These days you can land in jail for simply bad mouthing the government. US needs to strengthen its adherence to their constitutions. Words on paper are useless if they aren't followed.
The Apple TV one drives me insane. The selected button is so subtly raised that it takes a lot to see. Usually I need to move it back and forth and look for the motion.
it really baffles me that Apple lets this happen with a design system/framework that has had years of battle testing. Clearly it's not working if today's apps are all insanely hard to use on a daily basis. Users that are power users. The system needs to protect us from app devs being able to ship stuff this hard to use. The remote is not helping of course.
China grants up to 200% tax deduction on intangible assets acquired through R&D. Means your spending on AI training fees becomes a tax return amount or like appears as a magical donation deductible on the books. I don't know if DeepSeek is benefiting from exactly such a system, but that's generally how aggressively China seeks its advantages in high tech R&D.
Nobody else is or has been that aggressive. France on a Monday morning would be like $10b for Mistral in 3 years, and that'll be it. China is like $10b every year for 5 top companies for 5 years. Not necessarily to say such an all-in-doubling-down-always moves would be necessary or correct, but there is that kind of substantial funding disparity between China and the rest of the world.
> China grants up to 200% tax deduction on intangible assets acquired through R&D. Means your spending on AI training fees becomes a tax return amount or like appears as a magical donation deductible on the books.
This is misleading. Deduction reduces taxable income and does not provide tax return. E.g. if your taxable income is $1000 and you spent $100 on R&D and qualify for those 200%, $800 will be taxed.
Thanks for adding that, still very interesting idea. Perhaps this >100% tax deduction could eventually be applied to human labor to help incentivize employment and subsidize it with automation profits.
Although you can often take losses from a previous year to offset current income. So if you do a huge amount of capital investment you can offset against profits for years.
> Although you can often take losses from a previous year to offset current income
This is true, usually for 5 years.
> So if you do a huge amount of capital investment you can offset against profits for years.
Articles 11, 12, 18, and 28 [0] say that capital investment can reduce tax based on the depreciation or amortization cost, not by carrying forward the investment as a loss.
Nothing in the Chinese tax law says that DeepSeek can receive tax returns or free handouts from the government because they do R&D.
Does DeepSeek not maintain an international financial structure to keep international profits offshore until it is convenient for them to be taxed? I can't think of a billion dollar corp that doesn't, but then Jack Ma went to a gulag for a year.
I'm not the DeepSeek Intl CFO. And DeepSeek doesn't do R&D outside of China. Platform.deepseek.com manages multiple payment providers, including companies created to support options outside of alipay/unionpay.
The default one is the standard deepseek:
12F, Galaxy International Building
Gongshu Dist, Hangzhou 310003
Zhejiang, China
It's interesting how you assume a bad actor by default. Not really an 'innocent until proven guilty' mindset. And providing misinformation too.
> but then Jack Ma went to a gulag for a year.
He never went to a gulag, and there is no information whatsoever about the reason he was put under a 'house arrest'. If you are close to those circles maybe you want to share the details of your claims?
It is actually not unrealistic to imagine laws for eu gov software only to allow Mistral or Aleph alpha models. They are pretty good - on par with deepseek atleast. There are all kinds of similar requirements already from software stacks to databases.
What I would see even more likely are requirements of no agent commits, use of only human written/vetted code under their name.
For chatbot-style usage maybe, can’t really attest to that; for long-running, long-context “agentic” work including planning, within a harness etc., definitely not (yet).
> What I would see even more likely are requirements of no agent commits, use of only human written/vetted code under their name.
I mean in the end that’s what the Kernel project does now, IIRC? Everything has to have a response human’s sign-off.
You will never stop hearing about this until they are restored. Also enjoy your very slow commute with all the bikes now legally required to ride in the car lane and block you.
Can we just say it out loud? Because it's good for the environment and we don't want our children or their children to have an unlivable planet. This should probably be the number one reason, but yes EVs are better in many other ways too.
Driving cars is not good for the environment whether your fuel is electric or diesel. The billions acres of concrete and asphalt to support car commuting, the electricity that charges the cars, the rubber microplastic tire dust made 100x worse under hard acceleration of heavy vehicles .
Best I can say about EVs is they’re quiet and don’t wear out their brake pads, and the lack of other service is economically efficient, so in that sense they are progress towards a vehicle less likely to fail on you (software updates not withstanding!)
If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil. A thousand pound lithium battery per household is not a tenable way out of destroying ecosystems.
> If you care about the environment you get an old VW or ideally a Mercedes that runs on used vegetable oil.
This is not realistic nor scalable. The reality is that the US and Canada were built around cars, and even if we had huge transit projects there would still be a need for roads and vehicles due to the size and rural/industrial areas.
Lithium batteries can be recycled. All the studies have shown that electric cars are a huge net win for the environment, and the cries about the environmental cost of building the cars in the first place don't actually match the reality. Especially when you consider that future ev ecosystems should and hopefully will have a strong battery recycling operation.
I appreciate that the question deserves a more pragmatic response than “buy used”
So I will speculate, there could be a more adequate supply of used cars if we found ways to keep old cars running longer. back in the 90s, a 200,000mi car was a real beater, doomed to transmission failure at least, uneconomical to repair. cars made in the 2010s are lasting into half a million miles just from improvements in engineering (Toyota hybrid planetary drivetrain eliminates many points of failure: no clutch, no alternator, 0 belts. Brake pads are only engaged below 5 mph and may not need replacing in the useful lifetime of the vehicle)
I don’t even know why I’m such a hater on EV, it is better in the same ways, it’s just also a luxury vehicle that is heavy and fast af. I would love to see more ev hype for efficiency, like this car is so lightweight it goes twice as far for the same kWh. Maybe Aptera will pull it off.
Unfortunately, lithium is abundant enough that it will always be cheaper to manufacture from virgin material, battery recycling will probably just look like power grid load balancers. When batteries age they don’t fail, they just lose the ability to deliver hundreds of amps when you floor it.
reply