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TikTok’s Poison Pill

calnewport.com

411–420 of 430 posts

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#411

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems insane to me to undercut our own companies because a hostile foreign state is operating in our nation. Kick out the hostile state. That's not hypocrisy.

Imagine in the current world that every other countries take the same approach and kick out that now hostile influence (basically banning Meta/Apple/Microsoft/Amazon). How would these companies look when limited to domestic market ? And is that really the world we want to live in ?

China and Russia already does this. Very few other nations have reason to, but if they want to pick between American, Chinese, or domestic websites they are free to do so and I'm confident the vast majority will pick American.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#412

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems insane to me to undercut our own companies because a hostile foreign state is operating in our nation. Kick out the hostile state. That's not hypocrisy.

The comment chain you’re replying to is advocating for reigning in “our own” companies, regardless Kicking out the hostile state solves the immediate threat from China. But what about threats from our own (current and/or future) government?

We can handle our own companies with regulations that reflect the fact they aren't owned by a hostile state. We need to be much much more restrictive with china and also restrict our companies ability to work with them when it comes to data and technology sales

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Do I need to spend my time thinking for americans? " Only if makes sense, and unfortunately, I don't think it does in this case. Which is the point: TikTok can't really be TikTok with those laws in place. There's no way to make any US or European privacy laws gel with CCP policy and there's no realistic way to 'segregate the data'. The only 'solution' would be to have a complete and total separation of the app in al…

Then EU would have to do the same for FB, Goolge,Apple and americans will have to stop complaining about protectionism every time we give those giants a fine for doing bad things.

The EU is not capable of producing it's own FB, Google and Apple, and those 'bad things' they do are are very marginal.

FB selling ads to people and allowing agencies to 'target' people based on whatever just isn't causing a lot of harm to anyone. Nobody in Europe is being 'put off' because they're seeing Kid's Clothing ads because they are parents. I mean, it's odd, but not that bad.

The American Gov. are not going after Europeans for arbitrary reasons. If the NSA is targeting a European for something, you can be sure it already rises to the level of 'international shenanigans' anyhow, and that probably something is very wrong.

FB could very well remove the possibility for the NSA to directly get data on some random European but it largely won't make a difference.

Right now, the CCP has access to anything they want, for any reason they want, including arbitrary malicious things such as harassing NGOs etc..

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TikTok is feared not because of privacy, but because it shows China can do tech too. America placed its economic bets on being a tech superpower and that is now under threat. Restricting American companies in the same way would only serve to also diminish tech in the US.

Eh, not really. There have been plenty of perfectly functional apps working in China for a long time. Makes sense that people are worried about feeding video streams, geolocation data, facial recognition data, social network data, etc. to our adversary who uses the very same data sources to manipulate and control its own population.

Wasn't Eric Schmidt working for the department of defense while pushing Google+ for other countries?

Letting most Silicon Valley-style platform stuff into your country is a bit crazy: why would you want network lock-in effects to mean 30% of taxi revenue or whatever flows back to the US, or that a US AI matchmakes your dating population and drains money out of the country having people pay to get more swipes than each other in a zero-sum competition?

For most countries Silicon Valley-style companies with strong moats aren't entering in and helping with comparative advantage: they are just a taxation that goes overseas, capturing people through failures of collective action causing inability to shift platforms when something competitive comes along.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What seats are changing party: In November there are 50 tight races for house seats alone. The house and senate play a huge role in legislation so this election will have massive impact. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2022-election-forecast/... Even if you live in WA/CA your vote still matters. At the federal level there are 4 elected positions, 14 at the state level, and more at a local level. There are also p…

I clearly said in my comment that I've never missed an election. I do also vote in primaries, those have typically gone opposite to how I voted, or else were a foregone landslide for my pick. I also never implied I live in WA. Apparently you got confused because I spelled out the name of the capital city of this country.

Ah, apologies for misreading your comment.

I see your point that district style voting can feel pointless unless you you're in a swing district. I still think there are smaller positions you can influence over but I agree with you on that.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The comment chain you’re replying to is advocating for reigning in “our own” companies, regardless Kicking out the hostile state solves the immediate threat from China. But what about threats from our own (current and/or future) government?

I find it fascinating how China is described as an hostile state when it's manufacturing the vast majority of our goods.

Are these two things inherently contradictory? They're currently flying missiles and threatening one of our allies. Can you interpret that as not a hostile enemy?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#417

TikTok scares me in the same way that DALL-E scare me. DALL-E is very, very good, but still obviously flawed. But behind the flaws I know it will get better. Like the original iPhone vs. the crazy powerful phones we have now. Or the original 3d games like Doom or Duke Nukem 3d compared to modern PC graphics. Or the insane quality of modern movie CGI. In 5 years or 10 years this AI tech to generate incredible images w…

> how TikTok is connecting to our subconscious

it's the same channel surfing that people used to do with TV, only more with more channels and better timing, plus a content recommender.

the mechanism is the same dopamine drip. there's a chance to see something that's exciting/interesting/relevant/pleasing/arousing/etc.

coub is almost the same (but a lot smaller, caters to an Eastern European audience mostly, plus has a baseline video+music remix content)

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#418

The question I have - at what point do Instagram and Facebook converge such to the point that it's not even worth having them as separate apps anymore? At a certain point, I imagine Meta would like these apps to all combine into one united "Meta" app.

They would call it Metaverse.

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And books and movies are being or have been made about Assange and Alex from both sides with no repercussion. Case in point. Here's another one: Show me a China documentary that outlines the overreaching adverse effect of state digital surveillance on China population. I can show you at least 5 docs on NSA and Snowden, produced by HBO / published by Harper Collins.

It's astounding how smoothly we went from "you can criticize the government" to "you can make a documentary about someone who criticized the government and got royally fucked". As if those two are the same thing.

To be fair, none of the examples you gave seem just like "criticizing the government," honestly. Snowden physically leaked a bunch of docs he agreed ahead of time would be a criminal offense to leak. I think what he did was the right thing to do and we should have said that whistleblower protections apply to people in his position, but I feel like that's a different problem?

Re: TikTok’s Poison Pill

#420
post #251

TikTok is having longer and longer videos. TikTok will become something else. The machine learning only works for short videos. For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. I expect that both technologies will be combined.

> For long videos, you need social graphs to match videos to users who like them. YouTube is all about long videos and there is basically zero social graph on there.

Like, subscribe and comment are all social interactions and they indeed are counted in recommendations.
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