It’s an interesting subject. If not for Beijing’s heavy hand, could Chinese internet companies have flourished much more and become international tech giants? Maybe, but there is one obvious counterpoint: where are the European tech giants? In an open playing field, it looks like American tech giants are pretty good at buying out or simply crushing any nascent competitors. If the Chinese did not have their censorship or great firewall, maybe the situation would have been like Europe, where the government tries to impose some rules, but doesn’t really have much traction, and everyone just ends up using Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

There are no permanent alliances in a multipolar world. The EU is realizing the danger of relying on a stronger partner, when said partner stops thinking of the relationship as an alliance as more as subordination.

More Americans have TikTok accounts than vote. For a shitload of normies who have only the vaguest notion of politics and current affairs, the app they’ve been enjoying gets cut off as the defining event of the waning days of the Biden administration. They are not going to care about how Trump tried to do it first, or it was bipartisan, or whatever. It’s hard not to see how this will cost Dems dearly.

TikTok and its service providers are liable. “No one is enforcing” is meaningless, because they can still be prosecuted retrospectively if the US Government changes its mind.

Google has behind it an incoming US government that puts US economic interests first, and relishes bullying its allies. The EU is weak, divided, and geostrategically boxed in. It will bend the knee.

It’s hard to figure out what other course of action they have at this point. VW’s factories in the rest of the world (including in China) have been propping up their loss-making German operations for years; it’s not sustainable.

Foxconn is betting on exactly that story. They are moving into the OEM market for EVs. The idea is that Foxconn will put together the chassis and batteries, and then the “actual” car companies will slap on everything else and sell the car.

Practically, there’s little to nothing the Europeans can do. They are thoroughly dominated geopolitically and economically by the Americans. From today’s FT: EU reassesses tech probes into Apple, Google and Meta – they are already in the process of rolling over on tech regulation for the benefit of US Big Tech. Likewise, when the US wants Europe to take part in containment against China, Europe will obey even if they are the ones who get hurt (it will be American firms, surprise surprise, that reap the benefits). On a whole range of issues, it’s the same story.

Many European leaders have seen this problem, but none have ever been able to do anything significant about it.

Lots of commentators seem to be under the impression that the EU is going to stand up against the US and Big Tech. My impression is the exact opposite; they are going to roll over. The EU is pretty good at throwing its weight around in areas where the US is not paying attention and doesn’t feel its interests are at stake. But in areas where the US wants to elbow the EU out of the way, it does so pretty effortlessly, and Brussels just looks embarrassed and tries to forget anything happened.

Panama’s leaders would be giant idiots if they didn’t have a “dead man’s switch” in place along those lines.

I feel like Musk doesn’t have much to work with in UK politics. In the US and continental Europe, his pattern has been to find the “barbarians at the gates” and use his resources to help open up the gates. In the UK, the barbarians kinda already sacked the city a while ago with Brexit. There’s not much left that Musk can do to mix things up.

The Turing Test codified the very real fact that computer AI systems up till a few years ago couldn’t hold a conversation (outside of special conversational tricks like Eliza and Cleverbot). Deep neural networks and the attention mechanism changed the situation; it’s not a completely solved problem, but the improvement is undeniably dramatic. It’s now possible to treat chatbots as a rudimentary research assistant, for example.

It’s just something we have to take in stride, like computers becoming capable of playing Chess or Go. There is no need to get hung up on the word “intelligence”.

How long will an independent Greenland possibly last if the US intends to swallow it up? All it takes is for the American establishment to whip themselves into a bipartisan frenzy over “national security”, then the population follows like sheep, then it’s game over.

Deepseek trained their v3 model for $6M. That’s the AI equivalent of building it in a cave with a pile of scraps. There’s no longer any reasonable way to stop China from developing frontier models.

Must be humiliating for the Mexicans to be condescended to like this. Agree to a trade deal with the Americans, stick to the terms of the deal, but now the Americans still aren’t happy. They also want to micromanage what companies can do business in your own country, with your own workers.

The trouble with all these schemes is that it’s totally contrary to poweful real world trends. The surface of the Earth has an overwhelming abundance of rural land that is incredibly hospitable to life. And these places are depopulating because people prefer living in cities. How are you gonna get people to move to the bottom of the sea, or Mars, if they don’t even want to move to West Virginia?

LLMs aren’t capable of maintaining an even remotely convincing simulacrum of human connection,

Eh, maybe, maybe not. 99% of the human-written stuff in IM chats, or posted to social media, is superficial fluff that a fine-tuned LLM should have no problem imitating. It’s still relatively easy to recognize AI models outputs in their default settings, because of their characteristic earnest/helpful tone and writing style, but that’s quite easily adjustable.

One example worth considering: people are already using fine tuned LLMs to copilot tabletop RPGs, with decent success. In that setting, you don’t need fine literature, just a “good enough” quality of prose. And that is already far exceeding the average quality that you see in social media.

Hot take: if they can get it to work, good! I welcome AI users who are smarter, better informed, and have better taste than the rest of us mouth breathing meatbags.

Fair enough. I think the “Taliban are moderating” narrative was also helped by the fact that the Taliban were being compared against fricking ISIS.

Not really analogous, I think? The Taliban are and continue to be wackos, and the US-supported government in between the Taliban regimes was always obviously made up of incompetent crooks and grifters.