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24·2 days agoAnd the next whataboutism! What a waste of time.
Yeah, these are the ‘tankies’ who got banned on Reddit, right? I guess it takes time until they get a minority, but it’s good that the community grows steadily.
One thing that’s obvious here on Lemmy is that whataboutism works only in one direction. If an article is critical of China, Russia, Iran, or other dictatorships, you’d read, “But about U.S./EU/the West”. But there are tons of articles here critical of Western countries, and it’s accepted. Why is this? Just wumaos?
The real change in retail pricing might be discrimination pricing (or ‘surveillance pricing’ as it is now called sometimes). Simply speaking, it uses personal data to personalize prices not just for each customer, but also for each customer depending on actual circumstances such as day time, weather, an individual’s pay day, and other data, collected through apps, loyalty cards, …
As one article says, there is One Person One Price:
"If I literally tell you, the price of a six-pack is $1.99, and then I tell someone else the price of a six-pack for them is $3.99, this would be deemed very unfair if there was too much transparency on it,” [University of Chicago economists Jean-Pierre] Dubé said. “But if instead I say, the price of a six-pack is $3.99 for everyone, and that’s fair. But then I give you a coupon for $2 off [through your app] but I don’t give the coupon to the other person, somehow that’s not as unfair as if I just targeted a different price.”
The linked article is a very long read but worth everyone’s time. Very insightful.
I am thinking the same. Must be some sort of Streisand effect :-)
This is related, particularly as the discussion is to a large part around cheap cars:
China: Carmakers Implicated in Uyghur Forced Labor - (February 2024)
China’s electric vehicle battery supply chain shows signs of forced labor, report says - (June 2023)
As one user in this thread said, it might be a feature required by the CCP.
“Guaranteeing security and privacy” could a strong argument imho.
I was wondering the same, especially as the article doesn’t mention any numbers or the like. But I didn’t want to change the original title.
Texas wants solar energy but forced labor in China is a concern
While the deployment of affordable renewable energy is great for Texas, the broader solar supply chain is cause for concern. Unfortunately, many solar panel manufacturers are entirely reliant on cheap Chinese materials with opaque traceability and forced labor concerns in the Xinjiang province. The State Department has concluded that since Xinjiang produces 45% of the global polysilicon capacity and a significant amount of silicon metal, much of the global solar supply chain could include inputs made with forced labor from the region.
As a result, U.S. Congress passed the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act in late 2021, creating a rebuttable presumption that all goods, made in whole or in part, from the region contain forced labor and are thus barred from entering U.S. commerce. Customs and Border Protection is tasked with enforcing the law and Congress specifically directed CBP to target polysilicon from Xinjiang. Since enforcement began in June 2022, CBP has detained over $2 billion in goods.
Forced labor appears to have a broader meaning than slavery as far as I can understand, for example, from the ILO definition or here. But I don’t know either.
Google makes billions from targeted advertising every year, don’t expect it to improve privacy unless it’s forced to by regulation or competition.
Yeah, I have been wondering my whole life that there are so many people believing in ‘privacy tools’ by companies like Google. This is one of the things that mystifies me most.
At least to some (large?) extent this is another red herring to distract from other and arguably more important AI topics such as copyright issues as well as legal and ethical issues imho.
Amazon has been having problems with books written by LLMs for almost a year, and it doesn’t appear to do anything about it. For example:
AI Detection Startups Say Amazon Could Flag AI Books. It Doesn’t (Sep 2023)
A new nightmare for writers shows how AI deepfakes could upend the book industry—and Amazon isn’t helping (August 2023)
These are just two examples, you’ll find many more. But people keep buying there and support this business.
[Edit typo.]
This is a very simplified narrative if I may say so. I’d argue there is no such thing as an artificial ‘mind.’ What you call mind is a stochastic parrot. Whatever the bot yields, its whole work is being copied, because that’s the point of training a foundation model.
The copyright laws in our current forms can’t simply be applied here. I’m not a laywer and can’t elaborate how we should address the issue legally, but the models’ results are 100 percent copied. There can be no doubt. There’s no mind that has created anything original.
Yeah, I was wondering the same, but didn’t want to edit the original title. Maybe there are some details that are new, I don’t know. What the CCP has been doing for a long time now is a shame.