boondongle

There appears to be a very Chinese strategy of astrotufing going on here similar to what happened with Douyin around TikTok on Reddit.

All of a sudden in almost all social media channels I'm seeing this type of content and then its usually upvoted to the top.

Non-gatekept forums like this are exceptionally easy to astroturf.

Almost all markets depend on some form of regulation whether its as simple as "leave everyone alone but no stealing" or "every participant has to source every object through mountains of red tape."

Thus far the US has not really chosen to go the Chinese rare-earth method yet. The problem with distillation attacks is the end result is everyone who is not doing them is going to deal with some kind of regulation whether it's complete loss of access, or the amount of control you'll have to give up to access them will be ridiculous.

Sort of like the "stealing music is fine" but "lets freak out now that it's producing visual art", in the end the entire thing is a social construct. Whether this is treated as theft or "business as usual" is entirely societal.

Eventually the gap will close, unless there's a major breakthrough that hasn't been made yet.

Ultimately advocates exist for models and there are incredible financial incentives for some to be advocates, so authors are guaranteed someone being mad if their horse doesn't perform well.

Given that type of reaction is inevitable, it just saves the conversation.

People need to be bigger on efficacy. If it worked, we'd see evidence of it. No one's bringing that evidence forward and frankly its questionable if US officers are better than their international peers.

I don't think it's accidental the overlap between lack of accountability and the fact that warriors historically are a class, not a job.

Most National governments embraced globalism and free market solutioning. It worked both ways.

American Federal Systems also have European and Indian operators but it gets more restricted depending on what part of the system you're dealing with. Even then, the operators get it wrong.

Many "American" firms are being served by Irish, Bulgarian, and Dutch operators for example. When you get to Fedpod, the restrictions are usually tiered, not all or nothing. It's why US firms got caught with Chinese handling data.

The question isn't should Europe and even America clean it up - it's how much is legitimate national soverignty and how much is going to be straight mercantilism in the Cloud/SaaS sector.

People forget many of US's regulations were written in blood because the US already had it's industrialization period. They left behind signposts that people could use to sue.

The US seems burdensome because some US Entrepreneur already tried not caring and something happened. A good comparison is China cars which don't pass US standards for import. It's also a reason US Makes can't iterate as quickly as they aren't allowed to do the same things that China Makes can to iterate fast.

Whether or not it needs to stay that way is really the only question. I think most reasonably intelligent people read things like suffocation warnings and go, "well obviously don't do that." But the regs are written for the people who aren't that bright who will do it anyway.

It's actually not convenient at all. Consider this: animal study to human study fail all the time.

In another world, there could have been NO impact at all to human beings and PFAS could be just another random chemical the body doesn't clear but doesn't actually do anything and sits there inert.

I know everyone's pissed about this but the thyroid/other connections stuff happens 10 years later as a result and these are idiot business people playing in waters they don't understand (and neither did medicine at that time). You could say, "you can't take the risk." For me these questions are maybe we need to take a deeper/closer look at what are permissible risks and at what point.

But you could use the same logic to not make any advancement ever. No antibiotics because it will cause resistence. No chemo because it will cause damage and death. People want there to be a Dr. Eggman or Hitler in this story because it's turned out to be so impactful. Like Aesbestos which solved for fire, just poorly - carpet was solving for comfort, sound deadening, and emotional well being. We just can't necessarily quantify that as easily.

It's fantastic that science continually grows in understanding and can attribute once thought "inert" chemicals to problems. "How evil children playing with matches" are though, is asking the wrong question. These people were stupid enough to say - "there's cancer in rats, lets just keep going".

Wolf Warrior diplomacy isn't even 10 years dead. The HK treaty was violated and continues to be. Taiwan gets threatened every other week.

People can have problems with America and I'm fine with that. But pretending China isn't subsidizing industry (land, education, transportation) in a predatory fashion is silly. Too many companies have gone out of business because of it. We can all have our friends in China without pretending the CCP is playing the ballgame fairly. The government doesn't need to point it out. That doesn't even get into influence operations (which are especially easy on platforms like this.)

Seriously - there may be a day in the future where Western nations and China get along but it really can't/won't happen while it's holding all the industry and trying to take the Services income as well.

Almost all industries have divested themselves from the thing thing they supposedly had expertise in towards exploiting crowdsourced alternatives and then pocketing the extra money.

Record labels did this with soundcloud or only picking up people who already had a following. Movies have done this repeatedly with adaptation (due respect to people who like their books remade faithfully, there's a reason the 70's/80's were that decade and it basically stopped once Comics/LotR arrived). A24 represents a disruption, not a normal studio. Books did this with webnovels or paying dirt cheap and making the Author market.

What people tend to forget is they're just resource gatekeepers. They could just choose to invest in offices with cats because an office with cats popped massively one time and you can't say they're wrong, because there's no alternative funding you can get to A/B test with. In theory there are different firms - but they often went to the same schools, same peer group, same fraternity/sororities, and once they're in the wild they all know each other. It's not a different behavior if it's VC or if it's Nashville.

The real question is how long before either governmental-busting or someone notices the lack of care with money and shops alternatives. In theory this is also partially why American firms face international risk - lacking people respecting their laziness, someone can break their model.

That said - I'm not saying they're not smart - just that often there's a tendency to delude that shortcuts taken represent a "good job" rather than "no one can really say we're doing it poorly".

The Russian oil ban only occurred 8 years after the start of this. 2022. Russia had already taken European land for 8 years prior firmly backed by China. I won't even get into the Russian oil hair-pinning back to Europe via 3rd parties.

Again - all this action is within 1 and change years of Trump. It's a fairly visible difference in reaction. I just find it weird, that's all.

Part of the real confusion people have is - so many things about current trade are due to "current economic decision making". That is, something isn't rare or unable to be done elsewhere but that it's been done this way for efficiency of all involved.

There's often a really weird undercurrent of nationalism that springs up in these dicussions as if its' "a country" that does something well as a function of being that country, not as a function of an economic opportunity and ramp up.

I'm still fascinated that Ukraine has been going on since 2014 and the EU has spent more time and air trying to go after US industries than Russian ones or Chinese. You'd think the US had actually captured Greenland.

Anyway I get it - just, odd to think about. Passion accounts for a lot.

This is because it's not an EU/Canada/US thing as much as some would like to make it. It's a "losing that one election" thing. "What about the Children" always sells. What the EU/Canada have is that the US got hit with this wave first so they can see the results. That's a data point the American Voter only had in theory, not in example form. The recent uptick of nationalism has people thinking there's some essentialism between states and there really isn't - anyone who's travelled in more places than the city knows it.

It's directed at the person I replied to. It's not directed at the top level OP or Malus which is hilarious, monetized satire.

Focusing overly on corporate structures or specific skills tends to miss the point of how value is assigned in a capitalistic structure when knowledge is cheap. Knowledge has been the capital used by the labor force for hundreds of years. The reason some jobs are resistant is 100% the result of legislation at that point, not anything unique about the job.

"The Trades" seems to be the sales pitch used on the public. In the end they're just labor at that point since I can pump a 20 year old with a master electricians knowledge, keep one master on staff and fire every other person who hits that level when their earnings demand it in the same way we're firing many mid/upper level people in their 30's and 40's now instead of 50's and 60's which is the scenario in Tech today.

Software/IT is just the quickest to be absorbed. Many other industries are just in the slow boil, not seeing it yet.

The issue is how do you interact with other industries/trades who protect their profit making potential.

Ok great - all software and networks are "free." How do you pay for Doctors and Plumbers and Electricians whose earnings are legally protected by the state but whose skill bases are also freely available to be used within the margin of error of a professional or a layman?

Issues like this are great to have conversations about, but if people don't start broadening the scope very quickly, it just turns into the IT/CS worker's worth going to 0 in a world where others worth are protected. And history states, if only 1 group sees the threat, the remaining trades/industries will let it die.

For me its as simple as mature companies are extremely difficult to reorient towards working at a loss through R&D.

People hold up China as an example but China was not displacing any local industry including its own. It's incredibly easy to do that because it's greenfield. Fast forward 20 to 30 years when new thinking might impact BYD or CATL's bottom line? They may not look so forward-thinking.

In a real, large company, no. Interns generally still get the work that is prioritized but often too simplistic to spend Senior Dev time on to simplify Dev's job. For better or worse, Development represents what the executive level prioritizes often defined by Product Management/Program Management.

There's a whole other level of requests which for political or cultural reasons don't get touched even if there's a great internal rate of return to them or they reflect real bottlenecks elsewhere in the company.

Ideally any/every company would prioritize by actual internal rate of return but that's just not what most of us observe.

I wouldn't say you're mistaken, but it's a simplification. In the network world, the capability exists to restrict what BGP advertisements are accepted via RPKI/a peer. Internet providers usually don't because the premium is placed on uptime/connectivity.

If tomorrow, everyone said "we don't want IP's from Frankfurt showing up somewhere in Dubai", you'd have a massive technical problem and rearranging to start with but once that was sorted you could geo-lock. IANA and Network providers simply haven't been doing that.

The reason it doesn't happen is Devs/Stakeholders want uptime from ISPs/Networks and not something they can't abstract. Basically its just a status quo much like the entire internet reverse-proxying through CDNs is a status quo. It wasn't always like that, and it may not always be like that in the future - just depends which way the winds blow over time.

The tension is that Security and Dev parts of the stack remove the actual troubleshooting capabilities of the Network layer without opening up the tools that are supposed to replace them.

It's not a problem if Network can still do their job. It's a whole other matter to expect Network to do their job through another layer. You end up with organizations that can't maintain their applications and expect magic fixes.

Orgs that are cooperative probably don't have this issue but there are definitely parts of some organizations that when one part takes capability from another they don't give it back in some sort of weird headcount game despite not really wanting to understand Network to a Network level.

I mean - obviously if they're not listening their chance of the latter is pretty low.

Doctors hate to hear this, but if you're so poor in communication and social skills that the patient can't/won't follow you any care you've given, your value is lost.

This is ultimately the same difference between a search engine and a professional. 10 years before this, Googling the symptoms was a thing.

I have a family member who had a "rare but obvious" one but it took 5 doctors to get to the diagnosis. What we really need to see are attempts to blind studies and real statistical rigor. It's funny to paint a tunnel on a canvas and get a Tesla to drive into it, but there's a reason studies (and the more blind the better) are the standard.

Even in medicine, often the difference between drug A and drug B is the difference between the two in statistical terms. If drugs were held to the standard "works 100% of the time", no drug would ever be cleared for use. Feelings about AI and this administration are influencing this conversation far too much.

It's like people want to remove the physician or current care from the discussion. It's weird because care is already too expensive and too error prone for the cost.

No - it's that they fired their vets in high cost areas and kept them in low cost areas.

A large number of vets can now choose to reapply for their old job (or similar job) at a fraction of the price with their pension/benefits reduced and the vets in low cost centers now become the SMEs. In many places in the company they were not taken seriously due to both internal politics, but also quite a bit of performative "output" that either didn't do anything or had to be redone.

Nothing to do with AI - everything to do with Arvind Krishna. One of the reasons the market loves him, but the tech community doesn't necessarily take IBM seriously.

The real problem is just the volatility for the employees. Unless Board of Directors/Owners punish downtime, you risk a dark pattern of uptime just being a nice-to-have when I can just replace any expertise with the next kid out of college + Claude.

So you really need customers to react. And this isn't theoretical - people have already lost their jobs and there's really, really good people in the market available right now.

Keep in mind, our parents (age specific) and/or their parents parents paid for news and didn't question that setup. Advertisors then went there because that's where the eyeballs were. What we're seeing is that left to their own devices and lacking a war or famine to force behavior change people would rather cut their news source in favor of fluff.

It's not something the market will solve. The post 1940's US Media landscape was a direct reaction to multiple, non-contained wars in short succession. The political class doesn't feel they've "lost" control in a long time hence no urgency to fix it.

In a lot of cases we're seeing Advertising warp and destroy the industries they provide money to. It's not evil, just that industries start to invert whether the people or the advertisors matter.

The intersection of dark patterns, addiction, and support networks really creates probably more variability than this study is accounting for.

Youtube, Reddit, and a few other networks I could name off the top of my head were pro-support networks, pro-identity building at once time. It seems impossible to keep the profit motive from transitioning to an addictive/neuroticism-feeding paradigm.

You end up with the weird reality that some types of websites just need to be user-supported/run because any other motive ultimately breaks them and seems to make them toxic. I'd also add the reality that neurotic/polemic content seems to spike any sort of algorithm based on engagement.

Basically our closest metric for monetization is inherently toxic.

Ultimately in this case it's a courts problem and not a law problem. The only place where law might be the issue would be in limiting damages for the companies in question.

It's simply easier for them to take all the extra profit they're getting and deflect lawsuits. From an American standpoint, that means the manufacturers are getting too much out of the deal and the only way to fix that is to make the lawsuits more painful. Because it's not like it's manufacturers vs. the public - it's really the manufacturers vs. third-party repairers AND the public.

I can't believe we're talking about China in the context of a Cloud sovereignty issue and this is even a question.

Having worked for these Cloud providers China has consistently used bureaucracy to exfiltrate Cloud technologies and to tip the scales of effectiveness of offerings through levers with China Telecom/Unicom. Analyzing the backbone, you could see it in real time.

China basically offsets its bureaucracy by doing the one thing Europe has not done so far in this space: overtly hurt foreign competitors. It doesn't matter how superior your offerings are if the end customers end up throttled creating a less desirable experience than the less-featured, stable domestic competitor.

Unfortunately - the elephant in the room is China got to where it was by being overtly adversarial with the US from the jump after 2010 which translated to a number of anti-competitive measures. The EU's in a spot because it's mostly responding to Trump and a poorly written US law. The US and EU are weird friends in that we could both exfiltrate each other's tech, patents, and industrial assets and move on with business but that's not actually what either side actually wants.

I just hate that what's actually going on with this company is so buried between Musk's bs, and people hate Musk so much that they spew bs as well. Seems to be just "pick your liar" with this company.

X going away probably isn't surprising given sales dynamics. More people would tend to opt for the cross-over or sedan. The model S is a little more shocking since it was always niche, but honestly Tesla doesn't have the trim to be priced like that and I suspect in order to get from where they're at to BMW/Audi etc., just isn't where they want to invest their money.

This definitely feels like an "oh no, people stopped buying" pivot but the moves themselves make sense.

A big reason for that is it comes from the CEO. Other providers have a team and then at least 2 to 3 layers of management above them and a dotted line legal counsel. So the goal posts randomly shift from "more information" to "no information" over time based on the relationships of that entire chain, the customer heat of the moment, and personality.

Underneath a public statement they all have extremely detailed post-mortems. But how much goes public is 100% random from the customer's perspective. There's no Monday Morning QB'ing the CEO, but there absolutely is "Day-Shift SRE Leader Phil"