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Qwen 3.8

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701–710 of 793 posts

Re: Qwen 3.8

#701

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> human rights and all that rubbish While I understand your point, please think a bit how you formulated the sentence above.

I almost choked on my tea when I read that. I’m glad I’m not the only one who noticed. A shocking turn of phrase, and one that IMHO catastrophically devalues the nominally valid argument underlying that post.

[deleted]

Re: Qwen 3.8

#702
post #583

I’m a developer from China. So, is this what Hacker News is all about? Whenever a model comes from China, the comments section stops discussing its technical architecture, optimisation points or real-world performance, and instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit. That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source c…

> human rights and all that rubbish Crazy that you think human rights are rubbish. It clearly paints where china and its population is headed.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#703

I have been using the docling software for PDF and XLSX reading/viewing/comprehension by my local qwen3.6. Claude was telling me that docling includes within it a very small LLM model just to assist with what is basically "super OCR". We are definitely in this era of ultra-mega-huge frontier models and super-tiny-micro models, all finding their uses. On an aside I tested docling by giving it the Ronin TTRPG rulebook…

An alternative to Docling is Xberg: https://github.com/xberg-io/xberg

"A polyglot document intelligence framework with a Rust core. Extract text, metadata, images, and structured information from PDFs, Office documents, images, and 97+ formats. Available for Rust, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, PHP, Elixir, C#, R, C, TypeScript (Node/Bun/Wasm/Deno)- or use via CLI, REST API, or MCP server."

Amongst other things, you can use it with Open Webui: https://docs.xberg.io/integrations/openwebui/#choosing-an-en...

fyi, they are releasing their v1.0.0 release shortly and until then you will need to a release candidate docker image tag: https://github.com/xberg-io/xberg/issues/1192

As a layman, I would say Xberg is better than Docling because its one engine for everything while the former feels like a bunch of scripts and glue logic.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#704
post #583

I’m a developer from China. So, is this what Hacker News is all about? Whenever a model comes from China, the comments section stops discussing its technical architecture, optimisation points or real-world performance, and instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit. That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source c…

> human rights and all that rubbish Crazy that you think human rights are rubbish. It clearly paints where china and its population is headed.

I think interpreting the word too literally may not result in a productive discussion here. Especially taking into account that the original comment is translated from another language.

All things considered, it seems plenty obvious to me that "rubbish" is used to express the commenter's frustration.

More particularly, their frustration about how the discussion always devolves into non-technical discourse (the actual thing that they are referring to when they say "rubbish", and "human rights" is one example of such discourse) anytime China is mentioned.

They are frustrated because they think this is in direct contrary to the Hacker part of Hacker News, because Hackers should be more interested in the technology.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#705
post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard to say what their motivation is. Feels pretty easy to me. They want to turn LLMs into a commodity, and watch the US AI labs crash and burn. There will still be plenty of customers who will pay them to host the models and run inference, even if the weights are open and others can offer competing products. (If necessary, the Chinese government can ban use of foreign inference services by Chinese citizens an…

I feel like there could also be a simpler explanation. Why does a debian contributor make debian free, why do they work on this thing anyone can use? Is it because linux and debian hate windows and iOS and want to see american fail? No, it's because most debian contributors believe software source code, information, should be free, users should be free to modify the code they use, and that they're building a thing th…

The comment you replied to implies a lot of over-complicated motivations and grand coordination. But I think “commoditize your complement” explains a lot here and is probably even simpler than your explanation.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#706
post #583

I’m a developer from China. So, is this what Hacker News is all about? Whenever a model comes from China, the comments section stops discussing its technical architecture, optimisation points or real-world performance, and instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit. That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source c…

> human rights and all that rubbish Denying human rights. Classic. Sorry - you instantly lost any respect I could have maybe had for your opinion.

I don't believe the GP is claiming that the idea of human rights is itself rubbish. Rather, the GP is claiming that what is rubbish is the practice of veering into the topic of human rights whenever a new AI model is announced from China.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#707
post #525

(I can't draw a pelican for this one because Alibaba Cloud have flagged my email address and won't let me pay them for access. So I'm waiting for the open weights release, or for the new model to show up on OpenRouter.)

Here's what qwen 3.8 max preview generated when prompted with "create an svg of a pelican riding a bicycle" https://cypressf.com/qwen38-pelican.svg Notably it added a cheeky fish in the beak.

Wow, that one is really good.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#708
post #690

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfectly in agreement, but in many places politics were forced into geek spaces. Formerly nobody cared which country you came from. I think anyone that used open models will have had contact with Qwen. China currently does the most work here, simple as that.

You might want to ignore politics all day long, but rather sooner than later it's politics that will creep into your life and take an interest in whatever things that politicians mis-understand about your little niche.

Christ. This again.

Sometimes people just want to geek out and talk about technical things, this isn't rocket science, is it?

Yes, those people mostly do realize the importance of understanding and discussing politics. But that doesn't mean _every single_ thread must devolve into a political discourse, especially when those discourses have a general tendency to lead to nowhere. It gets real tiring real fast...

I am willing to bet my 20 cents that you don't talk about saving the environment every single time you eat. And the reason is much the same -- it gets tiring.

Anyway. If you want to make a political statement, why not do it in a more suitable thread rather than a thread simply about the release of a model? It's not like HN strictly bans political threads.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#709
post #583

I’m a developer from China. So, is this what Hacker News is all about? Whenever a model comes from China, the comments section stops discussing its technical architecture, optimisation points or real-world performance, and instead starts going on about politics, human rights and all that rubbish? To be honest, we Chinese IT professionals possess a genuine geek spirit. That’s why you’re lagging behind in open-source c…

you probably are overly sensitive and biased, do not forget transformer is the only 'original' for AI so far, the 'original aspirations' nowadays are just incremental improvements. human rights are not rubbish by the way, you might earn high salary now, dare to criticize Mr.Xi at all? you could be in jail and lose everything overnight. without human rights, tech is fragile and mostly harmful in the end.

Re: Qwen 3.8

#710

> "compatible" instead of "comparable." It boggles my mind how you can train a frontier model but not write a tweet without an obvious typo.

Accurate reflection of Alibaba's cloud platform as a whole. I've never seen more misused terminology and strange word choices than when testing out their cloud dashboard.

This is egregious for a model announcement though, I agree with you 100%.

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