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Probably should point out that DeepSeek is owned by a Chinese hedge fund. They specialize in algorithmic trading. Can’t get much more capitalist than that. Very happy to see Chinese capitalists release an open source model. No doubt Altman and cronies will seek protection under the guise of national security. I guess free market competition is only good when you are not getting your arse kicked.

Awesome. More availability for the rest of us.

They do it because they can. They are squeezing every last drop out of their customers. Clueless people with roo much money won’t cancel. People who want to keep the product but are feeling the squeeze will go ad supported.

The rest were probably going to leave at any price as there is a lot more competition now and Netflix has adapted very poorly.

People either hop between services or go sailing wearing an eye patch or increasingly just so something else.

I think a lot of viewing time has been lost to social media, gaming and other alternatives. Don’t know if most people these days have the attention span for day long binges with their phones going off every few minutes and the FOMO. I can handle sitting in a room watching a movie with someone with them looking at their phone for half of it

That was obvious.

Option 1: a nation of predominantly anti-intellectual xenophobes organically discover a foreign language community and embrace it or option 2: a bunch of influencers from an existing platform are recruited to promote a competitor to a bunch of addicts looking for another fix. Social and mainstream media universally promoted the incorrect narrative.

I wish US citizens didn’t look so much to authoritarian states like Russia and China when they have old friends who they worked and faught alongside for years. These friends have been happily enjoying the benefits of social democracy despite an onslaught of anti-democratic propaganda, much of it from US citizens and their media.

Which brings me to the other narrative that pisses me off. That Chinese media are a national security threat but Meta and X are not. Lets be real. It is all the same shit. Any organized effort to manipulate mass opinion: politics disguised as religion, social media, conspiracy theories, cults etc have the potential to derail rational political debate, elevate populists and hand the keys to a generalissimo and it always leads to mass graves. Left or right doesn’t change the outcome which is shit. We all have to take some responsibility to fight back against this influence. Engage with people who are sucked into this shit and encourage them to disconnect.

I have been using PayPal increasingly for online payments. Not sure why. I have heard old stories about PayPal but Honey seems really bad. Its basically a given that any fintech company are going to be dodgy scammers but PayPal seemed almost grown up and respectable. Guess not.