Anthropic has also been the biggest anti-China LLM in a long while, so it's possible they're using an opportunistic hack (potentially involving actual Chinese IP addresses) as another way to push their agenda.
Considering ever since the Vault 7 releases, we should be well aware of the fact that at least one government is able to make any attack look like any other nation state actor, any attribution to, especially convenient adversaries, is extremely suspicious on the face of it.
Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.
I think when it comes to gatekeeping you are mixing up the organization that invented the basis for language models and gave it away for free with the one that does not release model weights because they’re too spooky
I was surprised to note at the end of the article it's written by Cade Metz, the same writer who doxxed Scott Alexander. I wonder if this turn to human interest pieces is a fallout from that scandal.
AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks.
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The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already.
The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.
Is this really an authoritarian regime survival guide or a not-too-hidden jab at the Trump presidency?
Like I don't see too many of the items applying to classically authoritarian regimes like China.
Let's apply the guide's own advice:
> Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, expose ignorance with facts.
The guide after all is written by Eastern / Europeans, the people is getting expropriated the most by Trump, in January 2017, right as Trump got elected and the democratic "resistance" movement was all the range. (Surprisingly, Trump 2 is even more extreme, and no more talk of resistance).
> Like I don't see too many of the items applying to classically authoritarian regimes like China.
The first (“Year 1 under an authoritarian regime”) is explicitly, and the rest also implicitly, about the transition from something loosely approximating a liberal democratic republic or Constutional monarchy to an authoritarian state; its not about surviving in an established authoritarian regime.
Perhaps because those things already happened at the beginning of the Chinese Revolution and we're just seeing a phase that's several generations on the future of the transition
The guide starts with the presumption they gained power through democratic elections. Neither China nor most other historic authoritarian regimes started this way.
(Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia being the classical examples of democracies going authoritarian).
Hungary, Turkey, India, Venezuela come to mind.
Poland, Brazil are also recent near misses. South Korea also had a recent oops.
So a well trodden path.
Why is it a bad thing to get more knowledge about authoritarianism and how it can sneak up on you? If it makes some people uncomfortable, that might should be an indicator that things niggling your mind often matter more than you think.
It's clearly a guide for regimes that are in transition from liberal democracy to authoritarianism, not regimes that are fully authoritarian. It looks like it's a jab to the current Trump presidency because it's following a well-worn path. Others have commented how it applies to Hungary too, and imagine there are plenty of others too. In 2017 these were more a threat than a reality, but this time most of them are already in place.
There are many flavours of authoritarianism, this is a guide how to act in the early phase of one of them (regimes that started from a democracy).
Maybe you are too US-centric (wouldn't be the first time that happened to someone from the US), but as someone from Central Europe I had to immediately think about Hungary — Trump is said to follow the Orban playbook, a mental line not only drawn by me, but also by the European Council for Foreign Relations: https://ecfr.eu/publication/the-orbanisation-of-america-hung...
Now China's regime is in power since 1949 and there was no democracy before. People who had the chance to enact the advice in the 50s are likely dead by now. So you literally criticized the article for not covering a thing they said in the introduction they are not covering.
Just a hint: critical thinking involves a step where you try to play the devils advocate and try to find all flaws with your own thinking. If you skip that step it means your goal isn't finding the truth, but finding a plausible counter-argument. This isn't critical thinking, it is contrarian thinking, so something that finds a point that could (to a non-critical audience) seem like a weakness of a thought, but doesn't hold water under close scrutiny. Good for use as an unfair rethorical tool, bad to establish good discourse.
Trump praises authoritarians, has said multiple things that showed he wanted to be one, uses authoritarian language and has done political things that square with being an authoritarian — he is a textbook authoritarian. No discussion needed at, all a spade is a spade. Whether it is still early authoritarianism is the interesting question.
Yeah, I mean the supreme court already knocked down Trump's whole USAID thing. The US is very far from authoritarianism, the institutions seem quite strong and thats something I believe Americans recognized when they voted for him, that it was just a bit of a risk but it was unlikely he would actually be successful in toppling the government.
There’s a dude that doesn’t hold any office telling everyone what to do, who to fire and what will be paid, including his own companies, and you feel like writing “American institutions are quite strong”, I must be living in a different planet.
I read that SCOTUS told the administration to pay for completed work. Considering USAID has been essentially dissolved, I wouldn't say they knocked down "the whole USAID thing". Unless I missed some news.
Amazingly, four of five justices said the President should be able to refuse to pay contractors for completed work from funds Congress had already allocated. WTF.
Or maybe it’s more amazing it wasn’t six of them saying that.
One really lovely part is how this would permanently make every government contract more expensive, if they got their way. Just great.
Right they won't even acknowledge that there was nothing unreasonable about those funds. Already allocated and promised. Why even say it's backed "by the reputation of the United States" if we won't even pay the bills we've already told we were going to pay. If they find fraud then sure cancel the deal. However they are using "abuse and inefficiency" as weasel words to get out of paying our debts and contracts that the current regime doesn't like.
SCOTUS said the money could not be frozen, but I don't think they put a deadline on when it had to be paid out. So it's not over.
The VP and Musk have both written recently about how the judiciary can't tell the executive branch what to do. I think Vance called it illegal. Regardless, law is meaningless if no one will enforce it.
> Americans recognized when they voted for him, that it was just a bit of a risk but it was unlikely he would actually be successful in toppling the government
Americans voted in someone that risked their whole 200+ years of democratic history knowingly? That would make it all even more absurd than it already is, risking a whole system of government, trust from international partners, respect from adversaries, the trade-off would never make any sense.
> The US is very far from authoritarianism, the institutions seem quite strong
Do they? They haven't even be put to test yet, the Congress is definitely not strong (there's no pushback from any voice of reason from the president's own party), the Supreme Court is voting 5-4 on matters that are almost blatantly unconstitutional. I'll agree that institutions are strong when enforcement of a decision completely adversarial to the current administration's goals is put to test and prevail. At this exact moment there's no sign that American institutions are anywhere near as strong as it was once thought.
MD-5 died the same way. We had to scare people into investing into upgrading to SHA-1 by showing them the slope of hardware and the variability in new breakthroughs and ask if they'd rather have an emergency that lasted for over a month or work it into the schedule among the other requirements now?
Yes, people can upgrade but nobody fucking will until you impress upon them how stupid they're being by gambling the entire company on carrying that debt for another year.
Only those who can change. In work in embedded systems - we still have to talk to machines that were built with exportable encryption in the 90's (read if it isn't broken that is only because nobody who has a clue has bothered to try). They can't be upgraded anymore so I have to keep those algorithms building just in case someone wants to mix new with old. (fortunately the old machines are never internet connected so vulnerability requires local access - but the vulnerability is in safety critical functions so I don't rest too easy)
I use the SHA-1 example in part because that was the newest hash that a bunch of smart cards someone wanted to try to use with our system supported.
Of course the max RSA key lengths on the card weren't up to it anyway (kids: if you by crypto hardware and don't use it immediately, don't warehouse it looking for a problem for your solution), but at least I got to put my foot down and we only shipped with SHA-1 and SHA-2 support
Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will.
In certain roles, AI micromanagement clearly will create higher performance. Add the marketplace of capitalism and it'll all compete away.
There are certain roles, like artists, where this is the wrong solution wholly: monitoring whether an artist is at her desk will create badly performing artists, and this will show. In these roles, these tools won't apply.
There will be companies that will apply them regardless, even in roles where they'll make things worse. The incentive for managers to show 'a bias for action' often results in managers doing any action that they can think of rather than the right action backed by data.
In the US? Sure. In more developed parts of the world? Doubtful. European labor laws are already much, much stronger than their US counterparts, and most countries outright ban using cameras to monitor employees.
> Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will.
I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.
It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.
Probably optimism talking, but I'd put Boom's chances of bringing to market an airliner capable of supersonic travel at equal-to-first-class-ticket-prices at 60%.
Now I'd put their wilder hopes of eventually taking over the subsonic economy market at considerably below 1%.
But I'm hopeful for that $5-10k ticket to London within the next twenty years.
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:
The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
> The Chinese name was inspired by two pivotal institutions in its co-founder Charlwin Mao's career journey that both feature red as their primary color: Bain & Company, where he worked as a consultant, and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where he earned his MBA.
I would guess that the association to Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong was intentional but he just said that for plausible deniability.
As a native Chinese I can assure you 小红书 and 红宝书 are as close semantically to each other as the words constipation and constitution. Few would relate those two.
Even the most leftist Chinese entrepreneurs avoid having their brand names associated to politics; it's just common sense.
The guy went to university in the US and his name is literally Mao.
He knows Americans call Mao's book the Little Red Book. He back-translated it to Chinese word by word. Anyone who would have an obviously perfect product name like that and not use it would be dumb.
There's zero chance a dude named Mao had an idea for a little red book app and thought "Yeah, I'll call it this because I went to Stanford and they're red." It'd be like Google saying they named themselves after googly eyes and not spelling the number googol differently.
The guy didn't pick the name. "Mao" is the family name he inherited from his father. In the case of Mao Zedong and Mao Wenchao, they have the same family name, but that's about it. The two people aren't even from the same province.
Please, at least learn your lessons first. It's like suspecting everyone with the family name "Manson" to be a serial killer aspirant.
And in case someone wants to hear a linguistic opinion outside of English and Chinese: As a Japanese, I can confirm that those two words indeed have about as much to do with each other as constipation and constitution.
None of the "actual" Chinese people I know were confused about the terminology. The average Chinese does not care one lick about anything related to communism or the history of communism in this country. Mao's book is largely a relic of their great (or even great) grand parents age.
However most of my Chinese friends were confused about why something that most Chinese find to be a relatively uninteresting app in mainland China is suddenly so popular in the US.
It's also worth pointing out that this isn't some serendipitous accident, 小红书 has been working to become a TikTok replacement for awhile now.
I don't know which Chinese person you are talking about. I've never associated 小红书 with whatever Mao did back in the day. Hell, I don't think anyone I know made that connection. I only get that idea after watching a video made by a youtuber, who's not Chinese.
The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia, trying to tie anything Chinese to scary, nefarious communists. I doubt that they were thinking of Mao at all when making the app, Xiaohongshu is an app tailored for young, wealthy, cosmopolitan Chinese as an alternative to Douyin which is more for the masses, I wouldn't call that very Maoist.
Antiestablishment-types supporting an ideology like Maoism is at least something I can understand. Antiestablishment-types expressing their loyalty to the establishment of a foreign adversary is significantly more concerning.
This nihilistic outlook may make you feel better, but at the end of the day only creates a void in government that megacorporations and malicious actors are happy to fill in.
In case if you weren't merely being facetious, your home country at least has some incentive to work towards your interest, no matter how evil they are because they have to pay the consequences of these actions. Even in autocratic China, for example, anti-lockdown censorship during Covid in China eventually caused even more resentment against the CCP.
On the other hand, look at examples of Russian election interference in 2016 [1]. One of the posts is "Satan: If I win Clinton wins. Jesus: Not if I can help it. Press like to help Jesus win." The entire goal is to get Americans to distrust and hate each other. Nobody in America has anything to gain from posting this, but China and Russia have nothing but to gain from a more fractured America. We only found out about this because Facebook cooperated with American intelligence to find this foreign propaganda. At best, you can't expect the same cooperation from TikTok they are accountable to the CCP. At worst, TikTok would actively be working with China to disguise this propaganda as genuine content.
The people who want to unite Americans might find more success meeting the outliers where they're at rather than framing it as needing them to conform. That approach is what made the outliers cynics in the first place. What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
> What would it look like to make real change to address the objects, rather than the subjects of frustration?
Real change will come when those who actually put work into it. Nobody will do it for you. Not China, not Trump, not the DNC. When the NAACP noticed that even the Senators who supported Civil Rights were too apathetic to put together a coalition to pass the Civil Rights Act, they created that coalition themselves. This is level political organizing that actually gets things done, and likely how Meta and Alphabet got this TikTok ban through as well.
What a truly insane take. Do you honestly think the Chinese government looks out more for your interests as an American citizen? The fact that you couldn't make the reverse claim in China without being censored speaks volumes.
When you've exhausted legitimate means for change, you begin searching for illegitimate means. Sorry, but at the end of the day, leverage is leverage and if a person in power says "this really hurts," congratulations they've told you their weakness.
> The way people are talking about the name of the app feels very stupid to me, in a way I can't put my finger on. I guess it smacks of more Red Scare paranoia.
Is it paranoia if Mao Zedong is still revered? If the government is the communist party? I realize the CCP is not perfectly communist in many ways but they are unapologetic about communism and their roots.
It is a coincidence that the original work did not mean little red book. But thats how it was translated, and the translation of the app is correct. So obviously now when you have the same name coming from a country that doesn't denounce communism I think it's fair to be concerned about communist influence.
he'll be revered forever the same way geroge washington is. theyre both warlords who founded a country, casting away the prior government and foreign invaders
washington is still liked even though he was a notable slave owner
I can't believe TikTok is not just getting around this by using the philosophy many people use when they are forced to change passwords. Just add an "!". TikTok: "We arn't TikTok, we are now TikTok!"
Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).
So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".
Not really. Mao's book has been known as the "Little Red Book" in English for decades, well before the app existed.
And the characters for "小红书" directly and literally translate to "little", "red", and "book". It's the most literal and obvious translation of the name, no agenda needed. Go ask any Chinese person.
The app didn't even have an English name until recently. It was just "小红书" which any Chinese person would render in English as "Little Red Book". "RedNote" is a recent branding exercise.
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