Technology

NEW YORK, Jan 25 (Reuters) - U.S. TikTok users who once saw the app as a haven for free speech say they see signs of censorship after the platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance, was revived by an executive order from President Donald Trump.

"Our policies and algorithms did not change over the weekend," TikTok said in a statement to Reuters. "We are working hard to restore our U.S. operations back to normal and expect some temporary instability as we restore our services, which could impact TikTok features or users' access to the app."

But some users said they now see more content moderation, like limited search results, as well as warnings about misinformation and prompts for users to check their sources.

Some claimed TikTok was striking comments that used phrases like "Free Palestine" and "Free Luigi," a reference to Luigi Mangione, who is accused of killing a UnitedHealth executive, which had been previously allowed. TikTok said it does not allow content that promotes violent or hateful individuals on the platform.

Jan 24 (Reuters) - Mastercard and Visa failed to stop their payment networks from laundering proceeds from child sexual abuse material and sex trafficking on the popular website OnlyFans, according to allegations in a previously undisclosed whistleblower complaint filed with the U.S. Treasury’s financial crimes unit.

The whistleblower, a senior compliance expert in the credit card and banking industries, said the two giant card companies knew their networks were being used to pay for illegal content on the porn-driven site since at least 2021, and accused them of “turning a blind eye to flows of illicit revenue.”

The complaint was filed in January 2023 with the Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and the U.S. Justice and Homeland Security departments, the whistleblower said.

The complaint said that the whistleblower and other anti-trafficking experts, including U.S. federal agents, alerted Visa and Mastercard to unlawful content on OnlyFans in a series of calls in 2021 and 2022. The federal agents corroborated the presence of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans, the complaint said.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/53562405

https://archive.ph/XyNXM

Welcome Skynet 😱

The streets of Beijing have changed dramatically within just a few years. The noisy, smelly thrum of traffic has been replaced by an unusual quiet for a megacity. Roads course with a stream of mostly electric vehicles, all with their distinct, green license plates.

This is not just a Beijing phenomenon. For those arriving in many of China’s major cities from countries dominated by gas-guzzlers, the quiet will be their first impression, said Li Shuo, director of the China climate hub at the Asia Society Policy Institute.

It’s like stepping into the future, he told CNN.

By any measure, China’s EV growth has been extraordinary. More than half of new cars sold are electric, putting the world’s largest automarket on a path to all but erase gas-powered cars over the coming decades. Last year, China’s EV sales soared to 11 million, a nearly 40% increase on 2023, according to data from UK research firm Rho Motion. It’s an “irreversible transformation,” Shuo said.

cross-posted from: https://lemm.ee/post/53487257

This is an upload by DJ Ware explaining the Landauer Limit and implications for silicon tech. Don Ware is a former Bell Labs engineer that posts about computing at an advanced level.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rUkGPIzsl6Y

Here is the more ambiguous Wikipedia article. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer's_principle

This is why the future of all technology is likely biological, and we live in the Stone Age of Silicon presently... or at least this supports my hard sci-fi universe narrative. I did not know how close the end of silicon may be. I highly recommend watching this upload. I've been pondering this one for days.

This is a perfect illustration of why government direction of labor towards productive purposes is essential and why this task cannot be left up to the markets.

The government started to crack down on the quant trading industry amid economic slowdown in an effort to move the economy away from the financial sector and towards manufacturing.

High-Flyer was one of the quant traders that was facing extinction. Instead of giving up, they spun out Deepseek, an AI lab using their existing talent and 10k GPUs they were already using for trading. They didn't even need any VC funding.

DeepSeek also proves you don't need billions in funding, as it's being developed on the cheap compared to commercial models like ChatGPT. The team is able to produce a cutting edge model using a fraction of the resources its competitors need.

DeepSeek approach fundamentally changes the economics of the market and makes OpenAI's strategy obsolete.

Scores of projects are starting to use DeepSeek model which leads to an ecosystem being formed around it, turning it into a standard setter. The model is open and free for anyone to use making it more appealing to both public and private enterprise, and it don't require massive data centers to operate. While large versions of the model still need significant infrastructure, smaller versions can run locally and work well for many use cases.

Another aspect of open source nature is that it amortizes the development effort. The whole global community of researches and engineers can contribute to the development of the model. On the other hand, OpenAI has to pour billions into centralized infrastructure and do all the research to advance their model on their own.

The competition here is between two visions for how AI technology will be developed going forward. DeepSeek's vision is to make AI into an open source commodity that's decentralized and developed cooperatively. OpenAI vision is to build and expensive closed system that they can charge access for.

Traditionally, open source projects that manage to gain significant momentum have always outcompeted closed source software, and I don't see why this scenario will play out any different. This calls into question the whole $500bn investment that the US is doing into the company. The market will favor cheaper open model that DeepSeek is building, and it will advance faster because it has a lot more people contributing to its development.

And looping back to the initial point, DeepSeek would not have existed if the government in China didn't crack down on trading industry which redirected labor towards productive endeavours.

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/21/why-us-companies-struggle-to-replicate-chinas-wechat-super-app-.html

Remember people, if newpipe give error when try to play a video, just turn your phone horizontally and vertically until the error leave. Is really easy

R1 utilizes a training method called direct reinforcement learning which is a form of unsupervised learning that forgoes the need for labelled data or explicit solutions. Instead, the model explores various approaches and generates multiple potential answers that are grouped and evaluated using a reward score. This score acts as a fitness function, allowing for learning and adjusting strategies over time. R1 progressively improves its problem-solving abilities by reinforcing successful approaches. This is a similar process to how humans learn to solve problems through trial and error.