>They also worry that executives could be detained and used as a bargaining chip in U.S.-China negotiations
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.
Really not sure if you're joking or not, but Meng Wanzhou (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meng_Wanzhou) was a major turning point for China-US and China-Canada relations.
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.
>>...under the indictment of bank and wire fraud regarding financial transactions in violation of U.S. sanctions against Iran by Skycom, which had functioned as Huawei's Iran-based subsidiary. On 24 September 2021, the DOJ announced it had reached a plea bargain with Meng to resolve the case through a deferred prosecution agreement...
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 charges were dismissed. Her “plea bargain” had her deny all the key charges and simply admit to one false statement - which did not amount to any criminal wrongdoing.
> 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]
What a vicious women, thanks to wikipedia, we know the truth
Yet Apple and Google are all hiring these folks to steal our secrets