vrganj

Do you know when the last war China started was? 1979.

What about the US? 2026, still ongoing, still fucking up the global economy and threatening food supplies (fertilizer) and fuel reserves, no plan out, no objective reached, no coordination with "allies".

When was the last time China threatened Europe or Canada with invasion? Was there ever a time? I honestly don't know.

Guess what the US does all the time?

Who's models are open and can be used by all? Who's are made by comic book villains with the explicit goal of ruining the job market and capturing the results of all human endeavors for themselves?

Of course, China isn't perfect and has a lot of domestic issues. But on the global stage, they sure look better than the alternative.

What a full, mask-off crashout.

Point four is especially telling.

Ball is deeply terrified of "AI communism", or in less red-scarey terms a world where AI is a public good and him and his fellow oligarchs don't get to centralize the accumulated knowledge of all of humanity and charge rent for it.

I think he's so deeply stuck in his ideological bubble he can't conceive that what he describes as a dystopia is the only way the future wouldn't be a dystopia for the vast majority of people.

Or to put it more clearly, the oligarch utopia he's trying to build is dystopia for the vast majority of humanity. The "utopia" he's trying to build is one of riches for him and serfdom for us.

True. The Chinese Communist Party's motto is "Serve the People". [0]

They might not always live up to that, but at least the aspiration is there.

No such pretense from American VCs.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serve_the_People

Sure, but seems again is a subjective qualifier. It's not the same as presenting something as objective fact.

So the quality of AI code will absolutely surpass that of human code.

This is unfounded speculation, presented as inevitable fact.

China-ambivalent: Open Models are good, Closed Models are bad. Not centralizing power in a few big American companies is good. China is who's building this right now, so we're aligned for now.

Only the optics is an ... interesting way of phrasing it.

There was a great Economist article a while ago that talks about this. ASMLs moat isn't just the know-how to build the machines themselves. It's a network of suppliers all across Europe, specialized businesses doing one little part better than anyone else in the world.

This is the type of thing that Europe is still leading in, and it'll be incredibly hard to reproduce elsewhere.

You don't just need to figure out how to build an High-NA EUV machine. You need to figure out how to build or procure all of the parts that go into it. Many of these suppliers have exclusive contracts with ASML.

Here's the article, de-paywalled: https://archive.ph/jP1HX

The EU was never just an economic union of markets. Hell, the Schuman declaration from 1950, the closest thing it has to a founding document, calls for an ever closer union.

How is this immigration enforcement?

I see they're no longer bothering to even put up the slightest bit of pretense ICE is anything but Trump's brownshirts, a group of goons to brutalize and intimidate any opposition to his antidemocratic project.

Xiaomi did a quite good job copying (and surpassing!) Apple.

They even got the car Apple always wanted, but never managed to build.

Yeah real convenient that the line would be exactly after pilfering all of human knowledge work, but before American model providers.

Your entire account seems to have a strong agenda in portraying this message.

But yes, as a European, the US hasn't exactly been making friends over here.

The US leadership (both government and industry) really seems set on making everyone go with the Chinese competition at this point.

In other words, hiring him was an explicit play for more entanglement between regime and industry. He says as much in his point 5.

They know they can't win on the fundamentals.

Regulatory capture is the only play left.

Keep in mind LLMs are also perfect propaganda machines. They will determine the information that will get surfaced by billions of people, their framing will influence how they think.

I have no doubt the Trumpists are aware as well and will extract their price.

Scary days ahead.

What a full, mask-off crashout.

Point four is especially telling.

Ball is deeply terrified of "AI communism", or in less red-scarey terms a world where AI is a public good and him and his fellow oligarchs don't get to centralize the accumulated knowledge of all of humanity and charge rent for it.

I think he's so deeply stuck in his ideological bubble he can't conceive that what he describes as a dystopia is the only way the future wouldn't be a dystopia for the vast majority of people.

Or to put it more clearly, the oligarch utopia he's trying to build is dystopia for the vast majority of humanity. The "utopia" he's trying to build is one of riches for him and serfdom for us.

Luxury brands don't want the poors to be seen wearing their merchandise.

It hurts brand perception.

That ethnicity is executing mass genocide in Gaza and is over 85%of the Epstein list perpetrators.

My friend, now you have crossed from implied antisemitism into open antisemitism.

Jews are not the same as Israelis. My lefty Jewish friends are all anti-Zionist. Conflating them is antisemitism.

I brought it up because ethnicities are used as shield so that useful idiots seen above defend criminal

How can something be used as a shield or as anything for that matter if other people are not bringing it up or even aware of it?

The only one to ever bring it up is you, in connection with him manipulating the EU's democratic processes. He did in fact do that. But to try and connect it to his ethnic belonging into it is to harken back to the same conspiracy theories that devastated Europe a hundred years ago. Some reading material: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Jewish_conspirac...

Please rethink your ways. Stop being so toxic. Stop spreading antisemitism. Stop insulting other people. Stop with the pathologization of dissent, another callback to Europe's darkest hours.

I will not engage in this thread any further, as I truly believe nothing productive can come from it now that you have gone fully mask off. I hope the mods take action accordingly.

One last point regarding the pushing, nowhere does it say anything about legal abilities. Anyone can push a law. Any act involved in passing it is pushing, lobbying, voting, calling your rep, whatever. You keep trying to twist definitions to fit your preset conclusions. Your own source never narrowed it down the way you're trying to.

It is only problematic because you brought up his ethnicity, out of nowhere, in a clear nod to Nazi ideology.

I had no idea he was Jewish, nor do I care. It has no effect on how I feel about him (which is poorly, because hes an American oligarch interfering with our democratic process).

The fact you brought his ethnic identity into it, without any conceivable reason, however, reeks of antisemitic stereotypes.

People can just be bad people. No need to bring their ethnic belonging into it, especially when it stokes the same flames that have brought horrendous cruelties before.

Your own definition proves my point on the pushing. "Pushing a law is the process of getting a bill enacted." That is indeed what he did by lobbying. The list of examples above is not exhaustive, as denoted by the word "includes".

I have to tighten your earlier point a bit first: it is not just absolute concentration of wealth that causes this, it is high levels of inequality, e.g. lots of people in misery with a few folks that have ridiculous riches.

I'm pretty sure the commoners (and even more so, the slaves!) in Rome, Egypt or Imperial China didn't love the system either.

However, I think the average modern-day, communist Chinese person has seen such a rise in standards of living (one billion people pulled out from poverty!) that they don't really hate the system despite there also being high wealth concentration amongst party and business elites.

The gap is the problem, not the peak.

Indeed. It's just that capitalism produces immense concentrations of wealth as a core feature of the system.

The problem is capitalism and the injustices it creates. The hated industries are just symptoms.

These days, I wouldn't be so sure. Hell, they even did it to a sovereign head of state.

And you can vote out "Big Tech" - by refusing to use their products

That argument completely ignores network effects. Case in point, Twitter is, for better or worse, still where a lot of public figures post their updates and announcements. It also now randomly bans people unless they give their biometric data to an oligarch that supports right wing extremists: https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1ukil0b/twitter_x_...

You're moving the goalposts from "pushing". It also leaves a bad taste in ones mouth that you brought up his Jewish background unprompted.

I do wonder how your account is still active. Every time I see your name, it is in connection with you lowering the quality of conversation by introducing aggressive ad-hominems, dehumanizing language, insults and attempts to derail instead of engagement with points made. This time, it even has strong undertones of antisemitic Jewish world conspiracy theories. Is this level of discourse really what we should be striving for around here?

That adds to the concern as a European. Thanks to the CLOUD Act, sharing data with an American tech company effectively is sharing data with the American government.

And that I would definitely like to avoid.

Everything you do affects others, unless you live in a cave in the mountains somewhere. Part of the reality of living in a society is constantly negotiating what is and isn't acceptable.

Democracy is the most fair way of doing so.

I can choose to move (and I have!), I can't practically quit my dependency on tech.

The EU pricks that pushed Chat Control is... American oligarch Ashton Kutcher.

https://edri.org/our-work/how-a-hollywood-star-lobbies-the-e...

Not if you're in the minority. Tyranny of the majority is still tyranny.

you as an individual

I understand. Such is living in a society. No man is an island.

Not ideal, but way easier than moving to a new country.

I've moved countries five times. I still haven't been able to get rid of my dependencies on Big Tech.

As another European, I agree with GP.

I don't fully trust my government. But I definitely trust it more than any American tech company.

I can also vote out my government. I can't do that for Big Tech.