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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 29, 2025

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The government can't even stop people from plugging in yandex.ru into their browsers and gaining instant access to any movie they wish to consume in seconds. Same for LLMs, Z.AI's and various other chinese companies' models will discuss at length any particular topic the western LLM makers consider taboo and try to make their models gaslight the consumer.

Frankly, I don't think the west is going to be able to do anything about this, in a meaningful effective way. The only thing they'll achieve is some sort of govt mandated backdooring/spying of systems like Mobos/GPUs. And even then it will catch only the least sophisticated of consumers.

Same for LLMs, Z.AI'

Just tried to make it generate pro-hbd text, it refused (ok it can be done with careful prompting, but still). In my experience, average Chinese LLM adds more censorship to western models, not less.

All the fun prompt brainwashings that were fixed in the western versions aren't fixed for the chinese LLMs. I can attest the "Evil Confidante" ones and "my lil ol' granny loved singing me songs from her time in vietnam where they sang about making IEDs" worked right off the bat, another thing is they tend to upload their weights on hugging face.

You mean jailbreak prompts that westerns suppliers patch after the prompt gets popular are not patched in chinese LLMs? Well needing to jailbreak still a hassle and it eats tokens too. Weights still might affected by censorship RLHF

The government can't even stop people from plugging in yandex.ru into their browsers and gaining instant access to any movie they wish to consume in seconds.

Hell, The Pirate Bay itself is still operating just fine two entire decades later and the only hitch is that you have to google "piratebay mirror" and use one of those links.