A friend of mine plays a lot of Arena and kept asking ChatGPT for advice, and as many of you know, it worked badly! It would confidently recommend things that didn't exist or had rotated out of Standard months ago. I thought it was a cool problem to tackle, so I built ten MCP reference modules that give Claude and ChatGPT access to real MTG data: 17Lands draft stats across all 31 color archetypes, Frank Karsten's hypergeometric mana base math, Scryfall's full card database, and the MTG Comprehensive Rules with semantic search.
The rabbit hole I fell deepest into was the draft advisor. It's an 8-axis WASPAS scoring engine — baseline win rate (Bayesian-shrunk so sparse archetypes don't produce noise), N-wise card synergy, curve fit, castability via Karsten's tables, signal openness, role composition, color commitment, and opportunity cost. Empirical winning-deck data only works for card-intrinsic axes; state-dependent axes like signal and opportunity cost need theoretical sigmoid parameters or survivorship bias destroys the differentiation.
Try it! The MCP works out of the box with MTG rules, cards, stats, and mana base. If you connect the lightweight Savecraft daemon to your Arena install, it'll watch your `Player.log` and context will automatically flow to the LLM on your specific decks and matches, enabling the draft advisor and play advisor modules (and other cool stuff).
I'm Josh! I built Savecraft (https://savecraft.gg | https://github.com/joshsymonds/savecraft.gg). It's an open-source MCP server that parses game save files and gives Claude/ChatGPT access to reference modules that do real computation -- an 8-axis WASPAS draft evaluator for MTG Arena using 17Lands data, drop rate calculators with magic find scaling for Diablo II, crop planning for RimWorld, and more.
The blog post is about why I threw away all my wireframes and built the whole thing as a conversation. You see, dashboards are collections of pre-answered questions, and the interesting questions are always the ones the designer didn't anticipate.
The longer version involves getting banned from every gaming subreddit on the internet for mentioning AI, a Reddit moderator accusing me of "interpersonal relationship theft," (!) and a RimWorld veteran telling me my tool was "incredibly useful," lamenting their aging Google skills, and downvoting me to zero. It's been a ride, HN...
Oh this is really interesting! I hadn't explored Steam Cloud as a data source. Currently the daemon watches local save directories and parses through WASM, but if Steamworks exposes an API to pull save files remotely, that could work as a server-side adapter (same pattern I use for WoW via Battle.net API). That would eliminate the daemon entirely for Steam games, which is by far the biggest friction point in the install flow right now.
I'd love to see your JS lib if you're willing to share it! The raw files would still need per-game parsers (D2R's .d2s is a gnarly bit-packed binary, for example), but moving file access to the server side would be a big deal for adoption.
Savecraft is an open-source MCP server that parses game save files and serves structured game state to AI assistants. Point it at your save directory and your LLM can help you with gear, stats, skills, quest progress, everything. Upload a build note and get detailed and specific advice about how to optimize your game.
I built this because I got tired of screenshotting my inventory every time I wanted to compare two items in Diablo 2: Resurrected (and am too garbage at the game myself to make the distinction). A local Go daemon watches save directories with fsnotify, parses files through sandboxed WASM plugins, and pushes structured state to Cloudflare Workers over binary protobuf WebSocket.
Every plugin binary is Ed25519 signed: community contributors submit source, CI builds and signs the WASM with a key they never touch. Your machine verifies before execution. This was the only trust model I'd accept for running other people's code on my gaming rig.
Server side is Cloudflare Workers + Durable Objects with WebSocket Hibernation, D1 with FTS5 for full-text search across saves and notes, and reference data modules (like a D2R drop calculator) running as separate WASM Workers via Workers for Platforms dispatch namespaces.
Currently supports Diablo II: Resurrected, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 (what I'm playing currently!), Stardew Valley (theoretically), and WoW (Battle.net API + Raider.io). Linux and Windows are solid, Mac is kind of undertested. Apache 2.0, solo project. The marketing site is https://savecraft.gg
We use Talos really extensively in production. It’s been an amazing solution for our Kubernetes clusters. Highly recommended for a really smart, really directed Linux distro.
Even if an LLM it isn't "AGI" as we all imagined the term a decade ago, it will certainly be able to fake it pretty well in the near-term.
What LLMs have done is really redefine my internal definition of "intelligence."
Putting aside the fact I don't believe in free will, I'm no longer sure my own brain is doing anything substantially different to what an LLM does now. Even with tasks like math I wonder if my brain is not really "working out" the solution but merely using probabilities based on every previous math problem I have seen or solved.
Is there much evidence that the brain is doing very much other than what a transformer is working its way towards? Either way, doesn't much matter because you are not your brain, you are a spirit inhabiting a meat sack, brain is just one of the meat sack components.
A 15 year old can reason about how to move their body through a complex obstacle course. They could reason about the nonverbal social cues in a complex interpersonal situation between multiple people, estimate the mood of each person even if there are very few words being exchanged, and determine how different possible actions would affect the situation. They could learn with brief instruction how to control their muscles to climb up a rope. They could learn how to learn so that they become better at a task of their choosing. They can receive new information that permanently changes their understanding of the world. They can learn new tasks for which no massive data set of training data exists. They can perform hierarchical reasoning, like “if I want to fly from San Francisco to New York I first need to buy a plane ticket, then pack my bags, tell my family where I will be going, make sure my phone is charged, walk to the train station, etc etc.”
Also if you ask them a question they can provide you one answer with very little thinking, and then if that’s not good enough they can devote more time to thinking about the answer before they answer again. They can devote arbitrary levels of thinking to any problem depending on what is needed. They can continuously take in new data and continually update their world view throughout their entire existence based on this new information.
There’s actually a huge list of things current autoregressive approaches to AI cannot do, but they can be hard to describe and people don’t like to talk about them so many people actually don’t understand how limited the current systems are.
Here’s a great video where Yann Lecun talks about the limits of autoregressive approaches to AI with many examples:
That’s fair. In the interview LeCun uses the example of flying from San Francisco to New York and he asserts that these systems are not good at hierarchical reasoning. I’m no expert in this field so I take him at his word but maybe it warrants further explanation.
He also says that such a system wouldn’t be familiar with how to actually move through the world because we don’t have good datasets for how to do so. The rest of what I said still stands. These systems aren’t good at things for which we don’t have massive datasets, and they’re not able to devote different amounts of thinking time to different problems.
What isn’t abstract about looking at an obstacle course and then imagining how you will move your body? Or looking at someone’s face and imagining how they feel. Isn’t that abstract?
These "it's like a young/stupid person" arguments are wretched. LLMs are interesting but it should be obvious their development is not comparable to the development of human beings.
It's obvious to everyone who isn't willfully blind that LLMs aren't truly intelligent, and all the mental gymnastics that people go through to try to portray LLMs as genuinely intelligent is just so tedious.
More specifically, something like “whats the best brand of phone”. The LLM just summarizes common knowledge. But even a child will grasp some of the differences and have opinions drawn from experience.
Note that this isn’t just an anthro-good argument. AI systems could have experiences and be trained on long duration tasks with memory of what worked and why.
Good question, I'm working on exactly this, I suppose you could call it the replacement of RAG.
It's actually not very easy to achieve this. I could give a very long winded answer (don't tempt me) but suffice to say it's a resolution problem.
All AI have a fixed resolution on creation. Long running tasks focus on a very particular narrowing space per step, the resolution required for an infinite task is infinite resolution.
No 9s of error will ever fix this.
Funny enough, small animals do this with ease so I strongly disagree the idea that our AI outcompete even small mammals in every way.
I agree. Whenever people complain about LLM hallucinations they behave like they never seen one in humans.
Not only humans hallucinate all the time, humans also have persistent hallucinations as evident from the presence of opposing beliefs in various slices of society.
Current LLMs have a number of limitations that human reasoning doesn't. Whether these are intrinsic to the technology or can be overcome with larger and better datasets is an open question.
It's extremely ironic you picked megawatt hour of power because that is approximately the amount of power humans need to get good at anything according to the popular proverb.
But don't worry just yet, GPT-4o could not detect the irony on its own either.
I wouldn't say humans are so different. You could argue we've been trained on about one quadrillion bytes of visual data by the time we're 4 years old: https://x.com/ylecun/status/1750614681209983231
I would say as counter, a child, pseudo-random training by parents and environment. Not sure what price tag to put on this, but in comparison, LLMs, how many billions, to reach what level of competency exactly?
Because that tells us how you approach novel problems. If you need tons of data to solve a novel problem that makes you bad at solving novel problems, while humans can get up to speed in a new domain with much less training and thus solve problems the LLM can't.
Thus AGI needs to be able to learn something new with similar amounts of data as a human, or else it isn't an AGI as it wont be even close to as good as a human at novel tasks.
Nonsense. You can't even define some of those words or know how to measure or identify them in humans. Well, foreign language learners do "reading comprehension tests" but an LLM can already ace that and it's not really the same meaning of the word.
For reasoning you can write out the logic of your reasons, so there's that. But that's absolutely not required for AGI. People can already go a long way (often further than by reasoning) on intuition alone without being able to explain how they reached their conclusions.
If that's the case, then a huge amount of useful intelligent-seeming stuff that humans do isn't intelligence because it can already be done by LLMs. You can keep calling them not intelligent all you like but they're already doing the jobs of human intelligences and it's only going to grow. If they eventually outperform all of us but still only using language and still never being intelligent then I guess intelligence was never that useful to begin with.
“Objectively,” left-handed versus right-handed changes nothing about a person’s capabilities in the world, whereas being deaf does.
Cultural norms is an interesting comparison. Despite there being no actual difference in capacity, cultural views forced many left-handed people to be right-handed, making those people miserable in the process for no good reason.
Gay people can obviously procreate, nothing about your body stops functioning when you are gay.
What you mean is that they don't have sexual attraction towards people of an opposite gender, where if they had a relationship with them, that relationship would encourage procreation.
To me that just doesn't seem like a "difference in capacity".
I personally don't want children, and will probably seek out a partner who likewise does not want children. If I encounter somebody who wants lots of children, I will see that we have different life goals, and I probably won't be very keen on being in a relationship with them. Do you consider me "damaged" or of "diminished capacity" because of it?
Interestingly enough it was still common to train left handed kids in right handed writing up until maybe 40 years ago as it was seen as some kind of defect obviously.
> “Objectively,” left-handed versus right-handed changes nothing about a person’s capabilities in the world,
As a leftie, this is only true in the current world — I live in a culture with a left-to-right writing system, and yet technology means I don't ever need to use a fountain or quill pen.
I did have one teacher who insisted on "no biro" when I was a kid, but they were also my first introduction to "not everyone is actually nice".
Being deaf is surely different from not being deaf but you can't objectively say it's a disadvantage. It's only a disadvantage in a world built for not deaf people, like being left-handed is a disadvantage in a world built for right-handed people.
I can and did say that. The world is easier for non-deaf people. I can’t imagine even many deaf people would argue against that statement.
The correct way to argue against this isn’t to say that “objectively” the world is the same for deaf and non-deaf people; it’s that there’s a culture and language bound up in deafness that don’t deserve to die thanks to medical advances. That is true, and makes treatments like these and what they mean to the deaf community much more complicated and difficult.
If dolphins could communicate with us they would surely tell how much easier it is when you have ultrasonic hearing. All humans are therefore disabled and in need of fixing.
Or maybe not, if dolphins turn to be wiser than an average human.
If all humans could echo-locate except a subset who couldn't, I would say that group is at a small disadvantage, yes, because the set of things the main group can do is 'objectively' greater. I don't know how relevant it would be for us especially in the daytime, but hey.
I agree. However, whether all kids should receive gene therapy to develop the echo-location once the science allows for that is a more nuanced question.
> It is okay for there to be a normal human experience, and define inability to participate as a disability.
That's what most people normally do, yes. Then many people out there define an "ability to enjoy hetero sex" as a "normal human experience" and therefore see gayness as a disability that needs a cure.
I'm not arguing about the conclusion here, but about the method and the basis for deriving this conclusion.
The initial comment in this thread declared deafness to be an "actual defect" while gayness "is just people being inherently gay". Such division is completely arbitrary and doesn't follow from any law of nature. Only from current societal views which change a lot with time.
Right, and it also gave us a strong desire for the opposite sex. So if you draw the line based on this principle then gayness and deafness will fall on the same side of this line, whichever side it is.
Hence I write that the initial comment making the distinction between gayness being obviously OK and deafness being obviously not OK, look arbitrary to me. This division is cultural.
It’s a disadvantage in the “built” world, but it’s also a disadvantage in the natural world. If you drop a deaf person in the middle of the forest with no one around, they will not be able hear rivers for water, they will not be able to hear animals approaching, etc.
Being deaf is objectively a disadvantage because 4 senses is objectively worse than 5 senses.
Most of vertebrates (including human's ancestors) lost the 6th sense of electric fields in process of the evolution. Apparently 6 is not always better than 5 from the nature's point of view. Moles went further to loose sight as well.
I don't think that's quite right, evolution makes trade offs and allocates scarce resources, it's not necessarily because such things would not be beneficial.
It's not clear what "beneficial" means if you consider it separately from the resources required to achieve it.
E.g. it's beneficial to be stronger I guess, and gorillas are always strong whether they use their muscles or not. However for humans nature chose a different path where only the muscles you actively use are strong. This approach seem to work great so far, even though it results in many individual muscles of the body being weak. For each and every of these muscles you can argue that making it stronger would be "beneficial" but as a whole it doesn't seem to work out.
> Most of vertebrates (including human's ancestors) lost the 6th sense of electric fields in process of the evolution.
Human ancestors are not human. Also, the ancestor you are referring to was a fish, and could only sense electric fields under water. Why would the ability to sense electric fields under water be an evolutionary advantage for humans who don't live in water? If it's not an evolutionary advantage, then there is no reason it would propagate.
When I said 5 senses are better than 4, I was clearly referring to senses that are useful in our environment. Answer this question: is a deaf person, all else equal, more likely or less likely to survive and procreate relative to a hearing person?
> Moles went further to loose sight as well.
Moles have eyes and can see. Their vision is just not as detailed as humans. Highly detailed sight isn't an advantage for creatures that live in the dark. However, hearing is a huge advantage for people who live in an environment where sound waves exist.
You're clearly wrong here. Stop reaching so hard and just move on.
No, I'm not wrong, I just don't like relying on "obvious" statements like "5 senses are better than 4". We can't know for sure what was "better" until the human race experiment is finished (and then we won't know either obviously).
Consider this: hereditary autoimmune diseases are usually seen as a disadvantage. However they were a huge advantage during the bubonic plague in Europe, increasing the chances of survival by estimated 40% [1]
If we manage to eradicate these disadvantageous genes we may not survive the next pandemic. I don't have the knowledge to predict whether deafness genes or some other property entangled with them will be advantageous 10000 years from now and neither do you. That's all. Now you can enjoy listening to music all you like, it's just beyond the point.
Hereditary autoimmune diseases are not a sense, and are irrelevant to this discussion about whether hearing is an objective advantage or not.
I’ll ask again, since you must have missed this question: is a deaf person, all else equal, more likely or less likely to survive and procreate relative to a hearing person?
> I’ll ask again, since you must have missed this question: is a deaf person, all else equal, more likely or less likely to survive and procreate relative to a hearing person?
You know the answer: it can be both ways depending on circumstances.
* In the prehistoric world I think he was less likely to survive. The difference doesn't seem to be dramatic though since these genes were not eradicated from the population.
* In the modern world the difference is close to zero with an unknown sign. Given that in developed countries probability to procreate seem to be limited by a desire to procreate, I can't rule out that e.g. deaf people for some reason have 0.1% more desire to have kids, or any other side-effect. So answer to your question is unknown, requires a study to figure this out.
* In the future hearing can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how the circumstances evolve. We see that species gain and loose senses depending on the environment.
EDIT: I would also like to clarify this part:
> Hereditary autoimmune diseases are not a sense, and are irrelevant to this discussion about whether hearing is an objective advantage or not.
It's a human trait which was "obviously good" in the past and is "obviously bad" now. Hence I don't trust statements that other human traits like deafness are obviously good or bad. It's interesting to discuss but it's not granted.
I think building a completely level playing field is a dangerous utopia. Essentially it's the same idea as fixing people to make them equal, just addressed from the opposite end.
Well thank you, but the question is why one needs "fixing" and the other doesn't. Parent comment made an argument that being gay is like being left-handed so it doesn't need "fixing". That's fine with me, but I don't see how the same logic doesn't apply to deafness.
Many deaf people enjoy their life as it is and don't welcome your attempts to "fix" them.
> What about the deaf people that don’t enjoy their life as it is and do welcome the opportunity to hear?
I would be happy if they had such an opportunity.
The question, once again, was different: should the hereditary deafness be eradicated in childhood by gene therapy once advances of medicine allow that?
I think you changed the question and escalated the severity of the proposal so it became easier to knock down as a straw man.
Originally this was about the desirability and capability of enabling deaf people to hear writ large. But now you are framing it as full scale eradication carried out in a way that bypasses consent.
The root of this thread referenced the cochlear implant which produces best results when implanted at a very young age (staring from 9 months) obviously without consent of the patient.
Other author replied that:
> The weird thing that we should not strive to fix human defects when they are truly defects is astounding.
All my comments are essentially stating the disagreement (or rather lack of agreement) with this point of view.
It declares being deaf as a "true defect" that we should "strive to fix". In the context of the gene therapy now available, I understand this means that a deaf-born children should be "fixed" to remove this "defect". This vision is not crazy, but it doesn't strike me as universally true either.
I read it multiple times and the unresponsiveness of this comment serves to further confirm my assessment, that you were unique in introducing the notion of full-scale eradication without qualification into this conversation. The participant you quoted noted a preferability, but you engaged in an original creative act in equating this to eradication.
> The question, once again, was different: should the hereditary deafness be eradicated in childhood by gene therapy once advances of medicine allow that?
Sure, because it's reversible. If they don't like hearing they can always become deaf again.
Why would you want ligatures? I would prefer to see text as it actually is, not combining multiple characters into one. I can't trust what I am seeing if I know the text might be something it is not.
Some writing systems like the Arabic script require ligatures for correct text rendering. I think supporting the third most widely used language worldwide is reasonable.
Also ligatures are optional, you aren't affected if you don't like the feature.
I guess I'm surprised that such a crucial feature isn't standard in everything if you can't even properly display a common language like Arabic without it.
Think you can still trust what you're seeing because the char width is different, so it's not hard to differentiate
Some prefer text to be seen as it was meant to be, so that === ugliness that can't be fixed at the source due to bad unicode support can at least be fixed at the output
Same I love my ligatures to death. And there are some interesting goodies. I find the author take on `tmux` being unecessary interesting, albeit it's a quite divisive opinion. Nevertheless, it's refreshing to see the status quo being challenged.
I liked kitty, but this was part of what drove me away. My terminal at work spans the bottom half of my monitor, and is typically split into 2-3 panes. I’ll also have multiple named windows at any given time. This works amazingly well for me, and I have no desire to switch.
My other problem was having TERMINFO available on remote servers. I’m not about to start installing alternative terminal emulators in prod, and while there is a workaround to losing control characters, IIRC it’s a pain.
Are you really claiming that extremist militias are actually a valid reaction to some kind of political problem? What a bizarre stance. We can solve political problems without resorting to extremism and violence; inability to do so is not noble or caused by something external.
I’m not sure I understand the framing of violent extremists as victims actually. There are many reasons to make bad choices, but that doesn’t mean we have to respect those choices or take the results seriously. So too here.
I'm not sure if anybody is framing them as victims here. It's not wise to frame the rain as the oppressor because it falls on your head, either. They just exist because of reasons. I don't think anybody here thinks it's good that they exist. The GP just pointed out that "why?" is important question. Maybe the most important and it should be answered with research and intelectual honesty, instead of just "because evil exists".
If violent extremists have no choice about how they act, then you should accept that society too has no choice but to reject them. It's just the rain falling, right?
If violent extremists do have a choice, then we can also choose our response to them. And pretty clearly that response should be to ignore their demands and treat them as having abdicated any say in our political system. Otherwise, you validate violent extremism, which creates more violent extremism. Which is bad, right?
There were other choices here. They chose not to make them. It's no one's responsibility to decide other people's bad choices are noble or worthy.
> If violent extremists have no choice about how they act, then you should accept that society too has no choice but to reject them.
Of course, but wouldn't it be nice to have a comprehensive answer to "why?" so we can be free of them completely? Or at least find out why it's impossible if it really is.
The choice should be creating environment in which they don't spawn.
Being free of violent extremism completely is impossible. Someone will always choose violent extremism as their method of political action. Considering their demands based on real, articulable, resolvable concerns validates their methods and encourages their activities.
If they want to be taken seriously, they should abandon their methods. Listening to them will not resolve their concerns and contains no teachings. It instead spreads violent extremism throughout society.
I’d love a source proving a causal relationship, but to answer your question strictly as asked I have to say “no, I don’t need more examples of studies examining correlations” mostly because there obviously isn’t a number that would satisfy the requirement of a proof for that assertion
> However, analyses show
that crime is not driven by poverty alone, but
rather by inequality. Countries with high
overall levels of poverty do not necessarily
have higher levels of crime. It is places with
high levels of income inequality that typically
have the highest levels of crime. Another
driver of crime is a breakdown in social
norms and values which results in, and is
worsened by, factors such as
unemployment, incomplete education, a
break down in family structures, limited
opportunities and exclusion from the formal
economy.
So I’m gonna again say no this does not prove the assertion
If the political problem is oppression, then it's almost the only possible reaction. Not that I'd say that applies to the US or any Western government though, but, looking at the past, that can change faster than you'd think.
If the political problem is oppression, militias are often part of it. Either as instruments of the oppressive government or as revolutionaries who end up replacing it with another kind of oppression. Violent revolutions usually betray their ideals, because they favor exactly the wrong kind of leaders.
No, it’s simply one possible reaction — and a bad one. Methods matter at least as much as ideals in politics, and violent extremism is not a valid political method and we shouldn’t treat with it like one.
Those who embrace it made their choice. It is no one’s responsibility to respect bad choices.
Not the parent, but this comment is peculiar in the way that it makes several somewhat unconnected, requirement heavy statements.
> Are you really claiming that extremist militias are actually a valid reaction to some kind of political problem? What a bizarre stance.
In ethics, just terrorism is a well debated concept. A fairly famous thinker on the subject was Satre, who was influenced, for example, by the Algerian struggle for independence from French colonial rule, which involved both guerrilla warfare and acts of terrorism.
> We can solve political problems without resorting to extremism and violence
In a general sense, this should be trivially true for extremism. But it can be a tricky concept, as the term is also used in a prescriptive way with a politically charged intention, much like "hate".
Violence, it depends. If someone argues violence is never justified, that would be a pacifist position.
> inability to do so is not noble or caused by something external.
I don't see why moral superiority (noble) and external determination should be thrown together - or how either relates to the previous statements.
I would agree though, that one's own actions are never purely caused by external influences, as I'm personally feeling strongly against team determinism.
The previous commenter probably just wanted to highlight polarization as a driving force for radicalization, which isn't entirely untrue, but also, of course, complex. One needs to be able to call out the baddies, despite it being perceived as polarizing.
> In ethics, just terrorism is a well debated concept.
In what way is terrorism against an occupying external force, and violent extremists targeting the legitimate and democratic government of their own country, the same? Why are you conflating them?
> Violence, it depends. If someone argues violence is never justified, that would be a pacifist position.
I said specifically that violent extremism is not justified, and I feel pretty at peace (sorry!) with that statement.
I think there are morally and politically okay applications of violence, but this is a great example of something that is neither.
> or how either relates to the previous statements.
Because my point was sympathizing with violent extremists is politically wrong. They are not noble and they are not victims. They have chosen violent means to a violent end when much better alternatives exist. We have no responsibility to take anything they say seriously, and analyzing their disaffection seriously is not some lofty high-minded exercise in empathy, but a mistake.
> In what way is terrorism [...] and violent extremists [...] the same? Why are you conflating them?
I have cut out the insertion of your meta-narrative. Terrorism as a method is the use of deliberate violence in pursuit of political or ideological goals, and is a tool of choice for violent extremists.
> I said specifically that violent extremism is not justified, and I feel pretty at peace (sorry!) with that statement.
No, you actually connected both concepts with an "and", making your statement ambivalent ... but it's not a hill I care to die on. From a purely ethical point of view, there is nothing upsetting about this issue. It was well chewed over decades ago.
> I think there are morally and politically okay applications of violence, but this is a great example of something that is neither. [...] my point was sympathizing with violent extremists is politically wrong. They are not noble and they are not victims. They have chosen violent means to a violent end when much better alternatives exist. We have no responsibility to take anything they say seriously, and analyzing their disaffection seriously is not some lofty high-minded exercise in empathy, but a mistake.
We must separate the moral question from the political question. We can discuss ethics with rigor and eventually come to a position of clarity. With politics, it's all procedural and fuzzy.
In your last part you assert several positions: 1. rejection of their methods (twice) 2. sympathy (and later: empathy) is politically wrong 3. rejection of their belief system (moral superiority, victimhood) 4. recognition is a mistake.
1. and 3. are probably trivial and I won't argue against them. We're both clearly not on their team, so we don't like their methods or their narrative.
I'd disagree with 2. and 4. I get a lot out of reading and thinking about all kinds of fringe groups. It clearly gratifies many readers intellectual curiosity. Those who shun intellectual curiosity are also bad - or at least misguided.
Why is it a bizarre stance? Take the word "valid" out of your comment and you will see the value of at least understanding why extremist groups pop up. They may not be valid, but understanding their origins, roots, grievances, etc. allows us to formulate potential interventions that could take place before having to deal with armed criminals in a life-threatening manner.
It's a bizarre stance because justifying violent extremism creates more violent extremism, which endangers us all. Choosing this method of political activity should (and in my opinion does) automatically invalidate whatever political arguments you have. If you have legitimate political grievances, bring them to legitimate political arenas.
Note how my philosophy still allows you to address origins, roots, grievances, etc. while also preventing the formation of violent militias because people won't listen to them or take them seriously. Yours forces us to take violent extremists seriously, even when their underlying concerns might not be worthy of consideration. Which is what violent extremists want.
>We can solve political problems without resorting to extremism and violence
This is proven untrue by history: Nazi Germany, the Irish Revolution, and countless others have proven that brutal, oppressive regimes can only be stopped by violence. I'm not saying the present-day US government is anywhere near this bad, but your statement simply isn't true: violence was absolutely essential in stopping tyranny in many places in history.
This is actually the opposite point to what you were trying to make. Nazism was the result of violent extremism becoming politically mainstream, and is the danger in normalizing and sympathizing and treating with violent extremists. It does not reform them, it corrupts society.
I don’t think your comparison to the Irish Revolution is accurate as there is no country occupying the United States. These people have the same political liberties and possibilities as any other citizen.
>I don’t think your comparison to the Irish Revolution is accurate as there is no country occupying the United States.
What exactly does the US have to do with anything at all here?
I'm only responding to the claim that "political problems can be solved without resorting to violence". I never made a comparison to the US. The people of Ireland were definitely NOT able to solve their political problems without violence.
>Nazism was the result of violent extremism becoming politically mainstream
Yes, but that's beside the point. Germany's neighbors had no choice but to resort to extreme violence to handle the Nazi problem. It was either that and surrender and line up for slavery or death camps.
Actually poor people deserve justice and security too?
Unless you're the richest person in the world. Because if you aren't, someone is going to outbid you on the security forces, and then it's their decision, not "the market's" decision.
Then if you are not rich you cannot even call the police because you cannot afford it. It's better to abolish police and not jail people for self-defense.
Sure, that works for some cases, but what if the crime already happened? For example, what if your house was broken into and your stuff was taken?
In that case, would your only recourse be to hire a private investigator to identify the culprit, and then personally show up at their house to exact your revenge? That doesn’t seem sustainable.
You can look for info and help in your local community for example. You don't need to extract revenge necessarily, if you find that person you can organize with some people and visit them to take your stuff back.
What if the person who stole it doesn't want to give it back? What if that person has their own group of friends-with-weapons?
We now a standoff between your private army and someone else's. Seems like an extraordinary inefficient way to achieve justice. (And, one that will likely end up being quite deadly for all parties involved.)
China already uses the same logic to ban American apps. People still try to do business with China, including other American businesses. And people will also continue to do business with America, including other Chinese businesses
Politicians in Democracies world over have walked into a trap by falling in love with Social Media.
How do you get noticed, in the absurd reality created by social media, where everyone is given a mic hooked up to the same sound system? No one can win in this game. Its an arms race to nowhere. Instead of recognizing that and creating a coordination mechanism for who gets the mic, politicians are currently doing two things -
1. Buying more Ads (just check the ever growing ad spends by political parties world over) - this basically means Democracy is for sale to the largest ad buyers
Factually incorrect. China didn't ban US apps, it required US apps to obey local Chinese censorship laws. Some apps (like LinkedIn) stayed in compliance and stayed, while others left China.
What a weird stance to take! What happens if apps refuse to self-censor or obey Chinese censorship laws? They are banned. So indeed, China does ban US apps. Twitter/X did not just leave China; it is blocked in mainland China and no one can access it.
That's not a weird stance at all. Twitter/X is blocked in China because it refuses to comply with Chinese law on censorship. China's law criminalizes behavior on censorship, which adheres to what modern notions of legal jurisprudence. The US law criminalizes origin and ownership, which violates a legal principle on bills of attainder.
While US apps are slightly harmed by losing access to a market, it's really the freedom of Chinese citizens that is impacted by China banning apps. The US banning TikTok will harm ByteDance's bottom line but it also sets a precedent that the US government can dictate what you install on your phone. Why are people advocating for this like it's some kind of victory for freedom?
> Why are people advocating for this like it's some kind of victory for freedom?
We’re not. It’s a victory for national security. It’s a collective curtailment on freedom, similar to how we’ve agreed Americans are not free to finance terrorism.
While I personally disagree with the Chinese censorship laws, it is quite common that companies have to obey local laws to do business. If they're foreign companies and don't like it they can stay away.
So not a weird stance to take that US companies are not banned - they're not directly but indirectly it prevents many companies from anywhere who don't want to do business in China.
A) I'm not aware of their compliance status and B) being able to access something on the internet or not is not just about legality but also about the ability to enforce it.
I was just stating that in general a business needs to comply with laws where they do business. They can (and will) try to find ways around but it all comes back to enforcement.
If Twitter/X has no direct presence or interest in China, there is not much the local authorities can do to force them to comply with laws. If they own assets, employ people etc it looks very differently
"non-adversary", implying that China is your enemy, this doesn't make sense lol, pure propaganda at this point
China tells ahead of time what the company is allowed or not allowed to do, then grant access if they comply
TikTok comply with the US law, otherwise it would have already been banned
The US is spreading some FUD to push some other laws and to prevent China from being leader in the US, they did the same with EU companies in the past, most notably French ones
Guess who is working on "we don't have WeeChat in the west, let's copy WeeChat for our everything app"
TikTok has failed for years to comply with US laws about not sharing data with the CCP, despite numerous warnings to do so and even a forced partnership with Oracle.
This is the final result of their noncompliance with local laws. Just as Twitter/X's noncompliance with censorship laws has resulted in their ban in China.
Yet again, false claim, otherwise the US wouldn't need yet another series of laws in order to "enforce the law"
What's funny is the Oracle partnership demonstrated to the world that CIA/NSA had access to these servers for years, "Operation Decoy Tables", so i would say, the current events are quite beneficial for both parties, China and Rest of the World, as for the US, it's sad that all eyes are on TikTok, but that's what you get for only having 2 choice of the same cake for November (hey, that's the month of my birthday, the 5th too!)
> otherwise the US wouldn't need yet another series of laws in order to "enforce the law"
Since we passed a law about murder and injury once we never need worry about safety again! Silly lawmakers worrying about lead paint and checks notes creating the FDA.
You seem to have a misunderstanding of how US law works. Not all laws have legislatively-defined consequences for violating them. For example, consider laws against terrorism: even though terrorism is illegal, sanctioning individuals for terrorism can be done either legislatively or executively and occurs on a case-by-case basis.
Similarly here to ByteDance, which has violated American laws for years and is now experiencing the consequences of its non-compliance.
So actually, my claim is true; your understanding of US law is what is lacking here.
If you believe that is so, why is it incumbent on us to accept China's businesses worldwide? Shouldn't we be banning them more to protest slave labor and concentration camps?
No country has a right to do business anywhere and everywhere. I feel like people are really grasping at straws to squeeze this argument under some kind of "freedom of speech" or "freedom of action" umbrella, but those concepts have only ever applied to humans, not nations.
I actually am fine with banning all Chinese businesses. Our ruling classes would dislike that. They ONLY want to ban Chinese businesses when they fear they might not have sole and total control over what Americans see and what "influences" them, and I hate that. It's that authoritarian impulse in rulers to keep people like docile sheep they can extract money out of and silence, that I hate.
If you already acknowledge that China (the CCP really; the average Chinese citizen is not complicit) is doing "evil" things — then do you not also acknowledge that one of the "evil" things the CCP does, is to suborn/coerce private Chinese individuals and companies into temporarily acting as foreign propaganda arms for CCP messaging?
Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population?
(Compare/contrast: the Canadian government's inquiry[1] into suspected foreign-state-led tampering of Canadian elections as executed through social-media marketing and psy-ops. Same question: why would any government knowingly permit this, if they had the tools to block it?)
China is a dystopia, because the CCP combines internal propaganda against the West, with strong filters on Internet, news media, etc., such that it's very difficult (and often illegal) to "be informed" — i.e. to get any idea of what Western thought about China actually is, without the tainted lens of the CCP viewpoint. It's not just that you can't access "US propaganda mouthpieces" in China; you can't access any foreign media reporting about the US in China.
Banning one foreign propaganda mouthpiece does not create a dystopia; and in fact, depending on what that propaganda vehicle is stating, can make your own state less dystopian. For the US to become "like China" in how it is manipulating the views of its citizens, it would have to be banning not only all Chinese-owned media (which it is not doing), but also banning any reporting on China from any neutral-third-party country — such that the only way to hear about China would be through US news media that the US government could suborn. Which is... not happening.
Also, for the comparison to be valid, the US ban on Tiktok would have to be somehow analogous to China's ban on US news media. Which it's not, because Tiktok is not Chinese news media. (You could say that Douyin is Chinese news media of a sort — insofar as you might call Twitter "American news media." But Tiktok is not Douyin; no Douyin content is accessible on Tiktok.) Tiktok does not give Americans access to a bunch of Chinese-sourced information about China that the US government would want to suppress. Tiktok just does the same thing Instagram or Snapchat does — give Westerners a place to share their short-form content — but with the CCP being able to step in at any point and inject psy-ops or "tune the algorithm" toward their ends, because of their ultimate control over the platform.
Rather than thinking of Tiktok as "Chinese news media", I think a more apt way to think about it, is as one of those scam apps that you find on app stores, that has stolen the (decompiled or FOSS) code from a popular app; injected a backdoor into it; and reuploaded it. Tiktok is the higher-effort version of this — it hasn't stolen anything, but instead independently implemented a (basically fungible) competitor to the other apps in its space. But, from the CCP's perspective, it's to the same end: like scam apps, Tiktok redirects Western civilian engagement and attention from apps that the CCP can't touch, into an app that the CCP is able to "nudge" at will.
>Even in a country with near-total freedom of speech, why would you knowingly permit a state-backed influence tool from such a known-"evil" country, to have a stranglehold over much of the attention of your civilian population?
Because Americans fought for the right to "be influenced" aka access information the government doesn't want us to see. No one forced Americans to use TikTok en masse. And no one hid from them the fact that it's a Chinese company.
This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong. It's completely bizarre that anyone would use the treatment of the Uyghurs as the beacon of immorality for the chinese, while the US currently bombs more muslims with the efficiency that the CCP could ever dream of.
If the China is evil for suppressing all social media for the purpose of spreading propoganda, what do you call what the US is doing with TikTok. Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices? With your standard, couldn't the US also be considered a dystopia?
I view banning of TikTok as dangerous, especially considering the political climate. Is my "freedom of choice" really freedom if my only choices are thouse controlled US hegemonic powers? If it was instead China that ruled world, and Douyin, WeChat and Weibo were used world wide, would it seem that China is the "free" society, and that America in banning TikTok was the autocratic one? You could even imagine them using Trump as "proof" of dysfunction in our system.
> This is only an opinion you can hold if you view the US as exclusively a pious organization that can do no wrong.
No? I think you're engaging in very black-and-white thinking yourself. The spectrum from "utopia" to "dystopia" is very wide. I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
A country is an effective dystopia, to the degree that, among other things, its citizens are:
• manipulated by the state into not realizing the bad things the state does (both locally and on the world stage);
• manipulated by the state into developing a negatively-biased view of countries that oppose that country in conflicts (usually involving many entirely-false beliefs about those countries), where countries neutral to those conflicts would not support those views;
• and controlled + influenced by the state into not visiting other countries where they could "learn the truth."
China does all three of these things, in the strongest and most active sense. News companies are state-owned or coerced. Citizen journalists are arrested. Individuals sharing things they shouldn't are arrested. People have low social credit scores and can't leave the country by default, and have to earn their way out by presenting as brainwashed. Etc.
The US, meanwhile, does some of these things, but in much weaker senses:
• the US very well probably manipulates its own mainstream media; but it does nothing to prevent access to foreign news sources (where, again, Tiktok is not a foreign news source — you can't learn anything about China on Tiktok. But you can still read CCP-mouthpiece Chinese MSM outlets like https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/ just fine.)
• the US suppresses virally-disseminated citizen journalism in the sense of telling social-media services to blacklist keywords in their recommendation algorithms; but they aren't arresting the people who post those things. There is no risk in the US to spreading samizdat — in fact, there is no concept in the US of samizdat, because there is no news or fact that will get you arrested by sharing it. Anyone who wants can join a group chat (even one hosted on a US-based service!) about these topics, and spread info there without a problem. People can put up posters or even run billboards calling for people to join these meetings, and the government won't go around tearing them down. (This is what your much-underappreciated right to "freedom of assembly" gets you!)
• Random US citizens have no trouble visiting other countries — even the countries the US doesn't like. You can buy a plane ticket to Beijing right this moment if you like. A US citizen can also legally visit Russia, despite the global sanctions (though you'll have to fly to a neighbouring country and come in via land.) In neither case will this get you in trouble with the US government. It won't even disrupt an application for security clearance.
(Also, if you're curious, I'm not American. I'm Canadian. Here in Canada, we have things like hate-speech laws. We believe that there is such a right as "freedom of speech", but that it can come into opposition of other rights — such as the right to one's own safety. Or the right to a fair election.)
> Why does the TikTok ban suddenly have so much support when they were the only platform to not explicitly mute pro-palestine voices?
Past performance is not indicative of future results. Especially when the past performance is in peacetime, and the future results are in wartime.
Which is to say: IMHO the CCP has not yet done any kind of real manipulation through Tiktok. In fact, they've likely encouraged ByteDance to be perfect little boy-scouts and build up as much social trust among Gen Z and Gen Alpha as possible. (Whereas Facebook et al likely were told by the US government to suppress certain sentiments.)
The thing the US government fears — the thing any US citizen should fear — isn't any already ongoing manipulation on Tiktok. The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent. And anyone who believes that a war between the US and China is inevitable, wants to get that sleeper agent out of the room before they wake up.
>I don't think the US is anywhere near the "utopia" side; but China is much further toward the "dystopia" side.
I think we are going to disagree on this because you are playing geopolitics and I'm looking at this from the angle of individual freedoms. I don't think this is a bad thing - for geopolitical reasons, individuals are barred from owning nuclear weapons. This line is will be different for everyone. Personally I'm glad that there is a foreign owned media platform in the west that at the very least offered a different point of view. I don't believe the chicken littles that somehow China had come up with a magic algorithm that makes all the kids dumb (I think the DoEdu has a _far_ greater impact of the deterioration of schools in America than Xi).
My discomfort with the ban is, on its face, is that first, it's just protectionism, and second, by isolating tiktok it makes it clear that propaganda is fine, as long as were the ones doing the propaganda. I'd love to see better data protection regulation in the space - but it's clear that anything that would hinder Meta and Google's ability to vacuum up data in the rest of the world is "bad". Rules for thee and not for me.
>The thing you should worry about, is what Tiktok would be able to be used as by the CCP, the moment the US starts shooting at China. Tiktok is the corporate equivalent of a sleeper agent.
This can be used an argument for banning all media. If your threat vector is that you fear that $enemy may use $platform to spread propaganda; I posit that banning $platform isn't an affective strategy. Russia already shown they could spread propaganda on US owned media sites. If the populace either isn't educated or, IMO, is primed to eat propaganda, that's a problem of local regulation.
On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled. We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
> This can be used an argument for banning all media.
No, because to be clear, the worry is that people (mostly: young teens) don't have any conception of Tiktok being a CCP mouthpiece.
Anyone reading China Daily is going to realize it's a Chinese news source. And, as far as the American government is concerned, that is adequate to inform a citizen's decision-making with regards to how they interpret content from that source. People in the US don't tend to read China Daily — and it's not because the US government prevents them from doing so, or even tells them not to.
But there's nothing about Tiktok that looks Chinese. The content isn't Chinese; the UI isn't Chinese; it doesn't run sponsored ads from Chinese companies; even the PR announcements and interviews are usually done by Caucasian, ethnically-American "figurehead" employees. The whole company wants to portray itself as if it was an arms'-length American subsidiary of a foreign company, rather than a plain-old foreign company. There is no level of "media literacy" that you can apply to interacting with Tiktok itself, that would enable you to realize that Tiktok might slipstream CCP propaganda into your feed at some point. To realize that, you have to research the app "out of band" — which is research that the average citizen (but esp. a teenager) has no motivation to do.
To put this another way: the US government would likely be perfectly fine with Douyin being exposed to Western audiences; or with Tiktok and Douyin being merged together, such that logging into Tiktok shows both Tiktok and Douyin content (but presumably doesn't allow American comments to filter back up to Chinese posters, for CCP reasons.) Americans would sign up for this app, and immediately be barraged by the majority-Chinese content already on the platform — and so would quickly realize that this is a Chinese app, with all that that implies.
This is how, for example, WeChat is. Its design and messaging makes it clear that it's the international version of a Chinese app. The default phone country code on signup is +86, even for the release of the app published in the US App Store. When you see signs saying "we accept WeChat Pay", those signs are usually printed once in English and then again in Chinese, even in countries without much of a Chinese population. Etc. Nobody thinks that WeChat is an American company. And so the US government has never considered banning WeChat — and likely never would, even in wartime. They'd trust US citizens to avoid it of their own volition.
> On the other hand, I consider it a very scary thing that the US state department is just going to ban any media platform that cannot be effectively controlled.
Not "that cannot be controlled"; specifically "can and likely will be controlled for malicious purposes, by a state actor who the US is planning to go to war with quite soon, and who has proven to have competent propaganda and cyberwar arms."
The US would never ban a media platform hosted in e.g. the UAE — no matter how much of a propaganda mouthpiece it might be for non-aligned interests — because the US has no plans to go to war with the UAE; and so the US has no reason to predict that the UAE itself would coerce a platform run by one of their own private companies, into doing psy-ops on Americans.
Likewise, the US has no strong desire to ban entirely-uncontrollable-by-anybody media platforms, like certain anonymous p2p chat clients. If there's no central lever that anyone can pull to turn the platform systematically toward being a psy-op machine (with nobody noticing), then it's not the concern of the US DHS to defend people from it.
> We might as well just admit that China was right to ban Google/Meta.
China was right to ban Google/Meta, precisely insofar as China also believes war with the US is imminent. In the event of a war, these US-owned platforms would almost certainly be used by the US to manipulate Chinese citizens, in exactly the same way Tiktok would be used against US citizens. There's no reason not to use this tactic as part of a war, if you have the know-how. Both the US and China have the know-how.
(I hope people the world over wake up one day and realize that they the only "safe" social media platform, is one hosted in — and with legal ownership by a company headquartered in — a neutral country like Switzerland or Austria, that explicitly intends to never make war with anybody, and so has no need for a foreign propaganda arm!)
> individual freedoms
I would note that it won't be illegal to access Tiktok. Tiktok would still exist in every country other than the US. So the ban on Tiktok would be more like an EPA-mandated "hazard zone" fence around a site, than like an FDA scheduling of a controlled substance.
A hazard-zone declaration stops any business in the zone from operating there (illegal to make your employees work in a hazard zone); and also disincentivizes unknowing individuals from entering the zone by mistake. But you can just, like, climb the fence. You're not going to be arrested; a hazard zone is not inherently private property, so you are not trespassing by entering it. You're just (likely) being an idiot, and voiding any insurance claims you'll make. But maybe you have some very specific reason to go there. Maybe you're filming a documentary. You can still do that.
Likewise, it won't be illegal to download a VPN, set it to (any country other than the US), switch to that same region of the App Store, download Tiktok, and sign up / log into it. You're jumping the hazard-zone fence, but there's no crime inherent in that. As an individual, you're free to do so. It's just a fence, to keep out the people who don't have a motivation to be there that exceeds the motivation to ignore some scary warnings and climb a fence.
(Compare and contrast: quarantined subreddits, which are basically the self-policing version of this at a sub-platform level.)
I won't comment on whether prioritizing national security over being business friendly is right, I'm just saying there are consequences in China's case, and I believe there will be some consequences for the US as well.
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