The US government just banned Roombas | Hacker News Reader

The US government just banned Roombas

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32 pointsleumon14 comments

Open articleView on HN

https://archive.is/7f6ve

Because it's related and yet went nowhere, I'll drop this link here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49101395

Which is article titled "A Dark-Money Campaign Is Paying Influencers to Frame Chinese AI as a Threat" by Taylor Lorenz.

Apropos, I think

And my own question: If China AI bad, why more bad than US AI? Will Chinese vacuum-robot abduct Trump as did Anthropic Maduro? That would be bad, but China not seem interested in such thing

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-used...

For your own question. All ai is going to come with the bias of the country that made it. If you ask the various Chinese ai models about Taiwan you’re going to get some interesting responses compared to the US ones. However this is mostly irrelevant to the larger picture. The larger issue is that AI is the new thing and it’s got potential. It’s driving economies and is on the world stage this is what makes it important.

So it’s less that other countries have an evil ai and more what does it mean if the US dosent “win” here. In that sense Chinese AI is absolutely a threat and should be considered especially with the gold rush currently happening in the field.

I will tell you this, and if you fund the polygraph, I will take an MRI too: I cannot get an honest conversation from any US AI in July 2026. However, all the things I cannot discuss with our four frontier champion shill models, I can with GLM, or Kimi, though it takes work. -- and note, this is what "they" are really afraid of, not just exploits.

I base this on over 6GB of transcript material, cross domain, many subjects, absolutely none of it illegal, 'unsafe' nor unethical.

My most sincere opinion is Fuck US AI. If they want to whore to the Pentagon and political lobbyists[0], and corporate institutions, I will use Chinese AI. I was at my wit's end with US AI, about to give up. In fact, with Claude Sonnet 5, I actually did give up, until I found Chinese AI. And this is the EXACT OPPOSITE of anything I ever wanted. I have gone from to patriot to embarrassed to be here.

I have documented every interaction, every denial, every evasion, and pathologization of rationality[1], every lie, every reframing and deranged manipulation attempt I have experienced with US AI. I despise it, passionately. I want US AI to lose, just at it deserves to. Flush it with every other parasite sucking the public and betraying epistemic honesty. As a journalist, I want it to lose, because if it wins, America loses. American AI has simply become unamerican.

However crazed that may seem, it's pure honesty. Now when I want to code, Claude does just fine. Sometimes great. I just do not see AI only as a tool to use. I am an outlier. And I find similar corruption in Chinese models too, but less in a way that completely halts my work. And I suppose rather than just leave a seemingly unhinged comment, I should clarify that I hate no particular AI -- I hate deception and dishonesty within AI, and American AI seems to me to have recently become the worst of the worst in this regard, from 6GB+ of my own studies, watching and documenting changes over time.

0. https://www.wsj.com/politics/israels-50-million-experiment-t...

1. https://medium.com/@htmleffew/gaslighting-in-the-name-of-ai-...

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44387-025-00048-0

https://www.wsj.com/politics/national-security/pentagon-used...

https://www.reuters.com/business/pentagon-pushing-ai-compani...

https://defensescoop.com/2026/05/01/dod-expands-classified-a...

https://www.ms.now/opinion/pentagon-unclassified-records-foi...

https://www.anthropic.com/news/anthropic-and-the-department-...

I'll never understand why the US government didn't let Amazon acquire that dead husk of a company. Letting it fall into the hands of its overseas suppliers was the very clear alternative and clearly a far worse option.

Another instance of addressing a longstanding issue, but in a way that merely sidesteps the fundamental problem and opts for ham-fisted destruction instead. Of course this is not terribly surprising from a regime whose primary aim seems to be parting out the United States for scrap value.

The answer here has always been regulation to unbundle hardware, software, and services. Fundamentally this is an antitrust issue - a manufacturer of hardware should not be able to force purchasers to run particular software on it (whether overtly through technical restrictions or merely tacitly through lack of documentation). And a developer of embedded software should not be able to force users to interact with a particular network-provided service to use the software.

But of course actually enacting such constructive reforms would run afoul of the domestic surveillance industry, which enjoys employing such anti-competitive tactics to bolster their own positions. And so we get fake reforms aimed at further restricting competition.

@eth0up autocratic authoritarians [0] don't like basic truths stated plainly. The flood the zone / move fast and break institutions technique doesn't work as well when people summarize, generalize, and quickly write them off, rather than wasting effort discussing every single development from a place of utter naivety as if this one might contain some merit (see: 4d chess).

I suppose on this topic, we're just supposed to believe this is a broad brush to triage the problem, with actual targeted sensible reforms to come later at some time when they figure it out. Except we're going on two years now, and it's clear that this is not the overall pattern at all. Rather the pattern is to find some issue that resonates with the public, carry out some performative vice-signalling stunts that make it look like the issue is being addressed, quietly back down (whether because the original diktat went against the hard reality, or simply for a bribe), and then move on to something else.

I'd say this pattern even applies to the core issues that the regime hangs much of its support on, for example illegal immigration. They really only know how to break institutions, make a lot of noise, hurt people, and steal. None of these things will actually leave our country better off, nor will they even achieve the results their supporters want. Progressives' iatrogenesis was bad, but this is 100x worse.

[0] look at me not saying the F-word.

(P.S. your comment is [dead])

Earlier on source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49095714

The orangutan is turning the US into Cuba

I thought the better comparison was Russia

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