A poison is not going to harm you unless it makes no contact with your body; what GP is saying is, regardless of which one is more potent, it's safer to pick the one you're least likely to ever find yourself near.
It's safer to not ingest any poison. You don't extinguish fire with gasoline because kerosene might be worse. You don't eat rat poison because fentanyl would be worse. It's a false dichotomy.
It's not a false dichotomy - the entire analogy to poison makes no sense, because US or China spying on people's activity on-line is currently a complete nothingburger. If anything, adtech is actually doing real harm to people this way, but that harm is still relatively small and indirect, which is why most people don't care.
> There's no way I am using a Chinese IDE with VSCode (w/ Coppilot) and Cursor existing after reading the privacy issues in the court documents with TikTok.
I have to say, on second reading, you are right because I basically overlooked that Copilot implies having no problem with being spied on by US corporations. That honestly escaped me.
But since you brought it up, for me mass surveillance and other abuses are simply a human rights issue more than anything. People can chose to not uphold theirs, or we can feel like we "have no other choice", but that doesn't change the human rights abuse, essentially. And we have no clue what the long term pay-off for everything being enmeshed into surveillance of every single data point, no matter how trivial in isolation it might be. And "I don't care about privacy, so let's not have privacy anymore, so nobody ever born will have privacy again" is not a decision anyone has the right to make, to put a point on it.
We all kinda ended up here, and I know it's not so easy, but that we don't have "fixed" it doesn't mean it's not broken, and it staying broken for a long time doesn't normalize it in my books. That people don't care is what raising awareness is for, after all.
And when people like Larry Ellison talk about everybody being on good behaviour because the AI will be always watching (to help everybody and make a great society, of course, because nothing could go wrong), basically, I think adtech isn't the only danger, and the effect of that would also not be "small and indirect". But it also underlines your point about what's the more direct threat to a US citizen.
