What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.
What I'm referring to here is idealism [1]. Whether it's European colonial powers or the US, the basis for foreign intervention is, quite simply, that we are the Good Guys. Why? Because we're the Good Guys. Even slavery was justified in Christianity by converting the heathen and saving their immortal souls, a fundamentally idealistic argument.
What's the alternative? Materialism [2], the premise of which is that there is not anything metaphysical that defines "goodness". Rather, you are the product of your material circumstances. There is a constant feedback loop if you affecting your material surroundsina and those surroundings affect you.
This has been proven wrong again and again. My grandparents were subsistence farmers. They had much less material wealth than any working class American and the vast majority of unhoused Americans. Yet, I can assure you that back then they were much more satisfied with life than the vast majority of working class and unhoused americans today. Second point, no amount of material wealth can compensate for severe mental illness. When people have severe mental illness, medical interventions must be performed against their diminished "free will." For those of you of American descent ask your parents or grand parents how their grand parents lived. I am certain you will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general hopefulness. Conclusion: once basic needs are met, the perception of "material" is more important than the material.
> What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.
It's not just "western" political thought if such a thing even exists. It's political thought.
For example, Japan's stated goal in ww2 was to liberate asia from european invaders. They portrayed themselves as the good guys. The liberators. That's true for every empire and war in history, "western" or "eastern" or "northern" or "southern". It was always the self-proclaimed "good guys" fighting self-proclaimed "good guys". The winner gets to keep the "good guy" handle while the loser gets assigned the "bad guy" handle.
Had japan won ww2, that's how history would have taught ww2. Instead, japan lost and the US won and hence we get to claim to be the good guys while japan does not.
It's one thing to analyze the world with this lens, which is perfectly fine, as long as it's part of a bigger analysis. But materialist views have never stopped the boot. Materialist political ideology has produced some of the finest jack boots history has seen.
Meta and Google (including Youtube) kowtow to the administration in what speech they promote and suppress in the exact way the administration (both parties) says China might theoretically do in the future.
Why do so many tech people push this "federation is a panacea" idea despite all evidence to the contrary? I don't get it.
First, the obvious: if federation was clearly superior, it would've won. No medium since email has been federated and even that's dominated by a handful of players. Running your own email server is... nontrivial.
Second, users don't care abou tthis. Like at all.
Third, supposedly tech-savvy people don't seem willing or able to merely scratch the surface of what that looks like and how it would work.
Fourth, there's a lot of infrastructure you need such as moderation and safety that would need to be replicated for each federated provider.
Lastly, zero consideration is given to the problems this actually creates. Look at POTS. We have spam and providers that are bad actors and effectively launder spam calls and texts. You need some way to manage that.
The utility of federated networks increases a lot when bad actors cause harm to people. What had a minimal value and failed to get attention yesterday when they need was low may be drastically different today when that need is high.
Federated networks are theoretically and systematically superior to centralized, that's why people push it.
Humanity and social media isn't about technological superiority. Current platforms have inertia. Why would people fragment when all they care about is basic actions, and their network is already built?
Federated networks have been burdened by an onboarding tax, but this, along with moderation, can all be abstracted away by AI.
Let's see the current reality: social media platforms are currently American-dominated. A serious geopolitical problem, especially considering the amount of time younger generations spend on it.
There is more and more reason for governments to get involved and force the fragmentation of these platforms.
For almost all of human history information has been centralized among a small actors, for some time period we had a large independent press but those days are gone.
Everyone has a stake in getting accurate information, and therefore they have an interest in owning part of that system.
Well for one we've seen how great and powerful federation can be, email is completely federated and the design of email has enabled hundreds of multibillion dollar companies.
Why wouldn't this also apply to social media? Why is it better for 5 players to exist rather than 1000s?
Sure is! the issue is that people's attention isn't -- most people on the web stick to a few web pages; their social media of choice (facebook, tiktok, etc...) and their news provider of choice (CNN, Fox, NBC).
Putting up a website is easy, pulling traffic away from bigger sites is much more difficult
I predict a future showdown over Section 230 because "algorithms" are used to cheat on the safe harbor protections. Let me explain.
The general principle of Section 230 is that a platform provider isn't generally liable for user generated content. This was a key piece of legislation that enabled forums, Reddit and ultimately social media. The platform provider does have responsibilities like moderating illegal content and responding to legal takedowns, etc.
Alternatively if you produce and publish your own content you are legally liable. You can be sued for defamation, etc in a way that you can't if you simply host user generated content (unless you fail to adequately moderate).
REcommendation algorithms (including news feeds) effectively allow a platform provider to select what content gets distributed and what doesn't. All algorithms express biases and goals of humans who create those algorithms. It's not a black box. It is a reflection of the company's goals.
So if you wanted to produce content that's, for example, only flattering to the administration even if you outright lie, you can be sued. But what if your users produce any content you want but you only distribute content that is favorable to the administration? At the same time, you suppress anti-administration content and content creators. It's the same end result but the latter has Section 230 protections. And it really shouldn't.
This isn't hypothetical. The Biden administration revived the dead Trump 1 Tiktok ban to suppress anti-Israel content [1][2][3].
What I find most funny about all this is that the American administration--both parties--are doing the exact thing they accuse China is possibly doing in the future.
How long will it be before somebody seeks to change AI answers by simply botting Youtube and/or Reddit?
Example: it is the official position of the Turkish government that the Armenian genocide [1] didn't happen.. It did. Yet for years they seemingly have spent resources to game Google rankings. Here's an article from 2015 [2]. I personally reported such government propaganda results in Google in 2024 and 2025.
Current LLMs really seem to come down to regurgitating Reddit, Wikipedia and, I guess for Germini, Youtube. How difficult would it be to create enough content to change an LLM's answers? I honestly don't know but I suspect for certain more niche topics this is going to be easier than people think.
And this is totally separate from the threat of the AI's owners deciding on what biases an AI should have. A notable example being Grok's sudden interest in promoting the myth of a "white genocide" in South AFrica [3].
Antivaxxer conspiracy theories have done well on Youtube (eg [4]). If Gemini weights heavily towards Youtube (as claimed) how do you defend against this sort of content resulting in bogus medical results and advice?
Anyone who is unironically saying China attacking Taiwan is a real threat (eg The Anthropic CEO quoted in the article) is either simply echoing the administration's painting of China as a geopolitical bogeyman or they're just ignorant of geopolitics, likely because they're projecting American economic imperialism onto China.
I'm glad the article dismissed this as a threat because it isn't one. The official policy of the US is the One China policy. You'll see this described as "strategic ambiguity". That's another way of saying that the official policy is simply to lie about supporting Taiwan's independence.
China can only hurt their position by taking military action against Taiwan. Also, it's highly debatable if they even have the military capability to invade Taiwan. Naval blockade? Sure. But to what end?
China is going to make their own chips. They'll just hire the right people to replicate EUV lithography. The article brought up nuclear weapons. It's a good analogy. At the end of WW2 the thinking of the US military was that the USSR would take 20+ years to get the bomb if they ever got it. It took 4 years. The gap with the hydrogen bomb was even less.
Western chauvinism in policy circles completely underestimates China's capacity to catch up in lithography. Not selling the best chips to China created a captive market for Chinese chipmakers.
I also think TSMC is being understandably cautious in not expanding their CapEx. AI companies really should focus on an economic use case for AI more than worry that foundry capacity will somehow limit a theoretical future AI use case.
"Putin is in the wrong here but there are no good guys. US rhetoric on this has predicted a full-scale invasion that hasn't come to fruition multiple times and the media just laps it up. It's reminiscent of the WMD justification for invading Iraq. It's straight up Manufacturing Consent [1].
However, Putin has a point: extending NATO membership to Ukraine is an overtly hostile act by the US and NATO member states. Putin no more wants NATO bases in the Ukraine than the US would want Chinese or Russian military bases in Canada or Mexico.
But Russia is not and never was going to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. It would destroy Russia. Trying to do this in Afghanistan, a substantially smaller and less developed country, played a significant factor in the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Russia wants a buffer between it and NATO and access to the Black Sea. That's it."
I got a friend who tends to be good at making strategic predictions but didn't see that;) because in addition to all the other bad things it would be strategically completely dumb move by putin. and it was.
it doesn't sound that Xi is as dumb as Putin but who knows.
A lot of work is fake work. It's just social signaling. It's just a game of being liked. Just look at the stats for autistic people who have difficulty finding and maintaining employment, not because they're bad at their actual job but because neurotypical people just don't like them. Anyone who has worked for a remotely large organization has met plenty of people who have been promoted well beyond their actual abilities or output.
In this space you'll often hear about Dunbar's number [1] and the idea that organizations with more than about 150 people tend to break down. In larger organizations, a whole layer of middle management seems to rise up with questionable output. Like you might have no idea who your VP is. One place I worked had the VP visit once a quarter, walk aroudn and ask what people worked on and occasionally yell at them.
The military is an interesting example because it's millions of people, often in confined spaces so a whole bunch of rules have to be created so they don't kill each other, basically. And if you talk to any current or former servicemembers you'll hear stories about how not much gets done there either. Toxic leadership, lots of waiting around for nothing, bureaucracy and so on.
One can view this "research" as "be nice to your employees" but I think it's more nefarious than that. Or at least "be nice" won't be the lesson Corporate America takes from it. Instead it'll be that employees need to be even more closely monitored so they're not slacking off.
I think about what I call "organizational churn". This is where every 6 months you'll get an email saying a VP in your direct chain whom you've likely never met now reports to a different SVP under some restructure or reorganization to "align goals" or for "efficiency".
What you realize after awhile is that organizational churn only exists so nobody is every accountable for their actions or output. They're never in the same place long enough to see the consequences of their action or inaction.
But what I've thought about a lot recently in terms of organization is the Chinese Community Party. Millions of people work for the CCP. Yet it's output has been stunning. Some 40,000km of high speed train lines in 20 years for less than the US spends on the military in one year. Energy projects, metros, bridges, cities, housing, roads, ports, the list goes on.
How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
> How does the CCP avoid empire-building, institutional rot and general bureaucratic paralysis?
Oh they don't! In exactly the same way US didn't. Right now, a lot of factors have put enough tailwind into Chinese economy and the inertia is a bitch to retreat, as can be seen with US itself. These tailwinds are strong enough that they lift everybody up, even considering the corruption taking its share.
I find almost all modern content producers to be a depressing business, fundamentally incompatible with being a large corporation. This includes movies, TV and video games.
The problem is the large corporation wants to remove creativity from the process. They want a repeatable formula that they can scale and infinitely reproduce.
The wet dream for the modern AAA studio is a "game" like FIFA that has annual releases and loot boxes to gamble on to get better pixels. Call of Duty and similar games are the next best because it's user-generated content ("UGC"). They still have to invest to create maps, which they don't like doing. But you still have micro-transactions for skins so that's good (for them).
I played Assassin's Creed Odyssey a lot. Some people don't like it because it's too CRPG. That's why I liked it. They paid a lot of attention to the environment. I've heard of teachers using it to portray ancient Greece.
They managed this even though it was a little formulaic. I suspect that any future AC releases will be even more formulaic.
The one exception to this "large game studio = bad" rule had been Rockstar. The various GTA3 titles and GTA4 were widely renowned because of their social commentary and wit, as well as being groundbreaking (at the time) for open world games.
But GTA5 was a turning point for me. Yes it was a sprawling, beautiful environment but the writing was complete ass. It had none of the intelligence and insight of earlier titles. The characters were awful. But Rockstar seemingly didn't care because they're discovered the GTA Online money faucet, something I don't care about at all.
I really wonder if GTA6 will be beautiful but soulless. It coudl go either way. RDR2 was released after GTA5, after all.
These big studios really do have a habit of killing successful franchises or simply sucking the life out of them. There are few bigger fumbles than the EA SimCity fiasco. I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something. But honestly I haven't really felt compelled to play the franchise much since Civ4.
I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.
At this point I'd call Valve a platform company (both in Steam and SteamOS (and all the mostly open source development that comes with it)) that occasionally releases games.
> I guess you can say Civilization has maintained... something.
Civ 7 sort of killed that, unfortunately, but at least the bones are there and future updates can fix it, I think it was largely just released unfinished.
Which is another pet peeve of mine with AAA studios lately. So many are putting out what are rightfully early access/beta versions as the full release, then "fixing" it with paid DLCs down the road. At this point, I no longer by AAA games on release. I wait a few years until I can get it + all the DLC on a steam sale for half the cost.
> I do miss the days when games were games not just loot box slot machines with annual reskins.
That still exists, you just won't get it from AAA studios. Thankfully there's a thriving indie scene and fantastic titles from smaller studios, most of which are better than the AAA slop coming out now. There's been some good releases from big names recently, mostly BG3, Elden Ring, Cyberpunk but all the others? I feel like gaming peaked, for the type that I play, with the Witcher 3 and its been downhill since then.
The very first Prince of Persia game came out in the early 90s. It's at least 35 years old. It was noteworthy as being one of the first games (if not the first) to have ragdoll physics for the movement of the player.
It was a game of playing through 12 levels (IIRC) and if you died, you started over completely. I played it for 20 hours straight at one point and ended up beating it. I think it takes like 30-45 minutes for a full run through normally? I'm a bit fuzzy on this part. It was an amazing game.
What you're talking about is the early 2000s "reboot" that launched a new franchise under the old name and really wasn't that similar to the original other than a setting of being loosely Persian/Arabic. But it wasn't a platform game in the same sense.
The failed remake in question is for Sands of Time (2003–2004) rather than for the original Prince of Persia (1989)—though, judging by this catastrophe, the remake development team wouldn't have been able to remake the original game in seven years either!
The article states it was a remake of The Sands of Time, so the early 2000s game. As the basis for the project it will count as the original in this case.
Maybe I'm a dinosaur in this regard but I don't like nor trust any of these desktop application that are really just Web technologies with an embedded browser eg Discord.
They're resource hogs and the attack surface is huge. You're basically betting that automatic code that's run won't find a vulnerability and escape the sandbox from an entire browser.
I have way more trust in Jetbrains IDEs and the JVM as a sandbox vs HTML/CSS/JS.
Still, I'm always impressed at the ingenuity of the people who come up with these attacks and the people who find them.
Won’t IDEA automatically index/execute some Gradle code when possible? As soon as you execute an arbitrary binary/script from the project directory, the isolation of the JVM doesn’t matter.
This particular vulnerability relied upon passing the require function to a scope to allow the loading and running of arbitrary code. This is what I tend to call a blacklist approach. You're saying in this sandbox certain features can't be used because they will allow escape.
The alternative is a whitelist approach. Instead of disallowing dangerous features you're enabling only the features you need.
So a build system like Gradle or Maven (same thing really) has a limited set of primitives it is allowing access to. It's not loading, say, the entire JVM and all the Java core libraries and then listing all those you can't use.
You see the difference? If nothing else, the blacklist approach is going to fail when the virtual machine (or whatever) adds a new API call upstream and it's added without intent to the sandbox by simply doing an update where nobody has thought to disable it.
Another way of looking at this is Gradle isn't being compiled into Java bytecode and run in the same environment as the IDE (sandboxed or otherwise). That is inherently riskier.
Yep. You’d think using web tech would make it really easy to sandbox any 3rd party JavaScript that gets run. But I suppose sandboxing is simply too inconvenient.
Because that isn't how it happens, the plugin model relies on external processes with OS IPC, most of them rely on basic process security model, and aren't even implemented in JavaScript due to performance.
What I'm referring to here is idealism [1]. Whether it's European colonial powers or the US, the basis for foreign intervention is, quite simply, that we are the Good Guys. Why? Because we're the Good Guys. Even slavery was justified in Christianity by converting the heathen and saving their immortal souls, a fundamentally idealistic argument.
What's the alternative? Materialism [2], the premise of which is that there is not anything metaphysical that defines "goodness". Rather, you are the product of your material circumstances. There is a constant feedback loop if you affecting your material surroundsina and those surroundings affect you.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism
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