Substack thrives because it's built a reputation for having well-reasoned or engaging voices in a newsletter format. They pushed a big campaign to onboard writers like Bill Bishop (Sinocism) onto the platform early on. Because of that, newer writers are likely seeking to tap into the network effects/discovery systems that comes with having big names on the platform.

People log onto Instagram, Tik Tok, X, etc. because the people they're interested are already on the platform, and the platform provides a recommendation system that allows newer "creators" to tap into an existing audience for others in their niche.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48938803

Points: 3

# Comments: 1

I do wonder if there’s some pluralistic ignorance going on, where travelers convince themselves it must be amazing because everyone else seems to think so.

It didn't give off the vibe of years of collected flavors; it was a thin broth and it didn't taste like much else other than beef broth from a fancy instant noodle packet and a ton of MSG (and to be clear, I'm normally a proponent of MSG but it genuinely was overdone here).

Maybe it really is just the volume that they're going through that's affecting the taste and composition, because they were doing decent business, but this was the biggest disappointment on my short visit to Bangkok.

[1] https://www.pixithq.com/

I didn't realize I could download a Shanghai apartment.

I would hope they return to their home countries with their expertise and start or join new competing frontier labs, similar to how Taiwan's homegrown semiconductor industry arose from US companies enforcing a bamboo ceiling on their Asian engineers. Taiwan was able to repatriate their nationals and make incredible compounding leaps in the semiconductor industry, to the loss and chagrin of the US. [1]

[1] https://www.npr.org/2022/10/07/1127595393/taiwan-miracle-sem...

On top of that, the cloud offering doesn't seem that well-run, they randomly blocked a colleague's API key for a couple days without any heads up, had a weird rate limiting bug and they have been deprecating models without redirects with very short notice, all while taking weeks to onboard new models. I assume some of these problems would be addressed if we had an SLA/enterprise contract.

It's a promising idea though. They offer a $5 trial credit (with an aggressive rate limit) though so no harm in trying it out.

I agree. This is a real problem in law enforcement. The issue is that while they're competing interests, my right to remain innocent should rationally supersede the deep profound desire for justice (but I recognize it rarely plays out this way).

The collaboration is informal. People don’t seem to realize this, but the Chinese internet for programmers and developers today feels a lot like StackExchange in its heyday. There’s a huge emphasis on sharing knowledge, because sharing what you know builds your profile, and becoming a rockstar in a subfield is one of the only ways to get ahead.

Competition in China is ruthless. But unlike in North America, where individuals are often bound by agreement to hoard knowledge because it can give them a competitive edge, the competitive advantage in China is building face and peer recognition. And that comes from proving that you are worthy of being a "master/teacher", and that extends to the valuation of your knowledge business. For example, the third wave coffee shops in China, the master roaster is often called "master/teacher" once they win a roasting competition and start sharing new knowledge of roasting in the public sphere, and that's a title of sincere respect.

You can see parallels with those that apply to give talks at conferences and post snazzy technical presentations they give in the US, but the bar for what qualifies as new knowledge is far higher in China because there's a massive ecosystem of people rushing to outcompete what you have to offer, and once the ball gets rolling on knowledge sharing, lots of people will go off and build upon that knowledge or try to build businesses on top of that, which in turn produces more knowledge.

Reading developer forums in China, once you crack the code (I find Gemini will get you a good chunk of the way with good translations), they are really quite far ahead with what they're willing to share. And I suspect in great part, the decision to release open-weights is heavily tied to that concept of building face/peer recognition = building valuations.