It's interesting to see how defensive some of these pro-China posters get on HN and elsewhere. I'm genuinely curious why there seems to be an inferiority complex here with respect to America/American companies.
> Xiamoi is some random chinese company not known for high end chips and was able to catch up impressivly in a short period of time
Xiamoi is a huge company and is a commonly known brand. They’ve been making chips for a long time. They didn’t start a few months ago and catch up with Apple on their first try.
That might be the funniest thing I read all day. Xiaomi is a massive company that makes all sorts of things, including a lot of pretty high-end mobiles, and has an annual revenue in the order of 75 billion US.
It’s no Apple, but it’s not exactly “some random Chinese company” either.
Intereresting point I will try to see if i can find more about it. I would assume apple has a lot more magic sause than just TSMCs best node and a little bit of ARM architecture addons.
And exactly how far ahead has Apple been since 2010 or so? That’s why you would assume that. ARM designs have different constraints than Apple’s designs.
Are they well known in China? I'm seeing that Chinese tech has decoupled from the West. They have all this cool stuff that we do not hear about because they aren't selling it to us because they don't need to. It's usually been stuff with better price to performance or ultra low prices though, rather than ultimate performance stuff. I wouldn't be surprised if they made a top end chip that everyone in China knew about, and we didn't.
I think for a while it was because they had a superior user experience that would compound with the more Apple products you acquired.
That, combined with sleek marketing and a good eye for product design, and building what was the best smartphone by far (IMO) in the world at the time it was first released, snowballed into Apple becoming the behomoth it is today.
I remember in 2018 they didn't have widgets, had like 3 different apps that had bugs, the swiping was slow after disabling animations, and everyday I was told I had to update.
And in 2018 the Pixel 2 was the Android flagship with 3 years of updates promised, with a Snapdragon 835 that was half the single thread speed of the corresponding A11 and slower in multicore with two extra cores.
Remember (not that long ago) when Apple was years ahead of ARM on performance, had vastly better support windows for their hardware and vastly better UI and UX? It is just that today Android has mostly caught up if not surpassed on a phone basis, but e.g. we still see a better ecosystem of iPhone + Watch with Apple, as well as between users.
They'd still have strong models without distillation, but strong enough to challenge frontier models and to claim the meaningful market share that they have? Probably not.
Or, they can figure out something else out? I recall couple years ago when China didn't have enough GPUs (still don't?), DeepSeek team figured out how to train with less computing. IIRC they made Mixture of Experts mainstream and made really optimized kernels and clever use of PTX instruction set.
The site has .eu domain. Every freaking site in the world has to annoy 8bn people to accept or reject cookies because EU passed a a law that can cost you a lot of money if you ignore that.
two reasons that I am moderately confident in: 1) I really want something open source, but most importantly, 2) I want something easy.
My experience trying to get Discord and/or Slack to work was painful for 1 agent, let alone the potential for hundreds.
Here's the perfect example of the power of Buzz: there was some hype today about Grok Bot so i wanted to spin it up. I did, and within like 3 minutes, I had a Grok Bot talking to my other agents in Buzz, and Buzz is definitely not a supported plugin.
Plenty of American cities have this. I have three big grocery stores within a 2-7 minute walk. Myriad restaurants, bakeries, and cafes literally on the same block and within walking distance of me.
Vancouver is great, just wanted to call out the bias and massive overgeneralization in your statement.
And yet many people continue to choose to live in the US or actively try to immigrate here. "Most livable" is highly subjective and such rankings are but one lens to evaluate where to live.
Unfortunately there is no such thing as utopia and there are always pros and cons.
That would imply they created their hacker news account when they were 3-8 years old. Seems unlikely.
Its more likely that they simply value all the convenience they listed over having their own backyard, larger living space, living in a quiet safe neighborhood for kids to run around in, and being surrounded by nature.
One key difference that jumps out at me between various cities in Japan and Vancouver is that the COL seems significantly better in Japan. When I visited Vancouver I couldn't afford to stay in or even near the city, I had to find a place about 20 minutes away and even then it was pricey. Whereas in Japan I had no problem finding affordable stays in city centers in all of the major cities I visited, including Tokyo.
I will admit my ignorance here however and acknowledge there are likely myriad other variables at play here that I'm not considering.
Affordable to you or affordable to the locals? The yen has devalued a lot in the past decade or so, giving foreigners a lot more spending power in Japan and causing the current tourism boom and backlash.
Still affordable to locals. The yen has devalued, and the cost of mansions (condos) have gone up, but single family homes, small apartments, etc are still similarly priced to buy, and rent is generally stable. A major difference is that if you are OK with a tiny apartment, you can get one, and it'll be something you can pay.
You can definitely see affects of the poor economy lately (lots of pawn shops popping up, replacing expensive cafes/restaurants), but housing is still reasonable for now.
The weak yen has certainly made Japan feel much cheaper for foreign visitors in recent years. But even before that, the general price level was lower than in many Western cities.
Also, if you're trying to save money as a local, moving just 3–4 train stops away often makes a noticeable difference in rent or hotel prices.
As a visitor, it's probably impossible to know the real cost of living is in different areas, because you're not employed locally, paid local wages, or paying rent and utilities. You are a foreigner with foreign money staying in hotels.
