I wasn’t asking you a question, I was providing an explanation of why China having billionaires is not at odds with China being socialist which seemed to be the argument you were making in this thread.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urglg3WimHA

I was, our viewpoints happen to be compatible. I’m not sure why it matters to you so much who provides you with the explanation. Are you just here to argue for the sake of arguing, that’s the reason you’re still refusing to engage with what I said?

Yeah, I have a hard time understanding the justification for systemd. The only real argument I’ve seen is that it standardizes the process, but that could’ve been done as a spec where you define a common config format, lifecycle, etc., and then keep the actual utilities decoupled from each other, but behaving in a uniform way.

I mean I just explained that above, and provided you with a longer explanation in a link in the previous comment. You could try engaging with that.

Nobody here is saying billionaires are necessary to exist. They are a product of specific historic and material conditions China found itself in. They chose to accept the problems opening up would bring because they judged that economic relations with the west would outweigh the downsides. It’s impossible to look at how China managed to develop today and argue that it was a wrong decision. Opening up allowed China to rapidly catch up technologically with the west, and to develop peacefully instead of having to devote huge amounts of resources to the military the way USSR was forced to do.

I’m not sure what your argument is then. If you accept that it is a socialist society, then you also have to realize that it must have these contradictions which are the nature of such a society.

A socialist society retains capitalist contradictions by its very nature because socialism is the transitional stage of development when the working class takes power, but existing relations of production have not yet been abolished. This is precisely what we see in China today. There are capitalists, they do exploit people, and that is a real contradiction within Chinese society. However, that’s different from saying that these people run the society the way they do in capitalist countries. Saying China is capitalist because it allows a limited form of capitalism to exist because it’s seen as useful for development, is like saying Canada is communist because it has public healthcare.

A good read on the subject I can recommend https://redsails.org/china-has-billionaires/

fair

I thought it was interesting conceptually even if light on details. In the west, most application for AI has been in the realm for content generation like making images, documents, writing code. Meanwhile, in China AI systems are used for stuff like monitoring traffic systems, maintaining high speed rail networks, and other types of dynamic systems management. I haven’t really heard much about AI being applied in this way in western countries, and it seems like a far more practical use to me.

My point is that systemd did not have to be built at all. It’s an abomination that goes directly against the original philosophy of Linux creating a monolithic monstrosity to replace individual and composable programs that used to be the way init works. Now, everything is tied to it and it’s become like a cancer in a linux system that’s inoperable. The whole system-id problem is just one example of why this is a terrible design.

for most desktop users, not persisting /etc/machine-id is usually fine, but there are some specific scenarios where it can cause issues. Systemd uses machine-id to tag log entries. If it changes, you might lose the ability to correlate logs across boot sessions in journalctl. This is mostly an annoyance for debugging rather than a functional problem. A few NixOS modules like services.openssh or certain mail servers use machine-id for generating default host keys or identifiers. Changing it might cause warnings on first boot after a change, but usually nothing breaks since they fall back to other identifiers.

Not really, China has been experimenting with a number of different approaches using analog neural circuits

• https://jns.nju.edu.cn/EN/10.13232/j.cnki.jnju.2025.05.015
• https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/2510.23638
• https://www.tsinghua.edu.cn/en/info/1245/11373.htm
• https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-026-72401-z

LLMs are just one branch of a much wider field of AI research, and analog circuits that deal with flows instead of discrete values tend to be more efficient for modelling dynamic systems such as traffic flows.

The problem with machine-id specifically is that it’s become a standard way for the browser to identify itself. There obviously other ways you can be tracked, but this is a very low bar and a common way of sites tracking people.

yeah that’s not what the article actually says, but I can see how westerners living under oppressive regimes might start projecting

It was the same fear though, there was a really strong working class movement in the US after the great depression, and a lot of communist organizing happening within unions.

For a while the ruling class managed to convince people that it really was the end of history.

Systemd was designed long after a lot of these security practices and problems with tracking were well understood. There’s very little excuse for it doing a lot of the things it does. Systemd is literally re-architecting how Linux was meant to work originally, and for the worse. I get the impression you’re not actually familiar with the history of Linux or Unix philosophy in general.

Having to put everything into containers is really just a work around bad architecture that keeps being pushed in the Linux world. Containers are useful, and probably the only way to actually keep apps from having too much access to the system at this point, but I don’t see why bad architecture should be accepted and then have to be worked around.

Browsers aren’t just apps, they’re effectively platforms which run all kinds of apps you end up accessing online when you visit sites. Since the browser leaks the id to these apps, you’re effectively trusting the apps. Sure, you could run your browser in a VM or whatever, but that’s missing the point entirely. The real question is why your machine needs to have a unique identifier, and why the fuck it’s baked into functionality of systemd which is now replacing the traditional tool chain with a monolith.

And yes, I’m fully aware of other metadata that the browser leaks, and the fact that people are just starting to talk about that is also a problem. Running with Js disabled or putting a browser in a VM, is not really a solution for vast majority of people. The issue is that we have systems that are designed to enable tracking by default, and you have to jump through hoops to get around that. Telling people here are the hoops isn’t really helpful.

The browser itself is one of the biggest vectors of attacks here. Both Chrome and Firefox indirectly via libdbus, read your machine-id. Firefox shares browsing data and other unique info with ‘with partners, service providers, suppliers and contractors’ including Cloudflare and Google.