7,899 karma · joined June 4, 2018
They don't have to.
> The issue is that it’s awfully close to the kind of speech you are “permitted” to be exposed to, which is a slippery slope.
It is not. The so-called "free speech" issue with this ban is bullshit and a red herring.
I'm not calling them stupid for that, I'm calling them stupid because they didn't have a back up plan. Public policy should revolve around what they need or want (e.g. I'm sure some farmer somewhere could make a sob story video about how growing opium poppy has been so good for them, so heroin shouldn't be banned, but it's not about him).
> Honestly these "civil liberties" orgs have lost the plot a long time ago, or are just at "useful idiot" mode
Exactly. When I read "many American civil liberties organizations think," my first thought was "they think a lot of things, that doesn't mean what they think is true or a good idea."
Additionally: they're all essentially lawyers arguing one side of the case. Just listening to them is not going to lead to the correct outcomes (e.g. if courts only listened to prosecutors only, tons of innocent people would go to jail; if they only listened to defense attorneys, tons of guilty people would go free).
I don't know about any classified briefing, but TikTok publicly shot itself in the foot badly during the vote, though a hamfisted attempt to influence it. I think that was enough in itself to bring about bipartisan unity.
As they should be, because they stupidly made their lives dependent on a single platform that anyone with a brain could see was likely to run into trouble sooner rather than later.
The lesson for the is: don't put your eggs in one basket.
> Because that would be harmful to US consumers. Lack of short video entertainment reccomended in a particular way is not very harmful. No microwaves or fridges for a couple of years is.
And it wouldn't be a bad thing to "stop buying everything that's made in China," but it's not something anyone can do suddenly. It would require a massive political project on par to the industrialization of China. China makes pretty much everything now (IIRC, they have 30-40% of the world's manufacturing capacity), and that is not a good thing for anyone who is not an authoritarian Chinese communist.
I doubt there were, because it would have been moot: the Soviets were so far behind on computer technology that they didn't really make anything anyone would want.
But more generally, the US was a lot smarter about trade with adversaries during the Cold War. There were significant restrictions on trade with the Communist Bloc that limited the kinds of entanglements we now have with China. The US got really stupid and overconfident after the Cold War ended, and that's only slowly starting to change (and this TikTok "ban" is a welcome part of that).
Being a government. They also get to tell you want kind of guns your allowed to have, what kinds of medicines you can take, and how much gas your car uses, and how your home has to be built.
Welcome to the real world, is this your first time here?
The CCP is not some weird thing that's wrong 100% of the time, so the US must always do the opposite thing.
The CCP banning Google/Facebook was wrong, but not for the reason of removing something a "geopolitical adversary has control" over, it was wrong because it was part of their extensive and illiberal censorship regime. The US has nothing similar.
> we are the same now
No.
There are 335 million Americans, and a lot of them are stupid and/or foolish.
It does, because the Supreme Court's ruling is the legally binding interpretation.
The EFF are just some people with an non-legally binding opinions.
See also: Engineer's disease.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_disease
I'm kinda not a fan of the list there, since it tries to tar a few early-20th century folks with connections with ESP and parapsychology, but my understanding is those ideas weren't as kooky back then as they are now.
> Yeah, this is really a bit insulting.
So you're insulted some country of other wasn't included in:
> First, this rule creates an exception in new § 740.27 for all transactions involving certain types of end users in certain low-risk destinations. Specifically, these are destinations in which: (1) the government has implemented measures to prevent diversion of advanced technologies, and (2) there is an ecosystem that will enable and encourage firms to use advanced AI models to advance the common national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and its allies and partners.
?
IMHO, it's silly to get insulted over something like that. Your feelings are not a priority for an export control law.
Taiwan, even though it's a US ally, is only allowed limited access to certain sensitive US technology it deploys (IIRC, something about Patriot Missile seeker heads, for instance), because their military is full of PRC spies (e.g. https://www.smh.com.au/technology/chinese-spies-target-taiwa...), so if they had access the system would likely be compromised. It's as simple as that.
Why would you want to automatically increase the cap algorithmically like that?
The purpose of a regulation like this is totally different than the minimum wage. If the point is to keep and adversary behind, you want them to stay as far behind as you can manage for as long as possible.
So if you increase the cap, you want only increase it when it won't help the adversary (because they have alternatives, for instance).
I'm disinclined to let that be a barrier to regulation, especially of the export-control variety. It seems like letting the perfect be the enemy of the good: refusing to close the barn door you have, because you think you might have a better barn door in the future.
> Instead of focusing on compute thresholds or model sizes, policymakers should focus on regulating specific high-risk AI applications, similar to how the FDA regulates AI software as a medical device. This approach targets the actual use of AI systems rather than their development, which is more aligned with addressing real-world risks.
How to you envision that working, specifically? Especially when a lot of models are pretty general and not very application-specific?
Reducing risk from Chinese influence is "rebuild[ing] the republic" and is not " hopeless adventurism and imperial expansion."
Also, letting China encroach and control more vital supplies is a good way to make "rebuild[ing] the republic" a lot harder.
Yep: https://www.energy.gov/articles/doe-releases-new-report-eval...:
> The report finds that data centers consumed about 4.4% of total U.S. electricity in 2023 and are expected to consume approximately 6.7 to 12% of total U.S. electricity by 2028. The report indicates that total data center electricity usage climbed from 58 TWh in 2014 to 176 TWh in 2023 and estimates an increase between 325 to 580 TWh by 2028.
A graph in the report says in data centers used 1.9% in 2018.
> Much of the American economy is already at China's mercy, due to the $500,000,000,000+ in goods we rely on from them annually.
Yes, but let's not use that as a justification for letting it get worse.
> This whole "Taiwan is super important to USA" narrative is itself pure government propaganda, related to military power projection over China's coastline.
The whole f*ing modern economy runs on semiconductors, and the most advanced ones are fabbed in Taiwan. You might have a point if Intel wasn't falling on its face, but it is, so you don't
The way the law is written, any adversary-controlled social network with more than 1 million MAU could be affected.
I think they'd ban it if it started gaining traction outside of Chinese immigrant communities. And it'd make sense to do it early, now that they have the legal power to do so, since it'd avoid controversy. No one would have cared about the TikTok ban if they did it when it was at 1-2 million MAU.
It does have a threshold:
> (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);
So if it stays unpopular, it's protected from this law.
> but RedNote is owned by a different company that would have to be targeted separately under this law.
I think that's a foregone conclusion if it actually gets popular with Americans.
I know someone who speaks Chinese and uses that app. The name in Chinese Xiaohongshu clearly translates to "Little Red Book," and they're confused how anyone got "Red Note" out of it.
> My guess is, at the end we will see maybe some million users from the USA and some more millions from around the world moving to this app, and maybe bringing a new interaction between the countries, but the majority will end up somewhere else.
If that happens, Little Red Book will trigger exactly the same law that's banning TikTok.
This is a standard element of conservative/libertarian gaslighting: "Do not complain about your precarity or inequality, because you HAVE COLOR TV!!! OMG, NOT EVEN KINGS OF OLD, COLOR TV!@!! FOCUS ON THE TV, IT'S COLOR!!112!!"
> It’s not really our fault: Humans have memories that are both short and bad, which leads us to forget just how bad many things used to be in even the recent past, and take for granted the improvements that have been made.
That works both ways. Bad things can become the new normal, the degradation only clearly visible at the transition, then fogotten.
In that scenario, it seems like that would be an insufficient amount to really do anything except handle very basic needs for a week or two.
That's not a good reason. Would you let your kid take up smoking, because they'd resent you if you said no?
Also: My parents wouldn't let me drive until at least a year after my peers got their licenses. I didn't like it, but I don't harbor a "lifelong resentment."
The problem with advertising is that a little bit done honestly is actually good and fine. What we actually have way, way too much, and it's often dishonest and manipulative.
It's a similar thing with finance. It's necessary, but way too many talented people are spending their energies on it.
Black and white thinking doesn't really capture the situation, and ends up creating a lot of noise (BAN IT ALL vs. IT'S ALL GOOD AND YOU LOVE IT, FIGHT!).
Honestly, I think it might be a good thing to put caps on the number of people that can work in sectors like that (and further limit the number of very smart people working in them), to direct talented people to more productive and socially beneficial parts of the economy.
I think you're misunderstanding. The point of the great firewall is to keep Chinese users from bypassing the Chinese censorship apparatus. A bunch of American e-refugees does not foil that, if all they can say are things acceptable to the Chinese government.
In fact, a bunch of American e-refugees can probably be parlayed into a propaganda win for the Chinese government strengthening the Great Firewall ("our stuff is so good that the Americans are seeking it out. Why look abroad when we have the best stuff? Stay inside the firewall.").