I guess he is not yearning for dictatorship, the style of censorship is the question. Preventing access to information is bad, but likely less harmful than deception.
Yes I remember doing something like that in 90s for a survey/map engineering cad application. After delaunay triangulation, calculating approximate voulume is easy. But this probably is a more general solution
OP's description vaguely triggered memories of the shoelace formula from a decade ago, but geometry was never my strong suit. All I remembered was positive/negative triangles (or was it trapezoids)? make magic happen for area calculation.
You can make the other argument that China subsidizes the price and that they can't be profitable at this pricing level. From an industrial strategy standpoint, they already do this for many other industries with huge subsidized state loans.
So we can go round and round on this, each with our made-up objections about how it's temporary or unrealistic or impossible or whatever, or we can just accept the prices as listed and use that to guide our economic decisions.
Just look at the prices that inference providers charge for small models. The argument that these unit economics are negative is trivial to disprove.
DeepInfra sells DS v4-flash at 0.08 in, $0.18 out. Gemma4 they sell for $0.07 in, $0.34 out. OpenAI's price for luna is $0.20 in, $1.20 out.
Why would you assume OpenAI is somehow uniquely incompetent at making small, fast models? And that they're worse at serving it than DeepInfra? Any observer can see they are making money here.
I never understand why people who are convinced there is a big con just don't check market prices and see if there's money to be made.
That doesn't mean their business is great -- they're losing tons of money, but it's because they spend too much on fixed costs, and they can't stop spending money on training next generation models with no end in sight, not because the inference is margin negative, which is a flimsy idea that just clouds the actual business issue.
There's a difference between the Deepseek.com provider lunch pricing and the pricing every other provider is doing now.
Right now DS4-Pro-0813 is available from multiple providers for $1.32/million input tokens[1].
It's pretty easy to work backwards from B200 and electricity prices and see this is profitable even without the heavy serving optimization these providers are doing[1.5].
The OpenCode CEO said: "inference is very profitable and probably a good opportunity to understand some basic business math"[2] and "the inference we do is already profitable and that's with some middlemen involved"[3]
If at this point people don't believe inference can be profitable, and providers can turn the prices up and down to choose exactly how profitable they make it I don't know what to say.
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