It is a matter of national security for India, Israel, and every other country to maintain a sovereign communications channel for their leaders to reach their people directly.
The world cannot be ruled by American corporations.
Every sovereign needs its own basic internet infrastructure: hosting, payments, anti-DDOS.
Over the long term, crypto is the obvious choice for the 80% of the world population that is neither American nor Chinese, as well as large swaths of both Americans & Chinese.
This is now going to happen.
China is already US-independent when it comes to communication & payments infrastructure.
India, Israel, Russia are obvious candidates to go techno-autarkic next. Then perhaps the EU, South Korea, Japan, Brazil.
Fifteen years ago the far left still controlled almost one third of India.
The Modi government fixed the issue by using force against actual terrorists while addressing the underlying discontent with economic development. It worked. indiatoday.in/amp/india-toda…x.com/iyervval/statu…
Both America and China were invested in the illusion that China wasn't already the world's strongest economy.
Psychologically, it suited the incumbent to appear strong. So America downplayed China's numbers.
Strategically, it suited the disruptor to appear weak. So China also sandbagged its own numbers.
But the illusion is becoming harder to maintain.
In retrospect, all the China cope over the last decade or so was really just the stealth on the Chinese stealth bomber.
Hide your strength and bide your time was Deng's strategy. Amazingly, denying China's strength somehow also became America's strategy.
For example, all the cope on China's demographics somehow being uniquely bad...when they have 1.4B+ people that crush every international science competition with minimal drug addiction, crime, or fatherlessness...and when their demographic problems have obvious robotic solutions.
Or, for another example, how MAGA sought to mimic China's manufacturing buildout and industrial policy without deeply understanding China's strengths in this area, which is like competing with Google by setting up a website. Vague references to 1945 substituted for understanding the year 2025.
One consequence of the cope is that China knows far more about America's strengths than vice versa. Surprisingly few Americans interested in re-industrialization have ever set foot in Shenzhen. Those who have, like @Molson_Hart, understand what modern China actually is.
Anyway, what @DoggyDog1208 calls the "skull chart" is the same phenomenon @yishan and I commented on months ago. Once China truly enters a vertical, like electric cars or solar, their pace of ascent[1] is so rapid that incumbents often don't even have time to react.
Now apply this at country level. China has flipped America so quickly on so many axes[2], particularly military ones like hypersonics or military-adjacent ones like power, that it can no longer be contained.
A major contributing factor was the dollar illusion. All that money printing made America think it was richer than China. And China was happy to let America persist in the illusion. But an illusion it was. Yet another way in which Keynesianism becomes the epitaph of empire.
The first kind of retard uses AI everywhere, even where it shouldn’t be used.
The second kind of retard sees AI everywhere, even where it isn’t used.
Usually, it’s obvious what threads are and aren’t AI-written.
But some people can’t tell the difference between normal writing and AI writing. And because they can’t tell the difference, they’ll either overuse AI…or accuse others of using AI!
What we actually may need are built-in statistical AI detectors for every public text field. Paste in a URL into an archive.is-like interface and get back the probability that any div on the page is AI-generated.
In general my view is that AI text shouldn’t be used raw. It’s like a search engine result, it’s lorem ipsum. Useful for research but not final results. AI code is different, but even that requires review. AI visuals are different still, and you can sometimes use them directly.
We’re still developing these conventions, as the tech itself is of course a moving target. But it is interesting that even technologists (who see the huge time-savings that AI gives for, say, data analysis or vibe coding) are annoyed by AI slop. Imagine how much the people who don’t see the positive parts of AI may hate AI.
TLDR: slop is the new spam, and we’ll need new tools and conventions to defeat it.
I agree email spammers will keep adapting.
But I don’t know if a typical poster will keep morphing their content in such a way.