That means you're a peasant, and don't matter.
Don't worry, they'll work with telecoms and carriers to ensure devices matching your budget are subsidized and made available at every possible opportunity.
I expected mostly snark from my earnest question, And got it.
Ok, concrete scenario. What about homeless people using the computer at the library? Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they? Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Honestly, if you ask such terminally naive questions don't be surprised to get sarcasm in reply. Google does cut off access to chunks of people if it deems it profitable to do so!
Google would throw homeless people in a furnace to generate electricity for their datacentres if they could. No, this is not sarcasm, I fully expect they would if they could.
It's unpleasant to face, but this initiative from Google is a concrete example that the homeless/too-poor-for-phone do not matter. I've heard of cases where university library apps/admin systems required a phone, and for those cases you could borrow a phone from a "device library" on campus. But, obviously, there's nothing like this for the homeless guy being blocked by Google...
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Sure they would. Cloudflare has already arbitrarily blocked entire swathes of the internet. Captcha as well. Your average user ends up going to the path of least resistance, and end up with a compliant ISP or carrier that's doing all sorts of censorship and gatekeeping and siloing and funneling.
And if they did get noticed, they'd whip up some sort of program through their cronies like the Obama phone, and get subsidized service to some token groups, heavily favoring political funneling and defaults supporting whatever party won the grift for that particular round of conspicuous do-gooding.
It's bad, man. For technically savvy people, they can get around things, switch up DNS, muck with vpns, etc. Normal folks are kept firmly within the walled gardens.
Then there's the information silos, platforms, and psychological shit they use. People don't have a chance in hell of getting a free and open link to the internet, what they see is tied to their identity, tied to their service provider, tied to their geographic location, and it's all done seamlessly in the background so they never even notice what they're missing, by design.
It wasn't snark. It's the awful, honest truth, and I have things to suggest involving wire brushes for anyone at Google or any other company involved in this shit.
We need a digital bill of rights, outlawing commercial trafficking in user data, mandatory ephemerality, and penalties involving prison time for CEOs and fines that are rapidly and unavoidably fatal even for companies like Alphabet or Amazon if they screw up even a little bit. Otherwise, this whole pretense at a free and open internet is just a convenient talking point and marketing schlock.
> Im pretty sure Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Why wouldn't they? Google is notorious for making marginalized people's lives harder if it can make them money. Some examples:
- Hosting Palantir's ImmigrationOS, used by ICE to track immigrants
- Actively removing tools marginalized people use to protect themselves against ICE, such as ICE-tracking apps on the play store
- Intentionally aided Israel in committing genocide as part of Project Nimbus
- LGBTQ creator censorship on YouTube
Cutting off a small group of people they've repeatedly shown not to care about in the first place is a small price to pay to further cement their position as gatekeeper of the internet.
You might want to campaign to get rid of the entire concept of citizenship then. Until you manage to get people onboard with that, the lawful thing to do is to support legal enforcement of the laws on the book, which most people also agree with in this case.
Well, it depends on the application and context. I don't think a homeless person at the library is going to be booking a $1000-a-night room in downtown Los Angeles.
However, services that homeless people will be using should factor in their target audience (such as the homeless not having a phone at all, or maybe not one that's up to date even).
However, like it or not, having a modern up to date device is becoming essential for even rudimentary basic access to society. Whether that's right or wrong it's where we are.
>Google wouldn’t intentionally cut marginalized people like this off from the entire internet, would they?
Followed by
>Please don’t respond with sarcasm.
Is my kind of humor. Just because they follow ESG scoring doesn't mean they actually care, if anything it means they very much don't.
They already trying there best to marginalize non chrome, non residential ip, non lodged in user not to mention there decade long silicon valley political purity targeting.
>>> Barring them from leaving the country feels a bit sinister for people who haven't been accused of committing any crimes.
This is standard operating procedure for the CCP. They are a truly ruthless, sinister group who have no scruples about ensuring compliance and using leverage on behalf of Chinese interests. Just look at what happened to Jack Ma.
Breaking the export rules. Tech workers should be used to the idea of a "Invention Assignment Agreement".
Manus was built in China and all of its development happened there. In order to skirt Chinese review of the deal they tried to close down shop there and move to Singapore.
I don't think China is being unreasonable. I'm sure the US would act exactly the same way if an American tech company raised money from China and then tried to close down in the US and move all of its IP and technology to a different country so that it can be bought out by Alibaba or Bytedance without having to deal with US approval
There is no equivalent exit ban in the US that can be instituted on a whim for regulatory or business disputes. If you want to know more, you can read up on it in this Stanford Journal of International Law publication:
Do you read the news? Whether or not to stop Nippon Steel's acquisition of U.S. Steel was being discussed everywhere. On what basis was that power?
> Nippon Steel's acquisition of U.S. Steel can be stopped by the US President based on a recommendation from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), citing risks to national security under Section 721 of the Defense Production Act.
National security risks. Exactly what China is citing. It's literally the exact same situation.
> Two days ago, President Trump issued an order blocking the $1.3 billion sale of a Portland, Ore.-based company called Lattice Semiconductor to private equity firm Canyon Bridge Capital Partners. The stated rationale for Trump’s order was national security.
Outside of immigration issues, you can only be made to surrender your passport if you have been arrested and indicted for a crime, as a part of bail. That power can only be granted by a judge.
China arbitrarily traps people in China without any such thing or any due process whatsoever.
The first case makes sense: ex-CIA officer explicitly outing CIA officers. Naturally, the government is going to step in and it's a false equivalence to compare to restricting random citizens.
As for your second case, US schools teach about the perils of McCarthyism. You neglected to link to the subsequent Supreme Court ruling in 1958 overturning the confiscation of the passport over protected speech. Note how long ago that was and how it's taught as a black stain on US history.
Anyone with a child support order that makes decent money is only one misrecorded or bounced payment away from being ineligible for a passport. The trigger is only 4 digits of USD.
In the US, the Passport Denial Program, since 1998 (other developed countries enacted similar legislation), following the 1992 UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC) [2]:
> The Child Support Enforcement Passport Denial Program was enacted as part of the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996. While authorized in 1996, the program was jointly implemented by the U.S. Department of State and the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement in June 1998.
So were these founders found violating a child support order?I'm still unclear on what crime they actually committed and what they're being investigated for.
Is it possible that they are merely pawns in a political dispute between two rival countries?
It's one thing to block an acquisition because you don't want your rival to gain an advantage, an action which is not limited to the CCP.
It's another thing to detain an individual when no crime was committed.
"Missing" (but quite often only due to a clerical misreporting) a payment isn't facially criminal and isn't even established as "violation" without a contempt hearing where you can argue why you didn't actually violate it. So the passport denial is even looser than that.
I'm just pointing out the bar isn't much different except dressed up in a think of the children meme. I'm not justifying either one.
Understood. I'd note that the difference is that with a missed payment, you can simply make that payment (which can be a relatively small one as you noted) and you're free and clear.
With these Chinese founders, I'm not sure it's quite so simple.
> China arbitrarily traps people in China without any such thing or any due process whatsoever.
What makes you think there's no legal process for blocking nationals from leaving China?It's a very common instrument and in a bunch of countries it's an administrative measure with even less scrutinity than a judicial mandate. Do you consider France or the UK to be a countries without rule of law or due process?
But to the point in the US, for example, the government can just issue a warrant for you as a material witness or flag your passport and then you can't leave; these are hardly due processes and more like legal workarounds to do exactly the same thing; the US has disappeared plenty of people in much more sinister ways than that, however, so I agree that there's no equivalence here: the US is worse.
America is not exactly a shining moral example for the world, particularly these days, but these Chinese apologist takes can be a bit baffling to read at times.
It mostly doesn't make any sense and seems to be motivated by some kind of animus or bigotry. But maybe understandable given the current administration's behavior.
Oh come on. Look what happened to Russian enterpreneur, Pavel Durov in France, and what happened to Julian Assange and to Edward Snowden. It's the same thing just wrapped in different colored package. You don't cooperate with the government, you have some suffering.
All states, by definition, are authorities that demand compliance. You're not saying anything that distinguishes Jack Ma's condition from anyone else's just about anywhere.
This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation.
The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data.
Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value.
The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.
The problem with this idea is that someone can, and likely will, come up with the next best architecture that leapfrogs the current frontier models at least once a year, likely faster, for the foreseeable future. This means by the time you've manufactured your LLM on an ASIC, it's 4-5 generations behind, and probably much less efficient than current SOTA model at scale.
It won't make sense for ASIC LLMs to manifest until things start to plateau, otherwise it'll be cheaper to get smarter tokens on the cloud for almost all use cases.
That said, a 10 trillion parameter model on a bespoke compute platform overcomes a lot of efficiency and FOOM aspects of the market fit, so the angle is "when will models that can be run on an asic be good enough that people will still want them for various things even if the frontier models are 10x smarter and more efficient"
I think we're probably a decade of iteration on LLMs out, at least, and the entire market could pivot if the right breakthrough happens - some GPT-2 moment demonstrating some novel architecture that convinces the industry to make the move could happen any time now.
We're teetering on the brink of highly capable software agents that can run on a phone using a local model, that can manage things like basic digital hygiene, operating a self-hosted cloud, with tailscale and other private vpns that can leverage your own home internet service with a well maintained set of firewall rules and level of locked-down access that it's actually practical.
An inspired nerd can do it right now, but grandma will be able to do a curated, accessible set of things by the end of the year, and by the end of 2027, the internet and self hosted things are going to be incredibly different. When people can self host plex and anonymously pirate anything, and their local model can do the ethically gray area stuff like ensure everything is done so they don't get caught - cloud services can't compete with that. Cable and netflix and spotify and the rest are going to have to up their game, and not do the stupid lashing out, price gouging, hunting the pirates type of thing or they're just going to burn down faster.
We're headed for some really cool, interesting times.
If it catches engagement, the main firehose feed will show it. They've begun using Grok and AI processes, which is hit and miss, but definitely improving.
Having Japanese, French, other countries' tweets automatically translated back and forth has been fun, too. It'll be interesting to see where it gets to in the next few years.
The other day, I looked at the trending topics. Top one was "Lesbians". I was wondering if there was some kind of development in politics. Nope.
It was all porn. I was on a call with a friend and he checked from his account too and it was there as well, so this wasn't some kinda A/B test thing. It disappeared after a bit. My point is the algo is a bit wonky.
Twitter had always been the modern day Playboy mag from Sci-Fi era. So there's Bradbury, Lenna, geopolitics, all bound in one.
The catch is it's a UGC based algorithmic system with instant feedback, which means the fastest adapting contents with most bandwidth absolutely wins, which tends to be, like that.
Does anyone have the solution to this problem anyway? I thought this was always inevitable on WWW.
Not with 600m organic global active users. The platform moral compass must align to the performance weighted sum total of its user, rather than the other way around.
Trying to bend the platform morality to suit your idealisms seriously ruin yours over time.
I don't see how seeing the current feed of words and going "not this one" before they go online is difficult. You could literally filter 10 per minute and clean up the misfires
It's awesome if you mod your own gear, and 3d printing / one off part services are ubiquitous, so if you see something you like online, it's cheap and easy to do little upgrades.
More companies should do what they do - the less ethical players are already cloning knockoffs anyways, stuff like this builds brand loyalty and probably makes it more likely that people stick with Keychron over going for the knockoffs.
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