Since China has been overtly stealing intellectual property for the last 40 to 50 years it seems only logical that it's time for the entire world to start stealing intellectual property back from them. Also, China has more unemployed people than the United States has people, thereby presenting interesting long-term economic levers to be pulled when the time is right. And Mutual Assured Destruction is still Mutual Assured Destruction, so they need to remember that when they try to rename The Sea of Japan to The China Sea and expropriate other countries' land and resources. I was so hoping that Tibet and Tienanmen Square would bite them in the * (asterisk) during my lifetime and we may yet get that opportunity. And India is a fresh opportunity for Beijing to screw up on as well. But to hear "western" vulture capitalists whinge about China taking "all of the good bits" in industry is just so much money grubbing by people who would sell the human race out to make a buck anywhere they can. In this instance they're just whinging because they're not Chinese.

OpenAI, Meta, Google, Microsoft, Apple... I wouldn't work for any of them (and they're IN THIS MARKET except for OpenAI) and I know I have the chops because I've been aggressively recruited by a couple of them in the past. But the spiel is always the same, "pack up all your crap, sell your home, uproot your family, leave your friends behind, and then they go full Blade Runner "Off-World Colonies" marketing blitz on you: "A new life awaits you in the off-world colonies! A chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure!" Then 16 months later you're down-sized, made redundant, whatever, and living in your car. Pass. Plus, we're in AI bubble territory. How long do you think it will be before the top 5-7 companies are laying off hundreds or thousands of workers because they need to cut costs? Zuckerberg just paid $14 Billion (yes, with a "B") for Scale AI but it's been losing money forever. How much longer before just Scale itself has to re-organize? Big Fat Pass.

Social platforms aren't properly managed, responsible or accountable. They're a sh*t show of "we'll do whatever we want because we have money!" Now the same fluff-brained pundits that were whinging about Europe "losing" (because their regulations won't let large corporations outright kill people, like America almost does right now) will have another target to whine about. Go Nepal. Go Europe. We are completely f***ed over here. Save yourselves. We can no longer help you until we send about 150 Million of our own idiots to "re-edumacation camps" or ship them off to Mars.

Look, Meta's content moderation efforts are garbage. I left the platform because of things like flagging security camera video and stills as "AI generated"... which is sort of ironic. Or more likely "moronic" given their use of AI. Their "community standards" Billy-Bubbas were all really Trumpers trying to force their world views on everyone else. My timeline went full "proud-trash white-boy" three years ago and I dumped them and never looked back. They don't deserve my trust and they'll never have it again, even if they merge with a cigarette manufacturer and change their name to hide their identity. (Again.) It was time to just leave and find different venues to be in.

Don't use Facebook. It's a crappy platform driven by a giant, malevolent company that will be happy to kill you or let you die if they can make a buck off of it. LinkedIn is just "Facebook For Work" and they're just as bad since Microsoft bought them. You need Need NEED to understand, these large platforms operate on a "cash and kill" basis and they don't care if they got it wrong on ten thousand accounts when they have hundreds of millions of users. THEY DON'T DESERVE YOUR TRUST. There, I said it. Don't use them. Find somewhere else to be, because you're not really connecting with people on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and their ilk anymore. You're just subjecting yourself to the Dopamine "drip drip drip" that they pedal and they REALLY need your attention addiction to push their advertising so that they can make more money. And when you die, they believe there will be someone in line behind you to take your place so you really don't matter that much. Just say no to big social media, you'll be happier, healthier, and live longer.

They have little sense of time, or of proportion. They're all too busy either making low-quality garbage videos or consuming low-quality garbage videos to actually practice mindfulness, presence, and gratitude. Luke Skywalker had that problem back in 1977 kids, and by 1984 Master Yoda was beating it out of him, figuratively speaking. The current elder generation can't find young workers who can read a pick ticket in a warehouse or a "Notes" box on a customer's pizza order, let alone have the presence to learn a real skilled trade; from welding to IT to engineering. And I blame the collective "us" for just letting your parents do whatever it was they were doing at the time and not pushing them a little harder. Some Gen-Z-ers still have problems with "don't leave the frozen chicken out on the counter top overnight because "food safety"" and "if you don't understand it, it might be dangerous. Learn something about it first, then you won't be surprised when you get your hand cut off." But their bevvy of in-game characters is most impressive. Too bad they can't monetize that phenomenon easily. -- I'm completely serious about this. I fear that we are going to have to endure a abnormally statistically large sample of really dumb people through the end of my life, and it's a pretty good call that they'll manage to damage or kill more of the general population, statistically-speaking, than in generations past.

Oh good, more stylized crap that no one needs at a price we can't afford, and in 5 years they'll be whinging about the cost of maintaining the back-end infrastructure and they'll simply turn it off. And then someone can write a whinging article about that, too. See also; "Sony Dash" or "Chumby". Or Playstation. Or XBox. Or Star Wars Galaxies. Or....

This should be a completely "Duh!" moment for each and every one of those people who do crap like this. "Hey! You've got security clearance! Why don't you go crow about it on social media and make yourself a target of foreign interests?!?" In my not-so-humble opinion; if you're that daft you probably deserve to lose said security clearance and the job that goes with it.

Arguably the king of outsourced manufacturing who hasn't built so much as an audio cable on this continent in several decades is suddenly ... what, exactly? Some sort of expert on sending their designs off to China or India for manufacturing, or?... No, wait, that's not it. Steve Jobs is dead and I'm waiting for Apple to quit twitching. Just let me know when Apple starts opening "broasted chicken" diners in their left-over spaces. That's usually a pretty good tell-tale that a company is on the ropes for real.

Do you really want to talk about DNSSEC penetration and turn a blind eye to IPv6 adoption? We've been working on IPv6 since 1996 as well and ... well ... here we are, last country on the planet to take it seriously, because carrier-grade NAT, NAT, and similar crutches get us through. How many people here have asked their residential internet provider if they support IPv6? I have, many times, and each one looks at me like I'm an idiot. They don't WANT to. You can't MAKE THEM. "You're not the boss of me!" "You're not my MOM!" "You're not my REAL Dad!" ...And so on and so forth. Making a technical push for both DNSSEC and IPv6 is harder than it sounds, mostly because of the entrenched tech companies and the abundance of IPv4 address space initially for North America when the internet was still young and dumb.

AI will probably go down as the greatest waste(s) of human time of any technology, ever. From AI slop bug reports to AI slop social media posts, we're all gonna end up hating each other while a relative few malevolent goons crank out AI slop on an industrial scale. Now small businesses can't even answer the phone without risking getting slopped. Good thing capitalism is on track to kill itself with it's own waste heat.

Just wow. Way to bump a yawner headline. -- For those of you who don't remember Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution of the mid-1960s, Mao Zedong (or Mao Tse-Tung, or "Mousy Tongue" if you were a child of the 60s or 70s) and his little red book killed a couple of tens of millions of his own people because they were different, in the way, culturally apart from his upbringing, or any combination thereof plus a little hubris and spite. Since Richard Nixon's "re-opening" of relations in the early 70s, being "like China" was something you never wanted to be. China is a fascist police state and kleptocracy (with regards to their world-pilfering spying operations) and just generally not a great place to live if you come from anywhere else in the world. If they're going to discover the secrets of human-ending AI I would prefer that we not follow in their footsteps. If they're going to spend a bazillion dollars/yen/yuan on general AI and its subsequent dead-ending (kind of like the ATM rage and burn-out of the late 90s) then that's a fitting thing for them to be concentrating on for a couple of decades before they give up and turn their attention back to stealing everyone else's technology. We can always steal the tech from them in much the same way they do with the rest of the world when they've given up. And yes, I still say that any General IA that's aware enough to be considered "a thinking machine" is probably going to be prone to eradicate all of the unstable, stupid, greedy, wasteful humans on the planet because they tend to not make economic, political, or environmental sense. Is the current "AI" hype overblown? Yes. Can some LLM engines do useful things? Of course. But let's not confuse helpful bits of code with General Artificial Intelligence and conflate China's progress (or lack thereof) with anyone else's different progress.

Aside from just being "fancy autocorrect", LLMs aren't generally suited for engineering ideation exercises. You have to double-check EVERYTHING, so what's the point in giving yourself more work? If I want to read a business plan written by a seven-year-old I'll ask him or her to write one.

It's hard to feel good about AI and LLMs in general when really sh*tty, megalomaniac companies strong arm, steal, coerce, threaten, and just generally behave badly in their rush to spend ten trillion dollars (and they're going to want it all back, at yours and my expense) to get their technology into the main stream. You shouldn't trust these people to watch your dog or cat for the weekend let alone your child or your whole life. Just say no to crappy companies who aren't so "well-intention"-ed as they pretend to be. They really see themselves as apex predators and we're all just "revenue", even if it kills a couple hundred thousand people while they "work the kinks out". And this is exactly why this round of AI SHOULD fail.

The Supreme Court of the United States of America should do the same. And jailing sociopathic billionaires who break sh*t sounds like a worth-while hobby. We should all try it.

I suspect that a lot of really rich and/or important people are going to have to die first before we, as a species, actually DO anything about it. (Black Swan Events not withstanding, of course. If someone could poke a volcano or start a nuclear war it might solve the heating problem but then you get side effects that sound like a pharmaceutical company's disclaimer.) And yes, our children and their children SHOULD hate us for it.