Not really, that’s just the type the EFF gins up. The problem is the regulation of speech and requiring verification.
The VPN stuff is a misapplication of security “best practices”. Tech companies are amoral and happily facilitate the use of their technology for oppression in other places.
I would argue it's more accurate to say tech companies take the "old-style" US approach. It's based on the idea that propaganda doesn't actually work. There weren't many actual communists in Russia, it was a dictatorship with mostly prisoners/hostages who were threatened into lying, and knew full well that they were threatened, and after the teenage phase is over, actually start asking "why are we being threatened over this?".
So as soon as they left with little intention to return, they suddenly become the problem that socialists really hate to discuss: ex-Soviets hate socialism. It's like cults, or, if we're honest, there's other repressive groups and repressive ideologies that have loooooooooong lost their any usefulness and really only the repression remains.
In other words, if tech companies show Chinese that non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there, then no amount of CCP censorship will ever actually convince those people that the CCP has good intentions.
Judging by my conversations with Chinese, it's working.
Hierarchies are fractal; at every level of an ideological authoritarian society, comfort and influence are only granted in exchange for affirming and regurgitating state ideology. Cognitive dissonance forces people who take that deal to choose between losing self-respect and accepting the ideology. I think you'd be surprised how well this works. People always want to believe that they deserve the things they have.
> ex-Soviets hate socialism
Naturally, they change their minds when they leave. There's no longer any psychological incentive to believe. Besides, people who choose to leave have typically already broken with the ideology. You compare it to a cult, but the thing about cults is that the members generally do believe.
> non-communist democratic states exist and how it is to live there
Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable.
For almost all of human history, people have lived under authoritarian governments. It's unpleasant to think about, but authoritarianism can be stable and durable. There's no guarantee that democracy wins.
> Life in many authoritarian states is fine for most people. It is what it is; if you don't make a fuss, you can live pretty comfortably. Obviously many dictatorships are not like this, but China is fairly stable.
I've always found Chinese who left are either rich or not. If they're rich, they've seen other rich suddenly fall out of grace, suddenly "relocate" or outright disappear.
If they're not rich, they've always been miserable in China, and don't want to go back.
Well, most are not rich and the biggest complaint is hukou, ie. that you can't actually live where you want in China. The state assigns you a city and you go there. There's a huge set of consequences if you don't, and a lot of people aren't happy with the choice made for them. People outside of China think China is like the US. You want to live in, oh, say Washington, or Anchorage, you can just go live there, find a job and live life.
Which also means your basic question is kind-of wrong. There's a lot of Chinese who want to leave but can't. The only Chinese who actually leave were asked by the government to leave, for a purpose (often studying), usually only for a limited time. Now it's not like it's 100% forced, they do ask for volunteers and what you want but it's certainly not a free choice to leave China or go back.
In China you're effectively locked into your city/town/village, and often a specific building and job (you can leave for a weekend or ..., that's not usually a problem, though sometimes it is)
For the rich the fear is kind-of the same, just with much more pressure and much more consequences, essentially being asked to relocate, give up a company (apparently much more common under Xi), forced to hire someone and give them a high position, buy or sell certain things, and being arrested, even tortured (in some kind of torture chair) if you are even suspected of not complying with often corrupt requests from government officials. The issue with that is just how many corrupt governments or de-facto governments there are. State, province, city, 1000 special purpose governments (e.g. one for the coal industry). Of course, the state can't be bothered with having a standard for identifying/authorizing themselves, so there's scam requests too. Then there's the local police, and 10+ police services that all operate where you live for one reason or another.
Makes you wonder. I always thought a communist state would be like a gigantic bureaucracy. And it is, but it's also a mafia.
Second complaint you keep hearing is about the consequences of failing the Gaokao, or even succeeding but getting selected wrong/not what you want. There are no second chances.
And I do get almost all of Asia is less "do what you want" than the US or Europe is, but some aspects of China are absurdly controlling.
Excuse me, what exactly is "sideloading"? If I wanted to run third-party code on a system through the means that's supported by the system, then it should be called "running", it's a part of normal operation.
The word "sideload" made it sound like you're smuggle something you shouldn't onto the system. Subtle word tricks like this could sneak poisons into your mind, be watchful.
You can't make people just stop using a word. The best course of action is to reclaim it. Look at us, we're posting on Hacker News. With a sideloaded browser.
They already did! The word was install. Or as GP noted, run. They're actually even now much more conventional and widely understood uses, and if anything it's Google attempting to swim against the stream and normalize sideload as language for software installation. Theirs is an object lesson, I think, in appropriately registering the objection and pushing us back to normal language.
I keep hearing that here, and people have good reasons why they think of that but to me sideloading always meant having your phone physically next to the device you're pulling an apk from, in other words loading the app from the side.
I always thought of it as coming from side-channel. Which (until I searched just now and was only offered side channel attacks as a result) I generally construed it as a good thing because the system was assumed to be broken. Things like track 2 diplomacy or messaging the CEO/minister because customer service/bureaucracy was broken. You can go in the side door of a business if you own it or belong there, only dis-empowered customers are forced to go in the front.
Side loading was getting something to work because it should when the system hadn't caught up to the fact that it should work.
Yeah, that strikes me as a familiar use also. They seem to be using it to mean not only that but any software installation that doesn't happen via the Play Store, so it's rooted in real history but also conveniently re-appropriated to imply it's veering outside of typically intended use cases.
The old Indian word for setting up software was in-sta-lin-it. It was so common, anyone with basic tribal knowledge could gather next to their "Pee See" and execute the code.
You're about two decades late to the complaint party in this context at least. I can find references on google books back in 2006 referencing sideloading.
I'm ready to grant that you found an occurrence in the wild but it takes more than that to demonstrate prevalence, conventional usage, or semantic fidelity to originally intended meanings. Also they are appealing to a usage that's practically as old as the paradigm of personal computing itself, so I don't think they're the one that's out of date.
I happen to remember "sideload" as a term of art for some online file locker sites to mean saving it to your cloud drive instead of downloading it to your computer. A cool usage, but it never caught on.
I think nomenclature as it exists in the PC software universe is closest in spirit on all fronts, in describing running software as, well, running software, and describing installing as installing. While a little conspiratorial in tone they're not wrong that "sideload" pushes the impression that controlling what software you run on your phone should be understood as non-default.
This is an instance of an on target usage though relating to the unofficial loading of software onto the device. And in my eyes finding it in a published work by a major publication means it was likely in wider usage in the same context, at the very least it can be an indicator of the start of that particular usage.
The firm got some good in it, sure. But as I see it, today people could be motivated by a firm of good meanings, then tomorrow a post with bad intentions could swing people the other way just as far.
The firm was produced back in 1945, but we still hearing similar if not exact same racist and xenophobic talk points today across many countries of different backgrounds. This alone is telling.
People don't really care about good or evil, truth or lies, but the message, the story telling, whether someone can make it flip the switches inside their heads, make them subscribe. If you can flip their switches in the exact right way, they'll be your utility.
It turns out, we are, unmistakably, suckers. Just with different arrangement of switches.
People will be more likely to have good intentions if they expect others to have good intentions. If there's a lot of distrust in society good intentioned narratives will lose their power.
People are more likely to have good intentions when they expect a good payback (including non-monetary as well as monetary ones) from the good intentions they gave out. It's more of a trade than care.
Organisms on this planet require resource to survive, but resource is limited. The nature is fundamentally a zero-sum game so that's what everything tends to fall back to when hard time comes. This is so predictable, played again and again, like we're cogs in a machine. Well, maybe we really are.
> Any time you attempt to defend yourself in the main subreddit, posts get deleted. Or you’re accused of running a Reddit bot army.
Not sure what's the story from the other side, but...
One strategy to counter this could be buying ads on Reddit to expose this, with evidence to show of course. And if possible, place the ad right on the offending subreddit.
And don't forget, if you have enough evidence to show, you can always sue. So, do both at the same time and keep them busy.
> I basically treat it as 'any member of public can now access it'.
Still remember the conversation over "mega apps"?
Based on my experience with Alipay, which was a Chinese financial focused mega app but now more like a platform of everything plus money, the idea of treating every bit information you uploaded online as public info is laughable.
Back when Alipay was really just a financial app, it make sense for it to collect private information, facial data, government issued ID etc. But now as a mega app, the "smaller app" running inside it can also request permission to read these private information if they wanted to, and since most users are idiots don't know how to read, they will just click whatever you want them to click (it really work like this, magic!).
Alipay of course pretends to have protection in place, but we all know why it's there: just to make it legally look like it's the user's fault if something went wrong -- it's not even very delicate or complex. Kinda like what the idea "(you should) treat it (things uploaded online) as 'any member of public can now access'" tries to do, blame the user, punch down, easy done.
But fundamentally, the information was provided and used in different context, user provided the information without knowing exactly how the information will be used in the future. It's a Bait-and-switch, just that simple.
Of course, Discord isn't Alipay, but that's just because they're not a mega app, yet. A much healthier mentality is ask those companies to NOT to collect these data, or refuse to use their products. For example, I've not ever uploaded my government ID photos to Discord, if some feature requires it, I just don't use that feature.
It's even reactive, the clock went horizontal if you give it a wide enough viewport.
Damn this is good. It's like playing with oil without having to wash your hands afterwards, and there's no mom chasing to give you a beat for the oil money you've just wasted. And on top of that, it tells you time.
Speak of microwave anti-drone weapons, YouTube channel Tech Ingredients made one with microwave oven parts: https://youtu.be/V6XdcWToy2c?t=1298
At 21:38 of the video (link above is timestampped), as the drone got hit by the microwave, one side of it's motors stopped/malfunctioned, which lead to asymmetric thrust, causing the drone to flip and fall. But the drone itself seemed still functional after the fall.
Not sure how much damage Epirus’ Leonidas could cause. My opinion is, if you want to anti-drone, you need to kill it fast, faraway and complete. If the vehicle is not agile enough, the drones will just go behind you. And if a drone can total a tank with ease, that armored carrier vehicle will not survive much hits.
Generally, if a motor desyncs, you need to reboot the ESC. It's very hard for the drone to take off again, though, as stuff on the ground tends to tangle up in the motors.
Oh dear, we are definitely in a bubble, it's just not in the way of total burst.
Back when everybody got into website building, Microsoft released a software called FrontPage, a WYSIWYG HTML editor that could help you build a website, and some of it's backend features too. With the software you can create a website completed with home, newspages and guestbooks, with ease, compare to writing "raw" code.
Now days however, almost all of us are still writing HTML and backend code manually. Why? I believe it's because the tool is too slow to fit in a quick-moving modern world. It takes Microsoft weeks of work just to come out with something that poorly mimics what was invented by an actual web dev in an afternoon.
Humans are adoptive, tools are not. Some times, tools can better humans in productivity, sometime it can't.
AI is still founding it's use cases. Maybe it's good at acting like a cheap, stupid and spying secretary for everyone, and maybe it can write some code for you, but if you ask it to "write me a YouTube", it just can't help you.
Problem is, real boss/user would demand "write me a YouTube" or "build a Fortnite" or "help me make some money". The fact that you have to write a detailed prompt and then debug it's output, is the exact reason why it's not productive. The reality that it can only help you writing code instead of building an actually usable product based on a simple sentence such as "the company has decided to move to online retail, you need to build a system to enable that" is a proof of LLM's shortcomings.
So, AI has limits, and people are finding out. After that, the bubble will shrink to fit it's actual value.
This is fair but it's also assuming that today's AI has reached its potential which frankly I don't think any of us know. There's a lot of investment being spent in compute and research from a lot of different players and we could definitely make some breakthroughs. I doubt many of us would've predicted even the progress we've had in the last few years before chatGPT came out.
I think the bubble will be defined on whether these investments pan out in the next two years or if we just have small incremental progress like gpt4 to gpt5, not what products are made with today's llm. It remains to be seen.
It's basically a restriction on communication, i.e. the government decides who you're allowed to talk to, not just a privacy issue.