MugaSofer

That whole section seems to be pretty directly based on DeepSeek's "very impressive work" with R1 being simultaneously very impressive, and several months behind OpenAI. (They more or less say as much in footnote 36.) They blame this on US chip controls just barely holding China back from the cutting edge by a few months. I wouldn't call that a knock on Chinese innovation.

Kind of funny that you mentioned the Hobbit, given that half the fantasy genre is takes on LotR with the serial numbers filed off. So people have found some partial workarounds.

It would be more accurate to say the laws of physics push certain services to capture enormous market share.

How can a new search engine - or email service, for that matter - compete with Google's servers? How can a new social network compete with Facebook having all your friends already on it? How can a new encyclopedia compete with Wikipedia's vast store of volunteer-checked knowledge? How can a new operating system compete with the fact that everyone already knows hw to use Windows?

It's not impossible, but an incremental improvement won't do it; you need to be massively better than the default to overcome the sheer advantage that comes from being the default.

I can't find any source for this random comment's claim that they were actors, which seems like it would be pretty easy to prove. I think you've been bamboozled.

I don't think that fits the legal definition of crimes against humanity, although there's admittedly a fine line between that and e.g. some of the famines in the USSR.

This is currently true, yes. They're expressing hope/belief that this will someday seem unthinkable and strange.