thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]

The big jump with Deepseek honestly is the cost. Deepseek isn’t like better than the cutting edge Western models, it’s basically on par. The key is it cost 20 times less to train. Deepseek cost around $5 million, whilst gpt-4 was around $100 million.

Can’t wait to have all my sins wiped by participating in the sack of St. Louis.

It’s like eurodollars 2.0, huh. Interesting.

Completely untrue, yes. This was a rumour going around in mid-April in China, but it was debunked by Chinese financial media and the state bank. https://finance.eastmoney.com/a/202504183381053098.html

Love the username, but yeah I agree. It’s well agreed that DPRK hackers are some of the best in the world. They’ve robbed literally billions of dollars of crypto, and even publications like the Economist have admitted that DPRK hackers are top tier.

North Korea has several strengths. One is talent. This could appear counterintuitive: the country is desperately poor and ordinary citizens have severely restricted access to the internet or even computers. But “North Korea can take the best minds and tell them what to do,” says Kim Seung-joo of the school of cybersecurity at Korea University in Seoul. “They don’t have to worry about them going to work at Samsung.” At the International Collegiate Programming Contest in 2019, a team from a North Korean university came eighth, beating those from Cambridge, Harvard, Oxford and Stanford.

Per https://www.economist.com/asia/2025/03/19/why-are-north-korean-hackers-such-good-crypto-thieves

Why the fuck do they think this will work? The last “ground offensive” ended when Yemen blew up some Saudi oil processing facilities and the Saudis realised their infinite money machine was now threatened. Since then (2019), Yemen’s missile and drone capabilities have gotten so good that they’ve unilaterally shut down the Red Sea for shipping. What the fuck do they think will happen when they turn that machine back to Saudi oil targets???

Crypto is like gold but if gold was the hallucination of a tech bro and the “mining” of gold was continuous rather than a one time deal and if gold was not shiny or pretty and used for objects of great beauty

Yeah I think that’s the right level of existential risk to the system we’re talking about here. Clearly we have reached new paradigm time, and how that contradiction is resolved who knows. But at the end of the day it’ll just be capitalism 8.0 or whatever. The system will not collapse without our doing, unfortunately. It needs a push or it’ll just reconfigure to capitalism but even worse.

Oh no doubt, this shit is still funny as hell

As fun as it is to watch the S&P500 tank, this unfortunately does nothing to destroy capitalism. Like capitalism predates stock markets, and there’s nothing inherent about capitalism that requires finance like this. The name of the game is changing, but it’s still the same game at the end of the day. Capitalism is not in crisis like it was post-WWI, only the current iteration of neoliberal globalized supply chains is staring down the barrel of a gun. No amount of big guy bumbling about not knowing wtf a tariff is and destroying the economic basis of the post-war global order is going to radically alter the capitalist structure writ large, unfortunately.

The current protests against Erdogan aren’t even like the third largest protests he’s had to face. Not his first rodeo. The watermelon seller will be fine.

Per Reuters: “CK Hutchison will not sign deal to sell strategic Panama ports next week, sources say”

Looks like the Chinese threats against CK Hutchinson, and their directives to state owned enterprises to cease business with CK Hutchinson in response to them potentially signing this deal, might have worked their magic.