upvote
I'd rather my data go to China and directly to labs that release open weight models (DeepSeek is MIT licensed still); instead of closed labs and the NSA/CIA; who has far better ability to hurt me than China does.

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.

reply
reply
This number reports, basically, how good it is to live inside a country, while the comment that you are replying to is entirely a list of foreign policy complaints (regime changes, etc).

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?

reply
> 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.

reply
have a look at everywhere at the human cost of what the orange man is doing depending on his morning coffee. much better to send data to china than to US right now.
reply
Why link to a number, which means roughly nothing, instead of the specific details on the countries you're trying to compare? I have no idea how to break down or make my own assessment of what 0.83 or 0.18 means. Does that 0.83 for the US include all of the people being shipped off without due process to El Salvador, or do they count that as part of El Salvador's Human Right Index?

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.

reply
Sorry but you're arguing against a reputable institution here.
reply
I'm not arguing against a reputable institution, I'm arguing against using that reputation + their final number alone without going through the process to verify the methodology myself, which you didn't link to. You only showed the conclusion, which to all of us, should mean very little until we look into how that number was arrived at.

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.

reply
We're not talking about a few % difference here. If you want to look into it then fine, but you have to come up with some really good evidence if you think you can debunk anything here.
reply
We're talking about the country that has tried multiple times to destroy their country, look up Mossadegh for the 1950s and check out the glorious bombing of a school for 2026.

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

reply
There's absolutely nothing in those numbers to argue against. They are simply providing fluffy quantitative declarations in order for people who don't even claim any particular knowledge or even understanding of the details of the metric (such as yourself) to argue from authority.

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?

reply
The metric was carefully crafted by a group of experts as means of communicating a complicated topic.

I'm not going to discuss it further if you don't have anything substantial to bring to the table.

reply
'experts' lmao. Your entire argument boils down to an appeal to authority fallacy.
reply
That fallacy does not apply here as the authority is legitimate and relevant.
reply
That's just your opinion, not fact.
reply
Eric Cartman is that you?
reply
Yes! By all means, let us appeal to authority and use institutions' reputations to shut down any discussion, rather than thinking about what these figures actually mean, what criteria they're based on, or how well they reflect reality.

edit: wording

reply
An institution mostly funded by the governments it happens to rank highly, and the open society foundation that's owned by George Soros, a man who's been obsessed with overthrowing China's government since the 80s. https://www.v-dem.net/about/funders/
reply
They're not arguing against the institution. They're arguing against the metric .
reply
Yeah but the metric was invented by that reputable organization and given the enormous difference it's not worth any discussion unless they come up with something good in which case they should probably publish about it.
reply
If you don't want to have a discussion don't post pointless metrics that you don't even understand.
reply
They are arguing for you using your brain instead of tethering it to a number.
reply
No he's arguing against your arguments and winning.
reply
lol the US was a .60 in 1789 during slavery. this chart is useless.
reply
The reason the US scores a 0.6 in 1789 comes down to how composite data is aggregated and the global baseline of the 18th century.

Yes, people have put thought into this. This is why I trust institutions and not random posters on the internet.

reply
Is WHO a reputable institution? And was it reputable between 2019-2022?
reply
The reason that US and its allies/friendlies always score high on these kinds of ratings while their enemies/adversaries always score low is because these institutions and 'experts' are directly funded by and beholden to these countries/interests.

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.

reply
reply
How much of the US economy is powered by prisoners?
reply
Depends on the sector. For example, in California's large-scale wildfire responses, forced prison labor in firefighting acts as an important auxiliary force. https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/los-angeles-firefighters-...

In Arkansas, agricultural work accounted for 17% of all prison labor assignments in 2021. https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/media/publications/Captive_L...

reply
That doesn't answer at all.

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.

reply
The biggest problem with this is that I can't run my company's own internal benchmarks against this API, because they will be trained into the next version of the model, making them worthless.
reply
Have you ever wondered why Manus founders gave up billions of dollars from Meta and “voluntarily” moved back to Beijing? One country does things out in the open, while the other operates in the shadows. The latter worries me more.
reply
It worries me far more what people are ok with us doing in broad daylight.

> 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.

reply
You mean the project that literally had an anus as its mascot? Wasn’t that a joke project? Maybe the government was admonishing them for naming their company “man-anus”
reply
You are not really narrowing it down
reply
This is really a roundabout way of saying you have no plans to live, or perhaps even travel, to China.
reply
To add to this, Fireworks (and many competitors, e.g. enumerated here[0]) offer zero-data retention inference, to anyone. DeepSeek cloud does not. It's part of their terms that anything you send them is fair game for them to train models on.

[0] https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4.1-flash

(The badges next to companies indicate their privacy terms, i.e. green/yellow/red)

reply
It’s pretty clear despite what they want you to think Anthropic and OpenAI train on everyone’s data who has a subsidized plan. Only way you get ZDR is by paying API prices. Also note that it is zero retention, not zero training.
reply
> "Also note that it is zero retention, not zero training"

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...

reply
deleted
reply
I figure (hope) buying from DeepSeek directly benefits them the most so they can release even more improvements and open-weight models.

Plus only one country has threatened to annex mine and it wasn't China.

reply
Assuming canadian or dane, but maybe there are other places he’s threatened. There are canadian inference providers running deepseek, and definitely eu ones idk about ones based in denmark.

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.

reply
> 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.

reply
What I am saying isn’t inconsistent with comparative advantage. International trade is fine, but only when it’s not a commodity easily obtained inside your own nation. Open model inference is a commodity. There is no real lost opportunity cost from using canadian owned GPUs or chinese owned ones. In fact, as a country with abundant cheap power, and physical space, canada’s probably a better place than many to run inference. That’s what I meant by “when there are options in country”.
reply
I hear you, but as I said, I hope that buying from Deepseek gets more Deepseek. Maybe they get the same amount (or more) from a Canadian provider, and if so I might reconsider.

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.

reply
Fair point. Personally i don’t see value in closed models, be they chinese or american. So, it’s pretty much against my religion to pay the model creator to provide inference. Even a situation where model makers license models to providers seems better than deepseek hosted deepseek provided models.

Also, re: power. I said canada has lots of cheap power, clean was your word.

reply
RE: clean power - China is by far the biggest leader in getting renewables off the ground, but they are also still comfortably the biggest polluter, so it's difficult to compare.

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...

reply
>International trade is fine, but only when it’s not a commodity easily obtained inside your own nation

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.

reply
[flagged]
reply
It surely does. Official DeepSeek provider logs and trains off your data.
reply
China has annexed (or it claims so) several countries already, so it sounds like you're only concerned with yourself - probably not what you wanted to achieve.

(But I'd concede that in the field of genocide China doesn't come up as bad)

reply
deleted
reply
If one is not American, why prefer American? Chinese fine by me, I trust the US providers just as little.
reply
There's also European providers for these models. More than one!
reply
There's even a European OpenRouter competitor

https://www.edenai.co/

reply
Thanks, i didn't know about these guys. Is their pricing competitive?
reply
Could you recommend me a few?
reply
I’ll add Melious.[1]

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.

[1] https://melious.ai

reply
Scaleway, Mistral, Lyceum, Verda, Silo AI, Siili, Upcloud, CSC, Gcore, Nebius...
reply
I haven't found that Mistral serve DS.
reply
They do not yet. They are testing it but they go with GLM right now.
reply
Which ones? And how is the price?
reply
I support people making choices with full knowledge of what they are doing and what the consequences are, as much as it is possible. What I oppose is making choices without such knowledge.
reply
There are multiple others in EU, and in US. Cheaper, more expensive, slower, faster. So much choice.
reply
Completely unrelated, but it's so odd to see upside down '8's in the first column of the base tables on their pricing page.
reply
The link points to OpenRouter with multiple providers.
reply