Because "why not?" Do we understand that humanity includes Chinese people? Do we also understand A) the steps they're already taking to reduce emissions and B) how much of their emissions historically and today are in service of Western consumers?
i don't accept arguments in the form of B when its a business (our pollution is just serving our customers demand, its their moral responsibility to reduce consumption), and I also don't accept it in country form.
centralisation makes centralised opporunity for change. You have all the power, and also all the responsibility.
Centralisation also comes with upkeep necessary to maintain centralisation. The cost of that upkeep can severaly limit opportunity for change. If you are a dictator, staying in power is priority one, at the cost of everything else.
Don't worry China and propagandists will just lie about it.
Just like people are doing here.
In reality China is the main reason climate change got worse for the last 20 years. Ask ChatGPT who contributed to CO2 growth most in the past 20 years, Chinese industry was not just the biggest contributor to CO2 emission growth every year but most years bigger than everyone else combined. And the only real exception was 2020, when China shut down a lot faster for COVID, and a LOT more draconian, than everybody else.
Also: China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants. Now, I get why (same reason even Germany is considering it), but that doesn't change the facts.
that's really looking at things in the worst possible way.
China acquired most of the manufacture of the world, so yeah emission increased, the problem is that they did not decrease where the manifacture was lost.
if you look at co2 emission per capita you can see how China is actually an example to follow, we can't say the same for USA, India or EU. you can ask this to chatgpt, or you could also ... search? for this data, it's publicly available.
> China is STILL increasing coal use. STILL building new coal plants.
this is misleading, yes they are building coal plants but not using them, that is the backup plan for "rainy days" . and the coal usage is going down.
Feel free to share why not. At the end of the China is still part of a global system dominated by capitalism and they have to play the markets game in order to survive.
They could easily fully do things their own way but that would mean, for example, chance of private intellectual property, which would mean no WTO membership, which would mean massively reduced capacity for trade, which would put them at such a disadvantage they'd inevitably collapse.
I don't think you get to abdicate responsibilty of some avoidable negative externality of something you do just because some entirely separate function of it is the thing your customers want. If I were a plumber who fixed leaks by diverting the water into the customers' neighbors houses, my customers aren't the ones responsible for the damage it causes. I don't think it matters even if the externality isn't avoidable. I think people who sell murder-for-hire services are culpable of murder, even if they are paid by someone else
If the argument were about slavery instead - slavery enables cheaper goods, ergo by buying our products, some of which were made using slavery, but we refuse to reveal which ones, but nonetheless by buying them you support slavery and are morally responsible for the slavery not us. Nobody would accept this framing.
I agree that China has done very well from manufacturing and trade, and would not have done as well if they had not industrialised at a large scale. But that doesn't change the fact that industrialisation of this kind causes pollution and is damaging the planet and it especially doesn't mean that China has no moral obligation to do as much as it can to reduce emissions.
I also don't believe the argument that the pollution is inherent to production, or that there is no way to satisfy demand without pollution. (or that china, specifically, derserves to be the one to profit from satisfying that demand). Production of almost all commodities can be done without massive emissions these days, and even when it couldn't, nobody was forced to ramp up production
Someone will inevitably jump in here to point out that china makes a lot of solar or whatever. Sure, they do. They also make a lot of wind power. Their emissions per capita are trending in the wrong direction though. Europe's have been going DOWN since the 1970s, and china's are going UP. China's emissions per capita are roughly equal with the EU at the moment and are going up - pretty soon they will catch up and surpass the US.
I don’t think looking at first derivative of emissions per capita is more important than absolute measure when thinking of the morality of polluting. If China’s per capita is lower than some other place, they’re doing better. The first derivative tells us that might become untrue, but countries with high historical emissions don’t get a pass because they’re lowering those high levels as compared to a lower emitting country whose emissions are rising.
china's historical total emissions will also surpass the US's pretty soon, on account of their nearly 3x as large population combined with their per capita emissions being nearly as high. and as mentioned, theirs is likely set to grow way faster. I agree extrapolating isn't always the best way to assign historical blame (for whatever that might mean), I do think it makes sense to use when thinking about what policies people ought to take now, to reduce damage as much as possible
I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns
I believe that every person has just as much right to emit pollution in 2027 as every other person in 2027.
What that person emitted in 2025 has no bearing on their 2027 “allowance”.
We can certainly discuss how much is an appropriate, sustainable, or defensible per-person amount, but I’m only interested in the 2027 amounts, not the increase in their amount versus a prior period, nor in allowing past large emitters to continue at higher rates than past low-emitters.
(I think we strongly agree on your last paragraph’s point. That was the point of my GP post, but maybe it didn’t land somehow.)
No. Everyone has an equal right as each other precisely because we all share the same planet!
It would seem far more weird to me to argue the opposite: “These people have the right to emit 2x or 10x as much as these other people!” (Or equivalently, “these people are only allowed to emit 10% or 50% of what these other people are…”)
> No. Everyone has an equal right as each other precisely because we all share the same planet!
The issue is that in the current situation, that effectively means we might as well give up on the idea of doing anything about climate change.
Besides, people don't care about CO2 emissions, only factory owners do, governments do. People care about energy available for use for them personally. In fact people generally dislike anything that emits CO2, from cars (somewhat) to coal mines and plants (which people dislike A LOT). If you care about "everyone", there's no need to give people CO2 emission rights, just energy.
right. I agree with this for a large part - I do think though, that chinas current level per capita 10.81 tons (higher than EU 7.14 tons, less than america 17.34 tons) is not sustanable, and they do not seem to be taking it seriously enough by my estimation. I also think that US emissions are far too high and must be reduced
that might make sense in a world where the US has been chugging along emitting at a constant rate for many years, to maintain a certain standard of living.- but the reality is the US emissions has been going down for many years, while increasing their standard of living (arguable, but difficult to say that US standard of living is less than half of what it was in the 90s), while china is going up in emissions.
I also don't agree that just because someone else became rich through some negative process (crime, perhaps), that everyone has a right to the same. This sort of thinking is the way the world burns.
I don't get a free pass to behave like a mafia boss just because I really really want to have a bunch of money like one
There's a phrase for that "do as I say, not as I do" (see also: "pulling the ladder up"). This is rightly viewed as hypocritical by those on the receiving end.
if the mafia boss tells his sons that they should avoid a life of crime, that doing it makes things worse for society and ones self, is he a hypocrite? should the boys follow his advice?
my read is yes and yes
are you suggesting it should instead be yes and no? that because the sons want to be rich they are morally in the right for going into a life of crime, even knowing the consequences?
The countries are competitive with each other, not in a father/son relationship.
At least the father has a natural lifespan and the ill gotten riches would go to the son(s). Can we say the same thing about the riches of say, the USA? If China does nothing then they will inherit all of it? Or will the US just keep its fortune gained through whatever means, and just tell other up and coming countries to suck rocks and know their place while using the Earth as justification?
This is a tortured analogy. Yes it's even better if they don't do crime and yet inherit the money as that would allow them to claim they have clean hands, like the developed world is doing now. ("Colonialism? Massive resource extraction? That was a long time ago. But we're still keeping our riches and embargoing our tech from you. Don't try to do what we did.")
There's also the phrase "Now we know better". When the industrial revolution came to the US we were ignorant and we polluted the world like crazy because of that. Today, we've learned from that mistake. We now know that you can and must control the pollution factories spew out into the world, even though doing that cuts into corporate profits.
China doesn't get a pass to pollute at historic US levels for their industrialization because they have the benefit of having learned from our mistakes. Rejecting the "No Fair! It's my turn to needlessly destroy the planet just to make myself richer!" argument isn't hypocrisy, it's just acknowledgement of history and the progress we've made in dealing with the problems we ran into while we were industrializing without the benefit of anyone else's past experience.
China and every other developing country has already been benefiting enormously from the example of developed nations, but they want to cherry pick the things that maximize their wealth while ignoring everything else at the expense of every living thing on Earth. They want to point to the damage we caused while we were stumbling around in the dark with no idea where we were going, even though today the sun is shining and they've got all the maps we made and GPS to guide them.
Even though the planet is shared, the earlier developed nations have gained advantages from their polluting (and at many times, colonial) past that allowed them to pull ahead of other countries. Now they want to stop others going down the same path without giving up their entrenched advantage. That is pulling the ladder up.
Either give up those advantages in the form of reparations (will never happen) or remove any pretense of moral superiority when all you are doing is just preserving your leading position gained using practices you now decry.
They don't want to stop others from following the same path, they just don't want them to do it while disregarding every lesson we learned the hard way whenever it's convenient for them. That's not pulling the ladder up, it's more like wanting OSHA regulations to be followed while they climb it for everyone's safety, theirs included. It's a little slower, but everybody still gets to where they want to go.
Reparations are already in progress and have been for generations. Extensive efforts have been made to start restoring the polluted land and water. Workers rights and health have been improved. The use of slavery has been greatly reduced. The ozone layer is recovering. Trillions have been spent on research and development into ways to help repair and prevent the damage developed nations have inflicted on the planet. Even after all this time we're still working on rebuilding what was destroyed and we've still got a long away to go. in some areas we're actually backsliding. We can't let every developing nation destroy our progress and set us back as if nobody knows any better. Our past was both costly and profitable. We made many of our mistakes out of ignorance, but we know better now and everybody needs to start acting like it.
It's not all a burden for the now developing countries either. They get the benefit of not having to start their industrialization from nothing. They've got access to centuries of knowledge and technology the developed world obtained at great cost. Having the perspective and advantage of all that history and progress however also makes it unacceptable for them to make the same costly mistakes just to satisfy their greed. Now that we all know what is at stake, it falls on everyone to make sure that many of humanity's past sins aren't repeated.
"I don't accept" is not an answer though. When the EU can create CBAM, so can (and should) the US and anyone else. That way we don't have to talk about moral responsibility and can progress to adequate international carbon pricing.
"steps to reduce emissions" is a platitude that sounds nice. they have never actually reduced emissions. they will surpass the US in per capita emissions at this rate within a decade.
This has always appeared to be a very measurable situation. Either one is committed to decreasing emissions or they are not. You can just measure emissions over time and compare.
It has never made sense to me that people are willing to ignore the trends and argue in platitudes.
Again, look at the derivatives. Western democracies are currently reducing while China are massively increasing per capita and on track to surpass US per capita in the next decade. Total has long been the more populous countries. The unfortunate truth that presents itself is that if you're not willing to go to war over climate, reduction of consumption is not going to happen.
Generally speaking, B2B prices are rarely supply-and-demand priced in the usual sense.
YC has advised startups in the past that it's easier to sell a single $100k customer than 100 $1k customers.
It would also be relatively surprising to learn that i.e. the Chinese providers are OOMs better at inference than OAI/Anthropic (like their prices would imply if they were in a perfectly competitive market).
The one thing I trust is that Chinese prices aren't overinflated. They're almost certainly closer to the actual cost of inference + training amortization than what Western labs are offering.
DeepSeek's price hike is mostly driven by increased demand, for example. It's not about losses so much as they don't have enough infrastructure and need to reduce demand somehow.
"Overcapacity and low profitability" [1] is how I understand the difference, i.e. different competitive ecosystem from a different policy and intervention style.
There's no English-language article that can fully capture the system because it's a moving target to begin with, and anything official is vague on purpose (to be fair, much of the legislation in the US is too, except the Constitutional backstop and co-equal judiciary does not exist in China). The official messaging is always targeted and curated with a specific audience in mind and how much truth is contained within varies. The best way to describe it without turning it into an essay is that it's "aspirationally market-driven" system that is not defined by a fixed and consistent ideology but rather the constraints of the capacity of the administrative state to control the parts of the economy that is legible to the state. It's not a free market except for the black market, but the black market is frankly huge if nothing else to compensate for the state asserting not just a monopoly on the use of violence but also the monopolistic determinator of morality, which the people are less willing to buy into, but that disconnection itself creates an opportunity for arbitrage. That is the relationship dynamic that have retained some degree of stability, but everything else is effectively subject to change on a dime without notice. The party will never accept openly that it is capitalistic and in some sense that's not even a lie, but what the state is able to impose and what the people actually do are very different things. As the state excludes 99% of the population writ large from politics, full stop (you are either born into it, or you're not eligible to participate, with some narrow exceptions that occasionally pop up), there's not much of a ground-level appetite for dogma and doctrines. Instead you end up with a pragmatic, descriptive market that exists differently within and without, and just like the socialism label being basically symbolic, same goes for capitalism.
People have been talking about late capitalism in the west for a century. The Chinese state would argue that we cannot be in late capitalism because we're actually in the first stage of socialism, and the people would wonder how we got to late capitalism when they never got to experience early or middle capitalism. But really the only thing we know that definitively does not work is implenting Marxism and Marxism-Leninism and Maoism and its offshoots as doctrine. Whether that means that the default is a prescriptive version of capitalism is, well, open to debate, and probably too simplistic.
There is no "Chinese capitalism" or "Western capitalism" - capitalism is applied thermodynamics, once you remove the limiting factors (both material and political), it's the same everywhere.
Like the 10th Rule of Acquisition says, greed is eternal. Structures and behaviors that flow down from this tend to be the same everywhere.
The problem with this reading is that Western capitalism has been effectively removing the thermodynamics analogy through monopolism, conglomeration, regulatory capture, etc.
I don't think DeepSeek's price increase has to do with increased demand, but rather increased investment. I think they increased their capacity and want to make the money back.
Fair, I hadn't looked recently. It looks like currently kimi is either 1/2 or 1/4 Ant pricing depending on whether you think Opus 5 is usable or not. (Deepseek is still an OOM though)
My pet theory is that the PRC is heavily subsidizing the hosted inferencing costs in order to capture valuable training data, token usage patterns and the occasional leak of valuable data.
Given their past history and current geopolitics, I'd be willing to bet this is more likely than not.
This is not what nix does unless a user configures it poorly. Nix will ship a single, dynamically linked package/version combo for all package that depends on it. Containers ship one for each package that depends on it.
I had the exact same experience. Claude is not my validation engine, I do not tell it when it has completed. I verify that in the code/project and end the session.
I also got this,
> A useful next habit is to end each correction with a concrete acceptance test, owner artifact, or stop condition: “write it into PROGRESS.md,” “make nix run .#bench fail until this is real,” “rerun this exact command,” or “do not proceed until these two choices are explicit.”
> You already do this well in the biggest penance sessions. Apply it to the smaller ones too.
Which I have found to be counterproductive in my personal work. Current models can generally infer acceptance tests of this level of granularity (not true for larger project-level prompts, but those don't produce good enough code for me yet -- even with specific acceptance criteria).
I also got penalized for using claude in read-only mode for the same validation reason?
> For read-only work, end with one of:
“turn the top finding into a PR-sized plan”
“mark these as accepted/rejected/deferred”
“write a cleanup checklist”
“give me the exact command I should run safely”
“stop, no action recommended”
No thanks, I'm literally just exploring the codebase. I don't want any of these.
It's a little sad to be honest, I would actually enjoy a product that helped me improve prompting + ai usage.
Yeah, I've found similar issues with even basic tasks like 'draft an email response' which will then populate a md file tagged as draft. Claude will then chastise me a few days later for not sending said draft. I've had to take real steps to avoid NannAIy in the last month that haven't even been a problem before in similar workflows.
It's notable that they're so valuable because they feature 800Gbps of memory bandwidth. About twice what's available on the top end of M5, and exactly what makes llm inference fast.
But if SpaceX does anything _other than become the most valuable company in history by delivering at least two technologies predicated on the largest stock rise in history based on a single technology (LLMs)_, the gains from zero to now will have been privatized and the losses will be born by the public. Which is what everyone is thinking about.
Really? The Last time I was in an American office, there didn't seem to be any milk around. They had an unrefrigerated bottle of "creamer" next to the coffee machine, but I was too scared to try it. I'm still not sure what it is, or how I'm supposed to use it.
Creamer is a liquid made with oil and sweetener that approximates the taste and mouthfeel of milk and sugar. Or really a flavored syrup, not sugar. They often have hazelnut or vanilla flavoring added. You would use it by pouring it in your coffee, at about a 1:1 ratio with how you would use milk.
I'm surprised you associated it with espresso. Creamer and drip coffee machines go together. Milk and espresso machines go together. I've seem drip coffee machines with real milk, but I've never seen an espresso machine with just creamer.
It tends to exist primarily in office environments, because it can stand not to be refrigerated and was the first lactose-free option. Therefore it was easy to buy one bottle and solve the problem of "stuff to add to coffee".
It is not an espresso. The temperature and pressure are lower than an espresso machine. The results would be considered analogous to more American style coffee. Meant to be drunk from a full mug (~177ml to ~298ml), etc.
It's marketed as a coffee machine that makes a single cup with a single pod at a time.
(Apparently you can tweak a Keurig to approach an espresso, but it's not the default).
Office coffee is not what people drink for pleasure -- it's a caffeine delivery device. If you go to a coffeehouse in the US you'll find that people often order drinks called Lattes which is espresso and steamed milk. And the word is Italian like espresso itself, so I think this isn't some weird Americanism but pretty traditional.
Every single coffee shop I’ve ever been in that serves espresso also serves lattes. Philz does not serve espresso, they only serve coffee. You went to virtually the only coffee shop in the US that does not serve lattes.
I find this hard to parse, maybe because English is not my first language. Do senior SWEs provide more value than they provide principles, or do they provide more value than principles do?
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