America & the World V: DOGE Business

[QualityChimp]

The TickTocks thingy hasn't gone back on the store, but it's available to use again if you already have it installed.
Hence why people were selling their phones on eBay for silly prices as it has TicTacs already installed.
It's unclear how they'll proceed as the flipside of looking like the cool Dad allowing you that app again is that when you have to take it away again, who can you blame?

Yes, Marty. It's been interesting to see the Chinese order a load of chips, leading to Biden limiting how many they can have, so they've managed to get AI working with less. I think it's cost about £5m to develop DeepSeek.

[Dogg Thang]

The TickTocks thingy hasn't gone back on the store, but it's available to use again if you already have it installed.
Hence why people were selling their phones on eBay for silly prices as it has TicTacs already installed.
It's unclear how they'll proceed as the flipside of looking like the cool Dad allowing you that app again is that when you have to take it away again, who can you blame?

Yep. But shutting it down was entirely voluntary at the point when they did it. That was a stunt. And I guess they were hoping for exactly what they got but were hoping, beyond that, that they would get the whole thing overturned. From what I've seen, it doesn't look like that's going to happen and they'll still have to divest, at which point it will be back in the app stores. Until that happens, it looks like the app stores are being rightly cautious.

[Neon Ignition]

https://chicago.suntimes.com/politics/donald-trump/2025/01/28/illinois-medicaid-federal-funding-freeze-trump-administration

[egparadigm]

TBF if you see what’s actually happening in China, the stuff going on in the US/Silicon Valley etc isn’t even close. Still very bad, but not on the same spectral plane.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001wkcr

This documentary is eye opening, about how China used Covid rules to control, manipulate and bully their population. Literally little estates that are run Stazi-style little old grannies getting told off about not leaving her moped in the right place. And that’s the less severe end of the control. People under house arrest more or less, agents of the state sat on their doorstep giving them **** or being beaten in the street.

I digress, but it’s worth watching all the same.

[briareos_kerensky]

Trump says Microsoft is in talks to buy TikTok.

https://www.eurogamer.net/microsoft-in-talks-to-buy-tiktok-us-president-says

[QualityChimp]

AI can already replicate itself, so we're not far off living in subways hiding from T-800s.

https://www.livescience.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/ai-can-now-replicate-itself-a-milestone-that-has-experts-terrified

[fishbowlhead]

AI can already replicate itself, so we're not far off living in subways hiding from T-800s.
https://www.livescience.com/technolo...erts-terrified

Stolen data, the sequel! Now we can harvest your data with not one, but two! Invasive pointless dumb bots!

[Neon Ignition]

https://apnews.com/article/trump-signs-laken-riley-act-immigration-crackdown-30a34248fa984d8d46b809c3e6d8731a

[MartyG]

AI can already replicate itself, so we're not far off living in subways hiding from T-800s.
https://www.livescience.com/technolo...erts-terrified

That sounds like utter nonsense to me, no "AI" can detect someone pulling the plug out of the wall.

However, the study has not yet been peer-reviewed

Ah.

[Neon Ignition]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2025/jan/30/plane-crashes-near-washington-dc-after-mid-air-collision-with-military-helicopter-follow-live

EU ministers to discuss migration as Germany pushes through radical asylum proposal with far-right help – Europe live

Meta agrees to pay Trump $25m for suspending accounts over Capitol riots | Meta | The Guardian
Cowards

[Asura]

Meta agrees to pay Trump $25m for suspending accounts over Capitol riots | Meta | The Guardian
Cowards

Gawd, Meta really have just rolled over and lubed up their arse for Trump in the last two weeks. The sheer about-face has been shocking.

[Dogg Thang]

https://apnews.com/article/trump-sig...b809c3e6d8731a

This is the start of concentration camps.

[Neon Ignition]

It's a good job the Supreme Court never made a really stupid ruling... like permitting Presidential immunity...

[charlesr]

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/pentagon-intelligence-agency-pauses-events-activities-related-mlk/story?id=118244237

We knew that Trump was going to bring endless posts to this thread.
This one, as part of his attack on diversity and inclusion, puts a stop to anyone observing anything that's not white male heterosexual at the DIA. Whilst on the one hand, you could argue that too much work time gets devoted to this stuff, on the other hand I'd say that too many white male heterosexuals still have a massive bias against anything else, so it still needs emphasis at work as well as everywhere else.

[Asura]

This documentary is eye opening, about how China used Covid rules to control, manipulate and bully their population. Literally little estates that are run Stazi-style little old grannies getting told off about not leaving her moped in the right place. And that’s the less severe end of the control. People under house arrest more or less, agents of the state sat on their doorstep giving them **** or being beaten in the street.

I honestly don't know with all this. I saw a ton of stuff about this since ~2018, talking about "social credit scores" and the like, or people talking about how people in China don't know about the Tianamen massacre. But I've spoken to people from China about this stuff, and people who are from the UK/US who worked in China for long periods, and they said these stories are really overblown, and that everyone in China knows about Tianamen (even if they can't talk about it online) and the "social credit" thing is only used for government-tied businesses, not individual people.

But on the other hand, I've heard stories from Chinese students, or Non-Chinese students living in halls with numerous Chinese students, who talk about "Uncles" - where they've come back to their halls' common area to find random, middle-aged Chinese men, who claim to be "someone's visiting uncle", but, in the stories, these are people paid by the CCP to "gently" remind those Chinese students that, even in the UK, they are not beyond the sight of the CCP.

I'm very much in a point with China that I know that (1) I've never been there, (2) I don't really know how things are there and (3) I don't know who to believe.