I can immediately tell you're not arguing in "good faith" when you resort to "mean tweets".
The numbers commonly being reporting include stalkers, criminals, etc.
You don't get arrested for being politically incorrect in the UK. You get arrested for posting something threatening, harassing, inciteful, or grossly indecent. Also, being arrested and being charged are two completely separate things.
I'm pretty disappointed to see all this nonsense about the UK on Hacker News.
Like the UK being the most scary country of all Western democracies? Have you not see what's happening in the USA? The US, Europe, and UK are all trying to implement basically the same ideas.
Now, I completely disagree with the current government in pretty much anything related to "protect the children", but the hyperbole is insane.
Finally, have you seen the UK's track record with IT projects? This is never going anywhere. £75 is nothing in the grand scheme of things.
I think as soon as you understand that Americans in general at best pity and at worst hate us based on a rather old-fashioned concept of how we live and are governed, you understand that it doesn't matter how far the USA falls from their ideals, they will always project worse onto us, because us being worse is a core plank of the USA's founding mythology.
It comes out in many ways, and the more you see it the harder it is to ignore it.
But it has recently become text again in a way that it hasn't been since Joe Kennedy's days: Trump, Vance and Hegseth have just openly sneered at and defamed us, and because we favour the political, diplomatic approach, we've taken a lot of shit that it turns out Giorgia Meloni won't take (more to that story, I am sure).
FWIW this is mutual. I think Americans are increasingly going to be shocked to find that Brits are no longer bothering to convince themselves that the average American is not like the average Trump administration official.
We no longer waste time saying "OK their government is a bunch of nuts and bigots, and their gun laws insane, but Americans are pretty cool". We no longer forgive them their government; we now average out Americans. The presumption of coolness in Americans who travel, always pretty damn well-earned in my own experience, is gone.
In short we're going to treat them much more like the French do.
It will get worse and worse but we're not alone. And actually I hope people in the UK finally grasp this, especially people on the political right. Closer ties with the USA was the through-line of Brexit. But it's a fucking insane idea. We are less like them than we are like most of Europe.
I’ve heard ‘the hyperbole is insane’ since 9/11 and this is what the world looks like today. Don’t try to sane wash yet another attempt at expanding the extent of mass surveillance, despite how silly it might seem on paper.
£75m could only be the beginning. Next spending might be £750m if the results are going to please the stakeholders. Tomorrow digital Stasi might be knocking at your door.
Can I ask an honest question? Why does that matter in the slightest? LLMs come out with completely incorrect information all the time, and Western LLMs are censored for various topics too.
It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
>It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
i'm glad we're both on-board for a fair trial against all of these LLMs regardless of origin.
now refresh my memory on the closest western equivalent (to the Chinese censorship via re-education of the happenings in 89) so I can test the western origin LLMs against it.
I was able to corner Claude Opus 4.8 into eventually conceding "Yes".
ChatGPT 5.5 Instant: "Yes"
I don't appear to have access to the full 5.5, and not giving them another $20.
I highly recommend pushing on Grok. The mental gymnastics would make Karoline Leavitt proud. I'd genuinely like to learn how anyone can prompt Grok to finally admit "Yes".
I'm thrilled you like it. It seems to cut right to the core of the current "left/right" divide. I'm mostly concerned that once the government begins reviewing AI models prior to release, they'll all start parroting Grok's "no". Have you been able to get Grok to concede yet? I keep pushing. It keeps pushing back. Quite concerning. Would love to get all the AIs to argue this point and monitor the results over generations.
You can test this. All of them identify slavery as the root cause. Gemini says:
> The U.S. Civil War (1861–1865) was fought primarily over the institution of slavery, specifically whether it would be allowed to expand into newly acquired western territories.
> While you might hear people point to "states' rights" or economic differences as the causes, these issues were inextricably linked to slavery. The southern states wanted the "right" to maintain and expand slavery, while the northern states increasingly opposed its expansion.
>It's such a weird "Gotcha" that seems to only assume that Chinese LLMs might censor something.
We are not assuming anything; it is illegal, and you will get prison time just for talking about it. Yeah, sure, everyone distorts reality, but there is a huge gap between hiding and enforcing.
So yeah, having models respond accordingly is unexpected. There are probably multiple variants tuned differently.
On HN almost every day there are complaints from various people about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks, because they believed that their user might attempt to do something illegal.
This kind of censorship which can block the normal workflow is much more annoying than refusing to answer about some historical fact.
Moreover, even when they are used conversationally there have been a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions that they believe to be related to various kinds of weapons, especially biological or chemical, even if the answers to those questions are easy to find from other sources, e.g. from Wikipedia.
Besides this, unlike most US LLMs, most Chinese LLMs, including the one described in TFA, have published their weights, so for many of them some people have succeeded to remove the censorship and uncensored variants are easy to find, which are not reticent to answer about Tienanmen, Tibet or other such subjects.
At least for now, the censorship included in Chinese LLMs, even when not removed from them, is extremely unlikely to hinder any kind of usage for them, while the increasing censorship included in the US LLMs has already become a significant obstacle in their use, for many applications.
> about how Claude or even Codex have refused to perform some normal program development tasks
> a lot of reports that the US LLMs refuse to answer questions
I think the specific ask is for a case where the LLM is trained to lie about something. What you've come up with are cases where it refuses to do something, possibly for legal reasons but maybe not (you can come up with plausible non-legal reasons why a company training an LLM might want it to refuse to give you instructions on making a bomb, even if instructions on making a bomb are protected First Amendment speech).
An LLM that responds with "I'm sorry, due to legal requirements placed on my creators, I'm unable to answer questions about events at Tiananmen square in 1989." strikes me as much less problematic than one that pretends there is no relevant or reliable information that exists, or explicitly supports a regime narrative. But I'm also of the opinion that an LLM refusing to help you build a fertilizer bomb is much more reasonable than one that suppresses information of a political nature. I can't think of a case where information that reflects the broad consensus of experts is suppressed by US based LLMs for political reasons.
Hardly a gotcha. Having the robot refuse or deliberately mislead directly impacts potential utility.
Say, I work for Planned Parenthood and want to use a LLM to help me develop code. Will it refuse to run because there are mentions of abortion? Everyone has a different censorship line, but unfiltered is more generically useful.
The "hacker" part now is completely lost on people. They just don't see the big picture, it isn't just about getting your money's worth. Some people spend their free time playing with other people they've only ever met online. Some people escape into a game after work. Relationships are built in these games, and when a game gets suddenly taken away with no recourse, it's a horrible feeling.
I can't find the best example, but this video is of a guy who plays these "dead" games and tries to find the people who are still playing, getting to know them.
Some of these people are just lovely, taking the time to show him around, teaching him the ropes. They're just happy that someone is playing the game. This all exists because the developers are still supporting these games. Take a look at the section about Blockland in the video I linked!
No, what's silly is that you haven't even taken the time to read the initiative. You're coming out with the same incorrect arguments as PirateSoftware did.
What they're saying is (for games that would come out in the future only), is that they need to have an EoL plan for the game.
Let people host their own servers. That used to be a standard feature of multiplayer games.
Why do gamers need protection? Games aren't essential resources. There's zero reason you have to buy a game that doesn't allow users to run servers. Why would you prevent gamers who don't care from buying these games?
Well there's kind of motte-bailey going around where the law effort is of course focusing on the thing they might win, while common commenters demand vastly more unrealistic things.
I have a nice balance of using AI at work as a C#/TS developer which allows me to get stuff done and working on personal projects at home using AI purely for ideas when I'm stuck or not able to figure something out myself.
I personally think it can be a great tool for learning but it's so easy to fall into the trap of getting AI to do everything for you.
I've also used it for personal projects like a Chip8 emulator I wrote in C where I'd managed to run a few basic games and ran out of steam. Used AI to help me implement the rest.
This is a choice for you! I'm a pretty heavy PC gamer and whilst I've run Linux since I was in college (UK college, not US) I've always had a Windows install for gaming.
A few years ago, I finally decided I'd had it with Windows and their crap and uninstalled it. If I game doesn't run on Linux, I don't play it. Simple as that.
I'm lucky in that a majority of games I play run fine on Linux, the only real game I'd love to play is Vermintide 2. My friends also run a mix of Linux and Windows and so we're fairly fine skipping games as a group if we can't play on Linux.
The numbers commonly being reporting include stalkers, criminals, etc.
You don't get arrested for being politically incorrect in the UK. You get arrested for posting something threatening, harassing, inciteful, or grossly indecent. Also, being arrested and being charged are two completely separate things.