Yeah, the whole article reads like “China says good things, but actually, they are just bad things in disguise! Chinese AI is cheaper and in some cases better, but actually its all a master plan for world domination! Remember, guys, China bad!!!”

Of course the software created in China would intentionally try to follow Chinese laws. Just as American software follows the laws of the US. However, China made their models open-source, so people can tinker with them and (possibly) make a fork without the censorship, and run it locally without any data being sent who knows where. While ChatGPT, Gemini and all the rest are closed-source, and you have zero control over them, so you can’t even hope to circumvent the propaganda that’s built into those models.

But yeah, Tiananmen square 1989, China bad, let’s all stop thinking about anything

DeepSeek is designed to follow Chinese state propaganda. ChatGPT is designed to follow American oligarchy propaganda. Each side pushes their own biases. Where is the false equivalence?

Also I wasn’t meaning to instill hopelessness or indifference. On the contrary, I tried to point out that you should be equally as mad at OpenAI/Google/the rest of the western AI companies as you are at the DeepSeek. The fact that people are only mad at China and not at the megacorporations in the west does, imo, indicate their biases.

Breaking news: AI has the same biases as their creators! More at 11

I meant that these things aren’t as noticeable from outside of the country. Like, foreign news outlets probably won’t report on it much. Plus, eggs are more of an exception because of sudden shortage and prices rising rapidly. For most of the other goods the price grows more gradually and isn’t as obvious. Like in that metaphor about slowly boiling a frog.

Another problem that is noticeable from inside the country (at least by those affected by it) is that certain medications are vanishing from the pharmacies because they are no longer imported and they were never produced locally, or the local production is insufficient to meet the needs. I don’t know the full list, but the stock of ADHD meds is definitely low, and I’ve heard from friends that they had to switch to a different antidepressant due to shortages.

Uhhh, yes. It was 3am when I wrote this, so my brain probably farted hard

Adding to all the reasons already listed, Russia isn’t striving. For example, right now there is a number of towns and cities experiencing outages in central heating (with houses designed around central heating so basically no other option to heat their appartments) while the weather dips to -20°C (around -4°F). All because the centralized boiler facilities weren’t properly maintained due to the lack of money (or, to be more precise, due to money being diverted towards the war).

There are other signs, like plains malfunctioning and flights getting delayed because some component broke and cannot be replaced due to sanctions, and they happen more and more often. Also the less noticeable stuff like prices of common goods increasing by a factor of two in the last couple of years while salaries barely increased at all.

So yeah, Russia is keeping itself afloat, but it isn’t thriving at all

Well, he has Elon Musk in his display name, that definitely is 100% synonymous with bullshit

To summarize:

There was a dude called Igor Girkin, he was in the Russian military. His crimes include, but aren’t limited to:

1. Shooting down Malaysia Airline MH17 in 2014
2. Torturing and executing Ukrainians
3. Terrorism in Eastern Ukraine under guise of separarism
4. Involvement in the annexation of Crimea (at least illegally crossing the border as a part of military force and threatening citizens)

is arrested in Russia for saying that the Russian army is performing poorly in Ukraine and Putin and Shoigu (minister of defence) are not managing the situation appropriately.

It shows that in Russia, showing honesty about war is more of a crime than murder and terrorism. Combined