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This looks brilliant, thank you. I love DuckDB and use it for lot of local data processing jobs. We have a data stream, not to the size where we need to push to BigQuery or elsewhere. I was thinking of trying something like sql-flow but I am glad now it makes the job very easy.

I started using Rust out of a need , it's tough and I thought I can learn any language easily. But I think from my short experience , Rust teaches how to be a good and thoughtful programmer. My reason to continue learning Rust.

I never imagined that a service that ships DVD via mail would one day buy Warner Brothers. It is amazing how innovation and focus can change the game. Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.

More like how did these companies drop the ball so bad. Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.

Unfortunately for them around the time of Netflix's ascent they were embroiled with all kinds of financial issues but still the mind boggles


> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label. They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.

I feel like some of those very diversified company tend to be the one who struggle to evolve and adapt because some part of their business are worried about being cannibalized by the new business opportunity (like how streaming “killed” physical media). I.e, if you are the director of the “DVD player division” you have an active interest in killing any potential streaming division. Reality is of course more complex than this, but this is the kind of story we sometimes hear off when "too big to fail" companies end up missing a major shift.


Innovator's dilemma. Leadership won't invest in the up-and-coming product because they've got a $1 billion revenue target they need to hit this year.

Funnily, Netflix is a common case study on how to transition past the dilemma.

I don't remember where I heard the original story, but this snippet from this article sums up why and how they deliberately cut the DVD team out of the company culture.

> “In periods of radical change in any industry, the legacy players generally have a challenge, which is they’re trying to protect their legacy businesses. We entered into a business in transition when we started mailing DVDs 25 years ago. We knew that physical media was not going to be the future. When I met Reed Hastings in 1999, he described the world we live in right now, which is almost all entertainment is going to come into the home on the internet. And he told me that at a time when literally no entertainment was coming into the home on the internet. And it really helped us navigate this transition from physical to digital, because we just didn’t spend any time trying to protect our DVD business. As it started to wane, we started to invest more and more in streaming. And we did that because we knew that that’s where the puck was going. At one point, our DVD business was driving all the profit of the business and a lot of the revenue, and we made a conscious decision to stop inviting the DVD employees to the company meeting. We were that rigid about where this thing was heading.”

https://colemaninsights.com/coleman-insights-blog/netflixs-s...


Silo-ing is the biggest brake on human progress

> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers. They owned a movie studio and record label.

They still do all those things? And they're still successful in most of them? They haven't "failed" or "dropped the ball" based on any metric I can think of. I'm not sure what you're referring to here to be honest.


Yeah lol, Sony still doing good in Music,Film etc

Sony just focus at their home market more


They purposefully stayed out of the money losing streaming wars and sell their content to the highest bidder

They have a streaming platform though! Sony Pictures Core. Seems half the comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct. Would take like 30 seconds to just fact-check what you're about to write.

It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.

That’s a completely different market. They are not trying to compete with Netflix and in fact have a deal with them that Netflix has first right of refusal to stream any Sony film

https://www.sonypictures.com/corp/press_releases/2021/0408

Sony created KPop Demon Hunters and sold the streaming rights to Netflix .

If you look at any of their popular back catalog TV content, it is all being streamed on other services.


> It looks like it’s mostly focused on renting and buying movies on demand. We are talking about pay a fee and streaming all you want.

Then you might have to look a bit closer :) There are plans out there that give you a fixed monthly fee and stream all you want, so that effectively makes it a streaming service even by your definition.

Not saying they are trying to compete with Netflix, but they do have a streaming service.


You can’t watch the full catalog of movies they have for rent or purchase for one price.

You know you’re being pedantic.


Same is true for Amazon, you can't watch 100% of the content unless you "Buy"/Rent, so is Amazon Prime Video not a streaming service?

You know you're trying to be misleading, but not everyone falls for those sort of things.


Prime video is more than just prime content, they are more of a marketplace where you can watch competitors content as well. Like their web marketplace for tv and movies. That's why you can sign up for things like HBO and even Apple TV directly via Prime.

No you’re being pedantic. Compare Amazon Prime Video subscription content to Sony’s subscription content.

Is Amazon creating new content and giving other streaming services first dibs on it? Are they putting their back catalog content on other streaming services en masse?

Is Sony spending billions of dollars to produce content to go on their own streaming service like Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Peacock, HBO Max (for now)?

Heck is HBO releasing theatrical movies and giving first run streaming rights to other streaming services?

You’re not making serious arguments if you don’t see the difference between every other streaming service and what Sony is doing or seeing what companies with both streaming services and movie studios like Warner Bros, Disney, and Paramount are doing.


You're making this way more complicated than it is, no need to compare against others to understand if what Sony is doing is a streaming service or not.

So I guess back to basics:

> A streaming media service, also known as streaming service, is an online provider that allows users to watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet

Fairly simple, I think at least. So with that, is what Sony is doing a streaming service, regardless of what HBO/Amazon/their mother is doing? Yes, in my humble opinion, what Sony is offering lets users "watch or listen to content, such as films, TV series, music, or podcasts, over the Internet", so it is a streaming service.

I disagree it's pedantic, it's just understanding what terms mean, in this particular case, what "streaming service" means.


These are two businesses, both under the Sony name: content production and content distribution. Very likely they are two different divisions with different P&Ls.

Every “streaming service” is a distributor. Some of them are also content producers.

Content production is also a bizarre mini world of VC-type funding and shell/temporary production corporations. Some companies lean heavily into that, some do a more traditional in-house studio model, some do both.


They do but that is a digital store & rental service you cited, basically like iTunes. The streaming service they own is the entirely anime-focused Crunchyroll and it’s not managed specifically as an outlet for Sony Pictures because that’s not its core audience.

Sony Pictures for its part does quite well for itself not being tied to a specific vertically-owned streaming service, and given the number of those already out there which will eventually consolidate, they’re probably all the better for it.


> comments in this submission is just straight up guessing and assuming whatever guesses they make are correct.

True of every comment thread on HN.

Absorbing the thoughts of other humans on any topic you have deep knowledge of makes you see that all coverage of EVERY topic is subtly incorrect / poor / has an agenda.

It's sort of liberating when you realize.


I'm sure everybody with a Bravia TV is super excited. If you have a streaming service no one knows or cares about do you even have a streaming service?

Or anyone who plays online with a PS4 or PS5, which correct me if I'm wrong, probably is more people than the people with Bravia TVs.

Yeah and how many of those are subscribing to Sony’s streaming service where they don’t even put their releases on during the initial streaming release window and don’t have any of their popular backlog content?

There isn’t an iOS app or a Roku app. Even AppleTV+ is on Roku. This isn’t a serious streaming service.


My point is that it's included...

Sony bought Crunchyroll + Funimation but I have to admit that I'm sick of normie anime like Bleach and I crave the kind of things that you find on HDIVE like Backstabbed in a Backwater Dungeon: My Trusted Companions Tried to Kill Me, but Thanks to the Gift of an Unlimited Gacha I Got LVL 9999 Friends and Am Out for Revenge on My Former Party Members and the World. [1]

[1] If the Anime News Network finishes reviewing it doesn't make the cut


Right reading that, didn’t Sony produce KPOP demon hunters, which is now the most watched movie of all time?

Sony sold it to Netflix (after the pandemic but before it was finished) for a fixed price which locked in a small profit for Sony but got them NOTHING for it being the most watched movie of all time, and Netflix gets all of the sequels as well, so they can't get anything from theaters for those movies either.

> how did these companies drop the ball so bad

Companies didn't, leadership did. For a big, fat check. And they're happily retired now, sitting in their expensive villas with millions on their balance.

They couldn't care less about your happy childhood memories that the content produced by their predecessors engraved in your mind.


I am not attached to any memories, I am remarking that a company that is currently 170~B market cap allowed a tiny upstart become a 460~B company when they had all the means and distribution to have stop them or outcompete them at many stages of the ascent.

Really, it is probably an inevitable and somewhat healthy feature of life and the business cycle, but it is also baffling to witness.

When I was at Amazon, I came away feeling that the gap between retail and Amazon was too large and the disruption was warranted. But in the case of Sony, it feels they were so much closer to the space that it feels like a much bigger own goal...


I remember Sony.

Sony Rootkit, Sony BetaMax, Sony MiniDisc, Sony ATRAC, Sony Memory Stick [Select / PRO / Duo / PRO Duo / PRO-HG Duo / M2 / XC / PRO-HG Duo HX / WTF], Sony UMD, Sony Elcaset, Sony SDDS, Sony VAIO, Sony Walkman, Sony Discman, [...]

At least they had some lasting success with their Umatic video tape cartridge, and with the CD that they co-developed with Philips. Their Trinitron tubes were unique and generally quite good -- and they lasted as long in the market as any other CRT did, I suppose. And their various iterations of PlayStation console have all been popular despite being Sony products.


> Most notably Sony which produced TVs, Computers, DVD players, Media Centers.

The answer to that one is simple: they were bad at software.

Apple and then Android killed the market for all those hardware devices and physical media.


Maybe but they were still good enough to in house a whole bunch of dev - console OS, games, mobile OS, various forms of content distribution...

Not good enough.

Apple and Google were much, much better at it.


If everybody is dropping the ball, my first guess is that catching it is actually legitimately difficult.

Sony is still the 2nd largest music distributor and label in the world, behind Universal Music and ahead of Warner music.

My 65" Bravia is one of the best TV's in its class and runs Google TV (IMO a major leg up over the junky Tizen/WebOS offerings from competitors).

They make some of the best noise cancelling headphones money can buy. They have the PS5 and own a bunch of game studios to provide exclusive content for it.

They're doing just fine!


Sony still makes TV they get to sell to the highest bidder! They get to sell to Apple TV or Netflix.

Not recurring revenue but they have their thing set up


>They also have in house expertise with cloud content distribution via PlayStation.

Maybe it's better now, but looking at the PS3-era PSN, that expertise had negative value.


It’s exactly the reason why. They focused on proprietary formats/devices to lock consumers in

Sony has crunchyroll

They didn't fumble around as much, also Sony still has leverage a lot on Japan Industry


Hindsight is 20/20 and the Innovator's Dilemma is very real.

And no OS. That certainly helped Apple.

> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.

I think what history shows us is that the modern monopolies managed to destroy antitrust to the point where nobody will ever do to them what they did to others.


People said that a generation ago as well, and the one before that. Yeah monopolies make it hard, but every one of them eventually crumbles to the next wave of innovation.

So innovative, the toilets have cameras in them now! I love the future.

I disagree. I strongly recommend this talk by Cory Doctorow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4EmstuO0Em8

“””innovation”””

Yup. Can't redirect the ocean. So-to-speak.

Well, AOL did ship 1 billion CDs over its heyday and they acquired Warner Brothers in 2000…

If I had a nickel for every time a company that sends out optical disks bought Warner Brothers, I'd have $0.10, which is not a lot, but strange that it happened twice.

> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.

Is that a financialised version of piggybacking?


> Someday a new startup will piggy bank on Netflix and probably buy it later.

Netflix got it's start shipping CDs, which was only possible due to the first-sale doctrine. The rights landscape hasn't adjusted for the new technologies. How could an new player disrupt a streaming world when everything is so locked down?


Considering WB was once the champion of that format too. Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format.

> Guess that is end of DVD now. Netflix has no interest in that format

and neither do consumers. video over the internet is the future that Netflix saw 20 years ago, when others didn't, except YouTube.


That's absolutely not the case. Demand for physical media not only continues to exist but it's growing as streaming services prove undependable at keeping shows available, and are willing to censor/edit shows at a whim.

For most things in the world there’s some demand, but that doesn’t mean it is a big business.

I buy vinyl but mostly listen to music on Tidal. People buy cassettes and CDs, but that’s, for all intents and purposes, a dead business.

The physical medium is not the content.


They have to as a stop gap before going on generating full feature film on demand. Those streaming service are all struggling to have an attractive enough catalog for an extended period of time for a lot of folks with their shitty pricing policies.

It's less "innovation and focus" and more "wealth consolidation and monopolization".

I never realize Ghostty is a project by Mitchell Hashimoto. I am very happy with tmux and never seriously looked at it , now I really curious what is it about and how it is different than say tmux ?

It's not an alternative to tmux, it's an alternative to the macOS Terminal.app or iTerm2.

You can run tmux inside Ghostty.


To be fair, you can also run tmux inside tmux (inside Zellij, inside another tmux, inside screen, etc). :)

For those who will read this literally, it works fine on linux as well.

It's a terminal, not a multiplexer. Different type of product.

tmux is another terminal layer inside of any terminal.

Newer terminal apps like WezTerm have a multiplexer built-in.


One of the best explanations I have ever read about American Healthcare. Even after such good infographic it is still hard to comprehend such complexity.

> The $441B in prescription drugs - the story of incentivizing American innovation over price controls.

This itself speaks for how messedup the entire design is.


It actually doesn’t incentivize innovation. That’s the biggest scam in healthcare. If it actually led to innovations and notable uptick in quality, other countries would have done the same. The whole argument is so flawed it makes my brain hurt.

How is the argument flawed? On average the USA has more innovation than any other major country in pharmaceuticals in terms of new drugs per capita per year.

I think the author seems to be using sarcasm when he said innovation.

As much I agree with your sentiment, but I doubt the intention is singular.

It's like AMD open-sourcing FSR or Meta open-sourcing Llama. It's good for us, but it's nothing more than a situational and temporary alignment of self-interest with the public good. When the tables turn (they become the best instead of 4th best, or AMD develops the best upscaler, etc), the decision that aligns with self-interest will change, and people will start complaining that they've lost their moral compass.

>situational and temporary alignment of self-interest with the public good

That's how it supposed to work.


It's not. This isn't about competition in a company sense but sanctions and wider macro issues.

It's like it in the sense that it's done because it aligns with self-interest. Even if the nature of that self-interest differs.

The bar is incredibly low considering what OpenAI has done as a "not for profit"

You need get a bunch of accountants to agree on what's profit first..

Agree against their best interest, mind you!

I don't care if this kills Google and OpenAI.

I hope it does, though I'm doubtful because distribution is important. You can't beat "ChatGPT" as a brand in laypeople's minds (unless perhaps you give them a massive "Temu: Shop Like A Billionaire" commercial campaign).

Closed source AI is almost by design morphing into an industrial, infrastructure-heavy rocket science that commoners can't keep up with. The companies pushing it are building an industry we can't participate or share in. They're cordoning off areas of tech and staking ground for themselves. It's placing a steep fence around tech.

I hope every such closed source AI effort is met with equivalent open source and that the investments made into closed AI go to zero.

The most likely outcome is that Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic win and every other "lab"-shaped company dies an expensive death. RunwayML spent hundreds of millions and they're barely noticeable now.

These open source models hasten the deaths of the second tier also-ran companies. As much as I hope for dents in the big three, I'm doubtful.


I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.

Even when the technical people understood that, it would be too much of a political quagmire within their company when it became known to the higher ups. It just isn’t worth the political capital.

They would feel the same way about using xAI or maybe even Facebook models.



TIL: That Chinese models are considered better at multiple languages than non Chinese models.

It's a customer service bot? And Airbnb is a vacation home booking site. It's pretty inconsequential

Airbnb has ~$12 bn annual revenue, and is a counterexample to the idea that no companies can be "convinced to use DeepSeek".

The fact that it's customer service means it's dealing with text entered by customers, which has privacy and other consequences.

So no, it's not "pretty inconsequential". Many more companies fit a profile like that than whatever arbitrary criteria you might have in mind for "consequential".


This is the real cause. At the enterprise level, trust outweighs cost. My company hires agencies and consultants who provide the same advice as our internal team; this is not to imply that our internal team is incorrect; rather, there is credibility that if something goes wrong, the decision consequences can be shifted, and there is a reason why companies continue to hire the same four consulting firms. It's trust, whether it's real or perceived.

I have seen it much more nuanced than that.

2020 - I was a mid level (L5) cloud consultant at AWS with only two years of total AWS experience and that was only at a small startup before then. Yet every customer took my (what in hindsight might not have been the best) advice all of the time without questioning it as long as it met their business goals. Just because I had @amazon.com as my email address.

Late 2023 - I was the subject matter expert in a niche of a niche in AWS that the customer focused on and it was still almost impossible to get someone to listen to a consultant from a shitty third rate consulting company.

2025 - I left the shitty consulting company last year after only a year and now work for one with a much better reputation and I have a better title “staff consultant”. I also play the game and be sure to mention that I’m former “AWS ProServe” when I’m doing introductions. Now people listen to me again.


Children do the same thing intuitively: parents continually complain that their children don't listen to them. But as soon as someone else tells them to "cover their nose", "chew with their mouth closed", "don't run with scissors", whatever, they listen and integrate that guidance into their behavior. What's harder to observe is all the external guidance they get that they don't integrate until their parents tell them. It's internal vs external validation.

Or in many cases they go over to their grandparents house and they let them run wild and all of the sudden your parents have “McDonald’s money” for their grandkids when they never had it for you.

So much worse for American companies. This only means that they will be uncompetitive with similar companies that use models with realistic costs.

I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

Any car company. Uber.

All tech companies offering free services.


Is a “cheaper” service going to come along and upend Google or Facebook?

I’m not saying this to insult the technical capabilities of Uber. But it doesn’t have the economics that most tech companies have - high fixed costs and very low marginal costs. Uber has high marginal costs saving a little on inference isn’t going to make a difference.


What American car company competes overseas on price?

All the American cars (Ford, Chevrolet, GM...) are much cheaper in Europe than eg. German cars from their trifecta (and other Europe-made high end vehicles from eg Sweden, Italy or UK), and on par with mid-priced vehicles from the likes of Hyundai, Kia, Mazda...

Obviously, some US brands do not compete on price, but other than maybe Jeep and Tesla, those have a small market penetration.


> I can’t think of a single major US company that is big internationally that is competing on price.

All the clouds compete on price. Do you really think it is that differentiated? Google, Amazon and Microsoft all offer special deals to sign big companies up and globally too.


I worked inside AWS consulting department for 3 years (AWS ProServe) and now I work as a staff consultant for a 3rd AWS partner. I have been on enough sales calls, seen enough go to market training materials and flown out to customers sites to know how these things work. AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.

Microsoft doesn’t compete on price. Their major competitive advantage is Big Enterprise is already big into Microsoft and it’s much easier to get them to come onto Azure. They compete on price only when it comes to making Windows workloads Bd SQL Server cheaper than running on other providers.

AWS is the default choice for legacy reasons and it definitely has services an offerings that Google doesn’t have. I have never once been on a sales call where the sales person emphasizes that AWS is cheaper.

As far as GCP, they are so bad at evterprise sales, we never really looked at them as serious competition.

Sure AWS will throw credits in for migrations and professional services both internally and for third party partners. But no CFO is going to look at just the short term credits.


> AWS has never tried to compete as the “low cost leader”. Marketing 101 says you never want to compete on price if you can avoid it.

Despite all that and whatever you say, the fact is you do compete. It doesn't have to be a race to the bottom.

So Cloudfront free tier and the latest discount bundles etc aren't to compete? People have also negotiated private pricing way below list price and a lot cheaper than competitors.

Similarly was the Dynamodb price cuts not due to competition?

I can give way more examples...


I am well aware that Netflix doesn’t pay the same price for AWS services that “Joe Bob’s Fish Tackle and WordPress shop”. All big companies give discounts to large companies as part of negotiations which is different from “we are the low cost leader”.

All technology gets cheaper over time. There is a difference between lowering price in response to competitors and finding the profit maximizing price based on supply and demand.

AWS was lowering prices to increase demand before GCP and Azure were a thing.

Jassy said right before he became CEO of Amazon and he was still over AWS that only 5% of IT spend was on any cloud provider. They are capturing non consumption and marketing value of AWS vs that.

While I don’t have any insider experience about Azure, looking on the outside, I would think that Azure’s go to market is also not competing against AWS on price, but trying to get on prem customers on Azure.


If the Chinese model becomes better than competitors, these worries will suddenly disappear. Also, there are plenty startups and enterprises that are running fine-tuned versions of different OS models.

Yeah that’s not how Big Enterprise works…

And most startups are just doing prompt engineering that will never go anywhere. The big companies will just throw a couple of developers at the feature and add it to their existing business.


Big enterprise with mostly private companies as their clients? Lol, yeah, that’s how they work from my personal experience. The reality is, if it’s not a tech-first enterprise and already outsource part of tech to a shop outside of NA (which is almost majority at this point), they will do absolutely everything to cut the costs.

I spent three years working in consulting mostly in public sector and education and the last two working with startups to mid size commercial interest and a couple of financial institutions.

Before that I spent 6 years working between 3 companies in health care in a tech lead role. I’m 100% sure that any of those companies would I have immediately questioned my judgment for suggesting DeepSeek if had been a thing.

Absolutely none of them would ever have touched DeepSeek.


I've worked with financial services, and insurance providers that would have done the opposite for cost saving measures. So, I'm not sure what to say here.

Financial Services are far more risk averse first than they are cost cutting, they literally have risk departments.

If you'd spent anytime working at one for swe you won't have access to popular open source frameworks, let alone Chinese LLMs. The LLM development is mostly occurring through collaborations with the regional LLM businesses or internal labs.


Regulators would have the head of any financial institution that used a Chinese model.

Why would you be presenting what AI tech you are using? You would tell them AI will come from Amazon using a variety of models.

In various sectors, you need to be able to explain why you/your-system did what it did. Exchange Act Rule 15c3-5 is probably the most relevant in financial circles:

https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-17/chapter-II/part-240/su...

Note: I am neither a lawyer nor in financial circles, but I do have an interest in the effects of market design and regulation as we get into a more deeply automated space.


To add on, while it doesn’t work with GenAI models as far as I know. AWS has a service around explainability around ML decisions

https://docs.aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/latest/dg/clarify-mode...


You still choose your model. I’m no more going to say “I’m using Bedrock” without being more specific than I would say “I’m using RDS” without specifying the database.

No… Nobody I work for will touch these models. The fear is real that they have been poisoned or have some underlying bomb. Plus y’know, they’re produced by China, so they would never make it past a review board in most mega enterprises IME.

I work at a F50 company and Deepseek is one of the model that has been approved for use. Took them a bit to get it all in place but it's certainly being used in Megacorps.

People say that, but everyone, including enterprises, are constantly buying Chinese tech one way or another because of cost/quality ratio. There’s a tipping point in any excel file where risks don’t make sense, if the cost is 20x for the same quality.

Of course you’ll always have exceptions (government, military and etc.), but for private, winner will take it all.


The xenaphobia is still very much there. Chinese tech is sanitized through Taiwanese middlemen (Foxconn, Asus, Acer etc). If you try to use Chinese tech or funding directly you will have a lot of pushback from VCs, financial institutions and business partners. China is the boogieman

it is many things, but not xenophobia.

What Chinese built infrastructure tech where information can be exfiltrated or cause any real damage are American companies buying? Chinese communication tech is for the most part not allowed in any American technology.

80% of the parts in iPhones are manufactured in China, and they have completely and utterly dominated in Enterprise (Ever heard of someone using a Blackberry in 2025? Me neither.) so there’s one example.

The software is made by Apple. Hardware can’t magically intercept communications and the manufacturing is done mostly in Taiwan. If Apple doesn’t have a process to protect its operating system from supply chain attacks, it would be derelict

Hardware can do any "magic" software can, which should be obvious since software runs on it. It's just not as cost-effective to modify it after shipping, which is why the tech sector is moving to more sw less hw (simplified, ofc, there are other reasons).

For what it's worth, this is complete insanity when practically every mega enterprises' hardware is largely Made in China.

Enterprise hardware isn’t the issue. It’s the software. How much enterprise hardware is running with Chinese software? The US basically bans any hardware with Chinese software that can disrupt infrastructure.

Backdoors in software are much easier to discover than backdoors in hardware.

Any kind of hardware that is somehow connected to the wired or wireless communication interfaces is much more dangerous than any software.

Backdoors embedded in such hardware devices may be impossible to identify before being activated by the reception of some "magic" signals from outside.


Tons of routers, modems, embedded, are running Chinese software

That conversation probably gets easier if and when company when $100+M on AI.

Companies just need to get to the “if” part first. That or they wash their hand by using a reseller that can use whatever it wants under the hood.


As a government contractor, using a Chinese model is a non-starter.

I don't know that it's actually prohibited. There is no Chinese telecommunications equipment allowed, no Huawei or Bytedance, but nothing prohibiting software merely being developed in China, not yet at least.

Although I did just check what regions AWS bedrock support Deepseek and their govcloud regions do not, so that's a good reason not to use it. Still, on prem on a segmented network, following CMMC, probably permissable


There’s nuance and debate about the 110 level 2 controls without bringing Chinese tech in to the picture. I’d love to be a fly on the wall in that meeting lol.

> I don't know that it's actually prohibited.

Chinese models generally aren't but DeepSeek specifically is at this point.


> I can’t think of a single company I’ve worked with as a consultant that I could convince to use DeepSeek because of its ties with China even if I explained that it was hosted on AWS and none of the information would go to China.

Well for non-American companies, you have the choice between Chinese models that don't send data home, and American ones that do, with both countries being more or less equally threatening.

I think if Mistral can just stay close enough to the race it will win many customers by not doing anything.


> Even when the technical people understood that

I'm not sure if technical people who don't understand this deserve the moniker technical in this context.


really a testament to how easily the us govt has spun a china bad narrative even though it is mostly fiction and american exceptionalism

[flagged]


Try not to accuse community members of being spies, sheesh.

American companies chose to manufacturer in China and got all surprised Pikachu when China manufactured copies for themselves.


This is how crazy and nationalistic people are getting. I'm an American citizen, though I am critical of the US government, and have no allegiances to China. What do you think America is doing to every country, even allies (which has been highly publicized)? Why would a country being constantly attacked by American intelligence and propaganda not want to counter that?

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/us-security-agency-spie...

American intelligence has penetrated most information systems and at least as of 10 years ago, was leading all other nations in the level of sophistication and capability. Read Edward Snowden.


Moralizing through whataboutism does not logically follow in disproving the China threat narrative, it is axiomatic that what matters is what they are doing to us, not what we are doing to them from that vantage.

Rather, I'd say it speaks more about how deranged the post-snowden/anti-neocon figures have become, from critiquing creeping authoritarianism to functionality acting at the behest of an even more authoritarian regime. The funny thing is that behavior of deflection, moralizing and whataboutism is exactly the kind of behavior nationalists employ, not addressing arguments head on like the so-called "American nationalists".


The average person has been programmed to be distrustful of open source in general, thinking it is inferior quality or in service of some ulterior motive

That might be the perspective of a US based company. But there is also Europe and basically it's a choice between Trump and China.

Europe has Mistral. It feels that governments that can do things without fax take this as a sovereignity thing and roll their own or have their provider in their jurisdiction.

[flagged]


> For example, a small random percentage of the time, it could add a subtle security vulnerability to any code generation.

Now on the HN frontpage: "Google Antigravity just wiped my hard drive"

Sure going to be hard to distinguish these Chinese models' "intentionally malicious actions"!

And the cherry on top:

- Written from my iPhone 16 Pro Max (Made in China)


Where does the software come from? Your iPhone can’t magically intercept communications and send it to China without the embedded software. If Apple can’t verify the integrity of its operating system before it is installed on iPhones. There are some huge issues.

Even if China did manage to embed software on the iPhone in Taiwan, it would soon hopefully be wiped since you usually end up updating the OS anyway as soon as you activate it.


The hardware can always contain undetectable sub-devices that can magically intercept anything with no possibility for the software to detect this.

You should remember that all iPhones had for several years an undetected hardware backdoor, until a couple of years ago, when independent researchers have found it and reported the Apple bugs as CVEs, so Apple was forced to fix the vulnerabilities.

The hardware backdoor consisted in the fact that writing some magic values to some supposedly unused addresses allowed the bypassing of all memory protections. The backdoor is likely to have consisted in some memory test registers, which are used during manufacturing, but which should be disabled before shipping the phone to customers, which Apple had not done.

This hardware backdoor, coupled with some bugs in a few Apple system libraries, allowed the knowledgeable attackers to send remotely an invisible message to the iPhone, which was able to take complete control over the iPhone, allowing the attacker to read any file and to record from cameras and microphones. A reboot of the iPhone removed the remote control, but then the attacker would immediately send another invisible message, regaining control.

There was no way to detect that the iPhone was remotely controlled. The backdoor was discovered only externally in the firewalls of a company, because the iPhones generated a suspiciously high amount of Internet traffic, without apparent causes.

This has been widely reported at the time and discussed on HN, but some people continue to be not aware about how little you can trust even major companies like Apple to deliver the right hardware.

The identity of the attackers who exploited this Apple hardware backdoor has not been revealed, but it is likely that they had needed the cooperation of Apple insiders, at least for access to secret Apple documentation, if not for intentionally ensuring that the hardware backdoor remained open.

Thus the fact that Apple publishes only incomplete technical documentation has helped only the attackers, allowing them to remain undiscovered for many years, against the interests of the Apple customers. Had the specifications of the test registers been public, someone would have quickly discovered that they had remained unprotected after production.

Therefore, for many years the iPhones of certain valuable targets had magically intercepted all their communications and they have sent them to an unknown country (due to the nature of some of the identified targets and the amount of resources required to carry the attacks, it has been speculated that the country could have been Israel, but no public evidence exists; a US TLA is the main plausible alternative, as some targets were Russians).


The argument was that you couldn’t trust American designed hardware running American designed software because it was built in China. All theories suggest that the security vulnerabilities were caused by Apple and had nothing to do with Chinese manufacturers

on what hypothetical grounds would you be more meaningfully able to sue the american maker of a self-hosted statistical language model that you select your own runtime sampling parameters for after random subtle security vulnerabilities came out the other side when you asked it for very secure code?

put another way, how do you propose to tell this subtle nefarious chinese sabotage you baselessly imply to be commonplace from the very real limitations of this technology in the first place?


This paper may be of interest to you: https://arxiv.org/html/2504.15867v1

the mechanism of action for that attack appears to be reading from poisoned snippets on stackoverflow or a similar site, which to my mind is an excellent example of why it seems like it would be difficult to retroactively pin "insecure code came out of my model" on the evil communist base weights of the model in question

"Baselessly" - I'm sorry but realpolitik is plenty of basis. China is a geopolitical adversary of both the EU and the US. And China will be the first to admit this, btw.

The US has also been behaving like an adversary of the EU as of late. So what's the difference?

The EU isn’t a state and has no military or police. As such the EU’s existence is an anecdotal answer to your question in itself: Reliance on (in particular maritime) trade. And yes, China also benefits from trade, but as opposed to democracies (in which the general populace to a greater extent are keys to power) the state does not require trade to sustain itself in the same way.

This makes EU countries more reliable partners for cooperation than China. The same goes for the US from an European perspective, and even with everything going on over there it is still not remotely close.

All states are fundamentally adversaries because they have conflicting interests. To your point however, adversaries do indeed cooperate all the time.


sorry, is your contention here "spurious accusations don't require evidence when aimed at designated state enemies"? because it feels uncharitably rude to infer that's what you meant to say here, but i struggle to parse this in a different way where you say something more reasonable.

Competitor != adversary. It is US warmongering ideology that tries to equate these concepts.

> It is US warmongering ideology that tries to equate these concepts

Please don't engage in political battle here, including singling out a country for this kind of criticism. No matter how right you are or feel you are, it inevitably leads to geopolitical flamewar, which has happened here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


you clearly haven't been paying attention

remember when the US bugged EU leader's phones, including Merkel from 2002 to 2013?


> you clearly haven't been paying attention

Please don't be snarky or condescending in HN comments. From the guidelines: Be kind. Don't be snarky. Converse curiously; don't cross-examine. Edit out swipes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


That is just objectively incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstanding the basics of statehood. China, the US, and any other local monopoly on force would absolutely take any chance they could get to extend their influence and diminish the others. That is they are acting rationally to at minimum maximise the probability they are able to maintain their current monopolies on force.

Several of your comments in this subthread have broken the guidelines. The guidelines ask us not to use HN for political/ideological battle and to "assume good faith". They ask us to "be kind", "eschew flamebait", and ask that "comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less as a topic gets more divisive."

The topic itself, like any topic, is fine to discuss here, but care must be taken to discuss it in a de-escalatory way. The words you use and the way you use them matter.

Most importantly, it's not OK to write "it is however entirely reasonable to assume that the comment I replied to was made entirely in bad faith". That's a swipe and a personal attack that, as the guidelines ask, should be edited out.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html


Can you, by any chance, delete my account? I have tried to do so before but it is not possible through the GUI. And I see you are associated with HN.

Other than that let's be very clear that there was no personal attack. You left out the part where I explain why I think the comment was made in bad faith. I.e. the part that makes it not a personal attack. And a part which I, upon request, elaborated on in the same comment tree.

As you said: Words matter.


We can disable your account if you email hn@ycombinator.com. That's in the FAQ – https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html.

And yes I am a moderator and it's my role to prevent flamewars and to encourage everyone to raise the standard of discourse here. In my comment I was trying to convey that multiple comments of yours were crossing too far into political battle and personal attack, and here are the main instances:

> That is just objectively incorrect, and fundamentally misunderstanding the basics of statehood

This counts as a personal swipe, and as fulminating.

> It is however entirely reasonable to assume that the comment I replied to was made entirely in bad faith

People can be mistaken or wrong, or just of a different opinion/assessment, without acting “entirely in bad faith”.

> "Baselessly" - I'm sorry but realpolitik is plenty of basis. China is a geopolitical adversary of both the EU and the US. And China will be the first to admit this, btw.

This is phrased in a snarky way.

The points you've made are fine to make, but the way you make them matters. Snarkiness, swipes, put-downs, accusations of bad faith (giving your reason "why" you think it was in bad faith doesn't make it OK) are all clearly against the guidelines.

I can accept that you didn't mean to break the guidelines, which is why I've politely asked you to familiarise yourself with them and try harder to follow them in future. It's a request not a scolding. It's not necessary to announce you want to quit HN in protest. (Though of course, eventually we would rather people leave if they prefer not to follow the guidelines.) Just making an effort to respect the guidelines and the HN community would be great.


The deletion request was completely unrelated. I just don’t like the interaction gamification. Thanks!

I have not made a single personal swipe in this entire comment tree. I have stated (implied) that certain views are not consistent with a cursory introduction to the topic at hand.

I absolutely assumed a basic familiarity with the concept of a state from a comment on the relationship between states. That is good faith and basic respect for the human you are conversing with as I view it.

Overall, I have kept a tone I would prefer be kept towards myself; fake politeness is just condescending.

That being said: Your site, your rules, and your power to arbitrarily interpret and enforce said rules. I.e., message received, regardless of my thoughts on your interpretation of events.


> Overall, I have kept a tone I would prefer be kept towards myself; fake politeness is just condescending.

We don't want you to be fake. We just want you to make the effort to share your perspective in a way that is kind and is conducive to curious conversation, which is HN's primary objective. We know it can be hard to get this right when commenting on the internet. It's common for people to underestimate how hostile their words can come across to others, when they seem just like reasonable, matter-of-fact statements when formulated in one's own mind.

> That being said: Your site, your rules, and your power to arbitrarily interpret and enforce said rules

That's not really it. The community holds the power here; when we try to override broad community sentiment and expectations, the community pushes back forcefully.

Your comments got my attention because they were attracting flags and downvotes from the community, and from looking at these comments and earlier ones in your feed, my assessment is "yes, I can see why". (We don't let community sentiment, or "mob rule" win out all the time; we often override flags if we think they're unfair, but in your case, given the pattern we observe over time, we think the community's response is reasonable.)


Isn’t every country by definition a “local monopoly on force”? Sweden and Norway have their own militaries and police forces and neither would take kindly to an invasion from the other. By your definition this makes them adversaries or enemies.

Exactly. I am Norwegian myself, and I don’t even know how many wars we have had with Sweden and Denmark.

If you are getting at the fact that it is sometimes beneficial for adversaries to collaborate (e.g., the prisoner dilemma) then I agree. And indeed, both Norway and Sweden would be completely lost if they declared war on the other tomorrow. But it doesn’t change the fundamental nature of the relationship.


Literally every time a Chinese model is discussed here we get this completely braindead take

There has never been a shred of evidence for security researchers, model analysis, benchmarks, etc that supports this.

It's a complete delusion in every sense.


For good reason, too. Hostile governments have a much easier time poisoning their "local" LLMs.

ChatGPT is like "Photoshop" people will call any AI chatgpt.

This is the new search and OpenAI is at the forefront, probably they want to become the biggest ad network.

This LLM-generated abstract contains instances of pleonasm. While I am unsure if there is a required minimum word count for abstracts, the current version could be improved. Specifically, the abstract could more clearly described that it is an "efficient decoding framework that compresses, senses, and expands to improve latency in RAG applications."

It's funny, as I currently fixed a bug caused by a trademark Unicode character after spending entire weekend. These characters can break LLM driven extraction processes.


I still feel there is no sure shot way to build an abstraction yet. Probably that is why Loveable decided to build on Gemini AI rather than giving options of choosing model. On the other hand I like Pydantic AI framework and got myself a decent working solution where my preference is to stick with cheaper models by default and only use expensive only in cases where failure rate is too high.


This is true. Based on my experience with real customers, they really don't know what is the difference between the different models.

What they want is to get things done. The model is simply means to an end. As long as the task is completed, everything else is secondary.


I feel like there's always that "one guy" who has a preference and asks for an option to choose, and, it's a way for developers to offload the decision. You can't be blamed for the wrong one if you put that decision on the user.

Tbh I agree with your approach and use it when building stuff for myself. I'm so over yak shaving that topic.


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