This “no harm to me” meme about a foreign totalitarian government (with plenty of incentive to run influence ops on foreigners) hoovering your data is just so mind-bogglingly naive.

(American talking, who’s had multiple Canadian friends make this mind boggling overcorrection)

edit: I misunderstood, I thought you were implying they designed their own GPUs. nevermind

It bears repeating that I do not presume a monolithic opinion of the citizens of China or the culturally Chinese diaspora.

I balance that against the reactions and attitudes that I do experience, in proportion to how often I experience them.

Contrast Sam's OpenAI announcement which was very carefully worded to appear to uphold the same principles, but is currently being rightfully disassembled as retaining various potential outs that would allow violating the signaled principles.

Honest and staunch about clearly stated principles is better than wiggly and dishonest about weasel-worded impressions of a principle.

And all of that is orthogonal to whether you (or anyone) agrees with a given principle or given revealed behavior.

Do they either clam up or act like it's a mortal insult to suggest that an independent democratic nation should not live in fear of impending violent conquest?

Because that's the kind of reaction that makes the reports of "happy life, all's good" a little harder to digest.

Not saying that's a unanimous opinion / response, of course. But it certainly seems to be the default.

Also, failing to consider the legal and rights regime of the attacker is wild to me. Look at what happens to people caught spying for other regimes. Aldrich Ames just died after decades in prison, and that’s one of the most extreme cases — plenty have got away with just a few years. The Soviet assets Ames gave up were all swiftly executed, much like they are in China.

Regimes and rights matter, which is why the democracy / autocracy governance conflict matters so much to the future trajectory of humanity.

/s

Yes when CCP undertakes an ethnonationalist settler campaign into Tibet and then instructs the settlers to “call for help”, it can be presented as Tibet “asking” for CCP authoritarianism. Same playbook as Russia in eastern Ukraine.

Yes, when the Xinjiang muslim population is terrorized by police state and concentration camps in a country with no free speech, it is hard to find locals publicly complaining and advocating for themselves.

The examples expand from there, but that one alone is sufficient.

In 2004, social media was mostly text, images and low-fidelity game experiences like Mafia Wars. Compare to a bottomless scroll of immediate-attention-hook optimized, algorithmically targeted video content found on TikTok / Instagram.

The social behaviors got zombified out of the audience.

I agree with your comment I’m replying to completely, but the date tag doesn’t have to be an indictment (as you yourself suggest)