Hacker News Reader

Comment by ToucanLoucan | Hacker News Reader

American corporations have it both ways all the time, and with a freshly elected pro-business at all costs admin I think they have a good shot. And not only is this pro-business, it’s anti-China. The republicans couldn’t ask for a better set of headlines than a Chinese firm outcompeting an American one unfairly or in some other underhanded way for yet more nationalistic chest-beating that will lead to yet more international humiliation.

Fuck Altman and his scam company, fuck the entire tech industry for getting behind it so they don’t have to admit perpetual growth is fucking impossible, fuck the tech media for breaking its back bending over backwards to tell us fucking chatbots were the future and credulously printing every stupid hype piece, fuck this entire thing. I hope it burns to the foundations of Silicon Valley. Every one of these firms deserves every last lost dollar of market value and far more.

View on HN

You put it well. It should also be noted that the embargos and tariffs will only sabotage the US's own interests in the long term, as if the Chinese were not intelligent enough to make their own in-house technology. Wait until their own GPUs beat NV's; there are already startups at work [1]. The NSA used to put backdoors in US-made hardware, which it was then happy to distribute worldwide; now, somebody has decided that encouraging China to make their own will work well for US interests? I have no idea what this foreign policy is meant to accomplish. Even if you were the most patriot of US patriots, I have no idea why you'd support this policy. Even Huawei is striking back [2].

[1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-gpus-made-by-moore...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-01-28/huawei-ha...

It's basically a slow return to the cold-war era strategy of brinkmanship

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brinkmanship

> I have no idea what this foreign policy is meant to accomplish. Even if you were the most patriot of US patriots, I have no idea why you'd support this policy.

Because the vast majority of Republicans in this country have no fucking idea how e̶c̶o̶n̶o̶m̶i̶c̶s̶ anything works, and no desire to learn. The entire platform now is fuck liberals.

And they still won't learn even after they lose their pensions, their federal funding, jobs, whatever else. They're married to the dumbass now. The best we can hope for is the rest of us riding out their finding out phase of their fuck around journey.

Before this gets flagged, just wanna let you know I agree with everything.

Here is an interview with Liang Wenfeng, CEO of the Deepseek company (it is in Chinese so use google translate to read) - https://www.36kr.com/p/2872793466982535

There is a lot of interesting points here which American CEOs can learn from.

Here is the CNN article from where i got the above link - https://edition.cnn.com/2025/01/28/china/china-deepseek-ai-s...

I'm generally sympathetic but the chatbot dig is just silly. A lot of the absurd promises of AI capabilities have already come to pass, and anyone with a browser and a throwaway email can see for themselves. It's terrifying.

This about sums up my feelings on the topic, thanks for taking the time to put your thoughts into words

> pro-business

Correction: the administration is pro-monopoly.

It's corrupt in the same ways that Trump accused of other administrations – it's just funneling cash and opportunities to a few established companies who are in good graces with the government. To be pro-business would be to welcome competition and encourage new businesses (a.k.a start-ups) by establishing proper incentives and removing roadblocks.

Agreed with your rant, but this time they won't get it both ways. The cats not getting back in the bag, the papers are out there, the knowledge is out there. Let's say the US bans DeepSeek from operating in the country. Firstly, just look at immensely succesful crypto casinos like Stake, CSGO gambling websites etc for examples of how trivial this is to get around, but let's say enforcement here is stronger. How are you going to stop people running their models locally? How are you even going to tell whether a model originates from e.g. DeepSeek or Llama or whatnot? Provenance, lineage? Are you going to ban the running of LLMs by anyone not called OpenAI altogether?

They won't get it both ways not for lack of trying or will but lack of feasibility in this specific case. It's too easily accessible. The single way to do it would be to set up a level of surveillance and control that ironically only China has in place. And even if the current government openly becomes a dictatorship, it would take an incredible amount of time and dedication to get something similar in place.

Maintaining a monopoly artificially isn’t pro-business; it might be pro-one-business, but it’s clearly anti-business.

(It’s possible that the US is rapidly transformed into the sort of failed state where only Dear Leader’s pals can really operate businesses, I suppose, but I think it’s actually a bit unlikely; the courts may be okay with human rights violations, but I suspect they may draw the line at destroying capitalism.

This is a common misunderstanding!

Capitalism: ie. the idea that you can spend money to make money, (ie. shareholders) is extremely compatible with monopolies. If you wanted to make an investment and get maximum returns, a monopoly would do it best.

The free market is what's being destroyed.

In practice, this sort of hyper-corrupt crony capitalism is _not great_ for the markets, at least not in the medium to long term (it might provide a temporary sugar rush, but it's going to destroy long-term growth and company formation). Most notably see Russia, of course, but you see it to varying extents in most extremely corrupt countries. Few of them exactly have booming economies.

If you filter out oil states, there are virtually no strong economies in countries without at least _decent_ court and regulatory systems.

My point was that it's capitalists that want this, not that its a good choice for them long term.

Hear! Hear!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com