Makes me wonder what the value of a PhD is.

Mimo 2.5 pro is the best intelligence / dollar

The USA has an entire economic system to financialize your personal data and obfuscate your privacy. China can just sniff on their citizens API Calls, and use that to distill models.

Latinamerican here. When you talk about "adversarial country" I think of the USA (they can kidnap a president, kill people on boats without a trial, etc) and not China. YMMV for different regions.

If I spoke freely about how I feel about the US right now and the direct personal impact of policies implemented by the recent administration, I'd be denied entry into the country to visit friends later this year.

It is inconsequential if the US or China have my data, both will misuse it and I am powerless to protect myself from that fact.

Not using LLMs presents a bigger threat to my career than protecting my data.

Most Aussies aren't really worried about China... China remains our largest trading partner, and polling shows less than half of Australians think the AUKUS alliance (which includes the nuclear subs) makes our region safer.

Re Australia vs China

https://youtu.be/sgspkxfkS4k?si=JgnhenF0qeTZXeGS basically explains the situation.

While having data/code stolen isn't ideal, there is a certain point where you need to assume it's already out there. There's actually more probability of harm from shady US companies imo, because people are less suspicious about data sovereignty

As an Australian.. politically I need to worry about business data touching China. It will come up at a Risk Advisory Committee meeting as a serious issue.

In actual personal practice, no. China having my data presents no actual impact to me, America will do things that impact me.

Historically speaking, the US might even be a larger risk to Australia than China is. The US alliance goes back a long way, and so does the opposition to US influence. Since the Whitlam government, MPs are generally fearful of US retaliation, rendering much of our politics hostage to US influence. Of course, some PMs have openly embraced the US so this feeling isn't universal. But many of our issues are directly tied to the US.

China has been far more beneficial to Australia by comparison, with the downside being the encroaching influence of CCP propaganda. Many of our strengths are tied to our relationships with Southeast Asia.

Paul Keating has famously declared US as an "aggressive ally", "our colonial masters", AUKUS as our "worst international decision", and that "our future is in Southeast Asia". This was under Biden too.

So the situation is much more complicated, and the feelings on the ground right now is that the US are not our friends (of course, the CCP is not great either).

China is not digging through my social media in order to find a reason to cut my grant funding. China isnt going to pull me over for speeding in montana only to examine my phone to see whether i am maga enough to get off with a warning. And china isnt at o'hare security scanning for anyone with skin darker than freshly fallen snow. China may be evil, but it is a far away evil that doesnt have a physical impact on my day to day. The other evil is much closer to home. Even if it is not the biggest, the crocodile closest to the canoe is always more concerning than the one still on the bank.

> isn't your data being in more hands worse?

> Having data stolen is shitty

Fun fact: Deepseek can be hosted by third parties even yourself.

Cache hit rate dominates your total cost calculation for long agent session, and it largely depends on the provider. Deepseek's native deployment is probably much better than third party in this regard. For v4 pro it's a whopping >100x price difference between normal input vs. cached input tokens.

I am using Flash and accessing the API directly via vscode insiders and occasionally Zed (it's buggy but I keep coming back to it because I want it to succeed).

Unless you need enterprise multi-model management, I don't see the point in OpenRouter as it just adds cost overhead and you can just self-host an open router alternative (LiteLLM, Bifrost, etc). Running an LLM gateway locally is kind of nice as it allows you to normalize your configurations against your internal gateway - but I haven't really needed to.

Pro is substantially more expensive than flash. In addition, there's wide variance in price with DeepSeek themselves providing the cheapest tokens last I checked (but they train on them). Caching policy also varies by provider. TTL can be as low as 5 minutes or as high as 24 hours and reading from the cache might or might not reset the timer. Whether or not you get a hit makes (IIRC) a 10x (edit: it's actually 50x) price difference in the case of DeepSeek themselves.

> You should be safe in Australia since they actually need to be friends with China.

As a non-Australian, I enjoyed very much reading about Australia in a book by Tim Marshall titled "The Power of Geography". I didn't quite realize just how vulnerable they become with China's ambitions and expanse in the South Pacific due to their reliance on vital sea lanes for trade with its Asian partners. After reading that book, I can appreciate your comment much more.

> Using laws to ban competitors is just economic warfare thats all. Its got nothing to do with "national security"

Economic safety is 1 angle of national security. They're not "wrong".

What? Every country has the right to freely decide which companies are permitted to operate under its jurisdiction, and exercising that right isn’t “warfare” of any kind.