Yeah. Whenever I teach newspaper reading to students I go into local digital archives and grab an article from the day 100 years ago. At first I thought it would just be interesting for students to see a snapshot of their city in the past, but the articles back then were just generally shorter and more information-dense.

Their articles are often a lot shorter, too. A lot of their press releases just state the facts, the actual news. No colouring, no editorialising, no agenda. Sometimes just a couple paragraphs.

It's interesting to compare it to English-language newspaper archives from 100 years ago, before Western Media got weaponized.

It's the same neural network technology, yes, and a different application, yes. But the generative applications require much more complex neural networks and push the same technology a lot further in ways that have affected more traditional uses of neural networks as well.

manufacturing consent

It’s a disruptive new technology that disrupt an industry that already has trouble giving a living to people in the western world.

Yes, and the solution to the new trouble is exactly the same as the solution to the old trouble, but good luck trying to tell that to liberals when they have a new tree to bark up.

The messaging from the anti-generative-AI people is very confused and self-contradictory. They have legitimate concerns, but when the people who say "AI art is trash, it's not even art" also say "AI art is stealing our jobs"...what?

I think the "AI art is trash" part is wrong. And it's just a matter of time before its shortcomings (aesthetic consistency, ability to express complexity etc) are overcome.

The push against developing the technology is misdirected effort, as it always is with liberals. It's just delaying the inevitable. Collective effort should be aimed at affecting who has control of the technology, so that the bourgeoisie can't use it to impoverish artists even more than they already have. But that understanding is never going to take root in the West because the working class there have been generationally groomed by their bourgeois masters to be slave-brained forever losers.

I wonder how this will play out in the eyes of the European public if they continue to re-establish and develop ties?

China is not, per its non-interference policy, going to do anything to halt Europe's descent into fascism. Not on the government policy level, anyway. But if the agreements they start making include an end to the promotion of Sinophobia, people having a unfiltered view of the quality of life in China might have a significant effect on European attitudes.

It is generally agreed that Holt's disappearance was a simple case of an accidental drowning, but a number of conspiracy theories surfaced, most famously the suggestion that he was a spy for China and had been collected by a Chinese submarine.

Wikipedia never gets old

Breaking News: Iraqi Muslim Doctor Marxist-Leninist has a different view on casual sex than Anglosphere Internet Marxist-Leninists; Anglosphere Internet Marxist-Leninists are compelled to opine that he's wrong.

That first and second sound exactly like what happened in Hong Kong.

Also remember that a lot of people, including Chinese, are boycotting this movie because of actress Gal Gadot’s pro-Zionist views. That is definitely a good thing.

If I have any criticism to level at Andy's video, it's that he didn't mention this. The rest of his piece I feel in agreement with.

Anti-woke? Do people like the Snow White remake here?

I agree with everyone else in China regarding that movie (and I'm pretty sure the Black Panthers would have agreed): it's performative virtue-signalling and blatantly insincere about it. It's not real progress, and it's clearly not reflecting real progress because the West is currently regressing. It exists for two reasons: to ease the Western left's crippling levels of guilt from the centuries of horrific abuse they inflicted on Africans and their New World descendants, and to stir up the culture war bread and circuses.

It just smells extremely liberal to be attacking Andy Boreham (someone who's made a career of defending China's reputation from liberal hatemongering) for calling liberal culture war bait exactly what it is.

Is it an unpopular opinion to find the edit irritating? It represents a body image trope that belongs in the dustbin of history.

It's too easy for a bad-faith user to trick it into saying something that can be used to support all the Sinophobic propaganda out there.

If people genuinely want answers to questions like the ones in your screenshot, it's much better to email their local Confucius Institute.

BYD has various meanings:

For Chinese, it's biyadi

For Westerners, it's Build Your Dreams

For Western capitalist auto makers, it's Bringing Your Downfall

If the Baltics were just imaginary land that everyone agreed was real, they'd have the same geopolitical relevance as they do now: a flag and a voice cheerleading the West on international fora and trying to convince the world that the duality of being both pro-Nazi and innocent victims of communism was a real thing that they could be in the war.

The Trump regime is throwing out most of the USA's soft power (except for entertainment media) and switching to hard power wherever it can. Going mask-off with its relationship with Europe (and NATO, Ukraine etc) is one of the ways it's doing that.

I'm enjoying immense Schadenfreude from it; especially from all the smug European NAFO bros getting hit by the reality check that being a European NATO member means having a pair of boobs tattooed on your back.

Starmer hoping nobody notices that his "coalition of the willing" is not a coalition of the capable.

Honestly after the way Zelensky got humiliated here, he should ask Putin to let Ukraine join the Russian Federation. It would spite Trump, it'd be funny as fuck, and Ukraine would probably get better treatment from Russia than it would under the US vultures at thos point.