China (meaning the Chinese government specifically, not the people of course) is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the developed West in general including Canada and Europe, not just the U.S. I don't exactly like this and would certainly prefer that this wasn't the case, but we can't exactly ignore the facts. This matters when we choose whom to rely on for things like certain hosted third-party services, including AI inference. GP's stance actually makes a lot of sense from this POV, even though it's just as true that many Chinese folks are doing wonderful work on open-weight local AI.

China has never threatened war against my country; America has. Between the two, it’s clearly safer to lean towards the Chinese options if EU ones aren’t available.

That’s incredibly naïve.

More naive than blithely blowing off threats of war?

Meh, people have their own interests and values. And you can't force people to spend money no matter how much you may disagree with them

Bring on the Chinese, fuck the Americans.

Americans hating on the Chinese for doing to them what they did to the rest of the world for 50 years.

Just without the bombs part.

How so?

Nothing but Love for China.

"the developed west" is not really a thing. its not a alliance like the eu just a description for some countries. a lot of them are split over china and its a major political issue in places like poland or germany. the only country where all parties treat china like the enemy is the united states, and thats just because theres only two major ones and both listen to corporations instead of their voters. the eu as a organization is a rival to china (not enemy) with all the special duties and import restrictions but thats just economic self interest and not every member is on board. when you ask the average person i think like 80 percent either dont care or think relations should be more friendly. if you ask people under 25 its basically everyone.

I hate to be the one to tell you this but things changed rather quickly when they elected a clown dictator, and now the US is widely considered to be a low-key geopolitical rival to the 'developed West in general' (blergh) including Canada and Europe ...

Seriously, even if you manage to elect someone capable ever again, the US can't be trusted to not elect someone worse than a toddler again in 4 years. In fact, you can't even be trusted to not elect someone even worse than your current dictator (if you thought it couldn't get worse, Trump isn't the bottom of the barrel by far).

You're giving up the rest of your country to a geopolitical rival from a separate region, in a separate hemisphere with smiling expansionist goals, even allowing armed Chinese security to protect Chinese installations in country. So why not give the rest of your country to China.

It will help them get a good flank on the USA such that even when that temporarily embarrassed country gets a leader you, and the rest of the world do like, it will be too late to do anything.

A perfect definition of cutting off your nose to spite your face laid bare for all to see.

The US under Trump is politically and strategically almost identical to China, and can be trusted about the same.

And then, compared to China, the US acts overtly hostile: threatening us with war, starting a war in order to collapse energy supplies outside of the US. Opportunistic beyond even China, much more hostile.

Will the US even be a democracy in two years? Is it now?

Nah man, balancing between China and the US is the only thing a smaller country can do in order not to be crushed

"Temporarily embarassed" doesn't even begin to describe what's happening down there.

We have an American neighbour actively funding and amplifying a formerly extremely fringe separatist movement in Alberta -- shades of the Donbas, North American edition --and a US "ambassador" who has the behaviour of a 4chan troll.

The bridge has been blown up. Americans might think they are a midterm election away from salvation, but we're on the whole not so naive.

No, a rational decision based on a crazy man in the US. The US needs to learn, that if it threatens its traditional allies, they go to work with china, the main competitor of the US. If the US wants it allies back, the tariffs have to go, and the childlike rhetoric and threats as well. If not, china _deserves_ the business of the US former allies.

Right, and we're not just watching the behaviour of the US administration, we're watching the behaviour of the electorate / populace. At the polling booths but also in online comment sections, as tourists, consumers, etc.

And mostly not liking what we see. Encouraged by the No Kings protests, but unless that boils over into a hegemonic and stronger opposition, it still seems like there's a 40% population there that can't deal rationally with the world inside their own border, let alone outside.

Also... When Biden took over after Trump's first term most of the protectionist policies stayed and foreign policy didn't really budge (outside of support for Ukraine). I expect similar if (big if) the Democrats regain executive power.

I've been using z.ai and codex latest models since last September. Each release has been an improvement.

codex handles longer sessions but the quality seems to decline and it tends to over engineer and lose focus. It will happily add slop on top of slop...which may pass immediate tests of "code works" but doesn't pass my criteria of "code as craft"

I'm using z.ai GLM with opencode. It's obvious when GLM loses its mind when the session gets too long.

I've been using AI to support programming for around 3 years now. The models have gotten amazing. However, unless there is a significant breakthrough I have determined that it's best for me to focus on short sessions.

I a) organize my work, b) improve my AGENTS.md, ensure source has appropriate comments to guide the models to the patterns and separation of concerns c) use shorter sessions d) review and test without AI. This approach means I still own my code. The AI is just an assistant.

With this approach GLM-5.1 is an excellent model. I never run out of token allotment on z.ai or codex plans. At this point, I only keep my OpenAI subscription as the ChatGPT desktop app is excellent at long web research tasks and I get codex with it.