Recent submissions

Comment · 1 year ago
I'd be mindful that having a NATO partner be able to spy is maybe better than having Huawei spy if you have to choose, but yes, I think it's a risk that EU countries should be aware of and probably are more aware of than with social networks.
Comment · 1 year ago
No. Unlike a newspaper, they host videos and photos of a third of (?) the US population, have detailed reader data on who reads what when, who is friends with whom, location history, etc.

This data treasure trove may be stored in US, but it isn't protected from Chinese govt access. It is the same for data by American companies, which US Patriot act lets the US govt access.

Comment · 1 year ago
Not necessarily. China pursues many objectives when it comes to its national security, such as intimidation and coercion of dissidents or opponents of its regime living abroad. Assuming China's equivalent of the Patriot act lets it treat TikTok user data as an open book, there is a lot for them to learn from it.
Comment · 1 year ago
EU countries are asleep at the wheel on matters of national security and sovereignty. Spotify is not a matter of national security. TikTok, and social networking in general, has been one for some time now. Misinformation, conspiracy theories, actual conspiracies to overthrow govt, etc have all found renewed vigor thanks to social networks.

US on the other hand now has its social media controlled by oligarchs, not much better maybe.

Comment · 1 year ago
Parent talks about Meta, you mention Microsoft. They are not in the same business. Meta is in the social networking domain, which the communist party in China has treated for years as a matter of national security. The "color revolutions" and the "Arab Spring" gave them good reason to believe that online social networks were a driver of societal change too powerful not to control. And they control it very very tightly.
Comment · 1 year ago
As an EU resident your govt likely exerts far more control over media (both domestic and foreign owned) than the US
Comment · 1 year ago
TikTok's problem isn't with what they say openly, it's with the amount of invisible control exerted by a foreign government.
Comment · 1 year ago
Compare with China though. There is absolutely no way that a company like Bytedance would be allowed to operate inside China while under American control.
Comment · 1 year ago
The fact that this emerged instead of IPv6 is a true testament to the power of "good enough hackery"
Comment · 1 year ago
I feel that the future for Python people who want type safety will eventually be TypeScript on nodejs. Go was intended as an alternative to C++. It seems that in reaction to the ungodly complexity of C++, the creators wanted to avoid adding language features as hard as possible. If the user could work around it with a little extra verbosity, it'd be ok. I feel they removed too much and maybe not the right things.
Comment · 1 year ago
Couldn't it just be algorithmic? Go uphill in the summer, then downhill until you hit water, you'll probably end in the same pond?
Comment · 2 years ago
Musk in 2022: "Shared power curbs the worst excesses of both parties, therefore I recommend voting for a Republican Congress, given that the Presidency is Democratic"

In 2024:

Comment · 2 years ago
If the continental US can do it (and it looks like it might soon, with California voting for it) I'm not sure I buy that argument. Heck if China can survive on one timezone...
Comment · 2 years ago
Reminds me of "how did this ever work in the first place" bugs. Something that used to work stops working, you look into it, and it seems that the thing looked broken to begin with, but by some lucky miracle something was making it work.
Comment · 2 years ago
Boggles my mind that after more than 60 years of computer science, we still design tools (programming languages) where the simplest tasks are full of gotchas and footguns. This is a great example.

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