aprentic

A completely anonymous stranger has no way to prove that they're human that can't be imitated by an AI. We've even seen that, in some cases, AIs can look more human to humans than real humans do.

The only solution I can think of to that problem is some sort of provenance system. Even before AI, if some random person told me a thing, I'd ignore them; If my most trusted friend told me something, I'd believe them.

We're going to need a digital equivalent. If I see a post/article/comment I need my tech to automatically check the author and rank it based on their position in my trust network. I don't necessarily need to know their identity, but I do need to know their identity relative to me.

If you can convince people that SVO is a distinctly AI pattern it's an automatic win.

Companies want people to spend as much as possible while doing the minimum work on the product.

Chatbots let companies spend almost nothing while pretending to provide long-term support.

I wonder if something similar to a copyleft license could help. What if there was a contractual "fair business" pledge that companies could add? I imagine that good enough lawyers could craft something that essentially said, "You can only display this contract if you legally guarantee that you do X, Y, Z and do not do A, B C."

I'm the customer, not the product.

Some of them look more like non Chinese people than like I he Chinese ethnicities.

If they offered to hold on to it for safe keeping, I'd decline.

As a baseline, they have experience living in about twice as many countries as the locals. They picked up their lives, often learned a second language, and established a home with minimal social support. They tend to be highly motivated people.

In many cases, they know more about the country than the locals do because they've traveled all over said country while the locals never left their home town.

edit: I just realized this might be confusing. By "foreigner" I mean someone who is from a place other than where they currently live. I'm not referring to people who only know about a country through hearsay.

As near as I can tell, there are essentially 2 kinds of laws; laws that people agree with and laws that they don't.

For the second type, governments often have trouble enforcing them consistently so they often try to compensate by making the punishments harsher (eg mandatory minimum sentencing). As near as I can tell, that tends to fail miserably.

Our government here has been shooting people in the streets and that hasn't stopped protesters from pouring out.

When you see a bunch of people peacefully following laws the most likely explanation is that they just think those laws are reasonable.

Gordon Chang has been making this prediction for almost a quarter century. Will it happen before or after the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world??

My experience in China was that the police were a bit on the bureaucratic side but otherwise far less obtrusive than in the US.

They divide their police forces into civil police and armed police. The civil police tend to be bored looking middle aged guys lounging around in guard booths at museums. They don't have weapons. The only armed police I saw stood at attention at the airport except when they had a changing of the guard ceremony.

As near as I can tell, China only allows immigration if they think that will benefit China. They've been pushing hard on academic scholarships and, in recent years, they've managed to shift net visits from the US to China.

They also seem to be pushing really hard on increasing the number of visiting African scholars. That's likely straight out of the US playbook; they see China as a rising power and want to make sure that their emerging leaders were educated in China and have ties to China.

They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.

mark_l_watson has the more believable take.

They argue that Proton is so secure that even governments can't break it when they're trying to go after terrorists.

That's exactly the level of privacy and security I want for myself.

The MSFT marketing folks seem to have opted for the less transparent one, just in case.

If you tell people, "I'll take care of safeguarding your key for you," it sounds like you're just doing them a favor.

It would be more honest to say, "I can hold on to a copy of your key and automatically unlock your data when we think you need it opened," but that would make it too obvious that they might do so without your permission.

They're not defending terrorism. They just don't believe that fighting terrorism is a good enough excuse to give up privacy.

They're not being hypocritical because they hold exactly that same view about the US government.

You may want governments to be able to read emails but for the vast majority of HN, strong privacy guarantees are a feature, not a bug.

If they honestly informed customers about the tradeoff between security and convenience they'd certainly have far fewer customers. Instead they lead people to believe that they can get that convenience for free.

The obvious better choice is transparancy.

Their main business offerings are privacy and security. The fact that they were able to pull customers away from Google shows that switching costs are low.

Your reputation is your moat. If you ruin it by acting like Google, you're filling your own moat.

If you own a newspaper and use that platform to make such a request, you're likely to attract a law enforcement response wherever you are.

The best measure I can think of is per capita prison population. It's not great because it doesn't directly address fairness but it's likely related.

Two countries, with roughly the same "fairness" of courts, should, ceteris paribus, have roughly the same per-capita prison population. By that measure, China would be slightly on the fairer end 92nd lowest out of 224.

I don't remember if HK does the same thing but China divides their police into two groups. The more common type are basically public safety officers. They are unarmed but I saw a few places where the had plastic riot shields and catch poles https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_catcher#/media/File:Mancat... The armed police are only called out as needed.

The airport had a two of military guys standing at attention with rifles. They looked like a couple of wax figures until I saw them do a formal changing of the guard.

I don't know if anyone has assembled data on actual court records. How often are police charges prosecuted? How often do they go to trial? What percentage end up getting convictions? What are the average sentences?

It would also be good to decide what we're comparing it to. A rich white person in the US can expect a very different level of fairness than a poor black person. Is a random Chinese person's experience more like the rich white persons' or the poor black person's?

From talking to friends and relatives from HK I've seen huge diversity in how people think about HK, China, their relationship with each other, Mandarin, Cantonese, food, and "the West".

There are certainly large groups of HKers who would prefer for HK to seced from China. There are also many HKers who love the UK and mourn the loss of HK to China.

There are also huge swathes of the population that chaffed at being colonized. Long time residents can show you the old police barracks where British troops would beat the locals in black bag operations. They'll tell you about how the feng shui of the Bank of China Tower lead to the collapse of the British empire. They'll tell you that they spent their lives paying taxes into a "democracy" they never got to vote in.

The opinions within HK are far more diverse than we make them out to be.

The relevant points on the timeline, from China's perspective, are:

China: Stop selling opium in our country. UK: How about no? China: We're kicking out your drug dealers. UK: How about an Opium War? China: Oh crap, you have way more guns. We surrender. UK: OK We're taking HK for 100 years. China: I guess we don't have any say in the matter....

A few years later... China: We get HK back now, right? UK: Yeah but we've altered the terms. Take it or leave it. China: OK. I guess.

A few years later... China: Now we have more guns so here are the new terms. Take it or leave. UK: But our deal!!

I don't want to be part of their collateral damage.

FWIW, the KBOS incident I saw didn't seem to be ATC either, if it was actually what I thought it was. It does seem like either of them may have been caught earlier if there had been more ATCs on staff or if they weren't as stressed or sleep deprived.

If you want to listen in yourself.