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I feel for our comrades in the US who have to live under Trump, but at the same time I can’t look at the dumpster fire that is the current US Government without feeling some measure of joy.
Couple days ago I hear that he’s moving to halt chip imports from Taiwan to have them manufactured locally. Yesterday I heard about the tariffs on Canada. This morning he appears to have axed USAID. Now this.
For all the harm he’s going to do within the US, he’s also rapidly diminishing the US’s ability to do harm to the rest of the world.
As a USonian, I’m kinda delighting in watching Trump basically rip up the entire post WW2 created world. It’ll probably make my living conditions all the more worse, but fuck it. As the Romans say, it is what it is.
Yeah on the one hand, I’m like, “Fuck, things are probably going to get very bad here.” On the other hand, I’m like, “If his wrecking ends up helping the rest of the world breath, the benefit is exponentially more than the scope of the US itself.” I don’t want people in the US to needlessly suffer, especially groups that are already marginalized historically. But the global exploitation does need to end, one way or another.
How exactly do they plan on banning a FOSS software that can be downloaded and run locally anyway? They can’t even close thepiratebay.
It makes sense as a protectionist measure. They don’t care about regular people running it locally. They want to protect their OpenAI cash cow from competition. This law would allow them to go after companies using cheaper models from China forcing them to pay for the expensive models from OpenAI. And it looks like this would apply to anything derived from Chinese models, so they could even sue people running stuff like DeepSeek as a service based in US. It’s a price fixing mechanism.
they could even sue people running stuff like DeepSeek as a service based in US.
“Time to set up my servers in Mexico.”
Saw Hawley, thought it was Tom Cotton at first, the guy who wrote the NYT op ed in 2020 about cracking down on protesters. My bad, these white supremacists all look the same to me.
Cutting off the global open source development can only result in diminished innovation, and long-term strategic vulnerability. Doing so imposes severe costs on domestic technological progress. This is a similar problem to the one faced by closed-source companies, but at a far greater scale. Open source amortizes the financial burden of research, development, and maintenance across a worldwide community. For example, technologies like Linux are maintained by thousands of developers and organizations globally, reducing costs for all participants. A nation that opts for closed, proprietary systems must shoulder these expenses alone, diverting resources from other sectors such as education and infrastructure. This problem is particularly acute in fast-evolving fields like AI or cybersecurity, where reinventing the wheel is prohibitively expensive. Developers worldwide find bugs, implement features, and adapt tools to new use cases, accelerating progress exponentially.
Countries that engage with open source will have easier time attracting skilled developers and researchers. By contrast, isolationist policies are likely to result in brain drain, as experts migrate to environments where they can collaborate globally. Startups and enterprises also depend on open source to reduce costs and scale rapidly. Restricting access to technology stifles domestic tech ecosystem, putting the country at a disadvantage with its peers.
Another big aspect here is who gets to shape emerging technologies and standards. Nations that participate in these networks gain early access to breakthroughs and will influence the direction of these critical technologies. Projects like RISC-V are already defining the future of their industries. Countries that isolate themselves forfeit this influence, ceding control to foreign entities. Locking industries out of global supply chains will inevitably lead to incompatibilities and make it difficult for these homegrown technologies to compete on the global market.
Ultimately, isolation is a recipe for technological stagnation. Closed systems will always be at a disadvantage compared to open ones. Over time, this will lead to dependence on legacy technologies that will be surpassed by the rest of the world. Meanwhile, open source adopters will continuously evolve, integrating global advancements. In a world where technological leadership determines economic and geopolitical power, cutting oneself off from the global community is suicidal. Open source provides a strategic advantage, enabling countries to pool resources for common prosperity. Those that cut themselves off will face higher costs, slower progress, and irreversible decline in the global race for technological supremacy.
can only result in diminished innovation
Like the rent-seeking tech monopolies cared about innovation…
Exactly, they just care about protecting their source of profit.
Ironic that the US wanted every country to open up to the world but now is pivoting itself the opposite way.
Basically, they wanted to allow US companies to take over development niches around the world. This created profit for the US while stifling domestic development in other countries. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, they don’t want to play this game anymore.
It would also ban the transfer of any AI models to China, so it would effectively criminalize the entire open-weight AI field in the US. This would effectively kill AI research in universities (it might even ban the release of academic papers on AI) and would wipe out most AI startups as well (as they rely on open weight releases to garner investment interest).
yeah they’re gonna ban open source
How many co-sponsors does the bill have? A lot of bills like this just die in committee.
This is going to bite us hard in the ass when Trump hands over Taiwan.
The governing broligarchs don’t like competition.
Competition Is for Losers If you want to create and capture lasting value, look to build a monopoly, writes Peter Thiel
