No need to use a chinese provider, in case that's an issue for you. https://fireworks.ai provides this model for an ok price.
Without getting too much into politics; over the past several decades, one country is going around starting wars, regime changes and other interventionism, or initiating economic warfare (Huawei sanctions because they were getting too competitive to US companies; GPU restrictions; tariffs; etc), and that's not one administration: it's US policy over the past few decades.
People like to bring up the Uyghurs immediately, but never really have the same smoke for the US. Also, do we include the prison population in human rights? Do we include access to healthcare? What about systems perpetuating poverty like lack of access to public transportation?
To pre-emptively be clear on my stance or potential bias, I stand by no country in the world. I was born in Iran, and my parents left when I was young to the US because they believed in the American Dream. The irony being that the dominos of why they left were initiated by the US and UK. And long before Trump was elected, but certainly immediately afterwards, I decided to leave the US once I had the means. (Also because of the lack of public transit, the $100k medical bills after an accident, being punched by a homeless person, and having my possessions stolen repeatedly and the cops giving me a :shrug:). I moved to Japan, where I experienced blatant racism for the first time. I moved to Hong Kong (and tbh no real complaints so far), but I am technically subject to the freedom of speech constraints on China.
I have no allegiance to any country or specific people. My allegiance is to all living beings.
And I don't care if they're reputable, I will look at the methodology and make my own conclusion either way. Appeals to authority are not a substitute for critical thinking.
If they actually said something, it would be much less effective.
> We're not talking about a few % difference here.
How may freedom percent is it again? Do you lose 1% or 20% for failing to allow foreign ownership of utilities? How many percent do you gain for stopping Russian misinformation?
I'm not going to discuss it further if you don't have anything substantial to bring to the table.
Seriously - appeal to authority is a fallacy, unless it's an appeal to an authority that I happen to agree with? It's hard to take you seriously.
Right now, you're basically asking people to trust Human Rights Watch because you trust them. But if people don't trust you, why would they trust your word on what sources are legitimized?
No lessons to take from the US.
PS. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_interventions_by_the_U...
I know the US thinks only its citizens are human, so "The United States has been involved in hundreds of interventions in foreign countries throughout its history, engaging in nearly 500 military interventions between 1776 and 2026, with half of these operations occurring since 1950 and over 25% occurring in the post-Cold War period” is not probably part of the reputable storytelling
edit: wording
Yes, people have put thought into this. This is why I trust institutions and not random posters on the internet.
Just look at Russia - it's score is highest in the 90s - the most corrupt and destitute time in its modern history, also happens to be when it was deemed somewhat friendly to US and friends.
It's kinda like meeting someone on the street who's protesting about animal cruelty in slaughterhouses, slyly handing them a chart showing them the nutrition facts of beef, and then walking off without another word as though you've settled your case.
Like, I get the point you're trying to make, but I hope you're aware it's a non-sequitur in context?
Your hope should have been that amelius was not aware that it's a non-sequitur, because that is correctable. But then they kept posting and removed all doubt.
https://www.prisonstudies.org/world-prison-data/highest-lowe...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/sep/27/slavery-loop...
In Arkansas, agricultural work accounted for 17% of all prison labor assignments in 2021. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/Captive_L...
17% of prison assignments might be 3 assignments for all I know.
I found a number in your document: "...1.2 million people incarcerated in state and federal prisons, over 65 percent work."
That's 780,000.
And there's 163 million working folks in the USA.
Prisoners power .4% of the economy.
Your whole argument about the percentage overall economy is nonsensical because most of the US economy is not actual productive economy. It's ephemeral stuff like service industry, entertainment, and software development. Obviously, you're not going to force prisoners to go on Joe Rogan podcasts. But when it comes actually producing things, 17% of the industry being done by slave labor is obviously very significant.
> oh please, the US economy literally runs on slavery
Also
> 17% of the industry being done by slave labor is obviously very significant.
That's not what the stat says. It says 17% of the prison labor did that job, not that 17% of the labor for that job was prisoners.
Here's the quote for ya:
"...agricultural work constitutes a greater percentage of work assignments, such as in Arkansas, where 17 percent of job assignments for incarcerated people were in agricultural work in 2021."
But tell me again how I'm nonsensical.
> Have you ever wondered why Manus founders gave up billions of dollars from Meta and “voluntarily” moved back to Beijing?
This country wouldn't be such a shithole if we were able to bring the wealthy to heel. I suspect most people on earth see China as the more competently governed country. Understandably, this forum tends to select for people who view private investment positively, but this is clearly insufficient by itself to produce functional societies.
boy oh boy, if you think the US doesn't do anything in the shadows. The last 100 years of world geopolictical history would beg to disagree
Assange, Snowden, Manning, just three of many and the massive things that came from that? And god knows what Musk & friends are up to.
Talk about being completely brainwashed by the US narrative and oblivious of recent history.
Only thing is they aren't clear on the SOC2 certification. Am I being naive?
Thank you. I've been shouting this very obvious thing from rooftops
I work in silicon valley and I feel everyone around me is suffering from China-BAD psychosis and dismiss Chinese releases
[0] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash
(The badges next to companies indicate their privacy terms, i.e. green/yellow/red)
The "green" badges explicitly say the opposite:
> "Private: this provider does not train on prompts and does not retain prompt data."
I.e. for the example of Fireworks, this is the precise language they use to describe ZDR:
> "More technically: prompt and generation data exist only in volatile memory for the duration of the request. If prompt caching is active, some prompt data (and associated KV caches) can be stored in volatile memory for several minutes. In either case, prompt and generation data are not logged into any persistent storage."
https://docs.fireworks.ai/guides/security_compliance/data_ha...
Plus only one country has threatened to annex mine and it wasn't China.
The economic sovereignty of any nation, but especially smaller ones like canada and denmark, is harmed by sending our money out of the country when there are options available in country.
I respectfully disagree. I subscribe to the comparative advantage economic principle, so I'm fine with international trade.
The 'clean power' would factor in a well, but I haven't really looked in to it. I know China is installing a ton of renewable and has a carbon market while Canada's building a new pipeline and building Alberta data centres running on natural gas, so I'm not willing to take on faith that switching is cleaner.
Also, re: power. I said canada has lots of cheap power, clean was your word.
The unfortunate truth behind at least the solar PV boom in China is that it's driven in large part by the exploitation of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang region. One of the reasons they can sustain the pace they're going at is because while nowadays PV modules exports increasingly gravitate towards offshore fabs (Vietnam, Malaysia), domestically all the biggest PV players make full use of modern slavery within Xinjiang's re-education camps.
more on the topic: https://www.shu.ac.uk/-/media/home/research/helena-kennedy-c...
It might be a minor nitpick, but that part is just not how the macroeconomic principle works. Abundance of a good/service within a country is irrelevant to the concept of a comparative advantage - this is counter-intuitive but but that was David Ricardo's entire point. It's not about whether production is more efficient domestically, it's whether comparative allocation of resources between multiple countries is more efficient by specialization within the different goods.
Even if you can produce "good 1" cheaper in Country A vs Country B, if Country A can instead produce "good 2" that Country B cannot, it's better for Country A to produce "good 2" domestically and import "good 1".
Now, I still agree with the original notion. It's unnecessarily risky to use services from "democratically-challenged" nations (especially imperialist ones), when safer options are available. But there's no need to twist macro 101 concepts to justify that view. Modern trade policy takes more into account than basic market efficiency.
As someone who's in the market for Canadian inference (data sovereignty reasons), the pickings are slim for DSF 4.1 man.
(But I'd concede that in the field of genocide China doesn't come up as bad)
I feel like I’m getting good value out of my subscription and they have the cheapest GLM-5.3 API rates I could find in Europe. I moved to them recently from Mistral for the better prices.
They do have a slightly different daily inference capacity allowance, but it’s actually not too bad once used to it. I was forced to up my game and figure out what GLM-5.3 Flash and Deepseek-4.1 Flash could actually do for me, rather than just throwing everything at GLM-5.3. Quite happily chugging along with a nice balance across them now.
I am hoping Melious make the new DS 4.1 Flash 1017 available soonest.