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I hope you don't leave, Dase! I've always found your posts unique and kept track of you since the Reddit days. Someone has to counter the American front and post interesting posts about geopolitics and such. I've increasingly skimmed past intra-US politics and as a European, with Trump's anti-EU turn, I've felt quite an estrangement with the American Right. Where before I had felt a sense of oneness, cheering on Trump 2 and Elon Twitter takeover, no longer having to feel like a persecuted minority, finally being able to speak my mind on the Internet.
I've also been deeply interested in DeepSeek after R1 published around last January. It tends to give me better results than Grok does when I run my questions through both chat bots, and not go unavailable due to high load like Grok sometimes does. I'm not quite as bullish on China as you appear to be, but I'm sure starting to root for them to do something while our US-led economy appears to bungle everything up, with DRAM and GPUs becoming unavailable to consumers, where it seems only Chinese manufacturing can save us from this situation where it seems that computation is going to be exclusively limited for corporations. I have faith in Western free market economies outcompeting the Chinese command economy with abundant malinvestments, like manufacturing a bunch of electric cars that now they have to find somewhere to dump to, or imposing such a strict trade surplus that you have to give countries loans to buy your goods, which it's dubious if they can ultimately repay.
My faith in Western society is kind of crumbling, though. Or more precisely our collective economies. With a k-shaped economy for haves and have-nots, we appear to have forgotten the part about the markets where we were supposed to produce goods for and employ each other? We have home ownership unavailable for new families as boomers have decided to make construction of new housing effectively illegal. Here in Finland we've managed an atrocious unemployment rate of 10,6% and 20,5%, and if you do manage to land a job, you get to enjoy the wonders of having 25% of your wage go to taxes and another 25% to fund Boomers' pensions in a giant Ponzi scheme! The left here is shrieking, blaming the right-wing government, while I think rising unemployment is a current global phenomenon. Somehow, the Western investment seems to have become oriented full-tilt into AI, apparently replacing both consumers and workers before any sign of the fabled productivity gains or even a profitable product in sight.
It makes me regret getting so excited about AI or even getting educated in CS, where I appeared to go from a hot commodity to unemployable in an instant.
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