CCP is pushing and amplifying AI opposition efforts, that’s a fact regardless of US politics. CCP is also working hard to smuggle around American export control laws for AI tech, at the same time.
I have no doubt China is taking part, what I doubt is that this makes any meaningful part of the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it. You can't create movements without ground support.
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
What is your point? You agree people have the right to act on their beliefs to effect democratic change, right? Surely that includes making up their own minds about information.
We should and should cut out sources of foreign funding and support, and prosecute and publicize genuine foreign agents, while allowing people to exercise their political rights.
Why? Do you believe free speech is a right only Americans should have? Or do you believe that people shouldn’t be free to evaluate competing points of view and decide for themselves?
This seems like a variant of anti-self defense logic. ‘The other guy has a right to beat you in the face with a bat, as much as you have a right to take it’.
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
What is to prove? Where are foreign powers or corporations listed as protected in the constitution?
Read it, it’s a short read.
You’re the one making bizarre statements unsupported by any cogent arguments.
Historically, unregistered foreign agents get deported, imprisoned, or executed. Not protected.
There is a long, long history of this. It’s only recently where it was possible to do this with any meaningful effect without physically being present in the US, which is the reason it is a lot harder to prosecute now. But the laws are still on the books, and the Supreme Court has had no issues supporting them in the past.
I have no doubt that Russia and China are not "okay" with it. It's also irrelevant: they are not fully functioning democracies (and China isn't a democracy at all). I would fully expect an authoritarian regime to want to control the narrative and restrict freedom of speech--and, in fact, both do. I don't think we want this country to become like those; we shouldn't hold them up as models.
Despite the fact that they don't approve of our speaking to their people, we do it anyway: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
The U.S. is a democracy. We hold freedom of speech as sacrosanct. We let people make up their own minds as to how to evaluate competing viewpoints. I see no reason why the viewpoints of other countries--even those very different from ours--shouldn't be considered.
I have no problem with labeling speech's origin so that people can take it into account, but that's not the same as censoring it.
Foreign powers and corporations are not protected entities in the US constitution, and historically have no recognized free speech rights.
Even ‘Citizens United’ is about otherwise eligible citizens being able to organize under an umbrella (and act under that umbrella) - not that the umbrella itself fundamentally has rights independent of the people under it. Though it has resulted in widespread abuse due to the ability to hide who is actually under the umbrella.
Foreign nationals making statements outside the US towards US citizens have historically no protection either - it’s why the NSA and CIA are in theory not chartered for domestic action, but have nearly carte Blanche outside the US. The CIA and US military has rather publicly assassinated folks off US soil for statements and actions that would be protected inside the US.
In fact, prior Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’, and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
Historically, foreign nationals have even been ejected/deported from the US for what would have been perfectly normal protected speech for US citizens, and it’s very common for visas and other entry documents to be denied based on what would be protected speech for US citizens.
Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
Here’s two [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg]. Electric chair though.
The Rosenbergs were executed for espionage under the Espionage Act 1917, not for acting as unregistered foreign agents under FARA. They were exfiltrating classified nuclear secrets. This is an entirely different thing.
Unregistered foreign agents tend to receive a fine, if they are charged at all. Before the past decade even this was very rare, now maybe there is one per year. The maximum punishment is like 5 years in jail, and no one has ever been hung for this. The directive to conflate these only traces to Pam Bondi.
Most of your post is like this in that you speak authoritatively but fumble premises. For instance you clearly don't understand free speech law. Yelling fire in a crowded theatre IS protected speech. The Schenck case your quote comes from was overturned in Brandenberg 60 years ago and is considered a national judicial embarrassment.
They were violating the FARA act, and were caught committing espionage for the folks they were foreign agents for. They charged them for the higher crime. That doesn’t contradict what I said at all.
Don’t forget the 5 Cubans thrown in jail under FARÁ, the LA major just indicted under it, or the numerous other successful prosecutions.
I gave a range of common punishments, don’t act like I’m not being entirely accurate here.
Hell, one of the recent prosecutions was a multimillion dollar bribery scandal from foreign nationals with the current admin - that only avoided jail time because of one of the more blatant pardons by the exact same admin.
That some were bad is par for the course. Most weren’t, and haven’t been.
I'm aware of what the law is, but this isn't really responsive to my argument. I'm arguing from principles, not existing law.
Why shouldn't the same principles we apply to our own people apply to foreign people? Isn't freedom of speech a universal principle? If not, what makes outsiders' speech substantively different from ours that we should censor it?
Moreover, people in the U.S. are free to say the exact same things that foreigners might say. Why does it matter that it's coming from outside the country as opposed to inside it?
> Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’
1/It was "suicide pact." 2/That was dicta from Justice Jackson in a dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), not law.
> and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
That was from an early free speech case in 1919 (Schenck v. U.S.) when speech restrictions were more broadly upheld--and it was not the question in the case (it was just an example). Freedom of speech has been significantly liberalized since then. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) overruled Schenck: "[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
> Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
It sounds to me like you're just an unapologetic xenophobe.
Not really, because I’m not sure what the existential threat to our nation is. They’re just words, after all.
Besides, the Constitution is designed to sustain our nation not just against speech, but even if our most sacred buildings are destroyed and our president is killed. That’s the beauty of it. It’s a clever design by the most brilliant minds of our time. Thus, I’ve never understood some people’s obsession with security. Such people are focused on current office holders and icons they deem important, not the health of the system, and not the ideals and principles enshrined by it. Paranoia and vengeance does not befit us.
Also, it pains me to have to remind self-identified Christians—the ones typically most obsessed with national security—that to “turn the other cheek” is one of the fundamental pillars of the faith, straight out of Jesus’ mouth. (Matthew 5:38–39)
Very little is more existential to even the idea of a nation than the national identity, the in-group, out-group, etc. and that is what it is used for.
And if you think Hollywood didn’t turn that out in spades, I dare you to watch Top Gun and tell me that movie is about people flying planes, hah.
If so, seems remarkably stupid to allow foreign powers to use proven effective techniques against you unchecked, doesn’t it?
Right up there with being convinced that if someone punches you in the face, you can’t punch them right back - or worse - and/or throw them in jail for it.
That last comment is pretty hilarious in the context of geopolitics. Or criminal law.
The court may make you swear on a Bible, but what would you think about a judge telling an assault victim that they going to not give the assailant a day in jail and they should just turn the other cheek?
That judge isn’t going to be on that bench very long, that’s for sure!
This is something well understood in the Bible too - Romans 13:1-13:7 sums it up pretty well.
What is the practical difference between propaganda from the inside and that from the outside? Internal propaganda is often much more dangerous than external propaganda because it has a patina of legitimacy. President Trump, as you may recall, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential Medal of Freedom for, among other things, legitimizing the racism and sexism and a fairy-tale version of America that eventually set the stage for his election.
I'd contend we should worry a lot less about what others are saying than what we are saying to each other. Yet it still doesn't mean we should censor speech.
> Very little is more existential to even the idea of a nation than the national identity, the in-group, out-group, etc. and that is what it is used for.
Who is the in-group? Who is the out-group? Who shouldn't be in? Are you sure they're not in already? Should a nation evolve or be the same as when they were founded? What evolution is ok? What's not ok?
I think that the inability to answer challenging questions is a stronger indication of who lacks the understanding.
My experience is that when people don't want to answer them, it's because they either 1/don't actually know the answers, or 2/are afraid of what their honest answers will reveal about them.
I already answered them. You just refuse to understand the circumstances. Why waste my time?
Literally everything you seem to be arguing about has already happened, even on the platform you are arguing on, but you seem oblivious to it.
It’s like arguing with a child about tax policy or something while they insist taxes are bad. Sure, but they are clearly not going to be able to do anything about it, and it isn’t even useful for anyone, so why waste the time?
You were not responsive to any of the questions I asked. It’s disingenuous for you to claim otherwise. You appear to me to believe your claims are self-evident, as opposed to principled and well grounded in logic and evidence.
If you’d like to have a serious intellectual debate, I welcome it.
I believe I live in the real world, where we have to figure out how to integrate abstract principles in a manner that allows our survival as a civilization.
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
Our survival as a civilization? I cannot follow at all what you are talking about. What threat?
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
> All effective foreign interference takes popular sentiments and helps organize and focus it.
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
> the total US anti AI sentiment, which can be much more easily explained by job loss anxieties, fear of massive change and good old NIMBYism. (Obligatory not an American).
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
I am not necessarily anti-AI. I am more anti-Sam Altman, against using LLMs to usurp power, and against using AI as a scapegoat to abdicate responsibility for decisions that are made. AI itself encompasses so much more than LLMs.
Sam at least can be understood. He's in it to make money and nothing else. The most dangerous men are people like Dario, who sit on top of their elitist towers and think they are right and will burn down the world in the name of righteousness.
1. Does every other company that says their products will uplift people "think we are lesser beings"?
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
Has Anthropic used uplift in that sense? I spent ~5 minutes trying to find an example like that but couldn't find them doing so. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826215">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49826215
> will burn down the world in the name of righteousness
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
Early days LLMs were declared an auditable. This was such a ridiculous idea that technology was so complicated and able to give good results without understanding why.
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
>. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.
I doubt China is taking part in opposition data centers. The cost paired against risk:reward on trying to push something that's already overwhelmingly supported (or opposed in this case) for an abstract goal of potentially slightly slowing down deployment of infrastructure makes no sense at all. Also, a natural consequence of the massive data centers will be an increase in chips, which makes it easier for more of them to end up headed to China, to say nothing of also easing espionage efforts.
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
It feels totally different than offering a modicum of aid to a western aligned country fighting an existential invasion from an antagonistic former superpower.
Get in the inner circle of the leadership of a country having money thrown at it. Somehow they're all getting filthy rich in the midst of a war. You too can have your very own golden toilet!
It's about a hundred billion total, and there's a single reason the war won't end - the invading nation refuses to leave. There is no other reason.
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
> The main reason ww2 is being continued is because it ending in an indisputably favorable way to Germany would be politically devastating to both its Western backers and to non-aryans who would shortly thereafter be out of power
Wow, almost as if opposing the genocide of millions and the invasion of Europe by a hostile invading power is good or something. Sounds like you're saying it's bad, though. Weird.
Framing this as WW2 is the purely Quixotic. This war was a small border conflict that should have ended within a matter of days. It's not WW2, some grand fight against genocide, or whatever other mental 'reframing' one wants to engage in. It's a border war that Russia expected to win in short order. Then the West jumped in expecting to win in short order.
Neither side got their quick victory, but now the war seems to have been effectively decided. It was arguably decided years ago after the major counter-attack yielded nothing but corpses. All that remains now is prolonging the conflict quite pointlessly, with regular efforts to try to escalate it once again that will hopefully go nowhere. Not because I hope one side or the other wins, but because if other countries start actively jumping in then we have WW3, and in a few years every single person alive, which would be substantially less than today, would regret that decision.
I'm not convinced by your two paragraphs consisting entirely of naked assertions, unsupported claims, and personal opinions. russia has genocided Ukrainians before, and have announced war goals which are tantamount to another genocide.
Could you link a reliable source that says international law supports forcefully attacking and annexing other countries to take their land which lies within internationally recognized borders?
The current state is that the vast majority of countries have judged that russia should leave, and the continued conflict is their fault (regardless of what a few in the extreme minority may think).
The UN has no ability to stop actions from powerful nations. For instance according to the UN the various US invasions - most recently of Iran and Iraq were illegal, the NATO invasion of Serbia was illegal, and so on. The votes themselves also mean something different than one might expect, as they're primarily driven by a balance of self interest and external influence, rather than any sort of ideological, let alone ethical, basis.
So that can make them informative, but you need to keep in mind what they mean as well. For instance a vote proposed by Russia to form an independent multinational coalition to investigate the Nordstream sabotage was rejected. Why? Because everybody knew Russia obviously didn't sabotage themselves, and so the investigation would be politically inconvenient, and the US won the influence check - so it wasn't passed. But this also points to something more interesting with regards to Ukraine. There are a total of 193 UN member states and early on there were extreme votes demanding Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine and more. These passed with 141 nations voting in favor, so your statement was quite accurate.
But as the war has turned in Russia's favor, with consequent geopolitical implications for the future, the things being voted on are now far less extreme, like a call for a ceasefire, yet even that is only garnering 93 to 107 votes. That's not even a simple majority in some cases. It's mostly coming down to the 'global north' versus the 'global south'. Notably, the global south makes up something like 85% of the world's population as well as the majority of its economy as well now. So your statement is certainly no longer true, and verging on misleading given the population issue.
If you spend time on Tiktok, it’s pretty evident which line that algorithm is purposely pushing. Even with purported US ownership, the algo still comes from Beijing; even a few tweaks can have dramatic hard-to-detect impacts. That’s happening dramatically on that platform, and is probably seeding a lot of the convos elsewhere.
Surely tiktok being heavily composed of people doing creative work that have understandably extremely negative views of AI would not be the cause of this, no, it must be an unprovable hunch.
You do realise that the algorithm has the same behaviour as the Amazon one right? You watch one anti-ai video for more than a few seconds and it'll suggest you watch more of it. If you're seeing a lot of anti-ai conversations on Tiktok I suggest you stop watching videos about anti-ai conversations on Tiktok so the algorithm can stop suggesting you videos on anti-ai
I’m aware of how it works. This is from naive scraped collection of TikTok without an account or durable device fingerprints, not from my personal browsing.
Agreed, if you had to pick just one reason why AI is tremendously unpopular, it is because the US AI companies, lead by Dario Amodei, are telling the US public that it is going to take ALL their jobs, as well as disrupt society. Amodei even wrote his "Machines of Loving Grace" essay, his "positive" spin on the impacts of AI, saying as much.
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.
They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.
Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.
I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.
737min · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-agent-prc-sentenced-two-years-prison" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/american-citizen-who-worked-a...
<a href="https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raids-target-san-bernardino-county-supervisor-ontario-councilman" rel="nofollow">https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-07-28/fbi-raid...
<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-citizens-charged-conspiring-smuggle-artificial-intelligence" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-and-two-us-c...
<a href="https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-guilty-economic-espionage-and-theft-confidential-ai-technology" rel="nofollow">https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-google-engineer-found-...
Etc
dumberquestions · · focus · HN ↗
bpodgursky · · focus · HN ↗
But the thing is, there are a LOT of issues where the masses are generally grumpy but don't act on it. Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge. Effective agitprop amplifies this and makes it happen.
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
runsWphotons · · focus · HN ↗
bpodgursky · · focus · HN ↗
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Hint: bussing in out of towners to astro-turf ‘town discussions’ is also seen as shitty.
A quick way to test this kind of thing is, if the roles were reversed, would they still be okay with it?
I guarantee you that China and Russia would absolutely not be okay with the US doing the same thing in their territory.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Read it, it’s a short read.
You’re the one making bizarre statements unsupported by any cogent arguments.
Historically, unregistered foreign agents get deported, imprisoned, or executed. Not protected.
There is a long, long history of this. It’s only recently where it was possible to do this with any meaningful effect without physically being present in the US, which is the reason it is a lot harder to prosecute now. But the laws are still on the books, and the Supreme Court has had no issues supporting them in the past.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
Despite the fact that they don't approve of our speaking to their people, we do it anyway: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voice_of_America
The U.S. is a democracy. We hold freedom of speech as sacrosanct. We let people make up their own minds as to how to evaluate competing viewpoints. I see no reason why the viewpoints of other countries--even those very different from ours--shouldn't be considered.
I have no problem with labeling speech's origin so that people can take it into account, but that's not the same as censoring it.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Even ‘Citizens United’ is about otherwise eligible citizens being able to organize under an umbrella (and act under that umbrella) - not that the umbrella itself fundamentally has rights independent of the people under it. Though it has resulted in widespread abuse due to the ability to hide who is actually under the umbrella.
Foreign nationals making statements outside the US towards US citizens have historically no protection either - it’s why the NSA and CIA are in theory not chartered for domestic action, but have nearly carte Blanche outside the US. The CIA and US military has rather publicly assassinated folks off US soil for statements and actions that would be protected inside the US.
In fact, prior Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’, and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
Historically, foreign nationals have even been ejected/deported from the US for what would have been perfectly normal protected speech for US citizens, and it’s very common for visas and other entry documents to be denied based on what would be protected speech for US citizens.
Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
runsWphotons · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
runsWphotons · · focus · HN ↗
Unregistered foreign agents tend to receive a fine, if they are charged at all. Before the past decade even this was very rare, now maybe there is one per year. The maximum punishment is like 5 years in jail, and no one has ever been hung for this. The directive to conflate these only traces to Pam Bondi.
Most of your post is like this in that you speak authoritatively but fumble premises. For instance you clearly don't understand free speech law. Yelling fire in a crowded theatre IS protected speech. The Schenck case your quote comes from was overturned in Brandenberg 60 years ago and is considered a national judicial embarrassment.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Don’t forget the 5 Cubans thrown in jail under FARÁ, the LA major just indicted under it, or the numerous other successful prosecutions.
I gave a range of common punishments, don’t act like I’m not being entirely accurate here.
Hell, one of the recent prosecutions was a multimillion dollar bribery scandal from foreign nationals with the current admin - that only avoided jail time because of one of the more blatant pardons by the exact same admin.
That some were bad is par for the course. Most weren’t, and haven’t been.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
Why shouldn't the same principles we apply to our own people apply to foreign people? Isn't freedom of speech a universal principle? If not, what makes outsiders' speech substantively different from ours that we should censor it?
Moreover, people in the U.S. are free to say the exact same things that foreigners might say. Why does it matter that it's coming from outside the country as opposed to inside it?
> Supreme Court precedent heavily uses phrases like ‘the constitution is not a death pact’
1/It was "suicide pact." 2/That was dicta from Justice Jackson in a dissent in Terminiello v. City of Chicago, 337 U.S. 1 (1949), not law.
> and ‘yelling fire in a crowded theatre is not protected speech’.
That was from an early free speech case in 1919 (Schenck v. U.S.) when speech restrictions were more broadly upheld--and it was not the question in the case (it was just an example). Freedom of speech has been significantly liberalized since then. Brandenburg v. Ohio, 395 U.S. 444 (1969) overruled Schenck: "[T]he constitutional guarantees of free speech and free press do not permit a State to forbid or proscribe advocacy of the use of force or of law violation except where such advocacy is directed to inciting or producing imminent lawless action and is likely to incite or produce such action."
> Unregistered foreign agents tend to be locked up, deported, or hung.
It sounds to me like you're just an unapologetic xenophobe.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Does my comment re: anti-self defense make sense now? I think you summarized the existing law pretty well - and what it grew out of.
If people feel threatened/are being targeted with a legitimate threat, they’ll react - or die. Regardless of rules or agreements.
That’s happened in the past, and is starting to happen again.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
Besides, the Constitution is designed to sustain our nation not just against speech, but even if our most sacred buildings are destroyed and our president is killed. That’s the beauty of it. It’s a clever design by the most brilliant minds of our time. Thus, I’ve never understood some people’s obsession with security. Such people are focused on current office holders and icons they deem important, not the health of the system, and not the ideals and principles enshrined by it. Paranoia and vengeance does not befit us.
Also, it pains me to have to remind self-identified Christians—the ones typically most obsessed with national security—that to “turn the other cheek” is one of the fundamental pillars of the faith, straight out of Jesus’ mouth. (Matthew 5:38–39)
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Very little is more existential to even the idea of a nation than the national identity, the in-group, out-group, etc. and that is what it is used for.
And if you think Hollywood didn’t turn that out in spades, I dare you to watch Top Gun and tell me that movie is about people flying planes, hah.
If so, seems remarkably stupid to allow foreign powers to use proven effective techniques against you unchecked, doesn’t it?
Right up there with being convinced that if someone punches you in the face, you can’t punch them right back - or worse - and/or throw them in jail for it.
That last comment is pretty hilarious in the context of geopolitics. Or criminal law.
The court may make you swear on a Bible, but what would you think about a judge telling an assault victim that they going to not give the assailant a day in jail and they should just turn the other cheek?
That judge isn’t going to be on that bench very long, that’s for sure!
This is something well understood in the Bible too - Romans 13:1-13:7 sums it up pretty well.
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
What is the practical difference between propaganda from the inside and that from the outside? Internal propaganda is often much more dangerous than external propaganda because it has a patina of legitimacy. President Trump, as you may recall, gave Rush Limbaugh a Presidential Medal of Freedom for, among other things, legitimizing the racism and sexism and a fairy-tale version of America that eventually set the stage for his election.
I'd contend we should worry a lot less about what others are saying than what we are saying to each other. Yet it still doesn't mean we should censor speech.
> Very little is more existential to even the idea of a nation than the national identity, the in-group, out-group, etc. and that is what it is used for.
Who is the in-group? Who is the out-group? Who shouldn't be in? Are you sure they're not in already? Should a nation evolve or be the same as when they were founded? What evolution is ok? What's not ok?
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
My experience is that when people don't want to answer them, it's because they either 1/don't actually know the answers, or 2/are afraid of what their honest answers will reveal about them.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
Literally everything you seem to be arguing about has already happened, even on the platform you are arguing on, but you seem oblivious to it.
It’s like arguing with a child about tax policy or something while they insist taxes are bad. Sure, but they are clearly not going to be able to do anything about it, and it isn’t even useful for anyone, so why waste the time?
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
If you’d like to have a serious intellectual debate, I welcome it.
lazide · · focus · HN ↗
bpodgursky · · focus · HN ↗
Reciprocity is a pretty straightforward strategy — we can allow uninhibited competing points of view from countries that themselves allow unlimited speech internally.
runsWphotons · · focus · HN ↗
I read the article as claiming that the Administration is implying it will harass or prosecute people for speaking or protesting against AI/data centers by deeming this to be "in support of China". I hope everyone agrees that would be a truly absurd breach of the first amendment, if it happened.
Letting the executive branch decide on a whim that certain speech is illegal because it would "further the goals of enemy X" would surely be a civilizational threat to America (if it actually happened), but that doesn't seem to be what you mean?
All the specific people mentioned in the article seem to be American [except arguably the three businessmen arguing for data centers--O'leary, Musk, Sacks], so I can't tell what the other guy is talking about either? Non-Americans do not generally have American speech protections unless in America legally (and then with some caveats). That's not America's decision!
otterley · · focus · HN ↗
What does "survival as a civilization" mean to you, exactly, and how might speech from other countries threaten this?
ElProlactin · · focus · HN ↗
And a lot of effective domestic interference takes fears about foreign threats and "helps organize and focus it."
China is a legitimate threat to US hegemony and this is clearly a new Red Scare. The irony is that it was largely the US who invited and welcomed China into the global economic order.
> Civilization only really functions because people don't shut down the country over every populist urge.
Civilization also doesn't really function because a handful of ridiculously wealthy lunatics and their sycophants know what's best for 8+ billion people.
isityettime · · focus · HN ↗
Some of it is also due to the qualities of LLMs as they actually behave and actually function today, "AI" being forced into products where it actively degrades the reliability, efficiency, or pleasantness of the product, etc. Think of Amazon's "Alexa for Shopping" or whatever, and whatever its predecessor was.
Groxx · · focus · HN ↗
rozal · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
dosisking · · focus · HN ↗
Onavo · · focus · HN ↗
matheusmoreira · · focus · HN ↗
no-name-here · · focus · HN ↗
2. Which documentation are you referring to? Googing "site:anthropic.com uplift" most of the top hits seem to be about bio research, another is about measuring agent performance (not a comparison to people), or "These are Anthropic’s internal designators for actors observed to be abusing AI. The report also attempts to measure uplift, a term we use to describe the AI capability boost, or how much more harm was caused with AI versus without AI."
Marha01 · · focus · HN ↗
willy_k · · focus · HN ↗
no-name-here · · focus · HN ↗
no-name-here · · focus · HN ↗
Is this referring to the 'safe development of AI', as they say AI development will happen even if they don’t exist, but other companies are less focused on AI safety?
watwut · · focus · HN ↗
Meanwhile, they dont care about acrual harm to real people. They sell to Palantier for christ sake.
classified · · focus · HN ↗
myaccountonhn · · focus · HN ↗
heresie-dabord · · focus · HN ↗
The righteousness of making a fast buck is also burning down the world.
detourdog · · focus · HN ↗
That was not from any foreign actors but the companies themselves. I’m sure that is no longer the case. My technology life is rich enough that I don’t have to pay attention to LLMs.
katzenq · · focus · HN ↗
tsimionescu · · focus · HN ↗
detourdog · · focus · HN ↗
CGamesPlay · · focus · HN ↗
A lot of which is fake "grassroots" movements by... foreign actors. This isn't new:
- 2021: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro-prc-influence-campaign-expands-dozens-social-media-platforms-websites-and-forums/" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/pro...
- 2022: <a href="https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dragonbridge-targets-rare-earths-mining-companies" rel="nofollow">https://cloud.google.com/blog/topics/threat-intelligence/dra...
willy_k · · focus · HN ↗
simoncion · · focus · HN ↗
When the CEO of OpenAI says that he expects at least 40% of all jobs to be eliminated by 2030 by the tool that's also making personal computing -whether PC or smartphone-, video gaming, and on-prem business computing somewhere between incredibly expensive and unaffordable, and driving up the price for just about everything else substantially -because just about everything has a computer in it or depends on computer-controlled processes these days-, you don't need some boogyman theory to understand why people are angry about the thing that's making the already-rich far, far richer.
Though. blaming it on the boogyman does have the benefit that you don't actually have to address the concerns of those revolting peasants!
GolfPopper · · focus · HN ↗
The establishment and its techbro enablers have messed up so badly that telling the torch people that the pitchfork people want to take their torches isn't working anymore. So now they're moving on to claiming that anyone with a torch or a pitchfork is secretly working for the next kingdom over.
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
This feels like the start of a propaganda push which will try to frame people opposing data centers as working at the behest of a foreign government, either intentionally or by being unknowingly manipulated. They did the exact same thing with Ukraine, reasonably effectively, by framing anybody who opposed sending hundreds of billions over there as either working for Russia, or having been unknowingly manipulated by them.
sampullman · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
sampullman · · focus · HN ↗
And anyway, it's not as if the money is freely given. Some of it's expiring equipment, some are loans or exchanges for the promise of resources, etc. Yes, it is a modicum. A few days of bombing Iran has cost us almost half the total amount given to Ukraine, for negative value.
Framing it as trillions and blaming the nation being attacked (all for what, having some nice land with resources?) makes it very hard to take any of your other points seriously.
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
ImPostingOnHN · · focus · HN ↗
Wow, almost as if opposing the genocide of millions and the invasion of Europe by a hostile invading power is good or something. Sounds like you're saying it's bad, though. Weird.
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
Neither side got their quick victory, but now the war seems to have been effectively decided. It was arguably decided years ago after the major counter-attack yielded nothing but corpses. All that remains now is prolonging the conflict quite pointlessly, with regular efforts to try to escalate it once again that will hopefully go nowhere. Not because I hope one side or the other wins, but because if other countries start actively jumping in then we have WW3, and in a few years every single person alive, which would be substantially less than today, would regret that decision.
ImPostingOnHN · · focus · HN ↗
Could you link a reliable source that says international law supports forcefully attacking and annexing other countries to take their land which lies within internationally recognized borders?
The current state is that the vast majority of countries have judged that russia should leave, and the continued conflict is their fault (regardless of what a few in the extreme minority may think).
somenameforme · · focus · HN ↗
So that can make them informative, but you need to keep in mind what they mean as well. For instance a vote proposed by Russia to form an independent multinational coalition to investigate the Nordstream sabotage was rejected. Why? Because everybody knew Russia obviously didn't sabotage themselves, and so the investigation would be politically inconvenient, and the US won the influence check - so it wasn't passed. But this also points to something more interesting with regards to Ukraine. There are a total of 193 UN member states and early on there were extreme votes demanding Russia immediately withdraw from Ukraine and more. These passed with 141 nations voting in favor, so your statement was quite accurate.
But as the war has turned in Russia's favor, with consequent geopolitical implications for the future, the things being voted on are now far less extreme, like a call for a ceasefire, yet even that is only garnering 93 to 107 votes. That's not even a simple majority in some cases. It's mostly coming down to the 'global north' versus the 'global south'. Notably, the global south makes up something like 85% of the world's population as well as the majority of its economy as well now. So your statement is certainly no longer true, and verging on misleading given the population issue.
aprentic · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
iphonecorridor · · focus · HN ↗
devmor · · focus · HN ↗
jalev · · focus · HN ↗
iphonecorridor · · focus · HN ↗
HarHarVeryFunny · · focus · HN ↗
This bleak future is all the more believable when tech companies are laying people of, en masse, citing AI as the reason. Meta's current "We're betting on people" ads appears conceived to combat this, yet at the same time Zuckerberg has been trying to lay off as many people as he can to be replaced with AI.
The disruption of society is not some Chinese created idea - it's also coming direct from the US AI companies, with Anthropic and OpenAI apparently in competition to see who can claim/admit credit for the most out of control AI hacking into external systems, and non-stop stories of employees of these same US AI companies apparently living in fear of it, and believing it could make us extinct(!). With that sort of vibe coming from US AI leadership and rank-and-file, it's hard to imagine how any foreign country could top it!
As far as datacenter locations goes, I was interested to read the other day about DeepSeek planning for a new 160,000 GPU cluster in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia, which sounds a bit of an obscure location until you realize that apparently there is a whole mass of existing data centers in that same city/region, chosen for it's remote location as well as easy access to power. I don't know what anti-datacenter messaging Trump imagines is coming from China, but maybe what he should be doing is being like China in this regard and planning where to put them.
Notwithstanding all his anti-China-ism, and regarding US locked in some life or death battle with China over AI, what's the betting that his current pop-wow with visiting Xi will result in some "deal" being announced where Trump softens his AI sanctions on China? He's brought Jensen Huang with him, Musk too, and apparently is looking for China not to block US sale of NVIDIA H200's he is offering, maybe increase NVIDIA sales.
ipsod · · focus · HN ↗
There's an 11 gigawatt cluster going in near Pantex. If they use evaporative cooling, they could use hundreds of millions of gallons of water per day... sucking it from an aquifer that gets replenished at the rate of millimeters per year, and was already being massively depleted. Without that aquifer's water, this region is dead.
They claim they won't use evaporative cooling, but... they'd save a lot of money if they did... until the water ran out.
Texan Republican statesmen are fighting it. Oil money, farm/ranch money, etc., are all fighting it. People who have historically been ride-or-die for Trump. These are the people he's threatening to treat as traitors.
I'm as pro-AI as a person can be... you can read my comments here. But, this build-out is wildly irresponsible - incredibly poor civic engineering.