Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
I think it's "organic" from the big tech companies looking to pull up the ladder behind them. These laws are straight up regulatory capture to make it much harder to start new Internet businesses, while forcing their users to divulge even more personal info.
Google has been bugging me with Android popups for years "please add your birthday to help Google comply with the law". Obtaining that bit of my information isn't something they need to do - it's something they want to do because every bit of personal information they scrape out of me makes their adtech surveillance database joins that much more accurate.
Today an email purportedly from Google said I will need to send age verification on my 20yo account, or they'll stop targeting me for advertisements and showing me inappropriate material. This sounds like an excellent deal for me, not going to bother determining if its a phishing attempt.
This seems strictly wrong. People talk online. People get their ideas online, and share their ideas online. Internet comments _alone_ are not a social movement, but they certainly do frequently represent social movements.
Musk in his tit for tat with Trump recently revealed huge numbers of the Internet comments supporting MAGA were foreign plants. He didn't reveal which accounts were bots though. All these comments supporting censorship appear mostly on platforms that would love to ID every person on their platform.
Internet comments do not represent anything anymore that doesn't manifest in the actual world. They are excellent at having a few influence the many
I agree with you, and probably more than it sounds. But I think the point you make is still too strong a case. ie, even if the online comments are ~90% foreign influence it doesn't also follow that everything is astroturfing or that real people do not discuss issues online.
To your point though, maybe we can no longer reliably tell the difference, and so it'd be better to adopt your view as a rule of thumb.
He asked for more concrete examples because the professional companies are behind the consumer level products. Home Assistant is one of the biggest projects on GitHub for a reason. It's still stuck in the hobby space but everything they are doing lately is to push it past Apple Home for the regular user.
When I looked into it, it seemed like a community that loved freeing robots but was absolutely not willing to buy robots that the developers did not have access to. This seems like a fair stance and I think they will start receiving dead vacuums soon. Hopefully Neato's security is as bad as their business side.
Hating women and having her waste money on a flight is way better than burning her at the stake, stoning her, or chatting her up because you are a serial killer.
Theres a long history there. It is already a good thing that most people identify that behavior as weird and awful instead of it being socially acceptable or even the law.
Whitehouse.com, Goatse, Lemonparty, wondering what results you will get if you type fuck into Dogpile, public and private chat rooms etc all existed on the early Internet.
There was way less advocating that slavery and Nazis weren't so bad and it was much harder to upload a photo of yourself, but nearly everything these censorship laws are trying to block existed in some form on the early Internet. Parents need to parent and we have an entire generation that grew up fine with the Internet and video games.
There are people from and not from El Salvador that are being sent to a concentration camp there. We don't know what is happening to people being sent to other random countries.
I had heard of many smaller apps using Kotlin for their iOS app, but this may be the biggest all in multiplatform app I've seen. It would be awesome if there may eventually be support for writing Pebble apps in Kotlin.
Pebble watches run on Cortex-M microcontrollers which have less than 1MB of flash storage and RAM, I like Kotlin multiplatform but getting it to run on them is extremely unlikely. I assume that for the foreseeable future Pebble apps will be only written in languages which are traditionally used for MCUs like Rust and C\C++
Calling rust traditional is a bit of a stretch, while it is being done it's pretty much bleeding edge (though if you do not use any of the manufacturer supplied code and libraries to begin with you should be fine).
It is honestly refreshing to see constraints like this again.
In my cloud infrastructure work (C++), we have gotten lazy. We bloat our containers because 'RAM is cheap'. Seeing a system designed to fit into 1MB reminds me that performance engineering used to be about efficiency, not just throwing more hardware at the problem.
I find this a little funny because as a firmware engineer the project I regularly work on only has 512kb of flash. This doesn't stop sales from constent new feature requests.
Embedded is definitely a fun balance of what we could do and how much we can do.
This doesn't make sense from Pebble hardware point of view.
Now it would be great if we could move on to C++, Zig or Rust, instead of coding C like I did in the MS-DOS days, where I was already able to develop C++ applications within 640 KB limitations.
Chiang Kai-shek is a standard part of the world history course in the US in high school. We know why China wants Taiwan at the personal level, much of the world is just interested in that not happening.
It's a civil war like the American revolution was a civil war and France helped out.
This is the first time I've ever seen a non-Chinese person say it this way on Reddit, X, or this platform.
I must have scrolled through way too much Reddit.
Yep, it's 100% common knowledge. I distinctly remember my teacher making a point to explain why Chiang Kai-shek and Jiang Jieshi were both valid transliterations in my 10th grade world history class.
No one in America with a high school education believes that Taiwan is an unrelated country that China randomly decided to pick on after throwing a dart at a map. Chinese history from antiquity to modern European/Japanese colonialism and war crimes to the unresolved civil war and KMT's retreat from the mainland are standard course material; the history and politics around reunification aren't some big mystery.
Don't get me wrong. The history is interesting, but from an American perspective interesting history doesn't translate into justification for violent incursion on an established nation's sovereignty. We largely don't even support our own past unprovoked invasions, much less invasions by rivals against stable and prosperous liberal democracies that we have long-standing friendly relationships with. The American lesson from our history isn't "we screwed up in Iraq and Vietnam, so other countries should get a pass to behave similarly"; it's "let's work to prevent such tragedies from repeating".
> We largely don't even support our own past unprovoked invasions, much less invasions by rivals against stable and prosperous liberal democracies that we have long-standing friendly relationships with.
Of course you don't support invasions of your puppet nation that only exists because of your intervention. But let's flip this around. Suppose that there was a second American civil war, one side lost and retreated to California. PRC funds the losers, stations troops there, signs a treaty guaranteeing to defend their independence. Do you think the US would ever, in a million years, accept that? Even after 75 years, it's obvious the US is going to state that California still belongs to it, and would try to reclaim it whenever possible.
If you looked at this objectively, rather than from your perspective as the defender of the puppet state, it would be clear that PRC's claim is justified. All the more so because not only was the territory rightfully theirs, but now they have a hostile power from halfway across the world threatening to use it as a staging point against them.
Your American lesson, also, does not disbar any country from having any claim to any land. America is by far the most egregious actor in the world stage because it routinely does, in fact, invade lands that are halfway across the world. It can be true that invading a country on the other side of the planet is wrong, and that seeking to re-unify your partitioned country is not so wrong.
That said, I don't particularly expect it to ever come to war, anyways. I think it's much more realistic that PRC will exercise political influence and economic pressure to achieve re-unification rather than invasion.
I agree that, in principle, the people of every territory should have the right to peaceful self-determination regardless of validity of other people's claims to territory. In practice, virtually nobody acknowledges that right, even though it's ostensibly the first article of the UN charter. The Irish had to make life hell for the English to get any concessions, Catalonia had its independence movement dismantled, Kurds are oppressed by every state they live in. The US itself is guilty of this; there was no particular reason the union of two completely opposite cultures had to be enforced, and in another timeline perhaps there was a peaceful national divorce. The hypothetical independent California was actually, in reality, an independent Confederacy of several states, and their independence movement was crushed. To that extent, I could agree China is in the wrong, but only insomuch as any other country is, and it should not be singled out as a particularly aggressive nation when it's playing by the same international norms as the rest of the world. That it wants to reclaim Taiwan is in no way indicative that it has any intention to invade Korea or Japan, as supposed upthread.
It sounds like we have some common ground, but I think you may have a misunderstanding of the present American worldview and politics.
We're 79 years removed from Philippine independence, and you would have to try very hard to find a single American who wants them back. The US military would have been fully capable of annexing Iraq and Afghanistan with violent repression of dissent and zero concern for civilian casualties, had that been the will of the people. After 75 years of peaceful coexistence with a hypothetical independent California, I would be very surprised to see any political will for annexation.
The "same international norms as the rest of the world" you refer to are anachronistic. The post-WWII norms, to a large extent defined and upheld by the US, aren't based around maximal balkanization or unconditional support for separatism, but rather opposition to transfer of territory by force. If that sounds like ladder-pulling, maybe it is, but China has no standing to complain; Western conquests have been largely disbanded, while China remains as the third-largest nation in the world (ahead of the US).
I'm not claiming that the US has never done anything wrong. I asserted the opposite of that. I'm arguing that pointing out someone else's crime isn't a justification for someone to go commit a crime of their own. If you shoot someone from a rival gang, your lawyer isn't going to argue in court that it's okay because someone else from that gang shot someone else a decade ago. There's actually a word for that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism.
But if we both agree that wars of aggression are bad regardless of whether they're started by the US, China, Russia, or anyone else, then we're basically on the same page.
I think that the American worldview is heavily propagandised and doesn't particularly reflect reality. The post WWII-norms are not at all a story of peaceful self-determination. The decolonisation of the Phillipines was an anomaly and an outlier. At the same time that the US was letting go of the Phillipines, it was gearing up for war in Korea on behalf of its puppet military dictatorship that was, at the time, even more repressive than the North Korean one. The Dutch fought a war in an attempt to keep control of Indonesia. France fought a war for its colonial possessions, which the US joined in on. Portugal fought wars for its colonial possessions. The UK let India go only because it was utterly ravaged by WWII, and they recognised they would not likely be able to keep it by force.
Moreover, the US specifically simply adopted a different model: puppet governance. As did the USSR. You would hardly find an American who would say that the USSR was benevolent, despite the fact that they believe themselves to be benevolent while doing the same things. Invading a country to install a regime loyal to yours is not meaningfully different from annexing the country outright. But it allows the populace at home to believe that they are doing the right thing. Why, their form of governance is the best governance in the world, so they're doing other nations a favor by invading them and replacing their governments!
Americans will make all kinds of fuss over China doing meaningless posturing in territorial waters, meanwhile their government is currently launching missiles in Venezulean waters, actually killing people. They violated the sovereignity of Iranian airspace, dropping bunker busters on government buildings. They assassinated another nation's top general. These are all acts of war. Nothing has changed. America continues to operate as it always has, under the principle of "might makes right", while dressing its operations up in pretty rhetoric.
Pointing out hypocrisy in ongoing international norms is not whataboutism. In a world where nobody is ever punished for shooting a rival gang member, then you either shoot or get shot; that is simply the natural way of things. And moreover, the prosecutor bringing charges against the Red Gang is a member of the Blue Gang that shot theirs first. Why would the Red Gang entertain, for a moment, the charges of aggression from the Blue Gang which did already intervene in its civil war and effectively seized territory from it? For the Blue Gang to possibly be convincing to the Red Gang, it would first need to make amends and to stop actively committing 10x worse crimes than the crime it accuses the Red Gang of. If we want a peaceful world, I'd argue the onus is on the US to live up to its self-proclaimed "rules based international order" first, because it is the one violating those rules the most, and other nations will not simply lie down and agree to be bound by rules that are openly being violated to their detriment.
I'm in agreement that wars of aggression are bad, but I strongly dislike the tendency for that to be selectively leveraged to paint only certain actors in a bad light. I think from a non-American perspective, it's pretty clear that the US is a much more egregious international actor than China. But if you agree with that, you're in a true minority of Americans. Even if there are a substantial portion of Americans who disagree with their own invasions, most of them will still see China as much worse than themselves, despite the fact that the PRC's last and only real invasion was the reclamation of Tibet 70 years ago, and otherwise it has only started a couple of minor border skirmishes for the entirety of its existence. Meanwhile Americans engage in Yellow Scare-esque fearmongering about China invading Japan which, as a neutral third party, seems so far outside the realm of possibility as to be utterly delusional.
Even if the criticism is fair, it's still whataboutism. I agree with you that countries other than China have done bad things, including post-WWII, but not that it in any way justifies turning the streets of Taipei into a warzone.
I wouldn't unconditionally agree that "the US is a much more egregious international actor than China". I'd use a more neutral descriptor than "egregious", maybe "militaristic". Following the rule of "might makes right", as you point out, the US more or less became the self-appointed world police after WWII. That's inherently going to involve unpopular decisions and occasional abuse of power, but it's a fundamentally different relationship with the world than pure assertion of first-party interests. The ultimate goal of post-WWII American foreign policy has been to ensure that the rest of the world remains stable and open enough for reliable trade, from which China has also benefited tremendously.
US as world police is a mixed bag, but it is what it is. No one outside the US is really complaining that America bears the cost of its navy protecting international trade routes, for example. I'm as harsh a critic of certain US actions and policies as anyone, but modern American hegemony doesn't resemble the prior centuries of great powers running amok. The US today doesn't invade innocent countries for the purpose of stealing their land and resources or enslaving their people.
The concerns about China aren't limited to its past military actions, but also its domestic policies and stated future goals. For better or worse, China's domestic policies are quite illiberal relative to American values. This alone precludes China from being considered a clear ally of the US, and informs perceptions of what a hypothetical Chinese-led world order might look like. China gets to play the "what about America" card because the US is still generally invested in globalism, but how China might behave in a power vacuum created by a US shift to isolationism remains speculative.
.. would be an illegal American war, yes. Like most of the American incursions into South America and violations of sovereignty of South American countries.
Yep, any war of aggression would be wildly unpopular today. Limited actions may be somewhat tolerated inasmuch as they're seen as being at the behest of the legitimate Venezuelan government in exile, but no one wants a land invasion or to see American missiles killing civilians.
I'm not saying it could never happen, but the party in power would be burning a ridiculous amount of political capital, to put it mildly. A big part of the reason President Trump even exists is the perception that Bush lied to get us into Iraq and Obama kept us there. Trump consistently ran as the "anti-war" candidate, and Biden was also known for his dovish politics.
I don't understand why you think an invasion or widespread airstrikes would be unlikely.
- Trump has been building up our military presence in the area over the last few months[1]
-He's already striking boats that he claims have weapons of mass destruct... I mean drugs in them
- Trump said “I don’t think we're going to necessarily ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just going to kill people that are bringing drugs into our country, OK? We’re going to kill them,” [1]
- He declared the cartels terrorist groups [2]
I believe he's going to link Marudo to the cartels and use it to justify a war to force him out of power.
Republicans, will support him. He'll lie, like he always does, and they'll believe it either due to stupidity or tribalism. The further they follow him the more painful admitting they are wrong will be.
I haven't commented one way or another on the likelihood of an invasion. My claim is that an escalation from limited airstrikes to full-scale invasion would be wildly unpopular, which I stand by.
I'm not referring to any specific actions or commenting on who did what. I summarized what I've observed to be the common perception, which is that Iraq and Afghanistan were "forever wars" conducted against the informed consent of the American public, and a spectacular failure of our institutions and both party establishments.
If that sounds lacking in nuance, well, I never claimed to believe American political discourse was particularly nuanced ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
So if you commit financial crimes and have a massive mansion, you get to just be at home and order door dash, plot your next scam, have visitors. Even without the amazing house it's already way less bad than even COVID restrictions. That's not a punishment
The if you can afford it bit makes makes it even more likely that rich and powerful aren't appropriately punished for their crimes.
Maybe improve the prisons instead so everyone has a proper chance at rehabilitation.
Will an LLM purposefully change facts to incorrect information without fighting you the entire way? Seems like a blog platform could offer a feature where every posts has 3 or 4 factually wrong posts that would only be found by scrapers.
Everything that these laws are supposedly regulating has always been there and we have an entire generation now that grew up with it. Everyone was fine just like video games were fine, movies were fine, racy books were fine, and the printing press was fine.
The Internet comments make it seem like lazy parents but it's very convenient that the solution is to ID every single person on the Internet. Facebook pushed this hard with their real name policy and then had to back off because people complained about trans people being forced to use their old names. They've been successfully demonized so now it's time to push as hard as they can. It's probably not just Facebook but it's obviously not organic.
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