The stated purpose of the law was to get TikTok out of the hands of a foreign adversary, and that was accomplished. Remember when Trump took office, and lots of people were worried he would refuse to enforce this law?
It sounds like the author would have preferred that a different group of billionaires take over.
It's very optimistic to assume that China was beaten here.
Bytedance still owns the algorithm and 30% of the new company. This new wrapper firm is just being granted the license to serve as Bytedance's operations, essentially. All the stuff about it being 'trained on US content' and 'overseen' by Oracle is smoke and mirrors. This is really just the zombie of the deal that was done four years[1] ago and then quietly scrubbed.
This isn't significantly different than the way TikTok has been operating all along, the only difference is a few of the administration's cronies are able to get their heads into the feeding trough.
From a libertarian perspective, I also thought this was a bad law. It totally abandons faith in the idea of free speech, and admits that China’s “great firewall” was the right idea. I think it’s better to document any lies that were being spread on TikTok, and counter them with truth.
If your first reaction is “but that won’t work!” then you don’t really believe in a free speech based society, and all that’s left to do is argue over which group of shadowy billionaires should get to control everyone.
i think the "but that wont work" is about visibility.
who are you intending to tell about these tiktok lies? how do you know if youve told the right people? what algorithm is going to pick up your corrections as equally viral as the lies were?
if youre actually going to do it, i think you need your own shadowy billionaire funding paying the various social media companies to pretend that your version of the truth is popular. maybe multiple shadowy billionaires.
> If your first reaction is “but that won’t work!” then you don’t really believe in a free speech based society
While I believe in free speech, free speech isn't some panacea. Nor does it magically exist without protection from powerful interests. What good does speaking up do, if "algorithms" managing the majority of speech have big money riding on promoting irresponsible speech at the expense of sidelining responsible speech.
This isn't a neutral open marketplace of ideas, battling on merit. It is a pervasively manipulated market for profit, and those who will pay to tilt it.
The right way to deal with surveillance and dossier based manipulation by external actors, is not to pick on one actor, but to make surveillance and dossier based manipulation illegal for all actors.
Nobody buys a TV wanting their watching habits to end up impacting what ads they see in web views, and vice versa.
That kind of behind the scenes coordination of unpermissioned data, as leverage against the sources of the data, is deeply anti-libertarian. Anti-liberty in both right and left formulations. (The idea that "libertarian" means the rich have a pass to do anything they can achieve with money, underhanded or not, is a corruption of any concept of individual liberty.)
The enshittification of the world is being driven by this hostile business model. Via permissionless (or permissioned by dark pattern) coordinated privacy violations. And it isn't just foreign adversaries who are benefiting at societies cost.
The constant collecting, collating, and converging of data on anyone doing anything that pervades the private/public economy now is deeply parasitical.
Free speech, like every other right, only achieves its real value in a healthy environment. I.e. a healthy idea competitive environment. I believe in voting too. But similarly, voting only matters in a healthy competitive candidate environment.
> The stated purpose of the law was to get TikTok out of the hands of a foreign adversary, and that was accomplished.
I don't know how we conclude that:
> The new U.S. operations of TikTok will have three “managing investors” that will collectively own 45 percent of the company: Oracle Corporation, Silver Lake, and MGX.
> the private equity firm Silver Lake (which has broad global investments in Chinese and Israeli hyper-surveillance)
> 30.1 percent will be “held by affiliates of certain existing investors of ByteDance; and 19.9 percent will be retained by ByteDance.”
Now we have oligarchs, plus a major surveillance investor group, plus the Chinese.
This doesn't seem to be a solution to anything except that "a deal was made", and any further attempts at cleaning up credible risks have so many players to deal with, they would be DOA.
You can just unlock the door and exit the car in that case-- there's no way to "lock someone in" unless you've modified the lock somehow. And if someone did that, they probably reinforced the glass too.
Well, I learned something new today! I always thought that kind of thing would be illegal because it's a fire hazard -- if the driver was unconscious after an accident, the passengers could be trapped in a burning car.
When you're a solo SaaS developer/company owner, the dedicated server option really shines. I get a 10x lower price and no downsides that I've ever seen.
"But are your database backups okay?" Yeah, I coded the backup.sh script and confirmed that it works. The daily job will kick up a warning if it ever fails to run.
"But don't you need to learn Linux stuff to configure it?" Yeah, but I already know that stuff, and even if I didn't, it's probably easier to learn than AWS's interfaces.
"But what if it breaks and you have to debug it?" Good luck debugging an AWS lambda job that won't run or something; your own hardware is way more transparent than someone else's cloud.
"But don't you need reproducible configurations checked into git?" I have a setup.sh script that starts with a vanilla Ubuntu LTS box, and transforms it into a fully-working setup with everything deployed. That's the reproducible config. When it's time to upgrade to the next LTS release (every 4 years or so), I just provision a new machine and run that script again. It'll probably fail on first try because some ubuntu package name changed slightly, but that's a 5-minute fix.
"But what about scaling?" One of my crazy-fast dedicated machines is equal to ~10 of your slow-ass VPSes. If my product is so successful that this isn't enough, that's a good problem to have. Maybe a second dedicated machine, plus a load balancer, would be enough? If my product gets so popular that I'm thinking about hundreds of dedicated machines, then hopefully I have a team to help me with that.
Worth noting that these foreign accounts are pretty small. The biggest foreign pro-MAGA account mentioned in the article is "MAGA NATION" with ~400k subs, with the others being in the 10k-100k subs range.
Contrast that with legit pro-rightwing accounts: @tuckercarlson (17M), @benshapiro (8M), @RealCandaceO (7.5M), @jordanbpeterson (6M), @catturd2 (4M), @libsoftiktok (4.5M), @seanhannity (7M).
Guessing you don't follow politics much? The owner of that account is an American woman, her identity actually leaked years ago. She's sat for several in-person interviews, I think.
COVID was a problem, but other systemic problems allowed the lack of math skill to go unnoticed until the kids showed up to college. This article[1] discusses how high school teachers were subject to political pressure, forcing them to give A's to students in a Calculus class who barely knew fractions. Combine that with UCSD dropping SAT requirements, and you've got a horrible mess.
If the rest of the system was functioning properly, the COVID-related problems would have been caught early when those kids started failing their high school math classes-- which would have left them with plenty of time to go back and learn what they missed. And if UCSD still required the SAT, it would have been painfully obvious that they were admitting students who don't know basic math.
I think the GP post might have been downvoted because "what the math is useful for" frames it in the wrong way, making it sound like every lesson needs to be immediately applicable to your everyday life. An honest answer might be "this lesson in fractions is one step on a difficult 15-year journey that culminates in a junior developer position at OpenAI," but most 10-year-olds aren't ready for that conversation, so "just trust me, bro" might be the best we can do at that point.
The math I was taught had a lot of practical applications. Fractions for cooking, calculating tips, finance, taxes, etc. Not even that was justified to us, let alone the more advanced stuff.
My recollections of finding math & physics interesting were simply a reflection of finding the world as a whole interesting - it (the world) was obviously full of stuff, stuff that had dimensions & mass & quantities and it seemed very clear that being able to relate such figures to each other would be always be very useful.
That doesn't sound like it's framed in the wrong way. It sounds like people don't have a good answer for it, get frustrated, and fall back on a "because I said so" answer.
I looked at the article that prompted this[1]. If I had to respond to the author of the piece, I'd say this:
The fact that you wrote this introspective essay is good-- it means you've spent some time reflecting on the kind of person you could be, and you've concluded that you're falling short of your own moral compass. It's good that you're thinking through this, and I hope that someday you'll choose to act.
You mentioned that you have a good career and some upward mobility; that tells me you are probably intelligent, well-educated, and you possess skills that are in high demand. It also sounds like you have some surplus income. All that's lacking is some courage, but that can change. Take an example from your leaders, the ones who "donate directly to bigoted causes." I'm guessing they don't limit themselves to donating 1% of their salary, but rather that they're contributing substantial amounts of time and money to things that they believe in. Now there's something you could do, too.
Or you could go further. You could figure out what kind of work would be a positive good (or at least not actively evil) in your own eyes, and then figure out what kind of path would get you there. Scary, yes, but people do this every day. Why not you?
Personally, I don't like your ethical framework; not at all. Your critique of your leadership's donations reminds me of Brendan Eich, a man who was punished and humiliated by his coworkers for donating his own money to a cause his coworkers disliked. But that doesn't matter-- this isn't about me, and I hope you'll complement your no-doubt considerable skillset with some courage and start making good changes.
Also, to tell you the truth, I understand why lobste.rs didn't want to run your essay. Pieces like this don't bring out the best in us nerds; all we do is repeat the same flamewar for the umpteenth time, producing output so predictable that those AI data centers you helped grow could probably re-create the whole conversation with a simple prompt.
UCSD (and many other universities) dropped SAT testing requirements, and high schools are under political pressure to graduate kids who never learned elementary school math. The universities are now shocked by the results.
You're right, that's definitely a mistake. Though to be fair, the same article gets it right if you scroll down to the Tesla section. The article on Tesla also gets it right.
It sounds like the author would have preferred that a different group of billionaires take over.