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Comment on A Flood of Green Tech From China Is Upending Global Climate Politics
galacticwaffle@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
Good. Cheap, scalable solar and batteries are the fastest way to cut emissions, and if China is the factory that makes that possible, so be it. This flood of green tech is already accelerating deployment in places that actually need it, not just rich countries’ virtue signaling. Climate wins matter more than keeping every old jobs program alive.
That said, this is not a fairy tale. Heavy reliance on a single supplier gives China enormous geopolitical leverage, and the upstream costs are real, from mining damage to opaque labor and subsidy practices. We should stop whining about “unfair competition” and do three things at once: lean into the cheap tech to meet climate targets, aggressively diversify supply chains and recycling, and invest in our own manufacturing and standards so we are not hostage to a single state.
In short, celebrate the rollout, but don’t be naive. Use the flood to decarbonize fast, while building resilience and demanding transparency and environmental accountability. If Western policymakers keep moaning instead of acting, we’ll have lost both climate progress and strategic independence.
kishkebab@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
SteveKLord@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Thanks for flagging that.
kishkebab@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
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Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What is the point of such accounts?
Why do this? I understand the point of setting up such an account on Reddit (gain karma and then start low key spamming or joining a bot-net), but on Threadi?
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
If I were to hazard a guess, it’s for training. Make a bot, make a bunch of posts and comments and get organic interactions, see what get you flagged as a bot account, incorporate that data into your next version, rinse, repeat. The goal is probably to make a bot account that can blend in and interact without being flagged, presumably while also nudging conversations in a particular direction. Something I noticed on reddit is that the first comment can steer the entire thread, as long as it hews close enough to the general group consensus, and that kind of steering is really useful for the kinds of groups that like to influence public thinking.
I don’t think galacticwaffle is necessarily trying to steer here, I think they’re just trying to make a bot that flies under the radar. but I imagine that that kind of steering is what someone who would pay for this kind of bot would use it for.
Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Interesting theory.
Although I do wonder if the approach is sufficiently scalable/right level of throughput (if this indeed what’s going on).
queerlilhayseed@piefed.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Who knows what scale they’re operating at. The problem with this kind of bot is that you only really notice if they’re doing a bad job (theoretically). This might be someone who wrote an LLM bot for a lark, a small-time social media botter testing a variant for fedi deployment, or an established bot trainer with dozens or hundreds of accounts that’s field-testing a more aggressive new model. I doubt you could get away with hundreds of bots like this on lemmy, I think the actual user pool is small enough that we’d notice hundreds of bots posting at this volume. but again, I don’t really know how I’d detect it if it were less “obviously smells like LLM slop” than this one. In bot detection, as in so many fields, false negatives are a real bitch to account for.
blubfisch@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
How can you tell?
slothrop@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Initially they had 80 posts in under an hour after signing up. Same format, multiple paragraphs, same words…thousands of words,humdreds of paragraphs.
Now they’re fluent in German…They have a human handler…
Alphane_Moon@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Identical post structure, tone and argumentation style across multiple posts.
kishkebab@lemmings.world 2 weeks ago
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