100%. Articles about obscure codename operations is a lot harder to grasp than "You are tracked at all times via your phone and license plate and here are the images to prove it".
It's the same as how communities respond to egregious law enforcement abuses. Accusations get nowhere as opposed to undeniable video of things like George Floyd.
I've used a few different AI review tools and I have very mixed feelings about this.
There's an inherent conflict of interest around productized AI that doesn't get discussed enough when you can't fully control the configuration of the AI stack, which models are being used, what the prompts look like, etc. And that causes major pain for a mission critical process like code review.
And this announcement doesn't really make clear how much of this money is going directly to maintainers vs. being offered as free compute to use their product. My guess is that 95+% is going to be given out as credit towards reviews, which is not the same as actually committing money to open source projects through actual donations.
I work at CodeRabbit, although I am posting in a personal capacity, but can say that a great swathe of it will be in cash, not just product credit, and it's not going to be just 5%. Although there will be product credit.
Previous donations have amounted to 1.2 million usd cash, we have plans to expand that enormously. https://www.coderabbit.ai/oss
> Is there reason to believe that outcomes would be better with many small players?
Not only is the blast radius smaller, but small businesses are less incentivized to cut corners since serious violations pose a greater risk to their business than large businesses. Corruption is essentially legalized in America via lobbying, but only big companies can really afford to lobby and make huge campaign contributions to sway the government in their favor.
Government is meant to be a check on businesses, but that completely falls down once business is big enough to buy the government. It wouldn't surprise me if quality control at large companies is worse for the simple fact that they know who to pay off if they get caught, as Taylor Farms has here.
IIRC that's what happened with the Boar's Head listeria outbreak. Inspectors had repeatedly documented that the facilities were nasty, but BH was allowed to continue operating for years because <reasons>. Things only came to a tipping point after multiple people died.
On the Uyghur Genocide, we've seen aerial photography of the camps, images inside the camps, and survivors have testified before the UN on horrific accounts of abuse. Some of the most heinous stories I've ever read have come from that event, published by widely reputable outlets. Hard disagree that it's a government psyop.
A lot of the photographs and testimony is from a single source and is very biased. Human rights abuses are massively overstated by the west in an attempt to demonize China.
The associated press reported the camps closing nearly 5 years ago.
The entire conversation around the Uyghur "Genocide" has never been serious. The claim of genocide came from the estimated rate of population growth reducing(to a still positive rate) and the actual report, written by a high up member of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation specifically used the phrase "Cultural Genocide".
Additionally, the region was a focus in the early 2000s during the War on Terror, when China asked to include the extremist groups in terror watch lists. The US agreed and they were included up until a couple years prior to the events in Xinjiang.
These were essentially re-education camps focused on radicalized groups. If anything, it's a more productive path than similar efforts, ie the ex-ISIS camps in Syria.
Those never seem to be mentioned in tandem. They're supported nominally by western countries, where ex-isis members and families are kept indefinitely. Thousands of stateless prisoners, including women with children are kept there. When the boys reach the age of 14(iirc), they're put in the actual prisons with the men. Those camps essentially concentrate the extremism for the eventuality of the camps' closure. No attempts were made for deradicalization.
Thank you for educating me brother - I never knew about the relationship between the GWOT and events in Xinjiang. The parallel between ex-ISIS camps in Syria is also very intriguing.
We can also trace the endless deluge of articles with their citations and see almost every single one ends up at a thinktank laundering the Zenz report.
There is an actual genocide in Palestine right now where we watch in HD as missiles are leveling apartment blocks and ripping apart the families of doctors while they tend to the wounded.
There is also a war in Ukraine where we can watch the destruction of vast swaths of land and people in a WWI esque meat grinder.
What did we have for Xinjiang besides a whole lot of "trust-me"s from known anti-communism orgs? A few interviews? a couple pictures of prisoners?
If there were satellite photos of extensive camps, why wouldn't we be shown?
We got to see one or two possible camps, but they were disassembled.
People can travel in Xinjiang. I've seen the increased security on display in those videos, but it was primarily local police keeping tabs on the tourist to avoid some international incident.
When something real happens, you see many different sources reporting on it. People share it on social media, multiple agencies report first hand.
When the state department is trying to influence discussion, it's all think tanks.
That's a very incorrect reading of what I was trying to say.
I was saying if it was more than a state department propaganda operation, we'd see a lot more coming out. The reporting is starkly different from even reports coming out of Myanmar with the ethnic violence against the Rohingya(which barely gets any attention as-is).
Texas Governor Greg Abbott coming out and saying on national TV that tech companies "dug their own graves" on data center construction was a major wake up call[0]. The more research that is done on these developments, the more damning it looks.
People want to compare this to the pre-industrial rail buildouts, and sure there are some parallels, but I'd be curious to know if that period had the widespread political resentment towards to infrastructure construction that we're seeing today. Because I can also envision a scenario in which the capacity just doesn't get built since being pro-data center is becoming a political death sentence. And what happens then?
> So I suspect this will lead to a much more formally rigorous system with various “certificates” proving, e.g., that you lost your job or that a doctor has confirmed you have a disability.
We're seeing how this plays out now in various states that have made their benefits systems nearly impossible to use, which helps them save money by not doling out benefits at all. Having helped some of my elder relatives try to apply for social security payments online makes me very, very concerned about how it's going to look when I'm that age.
The cost of an automated bot that will talk you endlessly in circles until you give up is negligible now.
It feels like a slightly more palatable version of what Anthropic has been doing, with their constant "use your free tokens before they expire next week!" campaigns. But it's feeling more and more ominous now, like they've hit the top of the demand curve and need to pull back prices to continue growing.
I was on the Anthropic train for 2 years, and I tended not to jump between vendors much because it felt like a lot of distraction for little gain. But last week I switched to 5.6 Sol during an Anthropic outage and it made me realize how frustrated I was with Opus 5 and I haven't switched back.
They don't have one, outside of trying to hoard as much wealth and power as possible if it all falls apart. I firmly believe that greed is an addiction just like any other.
Why does the raging alcoholic drink themselves to death? Can they not see that they're careening towards the end? The powerful worship one concept at the expense of all others, and that is the endless accumulation of more.
> On the other hand it is sad to witness the birth of Omarchy is precisely because of Apple macOS, iOS and its software ecosystem.
I'm not sad at all, this is great news. I'm only bummed that the install path for Omarchy on Mac isn't easier, but money like this may change that. Apple has been stagnant in this department for years and its high time they faced some thought-leadership competition on OS UX. They brought this on themselves and I wholeheartedly welcome efforts like this.
Omarchy is built on Arch and there is a flavor of Asahi for Arch as well, so there's no reason it couldn't support the same hardware that Asahi does, just that someone needs to do the work.
Even then, Asahi is understaffed and a volunteer project following a hard and software product blackbox that's changing annually with little public documentation. I think M2s just got external monitor support via USB just recently.
It's been going slow because they have been focusing on cleaning up their patches and getting them upstream into the mainline kernel. Once that is done work on other hardware will speed up.
It's the same as how communities respond to egregious law enforcement abuses. Accusations get nowhere as opposed to undeniable video of things like George Floyd.