> China distills and is therefore possibly not that competent.

I heard that argument more than one year ago, when chain of thought and reasoning cycles started to be hudden to protect against distillation.

Meanwhile, models as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent nowadays.

Ever since I switched away from OpenAI to DeepSeek I never felt the need to go back.

Deepseek Flash V4 really was a "holy shit" moment and deserves the praise/hype it's been getting from users. I have a multi-tier subscription strategy I've maintained for the last year of: 1. $20-$30 plan from first Claude now Codex for "SOTA" 2. Gemini via the extra $10/mo or so from my Google One plan 3. a cheap fallback plan.

Together it gives me plenty of head room/model performance for $40ish/mo, plus letting me compare the various models over time.

Originally I'd been using the Z.AI plan (that I'm still grandfathered into for <1 yr) as my cheap plan but wasn't keeping up with the SOTA progress and is slow/limited now. So I subscribed to the Opencode Go plan and use Deepseek Flash V4 almost exclusively and it is insane how much usage I can get for $10/mo.

I did the math on my Flash usage vs. what I'm paying Opencode and I'm typically not even exceeding $10 in API costs! So it's actually sustainable not rugpull pricing at least for me. I can pound it with requests/agentic loops and have it running for 30 min doing whatever the fuck and check back and have spent literal pennies for what would have cost $30+ on my work's Github Copilot plan.

I know enterprise world works under different rules and isn't price sensitive in the same ways as an individual but I truly don't see how this is sustainable for the US AI giants in the long term to maintain like 25x+ markup for 1.25x performance benefit.

IMO it does help explain the recent emphasis on secret, scary "super models" like Mythos to muddy the waters for decision makers with hype and FOMO at at time when companies are beginning to seriously scrutinize their token spending for the first time.

Man, I decided to try DS with a healthy dose of skepticism.

I canceled ChatGPT because I would be on vacations. Codex was pretty great, but I thought "Let me put 10 bucks on Deepseek API and plug it into Claude Code".

I was completely blown away. I found it even better than Claude or Codex. And those 10 bucks? It lasted for more than a month.

I don't see myself coming back to Claude/OpenAI.

Especially here on HN, where AI anxiety (especially amongst those that are really nervous that it needs to succeed) is very, very tiresome.

lol CEOs in jail.

And, thankfully, I never needed to have a discussion on Chinese politics with LLM in all the myriad of uses I had for it.

I actually experience 4.8 as worse than 4.6 for everyday coding tasks.

> Is Britain British without British Bourgeoisie that have lived there for thousands of years with new arrivals that have no commmon culture or connection to the land?

Thousands of years? Are you talking about celts?

Because Romans later arrived in Britannia and founded Londinium. Is it British when it was founded by those pesky Romans?

Or are you complaining about later populations, such as Vikings or Normans? I mean, they haven't been to the British isles for thousands of years. How can Britain be British with those smelly frenchmen?

Unless what you really are trying to do is complain that Britain now has too many brown people.

"constantly"

What the EU needs to get rid of is of the veto power. Otherwise I welcome our neighbors to the east as long as they are willing to play by the rules.

> Would freedom of permanent movement still be something Europeans would vote for today?

My guess is yes.

It's one of the best things that the EU brings.

His arguments on the numbers of AI are actually pretty solid.

I am still to see a solid counter to what he brings up there.

This is valid construct in languages, and a very legitimate use of this construct in the context.

If this was AI generated (which I am not convinced of given the full text), it escapes my alarm bells.