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Comment by behnamoh | Hacker News Reader

I might sound shallow or incognizant for saying this, but any time I see traces of Chinese in a product, my radars alert "Stay away from this." Maybe it's because of the constant worry about them spying on western users. And maybe it's because I am not exposed to high quality software from that part of the world yet.

I see this a lot in LLMs too. So many Chinese companies trying to game the benchmarks to show higher in the leaderboards without the fear of any backlash. Is it really a skewed perception of how software works in China, or is it really the case that their culture encourages finding shortcuts to success at all costs?

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It's not shallow, it's well documented across the internet and in their behavior with everything they do.

China is the land of shortcuts and facades. It's part of their culture. See: gutter oil, washing veggies in the toilet, concrete infrastructure with no reinforcement, etc. Even when they respond to natural disasters: it's not to help citizens but pose for pictures to show them helping then bouncing.

Chinese people don't even trust other Chinese to sell them things: so companies often bring in foreigners to sell Chinese products to china.

China is VERY CLEAR in who they are, and they show no attempts to be otherwise.

I'm sure some people think your country is full of lazy, smelly thieves, too.

I'm from there, and they are!

You really need to think about your biases. I've worked with teams (devs & non-devs) from China for years and I did not find them different from "western" ones. Some people will do stellar work, some will try to find short-circuits and lie to your face.

The culture is absolutely different, so it may take time to recognize behavorial patterns in one way or the other - as a European working in the US, it also took me some time to figure out the "US way" of working.

Chinese coworkers with code review and visibility are more trustworthy than Chinese open-source developers.

I must confess that is my first instinct as well.-

I guess - where posssible - careful code review is one's friend ...

(But, point taken).-

I think you are conflating "american" users with western users. Most users around the world are aware of Americans intentions, not chinese. Only Americans think Chinese products are a problem and you guys are investing billions on making this a world sentiment. Without much success.

tldr: Americans are afraid of Chinese people possibly spying on them, the world hates Americans real world-wide espionage system.

I'm not from the US and I'm wary of both. The US is geopolitically aligned much closer to the EU, which is why I'm much more cautious about potential involvement of the Chinese government compared to the US.

It's because you are brainwashed and you cannot think for yourself.

If you're worry is the Chinese spying on you, you can look at the code and double check. Furthermore the US govt spies on us on a massive scale as Snowden showed us.

Second when it comes to software quality they started much later than us but our culture has as much finding shortcuts to success as theirs.

Case in point: open AI killing off the team to make AI stuff to make a quick profit. Stealing copyrighted work on a massive scale to train llms.

So get off your high horse. Stop trying to hide your dumbness (lack of critical thinking) behind an intellectual sounding comment.

I see you've been on HN more than long enough to know all of what was wrong with your response to GP's comment.

> you can look at the code and double check

Can you honestly say that when a few months ago someone was trying to put a security hole in OpenSSH by making changes that looked harmless to an archiving tool (the xz backdoor)?

Your response is such textbook propaganda, instantly riffing into whataboutism with US surveillance, that I actually had to wonder if you had a real profile.

I then did see that you have actual posts, but imagine if I'd have to investigate the profile of absolutely every commenter I read. Isn't that practically impossible to do? And isn't auditing the source code of absolutely every project you use a few times harder than that?

On the topic of AI web browsers, a feature to audit the people whose comments I read would be an interesting feature. Also made me think of: https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/94638i/what_i...

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