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For China, AI is infrastructure. For the US, it's another cash cow to be made scarce so that investors can milk it.

That's why China chases open-source AI and commoditizes it. It will improve the AI until it is used in all kinds of things, ranging from vehicles to factories, from medicine to housemaid robots. China will make the AI the commoditized infrastructure to build bigger things on it.

You can't do that while keeping AI as a scarce resource and charging a premium for it. Like how the US does to satisfy endless investor greed.

And they are using the special debt vehicle tricks that made the 2008 bubble and the resulting crash. This is an economic nightmare:

https://makingsense.quora.com/AI-Bubble-Seems-To-Be-Using-Th...

At this point we have no choice but to conclude that the Eu has been subverted by megacorps as badly as the US political system has been.

Eu cannot be bettered. It was transformed into a supranational institution that imposes its will upon countries. At this point its a detriment to the entire continent.

Yes, the Eu basically morphed into a supranational institution that allows a minority to control entire Europe and use it as a private farm for the countries that dominate it.

Censursula is her nickname that she got in the days when she was a minister of family or something and wanted to censor the internet and allow using it only with a permit (2009).

If you water down democracy 2-3 times, it's no longer democracy.

recent (15) years

Not really - all of these have been happening in the past 5-6 years, since the surprisingly London-linked von Leyen and her cadres somehow ended up at the helm.

So it's not a surprise that whatever law the UK passes has been carried over to the Eu recently - the social media ban, digital ids, chat control and everything.

No machine has evern been 'the most important'. It's a freaking machine. Whatever it does can be replicated by different machines if you pour enough money into it. This delirium of thinking that if you ban !something specific!, China will end up clueless, hapless because it wont be able to do it itself, reeks of base racism as it sounds like the Chinese are not 'smart enough' to develop one freaking machine.

This kind of supremacist delirium is killing the Angloamerican West.

Nowhere near the value of having access to chips, at any cost. T

Disagree. Anything produced in the Eu or other US satellites is priced as high as possible. One could say that allowing China to buy those chips would have been a bigger drain on the Chinese AI budget.

You think without export restrictions China wouldn't be doing the exact same thing?

I dont think it. China did not do it and stuck by the WTO rules after going through so many hoops to get in. Then the US decided that China was too competitive and started ignoring WTO rules.

You are right that this greases the wheels, they are further along than they would have been without export restrictions, but they are still delayed even with the reduced friction

Disagree. Restrictions might have hampered them somewhat at the start, but setting up their own infrastructure as fast as China does and scaling it up as big and as fast as China does would eliminate any delay in a flash.

I think this is too cynical. Neither one of us is in the room to actually observe the real decision making, but export restrictions as a strategy are not some "dumbf-ck aristocratic elite" thing. They are perfectly rational from a strategic standpoint and arguably doing what they're supposed to do.

Nope. The narcissism and aristocracy of the US elite is well documented all the way since the 60s since the biggest ongoing social study on the matter (from UCSC) literally mapped it:

https://whorulesamerica.ucsc.edu/power/class_domination.html

Below is a more street-speak version of all of this if you wouldn't prefer to read the full study above:

https://makesenseworld.substack.com/p/narcissists-are-destro...

To what end, other than "well, future historians may need it"?

Future historians ! will ! need it. Today we learn the most about past civilizations from what the ordinary people left behind.

By the early 2010s, the Eu corporations noticed that they could use the consumer protection regulations as a means to sneak protectionist measures to protect their profits, and from then on, it has been a downhill ride. They have taken over the Eu through lobbyists and spammed innumerable regulations to bloat the regulatory space to make it impossible for domestic and external competitors to intrude, and the end result is bloated cars that cost 30,000 Eur a pop and require subscriptions to heat their seats while being inferior to the cheapest Chinese EVs of the last generation.

But hey - Eu investors reaped premium returns from their investment without having to reinvest any of it for a decade and a half, so there's that...

It's hard to understand: Do you think that having to use chips that were 20% less performant would lock China out of anything? Are you not aware that with the low costs they have, they can just stack ten times or more datacenters and run workloads in parallel to make up for that performance difference - even if there was actually one that high?

Nope. If China were not banned from US-controlled chips, it would be importing chips at much higher prices, therefore getting less bang for its buck while strengthening competitors with its money in the process.

Instead, the US banned China from chips and lithography machines, giving China the legal excuse to start producing them domestically without violating WTO rules. Now China produces cheap chips and uses them with cheap electricity.

This was a dumb move by the US. Brought upon it by dumbf*ck aristocratic elites who grew up in isolated mansions and then received law degrees, with absolutely no understanding of technology and technology ecosystems. They thought they'd just make the rules and everybody would have to obey. It turns out in technology, they don't have to...

Slow? The chip ban was just a few years ago. The result? China is more or less self-sufficient in chips, about to catch up with the latest generation. They even banned China from using lithography machines. The result? China is now producing lithography machines that only few in the world could produce.

Let's face it - all bans were dumb. They just gave China the legal (per WTO rules) justification to start producing everything domestically. The bans work as a reverse tariff, as a protectionist measure that actually protects your competitor. If China did those, others could bring China to court at the WTO. But the US did that, so nobody can sue China.

In certain jurisdictions, yet. Yet is the operative word, leaving aside how it readily gives the authorities the ability to directly pinpoint and persecute you with a court order.

People are downvoting this, but the objective is precisely that.

The objective of these digital id laws being pushed through age verification is to be able to easily ! legally ! prosecute the dissidents. That's one thing the intelligence agencies could not do with their illegally collected data.

are people still horrible on the internet if they use their real name

Yep. Google forced real names on youtube. People kept acting the same way.

I have bore first-hand witness to the scale of the PsyOps war waged on the American people by institutions near and far.

You can be sure that none of those organizations will be affected by it. Especially the domestic ones.

But, at this point, I have come to wonder it it would be best to always have your real-life personality attached to all you do.

No:

https://bianet.org/haber/eu-strips-journalist-huseyin-dogru-...

And that is Europe. The US wouldnt hesitate 2 seconds before shoving you into a federal prison.

It is the nature of the internet that you could never achieve absolute censorship

Oh yes you can. The only reason you have a 'free' internet now is because the US had to rush its internet out without implementing the censorship and control mechanisms it planned because the USSR was about to release its own internet. Now they are making up for their mistake.

Note that age verification does not rely on you handing over identifying information to the party requesting it

It most certainly does, because it has to:

https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveill...

"Monday’s headline was a ban on under-16s using social media which, to some, sounds about as sinister as a wholesome ribbon-cutting until you ask the obvious question nobody in Downing Street wants asked aloud: how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport."

AI is the CNC machine of the software industry.

CNC and other factory automation have eliminated innumerable jobs.

We are at the stage of capitalism after the usual control mechanisms the system used to keep people compliant started to fail, exactly as Frank Zappa described:

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater."

I can assure you it will be much faster than that.

God... Nobody else would be able to destroy the US dominance harder and faster than Trump... Though the other party was going to do the same - albeit slowly and more civilly. (Obama admn. started the trade war way back).

The article below sharply summarizes why all this is a dystopian surveillance setup:

how, precisely, do you stop a fourteen-year-old from opening Instagram without first checking the age of the forty-year-old?

You don’t. You can’t. So everyone gets carded. Britain is lifting the system wholesale from Australia, where a computer first scans your face and guesses your age from your cheekbones, then, failing that, surveils you to death, studies your browsing habits and the hours you keep, and then, when the algorithm throws up its hands, simply demands your passport.

https://reclaimthenet.org/starmers-social-media-ban-surveill...

Their thinking is that if someone runs their app on a custom ROM and uses that to manipulate the app in any way, and that causes some extremely hypothetical damage, that they might be held liable for not having prevented this situation.

Unfortunately, due to the regulations that have blown up in the EU in the last decade, they are right.

Economic safety can be guaranteed in many ways. It's not economic safety that these moves are for. It's for blocking anyone from preventing them from maximizing the value the Western oligarchs extract from both their own citizens and the entire world.

Also, isn't Australia in a more contentious situation with China?

China does not run 'rendition flights' to kidnap other countries' citizens and hold them in gitmo style prisons for decades. China cannot compel and does not compel random countries to extradite foreign citizens to China to persecute them and lock them up. Guess who does.

Yep. After moving Deepseek for a long time I also moved to Mimo 2.5 pro. It's not only similarly cheap, but it's very good with 1m context window and gigantic tasks. Produces very lean code.