They will probably use Elon's Grok as the benchmark. That thing is pretty far off the deep end.

No story about his fake robot demo being exposed? Slashdot used to love a failed tech demo.

If there was a remote kill switch and China ever got to the point of ordering manufacturers to flip it, you would probably be more concerned about the hypersonic missiles and nuclear warheads coming your way.

Plus they would probably start with the western brands using the backdoors they have been saving for just such an occasion.

Funny you should mention decolonizing STEM, because that's basically what has happened here. Even now many people are in denial about what the Chinese have accomplished. They seem to think that only white people can invent stuff or push the state of the art forward, and that everyone else just copies them, steals their ideas and technology.

Many Western countries put a lot of effort into maintaining existing hierarchies. They would rather some people just don't have access to a good education and opportunities, than be more competitive. Education gets defunded by people who can afford to pay for their own kids to get a good one, or who got theirs and just want a supply of disposable, low cost labour, and lower taxes. The risk that someone else might get something they didn't "earn" is too great to fund anything properly.

The EU had the same question when limiting credit card processing fees. They simply looked at what the costs were and how much profits those companies were reporting from that part of the business.

You can still make it much harder for them. Physically disabled the write pin on the UEFI flash memory chip, for example. Some vendors let you require a password to upgrade the firmware.

None of it is undefeatable, but you have to consider who you adversary is. If it's just the cops and their IT people, it probably won't take much to thwart them.

There are also more passive measures like making sure you have decent CCTV coverage, so they can't do easily sneak in.

We had a similar thing in the UK with the BBC. Conservatives decided that it wasn't helping them win, so destroyed it. The formerly excellent news service, that held politicians to account and kept the other news services at least a little bit honest, was gutted.

The country is far worse off for it, in ways that cannot easily, if ever, be undone.

Trump and his ilk are doing the same thing in the US.

Wow, I had no idea you were dumb enough to fall for the Red Scare.

It's quite amusing that some troll follows me around modding down any comments where I suggest humans should cooperate with one another. They are literally proving my point by moving things backwards with their solitary cowardice.

That it's a competitive system is the problem. The world advances through cooperation.

You seem to have forgotten we have read your comments.

Good. Fuck off and don't come back, hypocrite.

I see that you are ignorant of the USA's entire history in Central and South America. This is my surprised face.

So here's the thing: I think most websites can tell whether their content is "safe" or not, even given the varied desires of parents. And it'd take all of thirty seconds for the W3C to come up with a standardized way of indicating whether a page is intended to be adult or not. And it'd take all of an hour for Google to add something to Blink to respect a preference set somewhere, password protected of course, as to whether to show adult pages or not.

Most of the arguments would be "But can we guarantee that this type of content isn't seen as adult-only" and TBH I think the W3C could easily define it, and legislators could then basically decide whether it's worth the hassle of going beyond the W3C's recommendations. (Remember that a world wide standard for what constitutes adult material is going to be an issue anyway, to obey Australia's law as well as those of various US states a website will have to go for the most all encompassing definition to cover both. So having the W3C define something reasonable, and having nations decide whether they want to accept that, or basically create something unworkable more likely to result in their region being blocked than anything useful, would be an improvement.)

So we have a potential solution that doesn't involve the extreme "Upload your driver's license and other forms of ID and basically reveal to the world who you are and fuck anonymity just when we need it most" garbage, we just need to implement it.

The question then becomes: would Reddit support it under threat of prosecution? My guess is they would. My guess is Facebook, Reddit, X, etc, would happily mark their websites as adult-only to comply with a social-media-adults-only law. They wouldn't be happy with it, but the alternative, which blocks adults too, is worse.

I guess they need to use Yandex for that.

I'm wondering about that, because for years Google has had better resolution, but not 97% coverage.

Maybe that's the worst case, and it's better in areas with better satellite photographs available. I think Google uses aerial photography too, to get views from different angles.