the pricing page doesn't seem to call it out anymore, but the claim on z.ai coding plan used to be 3x the usage of the equivalent-price claude plan. whether that's accurate i don't know, but just based on api pricing GLM is way cheaper.
>The irony is I believe that if a medical devices company announced this, it was being sold to hospitals, and it would only cost the patient's insurance $100 a scan, then the medical industry would universally praise this as a breakthrough.
yes, that's the power of reputation. if a company with a proven track record of selling effective diagnostic tools decided to stake their reputation on a new system that sounds a bit like something from an ai-generated fairy tale, people might be more likely to give it the benefit of the doubt.
when a company best known for selling actual ai-generated fairytales announces a medical diagnostic tool that sounds like an ai-generated fairytale, i think it's reasonable to treat that with some skepticism.
No, it's not just about reputation, at least for me it's about the fact that there is a relatively strict, FDA-approval process for actual medical devices. Midjourney's announcement was the equivalent of a marketing page for some supplement that claims it will make be sleep great while growing my penis (the page even basically even marketed it as a "wellness" product), not actual scientific evidence that the device would, or could, work as advertised.
i think the reason this works is an implication that the article doesn't explicitly cover:
if you tell somebody you're going to to do something, you're not asking them to take responsibility. you're telling them that you're taking responsibility for whatever you're going to do. If you ask somebody's permission, you're asking them to take some portion of responsibility for what you're doing.
which is the same risk that the sibling comment is warning about - if you're trying to do this for things that you aren't ultimately responsible for, you're goign to piss people off. only take responsibility for things that are actually within your area of responsibility.
This is a point that tends to kill introverted/insecure people I think. They assume that asking for permission is making things easier for people, but there's a limit where you're not allowing others to delegate responsibility onto you. Your job is for others to not have to think about the things you take care of.
You can only take responsibility if you also have ownership. Large organizations very quickly become like communist state, nobody own anything and any individual action is suspicious.
My rubric is irrelevant--I promised I wouldn't try to argue against whatever countries got named. I'm just curious what people consider a successful communist country.
I think you can look at different lenses of success. Vietnam successfully defeated a much, much more powerful imperial force. They have fewer freedoms, and are still recovering from the generational damage dealt to them, and they are hardly without plenty of valid criticisms. But they've had successes.
China is a major global power. I think you'd have to accept that China is successful, even if that success doesn't reach every person. And I think it's fair to point at China and ask just how communist it really is. (Then again, I think it's fair to point at the US and ask how idealistically capitalist they are.)
Cuba has some of the highest literacy rates in the world, they have a developed medical care system with lower infant mortality, high vaccination rates, and they have developed their own effective vaccines for things like covid. They've eliminated measles. They enjoy a longer life expectancy than US citizens. And they've achieved those successes with an embargo that has made it difficult for Cuba to trade globally.
This is why I was probing for rubrics, because I think one can definitely find success in communist governments, and you'll also find corruption. And you'll find crime and war. And there's no clear story of "across all axes they are successful".
Would I rather live in any of these? It's complicated! I think there are very few countries right now that are primarily focused on the welfare of their people.
Vietnam is legit a good place to live tbh. My wife is Vietnamese and we visit at least twice a year.
Without making any value judgment on the government itself. I think it’s healthy for the planet to have people grow up in as many kinds of environments as possible. You know, as long as it’s not a full on totalitarian regime like North Korea or a place where women are treated like objects like anywhere ran under sharia law.
I think it's useful to distinguish between political system and economic system. The traditional communist system was to have both a one-party state and state ownership of the means of production.
Vietnam and China still have one-party states but have transitioned to market economies. The fact that there are Chinese billionaires implies that they are no longer communist.
Cuba is still a traditional communist country--mostly because of sanctions. But they would love to become a market economy.
North Korea is the other one with both a one-party state and autarkic control over the economy.
Would I want to live in any of these countries? Absolutely not. I would rather be a median American than a median Chinese or Vietnamese.
I think it's plausible China and US invert in that calculus over the next 30 years. The median US person (anecdotally) feels to me like they are getting worse and worse stakes. $45k a year is not a lot these days. Chinese are investing heavily in infrastructure in a way that's appearing to build a healthy amount of economic potential. Whereas the US is... struggling. Global happiness index scores for China and Vietnam have risen dramatically, while the US is sliding down.
But I could be wrong. Maybe there will be a reversion.
America’s freeing its slave population is similarly redistribution of the means of production to the general population. Which seems strange to modern ears, but the communist manifesto 1848 predates the US civil war 1861–1865.
I'm not going to disagree with the idea of the state redistributing wealth via taxes/benefits or even nationalized resources (e.g., mineral rights or FCC spectrum). Both have been features of US capitalism almost since the founding.
But if you're saying the US is a successful communist country... well, I promised I wouldn't argue.
I agree. Moreover, socialism and capitalism are not antithetical--they are orthogonal. Norway and the US have socialism (e.g., Social Security) and capitalism (e.g., people invest their capital to fund industry).
Socialism without capitalism is communism--the state owns everything.
Capitalism without socialism is anarchy: if you don't socialize a legal system, law enforcement, and national defense, then you don't have a country.
Anarchism exists within socialism too-- the anti Francoist anarchists in Spain who were crushed by Soviets for doing the wrong kind of socialism, for example. Kropotkin's approach and anarcho syndacalism is anti-statist, and also anti-capitalist.
Anarchism is a complex area that can be capitalist, socialist, individualist, collectivist, primitivist, techno..logist? Basically, like communism, anarchism doesn't have just one flavor.
Fair, to be clear I wouldn’t actually call the US a communist country either. I would say it’s more communist than modern day China, granted that’s a low bar.
What’s IMO worth considering is just how much more communist it is today than in 1776. 22 million Americans work directly for the government (fed, state, local, post office etc), that rises significantly when you include research grants, government contractors, farm subsidies, etc. K-12 education, Qualified immunity (1967), banking laws, etc the government is both getting a stranglehold on the economy and continues extending its reach.
We are closer to nominally capitalist than I think anyone wants to admit and in ways both parties quietly agree with. That isn’t to say we need “smaller government” just understanding of what’s happening.
Basic government functions like the military aren’t communist.
Communism however is when the government does everything. Thus there’s a threshold where more government control is more Communist.
40% of US corn is turned into ethanol not because the free market thinks it’s a good idea but because the government does. That’s Communism in action inside the US, it’s inefficient central planning that fits right into the kind of stupid economic decisions you’d see in the USSR. https://afdc.energy.gov/data/widgets/10339
China claims to be building a successful communist state. The argument goes that you need to have wealth first before you can redistribute it, and China is currently in the wealth-building phase of achieving communism.
> I would love to hear an example of a successful communist state.
Basically, all of them
They were so successful that the west (meaning mainly the U.S. and the Brits) have invested gigantic amounts of resources in fighting them.
Imagine what they could have done for their citizens instead...
And yet, communist ideas are still alive and kicking, while capitalism is hated everywhere, not only by the people living in anti-capitalistic countries, but also by those living in capitalist countries and by several über rich capitalists, nowadays.
Modern capitalism isn't market economy, it's not fair in any way, it doesn't promote growth nor it does empower the masses and all the successes attributed to capitalism, for example The Marshall Plan, were an implementation of socialists ideas under a different name.
Capitalism doesn't even improve living standards anymore, now that it distantiated itself from the socialist idea of the welfare state and promoted an unprecedented concentration of wealth and resources in the hands of the very few, who don't care about the society at large and have no problem in enslaving the people working for them.
The real problem that you can't see, because your brain has been programmed to not see it, is that the U.S.A. empire is the worst in the history of mankind and it showed all its cracks and flaws in less than a century.
Imagine how failing so hard and still claiming victory sounds to 90% of the world's population not brainwashed by the U.S. propaganda...
it's so funny when the stupid americans (from the U.S.A, because America is the whole continent and it's full of very intelligent people) can't stand that communism won over capitalism a century ago.
Communism won, you heard it right, because it still means to the *whole World* freedom and empowerment of the working classes, except for stupid americans - there are intelligent americans, mind you.
maybe a link with images and a voice over will be easier to understand for people like you
This is the end goal of one form of communism, but certainly not the end goal of communism. Many communists want a strong state and see a single party as desirable.
huh, that's an interesting perspective. I've never thought of it that way. This framing could explain some of the bullshit I went through with a politicking manager and a less experienced leader.
Personally, I tend to assume accountability for things I lead, but as a manager, of course, I am also responsible and accountable for my team; including both things I signed off on and things I didn't (because I entrusted that independence to them.) It's an interesting line to walk.
Another reason is that you're making a choice for them.
We think we like more choices, but it's generally proven that having less makes it easier to decide.
One path is: "fuck sake, I need to review all of this and make an informed decision". The other is: "If I have time I'll check it otherwise who cares".
There's another benefit in the change of tone: you're preserving their authority, while at the same time making things easier.
this was the response the last time this came up here.
you can do all kinds of nonstandard stuff if you control the server, the client, and any steps in between. the point of standards is for when you don't control it all.
put your server behind a managed load balancer or a caching proxy, and your get requests with bodies aren't going to do so well anymore.
sprinting towards me to help me, or sprinting towards me to hurt me?
i feel like i'm missing a whole lot of context to this article. is it part of a series, or just written with an assumption that i'm going to know what they're talking about
that is theoretically true. but i switched to the v3-compatible ublock origin lite a year ago and i've noticed essentially no difference in the performance. all the ads are blocked, just like they were with the v2-compatible adblocker.
they're spending $11B on compute because they need the compute and that's the market rate for it. it's the same price Anthropic is paying to spacex for compute.
but if they boost the spacex stock for the right amount of time, they can get that compute for free instead of for $11B. Google's own announcement of the deal frames it as a short-term agreement while they scale up their own datacenter capacity.
yeah, i think a lot of people on hacker news basically agree with that old meme that says "The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise."
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