How so, with the Snowden leaks we learned the extent of American digital espionage in Europe, the US government puts pressure on Europe to prevent taxation or regulation of American business and even European citizens have become the subject of mistreatment in American airports based on their digital profiles. We can enter China visa free.
Given that you're big on data and don't like emotions, what have the Chinese materially done to us Europeans we ought to care about?
They don't sell weapons to Russia, as Wang Yi said in Brussels, if they'd put their full weight behind Russia the war would be over, this is the middle position for them.
Which, I agree with you btw, I don't like but I can understand rationally. We still buy oil and gas from Russia too. And with 20% of the world's supply casually going offline after America's own 3 day special miltary operation the Chinese would be insane not to.
What one cannot understand rationally to come back to the Snowden era in which Denmark spied on us in Germany on behalf of the US, which is insane to begin with, is being threatened a decade later with annexation of their territory. China is on some fronts a rival, hence the tension around Russia, but the US is as destabilizing and unpredictable for the world as Russia itself now.
Americans truly seem to have no concept that they're in the middle of their own post-Soviet meltdown and look like a rogue state to the world now, which makes China which is no saint more and more attractive simply by being a source of order.
It's hard to call either side good. It can be argued that the side which had the highest powers and oligarchs implicated in Epstein files, and which has also threatened attacks on European nations, isn't the better option. Also the nation which actively funds the war in middle-east.
If only the US was a little bit more like China, nobody would ever know about the Epstein files.
You think China doesn't get its hands dirty because of some moral superiority? The country is utterly brutal towards its own citizens, what makes you think that the lack of warmongering is anything but inability?
Compel? I am confused, all data in China is held in datacentres which the state has full access to, that is the terms of their operation and why some big tech US companies didn't want to operate in China. They don't need to "compel" anyone, the CCP has people at every large company supervising employees, and they already have full access to your data.
I am always completely baffled by these comments that not only get basic facts wrong but appear unable to conceive of a situation where the everything is subordinate to the state.
There is no negotiation, there is no due process, you give access to everything before you start or you can't operate.
Isn't this essentially true in the US too though? The feds can show up at your data center with a National Security Letter and demand access at gunpoint. And you have to give it to them, because guns, and you can't ever tell anyone about it because that's what it says in the National Security Letter and also because guns.
Your reply already shows the difference. In US you have the default expectation of privacy, until the feds get their eyes on you. Meanwhile in China the default expectation is no privacy, exactly as OP argued.
This system in action is best demonstrated during the lock-down period of COVID, when any random dude who contracted the virus would immediately have their personal life for the previous week/month published nationwide to the hour, and those who have overlap will immediately get a 14 day lock-down at home.
I have not seen surveillance done with such ease and breath elsewhere. And local PD already have access to such info, and there are scandals where police sell such info for profit.
Is it so different in the US? These are just the surveillance we know about, and they're not openly telling us about these, they're actively fighting public knowledge of such programs:
You absolutely should remember the Chinese war with the first of those; if you have trouble, a good way to remind yourself is that it was not long after the US one.
Yeah, so getting 1 out of 10 he mentioned, even if it's their direct neighbor (where disputes happen for all countries), ain't bad! This absolutely means they're the same /s
If I had wanted to say “China and the US are the same”, I would have strung together a set of words that looked a lot more like “China and the US are the same” than the ones that I actually posted.
Tibet, Manchuria, it should be somewhat obvious that a nation that is as ethnically diverse as China was not a nation borne out of lots of different people deciding simultaneously that they would like to create a country together.
What is modern China has only existed for 100 years or so. When the country collapsed there were ethnic divisions that were erased after the country was unified.
The hallmark of successful ethnic cleansing is people claiming that there were never any wars, that things were always this way. The same is true of Kaliningrad, the most German city, centuries of history as a leading nation within Germany and the HRE, now a completely Russian city. It is only in the West that you see any narrative around division, in places like China or Russia history is erased (and how could it be any other way, the cornerstone of Chinese politics is one nation, one people...there is no political value in this narrative in Western countries).
Could you give a recent example? Because your example is as pertinent as the overthrowing of Guatemala's democratically elected President in 1954 by the CIA.
There's nothing wrong with the US buying greenland, which has been done for territories around the world?
The US has a long history of protecting individual freedoms, China does not. There's an irony that you're aware of the misgivings of the US because we have free speech protections. You're probably less aware of the misgivings of the EU because they regularly arrest citizens for speech, and no awareness of the issues with China because they'll just disappear journalists in the night.
I think you're kind of missing the important bit; there is no threat of invasion and there never has been. People just want reasons to be mad at Trump, and so they make things up
Since the late 60s there has been explicit federal legislation. I assume you meant this as a rhetorical question but there is a definite answer because the US is a transparent system. Law is passed, the courts enforce.
The fact that you are unable to answer this question about China where it is often unclear why certain people are being targeted should demonstrate how big the gap is. For example, when Xi's first corruption crackdown happened, it turned out that it was being orchestrated in part by someone in their 90s who had left front-line politics twenty years ago (and much of why that happened is unclear, we are only just learning about things that happened in Chinese politics multiple decades ago so it will be a while before we know...we do know that Xi was then able to make unilateral sweeping changes to his own role shortly after that broke every convention of the last 5 decades)...it is difficult to compare this to anything that happens in any other political system. In China, you find out someone has been executed for reasons that are obviously not explicit months after it has happened.
It is genuinely quite difficult to compare to anything else. 6 people meet in a room, they have almost all the power, and maybe you will read about what they might have said 4 decades later in a book...that will never be published in China.
The inability to conceive of a country where these things would happen and you would have no idea that it had ever happened...and, perhaps more importantly, wouldn't care that you didn't know.
I think too many people are conflating Chinese providers with Chinese models - you can easily have Chinese models safely (well, relatively safely, I guess) hosted on US or EU infrastructure.
Case in point, Microsoft just announced it is toying with the idea of using DeepSeek as a cheaper model tier in CoPilot. They are hosting the model themselves.
Exactly this. For some reason this is constantly being overlooked/confused. It is very possible to deploy these models inside your own VPC on the big cloud providers and have it be completely secure. I would argue that is even more secure than trusting a model provider’s native API as your traffic is not staying inside your own controlled cloud environment.
I was reading the threads about local AI closely yesterday. Some people seem happy with it.
If I had the cash, I'd spend 6-10k on a strix halo with 128 GB and run it local with no internet connection. I think the Framework desktop is sold out but there were others seem to be still available.
