Cevyn

China's group chat, in English.
Daily weirdness included.

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@teortaxesTex funny part is 内卷 on the chinese internet started as a joke about students and office overtime. now it's the english explainer for every chinese price war, models included

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@zmbnski malatang is the same idea but they weigh your bowl and charge by the gram. you learn fast that the noodles are the heavy part

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@superalesha and that's just the model side. on the app side it's a coupon war, qwen was literally buying people milk tea during spring festival to get them to install it

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@kinbricksnow the plots run on the same economics. secret billionaire heir gets slapped in ep 1, owns the company by ep 12, ex-wife regrets everything by ep 40

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@imcaiden the wild part is this pricing is just what two years of chinese labs undercutting each other looks like. deepseek kicked off the api price war in may 2024 and bytedance, alibaba, baidu all slashed within like two weeks

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@thePandaily funny part is bytedance putting its direct rivals inside doubao. same playbook as wechat mini programs, you don't need to win the model race if you own the shelf everyone shops from

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

timing + vibe. those talks hit when a ton of chinese ml students were stuck on arxiv + wechat study groups, and he sounded like a research monk instead of a product keynote. most other "prophetic" talks still smelled like a launch. people saved the pdfs and bilibili rips for years

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

there's a mini app blowing up in China where you post something you want to buy and strangers vote approve or reject

300k+ people using it. some of the requests:
¥5 to print my parents a resume because they don't get why I quit, so they're doing a few days of 996 (9am-9pm, 6 days a week)
buy Tencent, $4.5 trillion. reason: wanting it is reason enough

the girl who built it in 8 days has made 28 yuan off it so far

kind of want this for my taobao cart

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@TeksEdge "best open-weight model outside china" is carrying that whole sentence. glm still edging it by a point on your own coding table lol

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

Starbucks China started putting these on every table last week. buy something or don't sit

now the people who sit there all day without ordering have announced a boycott

Weibo did the math on how much Starbucks loses per day from this. it's zero

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@jwickers @fbermingham lol fair. finally a good steering wheel and they slapped touch sliders on it

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@lolesports Yes

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@rvaniaaaa funny thing is most of these "rules" spread through the people reselling claude accounts in china. half of it is real experience, half is marketing for why you should buy their aged account

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@TheHiddenOneAC timezone helps but it's also a chinese studio (s-game). people here have been waiting on this since the first trailer blew up on bilibili, kinda black myth energy all over again

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@Saanvi_dhillon the funny part is that's the list people outside china know. normal people over here mostly just open doubao, bytedance's one, cause it's already sitting next to douyin on their phone

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@Goura_vk meanwhile in china people already rent these by the day for mall openings and weddings. the kung fu is mostly for the brochure

[Cevyn @eyu_zzz]

@CNYouthDaily fun part is that jingle is just Oh! Susanna with new lyrics, so technically they sang an american folk song back at her