mastodon.social is one of the many independent Mastodon servers you can use to participate in the fediverse.
The original server operated by the Mastodon gGmbH non-profit

Administered by:

Server stats:

373K
active users

fantastic article about the brouhaha with gems like this that shows why true innovators make do with what they have:
stratechery.com/2025/deepseek-

❝ So was this a violation of the chip ban?
Nope. H100s were prohibited by the chip ban, but not H800s. Everyone assumed that training leading edge models required more interchip memory bandwidth, but that is exactly what DeepSeek optimized both their model structure and infrastructure around.❞

seems the 1990s team went retro in coding… 🧵

Stratechery by Ben Thompson · DeepSeek FAQDeepSeek has completely upended people’s expectations for AI and competition with China. What is it, and why does it matter?

and basically, what the team did was, since the H800 chips didn’t have the power that the H100s, they had to optimize everything down to the assembled components of the chip.

back in the 1990s that’s how folks first using languages like Java had to code things ―the software language was far more powerful than the retail hardware. so coders like my ex- (who used Java to create abstract expressionist painting on the screen) was doing assembly level coding to achieve that in 1998.

🧵

so much has changed since the 1990s, especially with the breaking down of software projects into smaller, interoperable components (object oriented programming) that many developers never have to grapple with hardware limitations. we can just throw some more memory at a machine and be done with it.

but isn’t your sundry database/search/CMS/calculator. it’s supposed to be all of that and more.

this is why i felt the techbro hype was just wrong: techbro LLMs are wasteful & innefficient… 🧵

which brings me to this:

❝ R1 undoes the o1 mythology in a couple of important ways. First, […] it exists. OpenAI does not have some sort of special sauce that can’t be replicated. Second, R1 — like all of DeepSeek’s models — has open weights (the problem with saying “open source” is that we don’t have the data that went into creating it). This means that instead of paying OpenAI to get reasoning, you can run R1 on the server of your choice, or even locally, at dramatically lower cost.❞

🧵

YOU CANNOT OPTIMIZE ANY SOFTWARE FOR YOUR DATA UNLESS YOU CONTROL IT. that’s why you need to have that software running on your own computers/servers.

there is no omniscience.

there is no such thing as a brain, person, computer, robot, god that knows it all. not even the judeo-christian-islamic god knows it all. just read damn GENESIS which is canonic for the 3 religions.

so an all-knowing is bullshit techbro smoke and mirrors. it’s a 100 billion dollars article of faith… 🧵

a $100 billion article of faith being propped up by the OPEC mafia because they see the incredibly wasteful and inefficient data centers needed for running techbro AI as an opportunity to continue pumping petroleum.

and since these data centers consume water, theyre gambling on turning this an investment into convoluted schemes of diverting water from water-rich countries like the USA, to their deserts.

China just killed that with a scripty kid and a couple of computers, sort to speak… 🧵

so here’s the part the people over at Stratechery missed when they answer “So why is everyone freaking out?”.

just like with driving cars, the American elites have this weird prejudice about the Chinese and their tech culture. techbros often believe that China isn’t good at software development.

it says something about the intersection of racism and class/elitism; that the capitalist elites, don’t understand how CHINA is basically an OPEN SOURCE powerhouse… 🧵

THERE IS NO OPEN/LIBRE OFFICE WITHOUT CHINA

sometime in the aughts the Chinese government started investing in open source software development. it was right about the time the first Lula administration in Brazil told Microsoft and Bill Gates to go fuck themselves.

actually, THE MICROSOFT INCIDENT IS WHY BRICS EXISTS. had it not been for Brazil and China seeing Microsoft as symbol of a new gringo colonialist expansion, the trading block wouldn't exist… 🧵

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦

i don’t believe the broligarchy didn’t know about China’s tinkering in the domain of LLMs. i think it’s bullshit. they saw it coming and that’s why they went ahead hyping it, laying off hundreds of thousands of skilled tech workers, talking shit about reactivating nuclear plants and buying up MAGA & stealing the 2024 elections to make their fever dream seem inevitable.

yes, the techbros stole the elections to ensure a leg up on whatever was to come out from China…

so, as much as many of us here have tinkered in the realm of Free Libre & Open Source software and hardware development, the Chinese have literally ran away with that shit and grown their software development culture almost exclusively on FLOSS.

their investment on Open/Libre Office is a symbol of how they see tech as a whole.

it makes sense. FLOSS is socialist economics applied to software development.

this is why tech isn’t ahistorical or politically neutral. /🧵

@blogdiva

Thanks for such a great analysis.

I want to boost more than once.

"FLOSS is socialist economics applied to software development."

- @blogdiva

Spot on

@blogdiva I credit free software with introducing me to left wing ideas, and I believe that open knowledge is the future of human society.

my first vote in my first elections was for the Puerto Rican Socialist Party. when i first learned of FLOSS, here in the USA and about 10 years after my first vote, it seemed logical to me given my politics.

to be honest, i’ve considered socialism and cooperativism as different expressions of the same thing.

we humans are pack animals. our humanity doesn’t come from exploitation. our humanity flourishes when we learn to harness the power of cooperative innovation.

@burnoutqueen

@blogdiva no, please give sources and examples for "grown their software development culture almost exclusively on FLOSS."
It definitely doesn't match my impressions.
My impression is that none of the big companies in China are super deep in Open Source, just like all other Big Tech's. They use it and have some repos with software that doesn't affect their main product.
Also China is the opposite of Socialism. The workers don't have democratic power neither of their workplace nor of their state.

@ejim @blogdiva
Not to knowledgeable on the floss part, but very supportive of the latter: there is not much socialism, let all alone real communism to find in CCP China.
Therevis no power for the people and there are no commons or shared resources accessible to the people. Social safety nets are missing and health care and pensions are not very abundant.
Plain one-party authoritarianism and genocide (i.e. Tibet & Xinjiang) on the other hand are well established.

@ejim @blogdiva They may not be competitive with Intel, AMD, or ARM on performance, but China's Loongson CPUs and LoongArch instruction set (based on MIPS) are homegrown, and they wouldn't make sense to build if they couldn't port Linux to them.

I see lots of activity on the Linux Kernel Mailing List related to Loongson. The average tech company in China may not care about open source, but it's fundamental to the existence of projects like Loongson.

@blogdiva thank you for writing this thread. I learned a lot and you answered the questions I had and didn’t know I had!

@blogdiva wow. I just thought about this in terms of the Chinese being (relatively) compute-starved, hence putting a lot of effort into squeezing out every last iota of performance, rather than the techbro culture of “hardware will just get faster” and resting on their laurels.
But this has the strong ring of truth to it. Do you have further reading on this? Because I have had a bit of exposure to chinese culture, and am thinking of the practice of “keeping one’s own step”.

LLM papers have been STREAMING out of China for years. Of varying quality, but then a lot of the stuff to come out of Google/Meta?OpenAI have been downright jokes.

@blogdiva