I see that Technology Review now publishes Chinese propaganda fluff pieces (complete with equally blatant and clumsy appeals to the “Global South”, one of Beijing’s latest global influence campaigns).

There’s not a single word in this “article” about the fact that this model is heavily censored.

Makes sense. I didn’t believe the claim for the article for a second that only the cloud-hosted version would be censored. In fact, they didn’t actually claim that “only” the cloud version was censored, but instead weaseled their way around saying that they only tested that version.

Is it able to generate text on Winnie the Pooh or how free Taiwan is without crashing though?

What an unbelievably ignorant thing to say. Why are you downplaying this?

The funniest thing is that they are carrying water for imperialist nations while complaining about imperialism. Peak parody.

Have they tried subscriptions? I’ve heard it’s the next big deal after ads.

Good riddance. I hope the EU follows suit and soon. Von der Leyen has indicated that this is on the table:

https://www.politico.eu/article/tiktok-ban-in-eu-is-not-excluded-von-der-leyen-says/

In case people still think it’s just another social media app and that it’s only being banned, because “China bad”:

https://www.nullpt.rs/reverse-engineering-tiktok-vm-1

I have only ever seen this kind of obfuscation with malware before. This fits unconfirmed (but credible) reports that ByteDance will not permit any non-Chinese employees to even look at the backend in their foreign offices and instead fly in experts from China. That’s not normal.

Twitter and Facebook are full of American propaganda

I see the Whataboutism Olympics are off to a good start this year.

Why is this always the only defense people have when they bend over backwards to write apologia for dictatorships like China and Russia?

Have you ever thought about why international TikTok is the way it is?

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Au contraire, I hope it does, because this kind of shit needs to be punished.

There’s a singleplayer mod of Tarkov, by the way. Might be the safest way of playing this game.

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This is entirely unsurprising. China, while being much weaker militarily (as well as in every other way) and having no chance of catching up at any point this century, is the main geopolitical rival of the US and a major destabilizing factor in Asia, a region that has become an increasingly large focus of the US as it slowly disentangles itself from Europe (and Europe from it). For all of its follies (LLMs and image generation mainly), AI in general and AI chips in particular are of enormous and growing military, scientific and economic importance.

If there is one major war that is increasingly likely to happen, it’s going to be a direct clash between China and the US over Taiwan, possibly very soon (likely hoping to exploit the chaos and incompetence of the coming Trump administration) given the preparation we are starting to see at the mainland Chinese coast facing Taiwan. We are also already seeing AI-powered drones being deployed in Ukraine totally changing the nature of warfare (like a large number of German drones recently supplied to Ukraine that can identify and attack targets on their own without any human input, making them jam-proof) and, as mentioned in the article, AI chips can be used for a wide variety of military-related tasks, so it’s unsurprising that America is restricting supply of a critical technology to the one country that will most likely start a war with them soon, similar to how the aggressive expansionist Japanese Empire was heavily sanctioned prior to Pearl Harbor. China appears to be hell-bent on repeating the mistakes Japan made, including possibly by trying to perform a - what they hope to be, but is unlikely to work - crippling first strike on US military assets at the start of the invasion. Preventing them from using AI technology more advanced than what the US has access to in any of this is vital in maintaining the considerable gap in capabilities between the Chinese and American military.

Even if China suddenly had the most advanced AI technology in the world (which is highly unlikely to ever happen, given the inherent R&D disadvantages totalitarian dictatorships suffer from), the gap would still be massive, but no nation is interested in a fair fight or letting the enemy close any gap in capabilities, so the US will be using any chance they can get to keep things unbalanced in their favor, including their vastly superior soft power. China is in the unfortunate position of being far more reliant on the US (and the global trade that is enabled by the American hegemony) than the other way around, which means they can only ever react to American actions against them. Yes, they control a large supply of the planet’s easily accessible rare Earth reserves, which are vital to chip making, but they can’t afford to cut the world off from it given the increasingly dire state of their economy that no amount of falsified figures can hide at this point, not even domestically, so any export restrictions they can enact in response will always be little more than attempts at saving face, an irrational concept that is driving too much of their decision making to their own detriment.

Before I sound too authoritative on this complex topic, this is just my personal opinion based on what little I know. Feel free to pick this apart.

I’m not a fan of burning down the house to catch spiders approach. Equally slow, gradual, boring and tedious democratic change has the best track record in history, whereas even successful revolutions result in ordinary people suffering the most for many years until things improve, if they ever improve.

In other words: Organize and vote, don’t fantasize about who to put up against the wall in which order.

Can’t wait to be called a fascist for this comment too.

WTF?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system

Shitting on company time is fine though.

What makes you so sure whatever will follow it is going to be any better?

some consequences

The word “some” is doing some really heavy lifting here.