So how do we ensure that Tiktok doesn't covertly alter the algorithm to subtly include propaganda tailored to China's geopolitical interests that are detrimental to the US? Or even just propaganda tailored to enhance internal strife to weaken the country?
As a European I have to ask the very same questions about US apps and European interests.
Even though I personally do not harbour strong suspicions towards the US, it's not a given that the US will always act favourably towards the EU, Europe as a whole, or any one particular EU country in the future. Especially in light of recent elections.
As a US citizen I would support your right to limit facebook/twitter/etc exposure to your citizens, especially with the incoming administration. That's why I think it's also appropriate for the US to oppose a adversarial government injecting propaganda here, especially to our most vulnerable to it.
Europe should ban American social media companies. They'd be doing themselves a favor, and a favor to most Americans as well (who, shareholders excepted, do not personally benifit from these tech corps being so massive.)
I think every country should develop their own social media. It would be best if it was federated-like services that smaller countries could just run the plain open source version of.
Any democratic country that has a large portion of their population using american social media is essentially a modern US colony.
It is federated and it has benefits but the UX is garbage for average people and the actual protocol isn't one that'll scale.
You don't need an A+ protocol to get great if your product is good enough / dead simple to use but neither of those things apply to Mastodon, as much as I'd like them to.
Good observation and argument. US politicians might be in for a rude surprise, if this effort to ban boomerangs on them, in the form of other countries making the same arguments and wanting to ban popular American made and controlled software.
I think this is a positive. We should be happy other countries reducing the tentacle lengths of US social media vorps (or Chinese social media like tiktok)
The revelations from the twitter files show that this is true. Social media works in tandem with US Federal Agencies to review what people see or don't.
and checks and balances allowed it to eventually come out, even though i think facebook knew they could fight it in court. In China that is not an option, Xi and his circle say is what happens with no recourse other than a straight up rebellion by the people of China.
Which can be openly discussed, critiqued, etc. Or in the case of X, bought up by a private citizen and turned into a completely different animal. There's important and significant similarities, but they are worlds apart.
this is the exact same question being asked around the global - how could you be sure that American made LLMs are not altered in a way to maximize US interests at the costs of everyone else's.
> The agreement was seen as a way to "spread the American way of life" though a war-torn France (and Europe at large)
> To further the cultural propagation effect of the Blum–Byrnes agreements, the informational Media Guaranty Program was established in 1948 as part of the Economic Cooperation Administration to "guarantee that the US government would convert certain foreign currencies into dollars at attractive rates, provided the information materials earning the moneys reflected appropriate elements of American life".
There's also the agreement where movie studies can use real war machines as props, provided they agree to make the US military forces appear heroic, noble and victorious.
You cannot. But in US you have elections every 4 years wheres in Russia or China both Putin and Xi are "elected" for their lifetime.
Does it tell you anything ?
May you precise your thoughts? I genuinely didn’t get the supposedly evident message before “Does it tell you anything ?”
The bipartisan system in the US show that free and regular elections isn’t enough to prevent some dictatorship drawbacks, like when policies are made to serve a party and not the population interest. They don’t often coincide.
To come back to LLM that could be an alteration to favor one party or another, or even both by occulting what people don’t like in the party system.
At the end it might be "good for US” with US as an organisation which want to preserve itself. But not "good for US” as US a group of citizen wanting a system that serve their interest.
I wasn't responding to any upthread point you might have made about LLMs, I was responding to your suggestion that U.S. is more democratic than China. I don't see much of a difference, and if anything there's a very real possibility the two-party system allows people in charge of policy to distract from many issues with partisan politics.
Both parties are the same with how they cater to the wealthy and the capitalist class. Compared to China where there is one party, sure, but elected officials arguably work more directly for the working class.
The world doesn’t elect US presidents. We are referring to the relationship of non-US citizen to US elected officials. The intra US selection of officials doesn’t matter in this context of who sits on a higher moral horse.
Chinese national living in China, I am openly anti-CCP, I don't like Xi. I can write a thesis on this, but let's just cut to the bones -
12 years in power, Xi led China to become the largest industrialised nation on earth with its industrial output larger than the G7 combined, Xi led China to be in leading roles in ALL emerging sectors, e.g. mobile internet, renewable energy, Evs, AI etc when the entire EU and Japan just gave up.
What that 6 times bankruptcy Trump managed to achieve? Trump should be nice to Xi, as Xi is the only statesman of Trump's time, Trump is just a reality show host getting into a renewed season of his show.
Xi accomplished a lot when he felt some restraints internally and externally- as those restraints have fallen away and he's been unleashed to do as he will, his 'touch' has faded alongside.
Stopped reporting real economic numbers as they've gotten bad, losing influence in his neighborhood as he's tried to steal control over the surrounding ocean, state owned/controlled enterprises being unfairly promoted extinguishing vital home-grown entrepreneurial sprit and a variety of other avoidable ills.
Unconstrained power will always expose one's weaknesses and unearned verities. Trump's second term will be an interesting pushback to see if any of these exposed Xi weaknesses cause a real crisis inside China.
What’s funny is nothing could be worse for our country than post war US foreign policy. Check out the wikipedia article on US foreign interventions. We don’t need China to fuck us up by subtly sending messages, we have our entire political establishment overtly doing it every day in DC.
I don’t see how some nebulous speculation about the influence of ideas that could then potentially lead to a bad outcome is a relevant conversation when we’re actively perpetually destroying ourselves from within on a daily basis no.
so in answer to my question - no you can't even imagine both could be bad. Your talking points sound very tankie so I guess nuance isn't to be expected.
Do you really think TikTok has more power in the US than the local oligarchs and warlords? Short-form video does more to "internal strife" than the lack of basic government services, widespread substance abuse and state violence?
Littering is against the law despite murders going unsolved ~50% of the time.
TikTok doesn't have to be the greatest threat of all time to be subject to regulation around its ownership or behavior. Other problems can be addressed too. It's not like the entire country can only do one thing at a time.
No, they went on a tangent about whether regulating something necessarily means you can't regulate something unrelated.
I asked whether the person I responded to actually have the beliefs they expressed, i.e. that the threat of internal strife in the US is in the future and comes from services like TikTok. Some people say things like that to practice loyalty to the tyranny they suffer under, while other people do it because they believe in it. To clear it up matters, because such reasons indicate whether someone is reachable through reasonable discourse or not.
Traditional media is dead in the US. Joe Rogan dwarfs media midgets like CNN, in both ratings and shear influence. Most of this new media is still using platforms based in the US or friendly nations, but that balance of power could shift very quickly. The rapid rise of TikTok shows that the dominance of American platforms cannot be taken for granted, and so the government is reacting in a bipartisan manner to this threat.
I don’t know who specifically you mean by “local oligarchs and warlords”. Do I think TikTok has more power and influence in the US than the average Fortune 500 CEO? Without a doubt.
Why do you bring up "Fortune 500" CEO:s? They only administrate businesses, they don't own them, unlike oligarchs.
When you read that quote, you can't think of anyone that would fit? You don't come to think of the Kochs, Clintons, Trumps, Musks, Obamas, Sacklers, Murdochs, Bidens and so on?
No, and even with those names listed out I don't really understand what category you're pointing at. Your list includes the sitting president and president-elect of the country, who do of course have quite a lot of power. Do I think that TikTok has more power than Rupert Murdoch? Probably not, Murdoch owns a wider variety of media even if he doesn't have any single dominant app. More power than Richard Sackler or Bill Clinton? Again, yes, without a doubt.
As a myth- and truth-maker I'm sure Bill Clinton outweighs TikTok by a huge margin. Compare speaking out against his recent theocratic and genocidal outbursts with speaking out against some stuff on TikTok, one can get you fired from middle class positions of authority, like teaching at universities, the other is perfectly safe unless it also goes against US elites.
I don't know what "theocratic and genocidal outbursts" you're referring to, but it's completely untrue that criticizing Bill Clinton can get you fired from teaching at a university. I'm not sure where you could have gotten the idea that it's rare or dangerous to criticize politicians in the US.
You should listen to his campaign speech in Dearborn, and later he went to a conference and basically said that the palestinians deserve to be exterminated because Arafat left the Camp David talks.
Over the last year many US academics and students have been abused because they openly dissent with or protest against the warlords in charge.
Yes, but they have successfully been shrinking that down from 94% in 2016.
Long road towards independence, but moving in the right direction at least.
And the default spot in the search bar is valuable to people outside of Google. Even if we assume that Google is overpaying, Mozilla could keep operating as is with another entity paying significantly less...
Indeed. A model is only as good as its data. Propagandists have no difficulty grooming inputs. We have already seen high profile cases of this with machine learning.
I've had numerous performance and memory issues with Firefox but from my testing over the years it's the closest to Chrome/Chromium you can get.
Also Firefox gets new features fairly regularly. It's still an "innovative" browser, as opposed to Chromium which is mostly stagnant. Vertical tabs are pretty cool.
This whole article is terribly confusing. Take this paragraph for example:
Now, your process might depend on other system resources like input and output; as this event is also a process, it also has a file descriptor, which will be attached to your process in the file descriptor table.
What event? Are input and output an event? Why is this event its own process? Input and output are not a process are they?
Also, does a process have its own file descriptor table? That was never mentioned before and this reads like it is already known.
This sort of stuff goes on in my head throughout the entire article...
It's also still unclear to me what happens if multiple processes try to access the same file. Do file descriptors help to lock files during writing?
The writing style just sucks and it reads like a LinkedIn post with every sentence in its own paragraph. It tries to be approachable, but it uses blurry undefined terms and overly-simplistic analogies.
Starting with 101, 102 in the first example, for some reason.
When a process or I/O device makes a successful request, the kernel returns a file descriptor to that process
I/O device?
By default, three types of standard POSIX file descriptors exist in the file descriptor table
Types?
Apart from them, every other process has its own set of file descriptors, but few of them (except for some daemons) also utilize the above-mentioned file descriptors to handle input, output, and errors for the process.
What?
It makes an impression of a poor translation of a pretty low-effort article, tbh. You’re better off just reading the corresponding APUE section, which you must have read anyway.
I think this desire for understanding ultimately drives the resistance to systemd and the Linux/BSD divide, and I think for good reason. There will always be friction between features and inherent simplicity/ability to understand the system.
The article was talking about the first computer science guy in a team of mathematicians. I don't know if mathematicians should be called technical, but they're hardly MBA types.
I definitely think it's a mistake that IKEA stopped printing their catalogues last year. The offline experience is totally different from online. Online I tend to do direct searches for things I already decided I want, but the IKEA catalog is perfect for casual browsing and getting new ideas for stuff I would've never bought otherwise.
It might come off as a cost saving short term, but I doubt in the end the catalogues did not bring in enough money anymore.
Or they could improve the website to make it easier to get an overview of everything by category and scroll through listings with details with as little clunkiness and ephemeralness as possible
With pdf catalogs, you get the undirected window shopping without killing trees and adding to landfills.
EDIT reply to: >Those PDFs really don't work well on mobile devices.
Sorry for not being clear. The initial UI is not a pdf. They are web browser "digital catalogs" with page layouts similar to a printed book. There's also an option to download to pdf file.
I just tried it on my smartphone and the pages look fine. No pdf download necessary.
I wonder what leads to worse pollution. A world where all information is printed and there are are no computers, or a world where no one uses paper and computers, cell phones, Kindles, etc proliferate.
Those are not the options though since personal electronics aren't going anywhere. It's either computers and papers or a similar amount of computers but at least less paper.
>Production of catalogs like this squeezes our biome, and if we don't turn back, it will pop, and we'll be left with only enough resources for a small fraction of us to survive.
Not just IKEA. Argos and CPC both stopped catalogues, and my purchase with them declined. Argos especially had a USP over amazon being the “book of dreams”, something to leaf through in a Sunday morning and go “oooh”
"Ikea has for years sold children’s furniture made from wood linked to vast illegal logging in protected Russian forests, an Earthsight investigation has found."
So IKEA bought lumber certified by FSC, which at least until recently was a well renowned organisation. Apparently FSC shouldn't have certified this particular lumber. "FSC denies wrongdoing, but shortly after being alerted to our findings Bakurov’s certificate was abruptly terminated on 15 Jun 2021."
This might be a scandal with FSC, but hardly with IKEA. I don't expect every company to themselves track every piece of raw material back to the sources. They must be allowed to outsource some of that.
Facts, like that IKEA used certified lumber so they had very good reasons to believe that they used sustainable resources? Or that this scandal doesn't have anything to do with IKEA, but it seems like everyone that bought wood from that part of the world probably are as big part of it?
They really tried to make it look like it was about IKEA children's furniture!, but if you actual read the article you linked it has actually very little to do with IKEA and there's nothing there that says IKEA did anything reprehensible or even anything that is hard to defend.
I linked that article, because I recall it in the news, and it got fairly widely covered at the time with the blame firmly placed at IKEAs feet - "They should have known" apparently.
People believe what they are told these days, without any desire to fact-check or cross-reference. I think this was my point.
Given IKEA essentially produce throwaway furniture by design, I don't think they've got much of a leg to stand on when it comes to environmental responsibility.
Just buying more stuff is literally how they have historically marketed themselves.
The price point might make people buy more that's true but calling it throwaway is hardly fair, still have a fair amount of 20 year old ikea stuff around the house and they're pretty extreme about quality assurance.
Indeed, IKEA stuff is really well built, solid, and lasts for years. I’ve had so many bad pieces of furniture from other manufacturers, IKEA just lasts, year after year, move after move
The “IKEA is crap” thing seems to be an American trope.
I'm a heavy touchpad user and the sole reason I will not use Linux for the foreseeable future is because touchpad usage is absolutely terrible on Linux. Depending if you use the libinput or synaptics drivers it's either completely inconsistent between applications or all-around terrible.
I use Windows + WSL even though I practically never do anything Windows related.
