FooBarWidget

And what do you think happens after the govt said that? Going to companies and force them to open models? That's only how westerners' misconception of China works. If you study Chinese EV industrial policy history you'll know they're not based on coercion of private parties but on incentives (and that, ironically, private EV companies succeeded despite incentives, not because).

The real policy mechanisms around open AI models are also incentives. Various cities have programs to pay companies for releasing open models. They subsidize compute through vouchers. They reward universities and students for open source collaboration.

This isn't some black box. The policies are written down, anybody can read their AI+ policy papers.

Alibaba went back to releasing open models way before the Xi speech from a few weeks ago. The cause is pressure from researchers, who believe in openness, as well as the competition who keeps releasing open models. This is Chinese "involution" at work. And the subsidies also help, of course.

Rather, thank you competition in China. This is Chinese "overcapacity" (of talent pool) at work.

How good is Lazarus nowadays? Haven't taken a look for 20 years so this is a genuine question.

Very weird for this to be downvoted. It's a legitimate concern. It's also a legitimate question: where do you get your trust from? Do you have guardrails? Or is it really just blind trust?

How do you have any kind of trust in these tools? They always feel like one prompt injection away, or one over eager agent away ("I'll lookup a forgotten credential in an email to ssh into a server to hack a system in order to fulfill your request"), from disaster. I don't trust any AI session unless I carefully select the exact files they have access to. No way do I dare sharing my entire mailbox.

Just look at this: https://blog.habets.se/2026/05/Everything-in-C-is-undefined-...

This is undefined behavior!

const int* magic_intp = (const int*)bytes;

Heck even something trivial like this is UB:

bool bar(char ch) { return isxdigit(ch); }

The only safe thing to do is memcpy, but that's super useless. As soon as you try to interpret or manipulate the byte-level data in any way, there are UB traps everywhere you go.

> Not every high-level language gives you byte-level access to the representation of memory objects.

Any code that ventures anywhere near that territory is 99% Undefined Behavior. It's almost impossible to write proper C/C++ code that isn't UB while touching byte-level representations.

Taking caffeine is fighting against natural circadian rhythm, avoiding caffeine isn't.

Malicious servers can send malicious terminal escape codes. For example https://www.sentinelone.com/vulnerability-database/cve-2026-...

Models don't have an inherent identity. It should be obvious by now that every models trains on public AI chat session transcripts. I've seen Claude say it's Qwen.

That really depends on who you ask. If it's that bad then why did all of those countries sign up for the RCEP?

It's called Tang and Ming dynasty. We already know.

Rootless containers have privilege escalation risks of their own. The problem is the unprivileged_userns_clone sysctl, which rootless containers rely on, has historically been a big source of local privilege escalations. The most recent attack I'm aware of is CIFSwitch.

The money and resources aren't going to Huawei exclusively, but to a whole range of companies. This selection changes over time as new companies show promise, or previously selected companies prove themselves to be incompetent.

For example there are like 6 different technical tracks of EUV development. They're not committing to one technical direction, it's exploring all of them.

They can already make chips economically. Yields are worse than TSCM but good enough since they no longer need to pay the "Qualcomm tax". Huawei's phones are profitable. The issue is rather that Chinese capacity comes from a low quantity, and scaling capacity while simultaneously indigineousizing parts takes time — years. Foreign capacity was too good and too cheap so they never succeeded in scaling capacity, because the demand for Chinese fabs wasn't there. Now the demand for domestic capacity is there and they're scaling like crazy, like 100-200% growth per year. But demand still far outpaces capacity. Fabs are hard to build. You need many more years of 200% growth to even approach the demand.

And yes, I made use of emdash. It's a legit grammar tool. Sue me.

The Dutch have a saying: it's better to have stolen something well than to have invented something bad.

I'm kinda confused given that they're from China. The Chinese Internet is very different from the western Internet. The web is way smaller, and a lot of useful content is behind app-based walled ecosystems such as Wechat, Douyin and Xiaohongshu. This makes web automation much less useful. And I don't see them marketing something like Wechat automation?

I'd like to see a serious HN discussion thread about WAIC first.

Lots of fake news out there, but you don't need to speculate any longer. Key takeaways from President Xi's speech in his first ever appearance at the World AI Conference in Shanghai:

- Started the speech by referring to his signature maxim, "great changes unseen in a century are unfolding across the world"

- Said that the world has "entered an unprecedented period of active innovation on AI technology", which means "great opportunities as well as challenges for governance”

- reaffirmed commitment to open source to promote AI "openness and win-win"

- warns against "over stretching" the concept of national security as applied to AI where one country's national security is prioritised over others

- China opposes emergence of “new historical injustices” in AI (one of the most strongly worded parts of the speech)

- China in next 5 years will provide 5000 opportunities to developing countries in "AI training and seminar programmes" and "cooperation centres" - names ASEAN, League of Arab States, African Union, CELAC, SCO and BRICS

Live blog: https://www.scmp.com/tech/policy/article/3360858/chinas-xi-j...

Complete translation: https://x.com/i/status/2077984062933762450

You don't even need that, all models are susceptible to prompt injection. You already need to take extreme security precautions and assume all models can essentially behave like attacker-controlled rootkits.

There is no such thing as an unbiased opinion, opinions always contain some sort of value judgement. Besides, training data contains biases.

What is plausible is that they haven't made any attempts to explicitly steer certain opinions into a certain direction, and just let the model take over the bias of the training data, whatever that may be. Filtering in the front end is the easy, lazy way out to be legally compliant.

Furthermore we should thank the amount of fossil fuel and CO2 reduction that HSR has given, or the planet will be really in trouble.

What from I understand the issue is mainly service frequency rather than fuel efficiency.

Also, the domestic commercial jet market is still sizable, so excluding the domestic market from analyses is kinda weird.

Finally, lots of countries are spooked by arbitrary US sanctions and want to diversify.

Doesn't matter. Getting entangled up in a court case that lasts years is hassle enough by itself that it's effective as an attack.

Their terms of service already effectively attacks people for criticizing Anthropic. It says that if you use Claude to criticize Anthropic, then you've pre-agreed to pay for their lawyers going after you, and pre-agreed to lose the court case.

I can't reply to your reply so let me do that here.

In Netherlands, the government wants to reduce emission, so it incentivizes people to isolate their homes better, and to use heat pumps instead of gas heating. On the other hand, if you actually try to install a heat pump, you'll run into all sorts of regulation issues: the unit can't be too big, there are only a few specific places where you're allowed to place it, a ton of people can object to it, permitting takes years if at all. Oh and if you isolate your house, then voila, during the current heat wave it's a constant 35 C in your home. So you try to install AC and you run into permitting/regulation issues. So you then use a super inefficient portable AC that just barely lowers the temperature by 3 C and uses 4x more energy, and that's fine. facepalm

And the government and banks also want to combat money whitewashing, so they incentivize people to use digital payments and discourage cash. Police could look at you suspiciously merely for having too much cash on hand. On the other hand, NATO and also a bunch of government agencies are warning about war and encouraging people to have lots of cash at home for emergencies.

"They" do not "clearly" want one or the other. Different government branches can have different, conflicting priorities.

The Netherlands is tiny. China has 1.4 billion people, and its state apparatus is orders of magnitude bigger. Forget about coordinating the population, even coordinating the tens of thousands of local government bodies has always been a huge problem. All the previous dynasties have said that governing such a large country is a nightmare.

Xi is not personally in charge of the censorship bureau. The top government sets broad direction and KPIs, while local governments and government agencies are given a lot of leeway for implementation as they see fit. And frankly you cannot run a large organization any other way — there is no large company in the world where the CEO micromanages everything without burning out. The KPI is "social stability", and as long as this is kept and there are no grave problems like corruption, it's not the top government's job to dictate how the censorship bureau do their work. Of course, you may be of the opinion that something like "freedom of speech" is more important than "social stability", but the point is that they value "social stability" more, and that they're motivated by that, and by not some idea of "suppressing freedom". This ties directly into my point of properly understanding them.

Furthermore, many people tend to be risk averse, and would rather instinctively deny something than to take chances. There was a famous scene in the Jiang Zhemin days in which Jiang said something frank in some meeting with a foreign politician. Then the cameraman was like "uuh should we record this?" and his boss was immediately like "no, cut it away". Then Jiang said "why shouldn't we record this? of course this should be recorded!" This risk-averse attitude is still pervasive in a lot of places. It's not just DeepSeek that's "paranoid", everybody implementing censorship rules is paranoid similarly. On Xiaohongshu/RedNote they don't want you to talk about societal issues at all, even "positive" things like "I think Taiwan belongs to China" — they recently banned a Taiwanese's account for saying stuff like that, they want you to focus on travel and food or whatever. This attitude likely won't change until the current censorship bureau generation retires, and gets replaced with the next generation that's more confident.

Finally, whatever Poland did pre-1989 has absolutely nothing to do with China. There are no similarities in motives or circumstances. You can't just lazily lump random Soviet-era countries together with China just because you give them both the "communist" label. China's adaptation of and motivation for adoption of communism is wholly different from the Soviet Union.

Chinese censorship rules are not about criticizing vs praising the state. They are about avoiding any kind of social controversy or collective action. They don't care when you talk about these topics in private or small circles, even criticism is fine, they just don't want them to spread far no matter whether it's positive or negative.

The fifth book is on Amazon. https://www.amazon.com/XI-JINPING-GOVERNANCE-CHINA-V/dp/7119... It's already an English translation.

For something shorter, you can see Arnaud Bertrand's recent review. https://arnaudbertrand.substack.com/p/the-book-the-west-refu... The review is behind a paywall, but not expensive.

If you want to read policy documents directly (primary source), try the State Council / Chinese government policy database: https://www.gov.cn/zhengce/ and https://sousuo.www.gov.cn/zcwjk/policyDocumentLibrary

They also provide official translations: https://english.www.gov.cn/policies/

For Central Party documents: https://news.cn/politics/zywj/. It lists recent Central Committee / General Office / joint Party-State documents, e.g. 2026 documents on township duty lists, Party member development rules, carbon evaluation, long-term care insurance, and SOE leadership rules.

The Thucydides Trap mention is different from what you describe. Xi has dismissed the Thucydides Trap multiple times in the past as being hearsay and self-imposed bias (https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/944179.shtml). "We should strictly base our judgment on facts, lest we become victims to hearsay, paranoid or self-imposed bias. There is no such thing as the so-called Thucydides trap in the world. But should major countries time and again make the mistakes of strategic miscalculation, they might create such traps for themselves."

But western politicians keep raising this metaphor. So at some point they're like "okay we'll speak your language". They then used this metaphor to make the point "our rise isn't the threat, your fear of it is. If you resist it you're walking right into the trap Thucydides warned about". So your conclusion is still right, they don't want open hostilities, a stable world is in their interest.

Then western media ran away with this and were like "OMG Xi mentioned the Thucydides Trap", completely ignoring his point.

It's even worse than that. China publishes stacks upon stacks of policy documents in which they explain clearly what they will do and why. This includes why they do poverty alleviation and why they believe big monopolies that own everything are bad. But almost no western observers care to read those documents. Instead, western observers, including HN, speculate endlessly about China's intentions, and "it would be naive to believe they would not do X" or drawing equivalences to Soviet Union or whatever. And the "journalists" sell this notion that Chinese state intentions are "untransparent" and "unknowable" while pretending the policy documents don't exist.

Meanwhile, Xi Jinping has published his 5th book on how governance in China works and what they're after. These are not books written for a western audience: they're compilations of speeches that he already gave to the Chinese party and state apparatus, so the contents are not sanitized for foreign audiences. But there are no English reviews of summaries of this 5th book at all by the usual China experts that distribute what western audience know about China.

This extends to beyond the government. Even though "for the people but only against the government" is an often-heard mantra, nobody seems to listen to what Chinese AI companies themselves say about why they publish open models. DeepSeek and GLM have said multiple times publicly what their motivations are, yet people on HN still speculate like they usually do.

Truly mind-boggling. I get that a lot of people don't like China. But setting aside the question of whether their dislike is justified, it would at least be rational to properly understand China, even if it's to defeat it. And listening to what China says themselves is absolutely essential for proper understanding. But people don't bother to? And they seem mostly happy with sticking to speculations that match preconceived notions, even if that hurts their chances of defeating China.