Seems like it's not pleasant, and the author says in theory it could be as low of a bar as getting into a heated argument; but the author never discloses his actual charge, which I think is critical context.
If he stabbed someone and got this treatment, it would be very different than if he had a loud but normal argument you might see in any big box store in the US.
That he doesn't go on to protest why he got locked up makes me think it was something more serious.
Some time ago (can't easily find it anymore) there was a expose on UK prisons, which was interesting without even knowing what crime the prisoner was convicted of, but turns out it was abuse of a relative.
Good catch. Additionally, one of the authors on this is just a student at UWisc, and the other author is also not a professional researcher but instead an author of popular books.
This is not an ad-hominum, but does put into question the statistical training backgrounds of both of these authors to accurate assess the data.
Anthropic has also been the biggest anti-China LLM in a long while, so it's possible they're using an opportunistic hack (potentially involving actual Chinese IP addresses) as another way to push their agenda.
Honestly, I'm fine with Google doing it. If not them, then some regulatory arbitrage startup will do it with way more de-facto scam and fraud. Google is not some morale arbiter for the long arc of technology -- look at how they gatekept their LLM technology and got wrecked by the people who actually commericalized it: OpenAI.
I was surprised to note at the end of the article it's written by Cade Metz, the same writer who doxxed Scott Alexander. I wonder if this turn to human interest pieces is a fallout from that scandal.
AI will change the world, but not in the way the OP (Thomas Hunter) thinks.
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The first statement, AI will change the world, is low surprise and clearly true already.
The second statement, not in the way X thinks, is also low surprise, because most technologies have very unpredictable impacts, especially if it is "close to singularity" or the singularity.
The guide starts with the presumption they gained power through democratic elections. Neither China nor most other historic authoritarian regimes started this way.
(Nazi Germany and Putin's Russia being the classical examples of democracies going authoritarian).
Is this really an authoritarian regime survival guide or a not-too-hidden jab at the Trump presidency?
Like I don't see too many of the items applying to classically authoritarian regimes like China.
Let's apply the guide's own advice:
> Always think critically, fact-check and point out the truth, expose ignorance with facts.
The guide after all is written by Eastern / Europeans, the people is getting expropriated the most by Trump, in January 2017, right as Trump got elected and the democratic "resistance" movement was all the range. (Surprisingly, Trump 2 is even more extreme, and no more talk of resistance).
Yeah it has terrible optics, yet it's clearly going to be normalized and come. The question is who does it and what is the organization of it. If this company doesn't do it, the next will.
In certain roles, AI micromanagement clearly will create higher performance. Add the marketplace of capitalism and it'll all compete away.
There are certain roles, like artists, where this is the wrong solution wholly: monitoring whether an artist is at her desk will create badly performing artists, and this will show. In these roles, these tools won't apply.
I would say the critics are already on average proven wrong in the sense that they were betting on something that had a prior of 90% chance of being true. And now those odds might be say 50%. If they were betting people, they would have lost half their money already, while the people betting it would come true have already made 4x. In that competitive sense, they're already wrong.
It takes little skill to predict something like "it won't snow on New York on 3/15/2025". Whereas if you said it will snow on 3/15/2025, and it's true, that's skill.
for those curious why an app would name itself Little Red Book despite the association, obviously they could have been better about the naming, but they're actually not the same name in either language:
The social media app Xiaohongshu (小红书) does literally translate to "little red book" in English. However, this is completely different from Mao's famous work, which was never called this in Chinese. Mao's book was informally known as "Hongbaoshu" (红宝书) meaning "red treasured book" and formally titled "Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong" (毛主席语录).
The apparent connection in English comes from translators using "Little Red Book" for both terms (maybe due to training or an agenda? who knows, choosing word-by-word translation for one and popular translation for another), even though they're distinct and unrelated in the original Chinese, and of course in the official desired English "RedNote" too.
Yeah but "little red book" (xiaohongshu) in mandarin is not actually how the original Mao Little Red Book is called in Mandarin, either formally or informally. Informally in mandarin it's called hongbaoshu (literally "red cover book" and formally, as you can imagine, is like Quotes from Chairman Mao).
So this is a case of translators with an agenda translating two phrases with different original mandarin renditions (hongbaoshu and xiaohongshu), and picking and choosing the style of translation (base on usage vs based on character) to get the English translation to merge both of them as "Little Red Book".
https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html