It seems every DeepSeek paper/patent has a huge number of authors, and this one is no exception. They couldn't even fit everyone on the page, there are 31 others not shown. This could be an asset protection strategy (i.e., human assets). Imagine if there were only 3 authors. Those authors may get hired away by competitors. If you list every employee on every paper then competitors don't know who to lure away.
Because if they get you to dismiss or not care about what nonAmerican AI companies are doing maybe people won't see that they are innovating in public. So they can continue smear campaigns that China is simply stealing everything and that's all they do. So the average person will be relieved when the govt moves to regulate away competition from us AI companies and labs. Horray
I don't know the original intentions, but I don't feel it's anti Chinese just by itself.
It could be pro-Chinese if you frame it like they give merit to anyone involved, or that they take care of their most valuable employees (maybe they pay them another way), or whatever.
Or just observant of how Chinese labs publish their stuff. (Not sure if it's always like that I haven't take a look at the number of authors in this type of publications. Or at least I can't remember it.)
You need to tighten up your tinfoil hat. When HN features all the discussions on OpenAI's shenanigans on Navier-Stokes, you weren't seeing claims this was anti-US.
> Why is this the top comment? Many of the comments, as well as this one, have no relation to content and only mention a triviality
This is hardly a triviality. If you are interested in a topic and you find a paper interesting, more often than not you are interested in reaching out to the author.
If a paper features a list of authors that outnumber the paper's pages 10-to-1, it's a major red flag, and it's quite plausible and expectable that 99%of the names in that list had zero input and might even have zero contribution to give to the topic. I'd even argue it's a kin to academic fraud.
By the way, the same goes for those researchers who work on paper mills, and manage to rake in production metrics that go well beyond an article per day.
If you're confused about who to contact to follow up on the ideas of a particular paper then write to the first author, or whichever author is listed as the contact person. This is not hard and is an orthogonal consideration to the length of the author list.
Corresponding author is the head of the group, usually the one who coordinates the study, the one who knows everyone else. Is the "if you have any question about anything in this paper, contact me" person, even years after publication.
I miss the YOLO (CNN computer vision model) days where one dude can publish a paper, completely disregard academic conventions, and yet push the field forward by leap and bounds.
Yea those days were cool. Shame he quit doing research once he realized the biggest application for his work was killing people with robots I guess. It was a nice period of time. Before everyone in industry realized the cool stuff they were building was likely only going to be used to surveil the public, target people, remove skilled labor, and probably develop new weapons (whether people call them that now or not isn't relevant). Good old days.
From the blog he linked to: "I’m going to try designing something way more ambitious."
This is how you end up with unnecessary complexity [1]. The best engineers don't aim for "designing something ambitious", instead they come up with the simplest possible design. They take something that seems complex and make it simple.
Unfortunately that's not how engineers are evaluated [2].
"I am going to solve a complex problem" is a better goal. If you start with the goal of designing something ambitious then the design will likely end up more complex than necessary.
It might be because of happiness, ego, persona, and humility. All are very important factors we consider in establishing our identity, our self.
But because of time, we all have to consider the value of our own time. AI forces you to look in the mirror, and reflect.
Don't be afraid to change: use first principles thinking and broaden your perspective about yourself. Your station, your position in your own mind has changed due to AI. It's easier to think AI will just go away: and our egos and personas can remain unchanged. We'll be back to where we were, and everything we knew about value will be right where it was.
It usually doesn't work that way, and you usually don't do yourselves any favors in being so rigid and stuck in the old way of thinking about yourself. Keep up with the times, but balance your health and happiness.
In the last few decades, there has been an increased interest in the role of prediction in language comprehension. The idea that people predict (i.e., context-based pre-activation of upcoming linguistic input) was deemed controversial at first. However, present-day theories of language comprehension have embraced linguistic prediction as the main reason why language processing tends to be so effortless, accurate, and efficient.
Does that mean the language(s) we speak determine how intelligent we are? Could learning French, for example—often considered a more expressive language—make a native English speaker more intelligent or even more compassionate?
Why is this limited to groceries? I don't want to pay a different price than others for any category of item, not just groceries.
Should gyms be able to charge me more based on my weight? Should airlines charge me more because they know I need to travel urgently? Should pharmacies charge me more for medication because they know I have a chronic condition? Should an online retailer charge me more because my browsing history suggests I'm willing to pay a premium? Should insurance companies charge me more because they know I'm unlikely to shop around?
you already do pay a price difference for many categories of items, insurance is a big one... where you live, how old you are, gender, etc
it used to be the norm with health insurance until the ACA dropped discrimination for chronic conditions
airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
online retailers very often charge people more, there are hundreds of factors now... but one funny case was mac users getting redirected to more expensive hotels by travel sites
car insurers will raise premiums for people who haven't switched recently, I had to switch every 6 months for a couple years until one of them just stopped hiking prices around renewal
dynamic pricing is very very prevalent, but doing it on food (like health insurance before it) is particularly egregious
> airlines charge more if you're too large to fit your seat
I don't think this is a good example, because you're literally using more of the product that's being sold. I get where you're coming from but this one doesn't seem to really reinforce the point you are trying to make. It's like selling by weight or something if you wanted to compare it to groceries.
well there are valid and invalid examples, I don't think you could have a blanket rule that covers everything
with the airline seat example some could argue that they have health reasons beyond their control and it's not their fault that airline seats are so small (they really are smaller than ever)
another example are stories of electricians charging more to people who want EV chargers installed because they already paid a premium to buy the EV, contractors will often bump up their prices if a house looks nicer, etc... these sort of biases have been rampant everywhere for a long time
> another example are stories of electricians charging more to people who want EV chargers installed because they already paid a premium to buy the EV.
I've heard people work around this by getting a plug-in charger instead of hardwired. They get a 14-50 plug put in saying it is for a welder for their home workshop or for an electric range or an RV hookup for when their parents visit or something like that. A clothes dryer outlet works too, but usually won't support as many amps.
All those, except the clothes dryer, still do give some indication you probably are reasonably well off or have well off parents at least, so might invite some gouging.
> another example are stories of electricians charging more to people who want EV chargers installed because they already paid a premium to buy the EV, contractors will often bump up their prices if a house looks nicer, etc... these sort of biases have been rampant everywhere for a long time
I think this is a more concerning problem and it's tough to tackle but I'd also say don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We can do some things to start with which I think would capture a lot of the downsides of these pricing models.
There is charging more because your costs are higher (most of your examples), then there is charging more because of opportunism. Insurance is customized because the costs are higher. That's fine.
Taking advantage of your personal circumstances that is unrelated to cost to charge you more--especially when it is hidden from you--is what is bad and should be illegal.
If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices? (Not for selling a house, but selling ordinary stuff to them).
If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
If you take charging higher grocery prices for richer people to its furthest point, you could end up with a system where every item costs Y% of their assets and the utility of a dollar is reduced the more you have. In effect, this would eliminate the relative value of having more money. For example, eggs could be priced at 0.02% of total assets, which means a poorer person with $2000 pays 40 cents, and a richer person with $1M pays $200.
Now, would this go to its furthest point? Probably not, but it has the same, but smaller, effect of reducing the utility of money for richer people.
In some scenarios, this actually might make sense. For example, in Finland, they use the day fine system where traffic ticket fines are based on the violator's daily disposable income. It's useful because this is a scenario where you want the punishment to feel equivalent to all income levels.
For groceries, I don't think this should apply, because I think we would not want the act of purchasing food to equally punish all levels of wealth.
This really becomes a philosophical discussion of defining price gouging and immoral market techniques. Some are clearly gouging, such as charging 2x plane fares for someone who has to fly to a funeral, or tripling the price of supplies after a natural disaster. Some are less clear.
That system would still have fixed prices that are the same for everyone, just in relative terms instead of absolute. It's the same as a "normal" economy with perfectly equal wealth. It would also break down if people can give each other money but that's a different problem.
The problem is surveillance pricing uses a different percentage for each person to maximally exploit them. When the store thinks a person is hungry it will charge them 1% instead of 0.02 in your scale free economy, or $20 instead of 0.40 in our world. That's not fair no matter how you put it, and it's only possible in a big corp dominated market with no real competition.
> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
I think so, because perhaps your costs to distribute those products is more too. But what I don't think you should be able to do is say, well your house was $50mm and your house was $1mm so you pay much more. Or you're wearing Air Force Ones so maybe your price is just a little more wink wink. It's a bit like hyper-targeted advertising versus general advertising.
> If I'm posting something for sale on Craigslist, and I don't put a price, is it OK if I quote different prices to different people who text me?
I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.
> I think so as well. I don't see a problem with this - you don't know anything (maybe besides a green/blue text) anything about the buyer, how much they make, &c.
Going with the Craigslist scenario, what if I do? What if I quote different prices depending on the area code of their phone number? So I quote higher prices for people with a California number?
I'm not asking about morality or ethics. Does it make sense to make this scenario (Craigslist ad) illegal?
I take issue with this type of argument, because it ignores that scale is the _core_ part of the problem.
Equating "an individual selling on craigslist prices based on area code" with "Albertsons buys petabytes of individual private data and prices groceries based on income" is IMO not valid. Yes the very very core -borderline philosophical- question is the same. But the _scale_ is what makes it the problem.
It's the same argument I heard a few times "Why is flock a problem? My home driveway camera points at the street and sometimes I can read a license plate!"
So much like other laws / ordinances / provisions / etc. if regulation against this type of behaviors get enshrined, they should include thresholds for scale (which I believe the Seattle one does)
> is it OK to change your price because the responder is from an area that is mostly black? No, it's not.
That's only because that's enshrined in law. Discriminating based on wealth or geography is not. Nor is discriminating based on political party affiliation.
> Anything else leads to discrimination and other awful behaviors that we've had to pass laws to change.
Only in the most egregious of cases.
Keep in mind that discounts for seniors, veterans, medical workers, etc are all discriminatory. You're giving a different price between two groups. It's really the equivalent of listing the price as $100, and then charging $110 if you're not in one of those groups.
Everything is egregious. Private equity is buying up everything, and the only things it doesn't control are what big data got to first. Everything is owned by soulless amoral demons who never sleep.
Employers are mining data to find the exact minimum salary each candidate will accept.
Airlines are working to charge every customer the maximum they can stomach.
Landlords are using companies to fix prices while claiming they're not fixing prices.
Grocery stores want in on it. Healthcare wants in on it. Everything is doing what you claim the "most egregious cases" are.
Idk it seems like it's just different to me and we don't need to create a blanket rule that encompasses Craigslist. Why not just start with stores for example?
Not comparable. The markets can still charge wherever they want, but it needs to be priced per item and not per customer. In your house counterexample, you could set whatever list price you want.
How can price discovery work if everyone’s price is different? What downward pressure would even exist on surveillance-derived prices besides resale black markets? Societally, do we really want to further monetize the expansion of the mass surveillance state?
> If I'm selling to the wealthiest zip code, where the median house price is over $10M, should I be disallowed to charge higher prices?
Yes, you should be disallowed. Otherwise every online store will upcharge you based on IP. There can be exceptions for small businesses or individuals, but that's it.
I've looked into these before and they're often a monthly/annual SaaS that are either by a one-person company, or worse, something like AirTable that gets crazy price hikes out of nowhere (or shut down) that's a disaster for a small company. Place I worked already had Microsoft Office paid for so why move away from Access.
If it works for you then there is no need to switch. But Access is a desktop app, and in 2026 it is pretty unusual to use a desktop app for business applications. Also, Microsoft is no longer developing Access.
In 2026, Microsoft Access is still fully supported and bundled into Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscriptions. Back in 2014, I'd said to my employer that it's not going anywhere for at least a decade (and that they can fully ignore a report they'd received from the NDPB that oversaw their work that suggested Access might be at risk of disappearing)
>In 2026, Microsoft Access is still fully supported and bundled into Microsoft 365 Enterprise subscriptions.
Having a subscription is only a small part of the total cost. Access works best when combined with a bunch of VBS/macro scripts, which IT departments globally are trying very hard to stamp out completely. Access also needs its own set of permissions and manager of permissions since it can't inherit permissions from anywhere of the other usual Microslop security stores - at least, not without having its own developer/maintainer/champion on tap.
Not to mention the agreed wisdom that while Access is fantastic for rapid-prototyping applications/warehouses/ETL processes, any "permanent" DB/DBMS/solution worth doing in Access is worth doing in a 'proper' database with a proper front-end.
All true and yeah, I did discuss with my employer at the time about how they needed to think long term about migrating to SQL Server or MySQL/PostgreSQL with a web front-end. However, the giant IT contractor they were stuck with would only allow SQL Server and charge a fortune, and they didn't have the time/money/know-how to go anywhere with that. They were stuck with Access!
> Access works best when combined with a bunch of VBS/macro scripts...
You're thinking of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is interpreted inside of Access. The standalone Visual Basic Scripting (VBScript) is a completely different thing, and eliminating VBScript doesn't have any ramifications for Access.
As long as it has a significant number of users Microsoft will keep shipping it. But it is not getting significant new investment. If you are building a new application you're better off using Power Apps, Dataverse, SharePoint, Power Automate, etc.
On one side, I fully understand that. On the other side, if this really reflects the cost of compliance, maybe this is the only way to signal the voter that the "there ought to be a law" approach has some downsides to it.
Solution: you may put it on the receipt, but the price you advertise must be final all-in. Gas stations manage it just fine. Advertised price is what you pay, but receipt shows the taxes
How would you like it if you rented a VM from AWS, and in the bill they added fees for employee health insurance, social security and medicare? That's a cost of compliance too!
It is not just a matter of whether it is itemized or not. It is a matter of deception. They advertise one price then charge you another. So in the AWS example, you think you agreed to pay $20 per month for the VM, but when you get the bill it is $37 because they added fees for employee health insurance, social security and medicare. Would you not be pissed?
You can’t ban business from passing on their costs to their customers.
Australia just tried this by banning businesses from charging a card use surcharge.
You really reckon business aren’t going to then just wrap the cost of card service / merchant fees in to every product, thereby hurting those who pay with cash?
Hint: that’s exactly what businesses are doing. I know because I asked them.
Maybe stop voting for politicians who believe they can tax and regulate an economy to growth and productivity.
The credit card companies have long charged merchants a percentage to use their payment services. In Australia, Visa and Mastercard were typically charging their merchant customers lower rates than American Express -- on chatting with various smaller businesses who are not in a position to negotiate the percentage with AMEX down, AMEX wanted a couple percent more than Visa at approx 4% of the sale price. However in recent years, the customer never sees the full payment cost passed on to them, just a smaller percentage - at a guess 50 - 75 % (Hard to say, bigger companies can negotiate the cost down) of what the merchant pays for processing costs.
Here in Australia when ATM bank cards were introduced and then about the same time with the national Eftpos [1] system, I don't ever recall seeing [myself 1990 onwards] a credit card usage surcharge though Visa or Amex purchases - business were just happy to get those sales from people who might not otherwise have made a purchase.
IIRC it wasn't until the major banks went the way of phasing out plain debit cards (mid 00s) and replacing them with visa debit - where business started to go the route of using visa debit for processing instead of Eftpos, since nearly everyone would have a visa debit card, (I do not, my bank would not provide a Eftpos only,) these business started to pass along a processing fee. When it started to happen I can't say for sure, slow and insidious adoption of passing along the fee means I only recall those external to myself, like family and people I know complaining that various stores were now charging them when they used their card but other stores did not. One would have thought Eftpos fees but on closer inspection the payment was processed via visa ... I do not why some business were not using the Eftpos payment route any more, perhaps the processing system by way of credit services was easier or offered something extra.
Some people have since moved back to cash, even though some stores think they can refuse cash ... but unless the regulations under Credit act in Australia changed in the last 15 years, cash is still legal tender and a system must be in place to accept it - even if that means by way of a temporary account. There are elements in govt here though that would like to track people's spending better ... by banning cash.
A fee for a specific service (ie using a card vs using cash) is pretty different from unavoidable junk fees. As long as a fee like that is advertised up-front it's totally fine; but fees that everybody has to pay are a qualitatively different thing because they are just a way to get a misleadingly low sticker price for the product.
In the US we were well on the way to substantial national bans on these types of junk fees under the Biden administration's CFPB, Khan's FTC, etc and then Trump reversed everything a few months into his current term.
Being ripped off by large corporations at every transaction is what "owning the libs" looks like for your life in practice, but hey at least you can say slurs on twitter now!
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