Once again we see tech companies capitulating to the US government who is actually doing the things we accuse China is theoretically doing in the future.
I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.
It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.
And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.
All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.
I bought some tower speakers made in the early 2000s and they sound awesome. Huge heavy things, but it's not like I've ever had to move them since I bought them. I power them with an inexpensive NAD amplifier that supports streaming and bluetooth sources.
One of the most destructive ideas of the last century in the West (particularly the US) has been the idea that private industry is a better replacement for the government to provide services.
We see this with Internet and telecoms service where municipal broadband dominates national ISPs at a fraction of the cost. We see the sell-off of utilities and water, which just leads to massive price hikes, so much so that private equity is getting in on utilities because it's a captive market [1]. All these privatization schemes (including so-called public-private "partnerships") are simply schemes to transfer wealth from the government to the wealthy. And the real problem is a huge number of people who will never benefit from any of this think this is a good idea.
The only entity who can be trusted for identity and age verification is the government. This is how it works in China [2]. I can already hear the cries of "we can't trust the government with that". We already do. Who do you think issues drivers licenses and SSNs?
Another like objection: "the government can monitor your activity". Um, they already do [3][4]. In some cases they're doing this voluntarily. An administrative subpoena is not enforceable. That requires a court order. Yet Google, as just one example, complied anyway.
A government, unlike private corporations, is accountable to its citizenry.
Let me give you a concrete example of how disturbing this all is. Leon Black was the CEO of Apollo Global Management, a private equity firm that owned Shutterfly. Shutterly owns Lifetouch, which is a company that manages school photos for children for a huge number of schools in the US. Leon Black has links to Jeffrey Epstein [5].
As of now, there's no concrete accusation of wrongdoing here or of information (such as stored photos) being passed to Epstein or affiliates. But do you want an unaccountable private company owned an Epstein affiliate having the names, school, age and photos of your children? Yeah, me neither, which is why now a bunch of schools are distancing themselves from Lifetouch. Investigations are ongoing.
As for Discord even doing age verification, there are two angles. The legal one is easy to dispense with. Countries like the UK require it. I'm surprised Discord escaped the Australia under 16 social media ban. I expect that to change. There's going to be more of this. And I understand why. Predators inhabit these spaces and Discord, unlike "public" social media platforms, seem to have way less monitoring and scrutiny of what goes on there.
The second angle is should you be able to remain anonymous online? Call it the ethical angle. Reasonable people can disagree here. I just don't think it matters because there will be increasing pressure for Discord and others toc omply with legislation.
First I will say that clearly all these attention hooks must work or they wouldn't keep doing them but, for me, it just doesn't match how I use YT.
Specifically, I am almost always going to YT with the intention of watching something specific. It could be because I need to solve a problem (eg installing a smoke detector). I also for some reason use it to play music despite having Spotify. I honestly don't know why.
But I almost never go to YT to look for something to watch. I do sometimes watch a related video after I'm done but this wouldn't happen more than 10-15% of the time. I think I'm in the minority here as people seem to go on YT and just keep chaining videos.
But I find YT's interface to be a confusing mess of "me too" products that are half-assed and various likely fiefdoms that force UX onto things that don't make sense.
For example, YT's Live streams are, well, ass. The player is terrible. The UX is terrible. And you still have that right panel showing related videos. But watching Live videos is a vastly different UX than watching VODs. So why is it there? I suspect because whatever team owns that recommendation panel has a lot of power. And it probably drives metrics still so it's still there.
And bringing this back to YT Shorts. Ugh, I too would like to never see them. It's a "me too" Tiktok. And it's worse. Tiktok's UI/UX is just a step above Shorts (and Reels). And I spend 98% of my Tiktok time on my fyp.
But yes the "please watch another video" UI is everywhere. The end of a video, your home page, the right panel and in-video prompts/
What I find most interesting about this is that US tech companies are doing what people accuse China of doing.
In fact, theoretical Chinese informed was the entire (performative) justification for the Tiktok ban. The reality of course was that TikTok wouldn’t censor what the US government wanted to censor.
The irony is that these companies are sowing the seeds for their own destruction and the US government is undermining US tech dominance, which is a potent foreign policy tool.
I think Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave at Tim Cook’s capitalization. I once trusted Apple to be more user-forest than any other platform. Now? I think I’d trust Huawei more.
At this point I think the biggest tangible difference between China and the US is that one country has high speed trains and affordable health care and the other has neither.
This kind of reductionist pithy comparison needs to stay on Reddit. Sure stuff is messed up here, but there are very real differences in both the degree and breadth of government abuse of power when you compare with China.
As an American, I can freely oppose the current regime. I routinely say, both online and in real life under my government name, that Donald Trump and his cronies are criminals, that everyone should work hard to stop them from achieving their goals and ideally they should all get life sentences once we throw them out of office. I’ll never face legal or even professional consequences for saying this, and even within the most authoritarian regime in generations few officials argue that I should.
Unless I’ve been severely misinformed, someone saying similar things about Xi Jinping on a Chinese tech forum would be swiftly banned and likely arrested.
I'm commenting on an article about an American advocacy group filing a lawsuit accusing high-ranking government officials of misconduct, another thing that similarly situated people in China cannot do. Again, happy to admit the possibility I could be wrong: are there cases I don't know about where Chinese citizens file lawsuits accusing the Ministry of State Security of misconduct?
The content of the lawsuit argues, correctly in my view, that American speech protections are so strong they go beyond mere criticism. American citizens have a right to publish detailed information about the location of government agents, even if this information makes law enforcement harder and even if the agents fear being tracked might be dangerous for them.
Thank you. Your reply is more respectful than I earned.
On paper americans have all these rights, but surely you are seeing how the paper is not matching the reality in many ways, and very little is being done to fix that as tens of millions of americans outright support the paper being ignored, so how can you trust that disparity to not come for your paper rights to speak? Already those same courts you are relying on have thrown away real rights, and the administration itself flouts those same courts regularly.
Chinese citizens have a lot of rights on paper too, including right to freedom of expression. I would bet you could find occasional cases or situations in China where some lowly citizen "wins" against the government, as that always looks good, but that doesn't make it meaningful and I can't read or speak any Chinese languages to back up this suspicion.
It's only going to take one Supreme Court case to change the paper rights. Do you feel this supreme court has shown a preference for principles over administration?
I mostly don't agree that the paper isn't matching the reality. The Trump regime does a lot of terrible things, and works hard to create the impression that this means they're omnipotent and can do whatever terrible things they want to anyone who steps out of line, and I think it's entirely correct to be stressed and worried that one day they might be able to put that into practice. But today it's not so. A guy yelled to Trump's face that he's a pedophile protector last month (https://www.cbsnews.com/detroit/news/ford-worker-keeping-job...), and Trump could not do anything in response other than impotently flip him off.
Going back 35 years to point out a time when protestors were killed is always a strange thing to me. You can go back just a few weeks until you reach a point where the US killed protestors. Then there's stuff like the Black Lives Matter protests where the US government violently suppressed protests and people died/disappeared.
If 1989 is all a country has as a problem, then that's a sign it's doing great.
There are plenty of other more recent examples in this thread.
I was simply replying to the original statement that China doesn't kill protesters in the street. The notion is so risible that in hindsight it may well have been sarcasm or bait.
But, if you wish to expand the scope of this discussion, sure. There are several clear distinctions between the (horrible) events you list and what happened in Tiananmen Square.
The most obvious is that we are free to talk about them now. I submit that the Chinese state's continued censorship of the subject is a sign that (1) the state is still complicit in these crimes and (2) it is not "doing great".
The scale of brutality is also just incomparable. I say this fully agreeing the events you list were terrible. The horrors committed at Tiananmen Square were simply on another level.
Uh.This has happened plenty. It's pretty well known that there's a lot of various abductions/disappearances of people the Chinese govt doesn't like. Including outright deaths in the streets:
While it's correct to criticize China's authoritarian policies and lack of civic and religious freedoms that are often taken for granted here, it's still very much a pot-calling-the-kettle-black situation. The US's treatment, both historical and modern, of it's black, native, and immigrant populations have been just as or even more brutal than China's crackdown on Islamism. Mass incarceration and criminalization of the poorest sections of society in the US are at levels far beyond what exists in any other country in the world. Political corruption and nepotism have been normalized for decades, and the deep-seated culture of elite impunity is apparent in the total lack of consequences from the Epstein files. US citizens should not be wasting time criticizing other countries for problems our own country has yet to fix.
They've been successfully blocked (for now). No current deportees are headed there so far as I know. But they are busy trying to build the system right here at home.
ICE detention is already beginning to resemble the Salvadoran prison system.
Due process rights get violated. Detainees get shuttled around to different facilities to be lost in the system through engineered incompetence, making it difficult for legal counsel or family to find them, or even to know who has been taken. They subject them to torturous conditions, abuse, and often hold people who've committed no crimes for months.
They are thwarting oversight and defying court orders left and right. And they are trying to scale up like 10x+. And once they do, the detention system won't just be for immigrants. They are going to target anyone they want.
D's have successfully blocked DHS funding for now, but if they (or SCOTUS) allow any of this to go forward, things are likely to get far worse
The author is wrong. IMHO he's operating under a false premise that the labor market just kind of "happens" or even that the labor market itself is "efficient".
At no point have worker rights and conditions advanced without being demanded, sometimes violently. The history of maritime safety is written in blood. The robber baron era was peppered with deadly clashes such as the Homestead Strike. As a reminder, we had a private paramilitary force for the wealthy called the Pinkerton Detective Agency (despite the name, they were hired thugs) that at it's peak outnumbered the US Army.
Heck, you can go back to the Black Death when there was a labor shortage to work farms and the English Crown tried to pass laws to cap wages to avoid "gouging" by peasants for their labor.
Automation could be very good for society. It could take away menial jobs so we all benefit. But this won't happen naturally because that's essentially a wealth transfer to the poor and the wealthy just won't stand for that.
No, what's going to happen is that AI specifically and automation in general will be used to suppress labor wages and furhter transfer wealth to the already wealthy. We don't need to replace everyone for this to happen. Displacing just 5% of the workforce has a massive effect on wages. The remaining 95% aren't asking for raises and they're doing more work for the same wages as they pick up whatever the 5% was doing.
We see this exact pattern in the permanent layoff culture in tech right now. At the top you have a handful of AI researchers who command $100M+ pay packages. The vast majority are either happy to still have a job or have been laid off, possibly multiple times, and spend a ton of time going through endless interview rounds for jobs that may not even exist.
This two-tiered society is very much in our near future (IMHO).
In the Depression you had wandering hoboes who were constantly moving, seeking temporary low-paid work and a meal. This situation was so bad we got real socialist change with the New Deal.
2008 killed the entry-level job market and it has yet to recover. That's why you see so many millenails with Masters degrees and a ton of student debt working as baristas. Covid popped the tech labor bubble, something tech companies had been wanting for a long time. Did you not notice that they all started doing layoffs at about the exact same time? Even when they're massively profitable?
So the author isn't worried about job loss? Delusional. We're teetering on the edge of complete societal collapse.
There's one aspect that doesn't come up often enough as well, and I think something most people are too afraid to even imagine about.
What happens when you have a surplus of able bodied young people who are angry and without purpose? What's the easiest way to divert all that anger and give them purpose at the same time?
People in developing nations worked around this by immigrating.
There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
Well, if that's true then employees of the companies that build the tools for all this to happen can also be held responsible, no?
I'm actually an optimist and believe there will come a time whena whole lot of people will deny ever working for Palantir, for Clearview on this and so on.
What you, as a software engineer, help build has an impact on the world. These things couldn't exist if people didn't create and maintain them. I really hope people who work at these companies consider what they're helping to accomplish.
I never worked at a company that could broadly be considered unethical, I don't think. But it was always a bit disheartening how many little obviously unethical decisions (e.g., advertised monthly plans with a small print "annual contract" and cancellation fee) almost every other employee would just go along with implementing, no pushback whatsoever. I don't know what it is, but your average employee seemingly sees themselves as wholly separate from the work they're paid to do.
I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
I used to work at a company where we did hosting/ maintenance/ etc for large-ish content sites.
At some point a project came across my desk where a hard-right propaganda site for college students came across my desk and I needed to migrate it.
Folks might quibble about the reality of what that site was doing but that's how I (as a person with an MA in rhetoric) understood the site, so humor me on my assessment of that site. It was a pretty regular site on the Drudge report, though, so that might help with context.
It was a very popular site, with multiple millions of unique visitors every month, and was a lot of easy cash for the business.
At that point in my career, I felt that not doing that work would be a rather "privileged" pose to strike- it would have negative impacts on my coworkers and the very small business in general, while I would just be "uncomfortable" either way.
At some point I was asked to build out a "tracker" for things like "confederate state removals, etc", IIRC sometime around the "Unite the Right" events.
I turned the work down, even though it pissed off my boss and forced a different co-worker to do the work.
That situation was what helped me understand that the immoral and "privileged" position was to do that kind of work, which wouldn't quickly and directly harm me but was likely to harm other people at some point.
However, what I also realized was that doing that work is probably harmful to me, too, as a queer leftist who now wishes I didn't feel like I need to own guns.
Almost everyone in that small business was queer or brown or both. At some point after (I am vaguely recalling) an 8-chan related shooter, the boss of the business stopped doing updates or work on the site.
All that is to say, I used to feel like "speaking up when I didn't want to do something unethical" was a privileged thing to do but I have come to realize that the inverse is true.
> I have friends who are otherwise extremely progressive people, who I think are genuinely good people, who worked for Palantir for many years. The cognitive dissonance they must've dealt with...
There's really nothing different about it than people working for Meta, AWS or Microsoft, and there are likely a dozen of those among us in this thread alone (hi!). Especially pre-Trump. Without the latter two companies gladly committing to juicy enterprise contracts with Palantir (continuing to this day), they would barely exist. Zuckerberg has caused magnitudes more death and destruction in the world than Karp could even dream of. Not for the latter's lack of trying, of course. And with similar amounts of empathy. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg, Thiel's combined empathy amounts to zero. None of them have more than any of the others.
To be fair, I think at least at Microsoft, Google and indeed Palantir a lot of people have had large degrees of separation to the despicable stuff the companies are responsible for. Working on say, Xbox (Microsoft), or Gmail (Google), or optimizing Airbus manufacturing (Palantir), one can see how it's quite easy to defend at a surface level.
In that sense I consider Meta the worst because Facebook/Instagram are effectively the entire business, with a little side of WhatsApp. Almost everyone is working directly on those two products, or is maybe one degree separated.
I'm sure this won't be a popular opinion on here, but it may help you give a different point of view about your friends in a way. You should talk with them about it. Pre-MAGA, you'll likely find that ironically the place they worked at was internally more progressive than Meta or Microsoft. Did your friends quit voluntarily or were they booted?
This is an interesting article [0].
This comment probably won't be very popular here, but I do invite those who instinctively reach for the downvote button to have a calm think and maybe reply before they do so.
> average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
What do you mean by this? If a government conscripts "average citizens" into its military then they become valid military targets, sure.
I'm not why you think this implies that developers working for Palantir or Clearview would become military targets. Palantir builds software for the military. But the people actually using that software are military personnel, not Palantir employees.
You're trying to find claims that aren't there, they are explicitly saying that "certain people" (which may or may not include the original poster) think that deliberately killing civilians is fine if their government is bad enough. They then go on to rhetorically question if those same "certain people" would find terrorist killings of tech workers who work at companies they don't like justified because they help the US government, even if it's in a purely civilian context.
>There are certain people who believe that average citizens can be held responsible for the actions of their government, to the point that they are valid military targets.
Yeah we typically call those people terrorists or war criminals.
It's almost like you could describe the physical store as the means of production so what we're talking about is the worker's relationship to the means of production.
You might say: but what abou the owners? Many such small businesses are just jobs you buy. Many don't survive when the owners don't move on or the business sells for what's a relatively low price given the turnover.
I'll give you another real world example of this distortion: NYC"s so-called "zombie stores" [1].
I keep thinking about a statement made by Xi Jinping in 2016: houses are for living, not for speculation [2]. Many China critics liked to point to the Evergrand collapse as some gotcha but what really happened is that the CCP intentionally just popped the real estate bubble, taking the position that affordable housing was more important than inventor returns.
Why do I bring up housing? Because as intentional policy decisions increase the cost of construction, it also makes commercial real estate more expensive. Even if you ignore the increased construction cost, every commercial space becomes more expensive because it's an opportunity cost to not build housing there in a speculative market.
Increased rent and increased property costs are an input into everything you buy and are killing the businesses people seem to like and the so-called "third spaces" a lot of people talk about.
And why? Because a plurality of Americans (if not an outright majority) see themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" [3] and future real estate moguls.
The physical store is not the "means of production" in urban areas, but a closer analog is the piece of paper that allows a given square foot of floorspace (for any use) the right to exist within the city for a given period of time. You could call this piece of paper a floorspace factory, since it's the limiting factor. Somehow we have decided it's best to have as few floorspace factories as possible.
Perhaps it was accidentally stumbling into good policy, but we all know western leaders would not be brave enough to do such a thing. The result of encouraging homeownership ideologically in the postwar era is that the west has a gigantic voting bloc of landowners who just want number go up.
I found a simpler explanation for what's going on [1].
To summarize, malicious Markdown files with custom schemes in URLs can trick users into executing arbitrary code. I honestly didn't know this was a "feature" of Notepad.
I guess that's my real problem here. The constant desire for feature bloat inevitably introduces potential vulnerabilities. In no world did I expect Notepad to have the ability under any circumstances to make network requests and execute arbitrary code.
Nor should I.
As an aside, this is why I violently despise Eletron apps and anything that runs its own browser engine for a GUI. I just don't want that level of attack surface in any app that I use.
I don't think I ever look at my feed on Youtube and I'm honestly not even sure why. This might just be a byproduct of when I started using it. I don't think I even logged in for the longest time. Even today, I don't subscribe much or even like videos.
My usage of Youtube seems to be near 100% intentional, meaning I'm looking for something in particular. I just don't really use Youtube for discovery. I'm sure other people differ. But I really wonder how much of this comes down to the UI and/or algorithm just not being that good.
the closest I get really is looking at my home page sometimes and seeing what channels I've previously watched have new videos, basically.
Now compare this to Tiktok. My usage of Tiktok is 99% on my fyp. There's a follwoing tab but I basically never use it. Almost everyone I follow I've found on my fyp. It's so good too. A big part is how quickly it learns. Watch one video on a topoic and you'll quickly be prompted with others in that category.
But how much of this is just the usage patterns I have chosen with Tiktok that I didn't for Youtube for largely historical reasons? I honestly don't know.
I don't own a smart speaker. It's actually annoying because there are so few options for a music system now. I've previously owned a Sonos but honestly it's just not a polished product. Anyway, my issue with smart speakers is I don't want a cloud-connected always-on microphones in my house. Sorry but no. You simply never know when law enforcement will use such a thing via a warrant nobody can tell you about (ie FISA). It could be targeted to you, individually but there are far worse alternatives.
It could be a blanket warrant against, say, people posting negatively against ICE online. Or microphones couldd be used to identify such people based on what it hears. You just have no control.
And once again, Google handed over PII voluntarily to the government recently [1]. Companies don't need to comply with administrative subpoenas. It takes a court order signed by a judge to enforce.
All of this is just another reason why China was correct to keep US tech companies out, basically. But here's where it's going to get much worse for the US and those same companies: when the EU decides enough is enough and creates their own versins that are subject to EU jurisdiction.
[1]: https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/10/google-sent-personal-and-f...
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