U.S. President Donald Trump has asked Apple to change the name of Lake Ontario to “Lake America” on its maps app, his administration’s interior chief said Monday, days after signing an executive order over the body of water now in the spotlight amid his escalating trade war with Canada.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum told Fox’s “Mornings with Maria” program that Trump “reached out to Apple directly.” He said he was confident the “Lake America” name could be seen on its platform soon.
Apple did not immediately comment in response. Only the Lake Ontario name appeared on its platform as of Monday afternoon.
Just over the weekend, competitor Google Maps rolled out the new “Lake America” name for U.S. users looking at the body of water that sits between the state of New York and Canada’s Ontario province. The company cited the recent order by Trump, and its already-established practice of using names assigned by the U.S. Geographic Names Information System, also known as GNIS.
“People using Maps in the U.S. will see ‘Lake America,’ those in Canada will continue to see ‘Lake Ontario,’ and those outside of the U.S. and Canada will see both names,” Google said in a brief statement on Saturday, reiterating that such updates “follow our long-standing policy for bodies of water with names that vary from country to country.”
Trump declared the new “Lake America” name last week — marking one of the latest provocations during his trade war with Canada that is now hiking tariffs on both sides of the border. His executive order on Friday directed the Interior Department to update the lake’s name in the U.S. geographic naming service.
The president cannot force Canada to follow along, however. And America’s northern neighbors quickly panned the idea. The leader of the Seneca Nation in upstate New York also said the move violates a more than 225-year-old treaty and shows a “blatant disrespect” for the Indigenous people who gave Lake Ontario its name in the first place.
Imagery is figurative by definition. I understand the expression.
It is used to describe intention. A person bends the knee when they intend to serve some other party’s interests.
To continue the LLM comparison: you prompt it a question, it’s response is not accurate, you say “that’s made up”, it says “I’m sorry, you’re right, I made that up”. Did something actually just apologize to you? No, of course not. There is no intention behind the words “I’m sorry”, it’s just an algorithm minimizing an error term, and the characters
[I, m, s, o, r, r, y]were the solution. Importantly, if you ask the same question again, there’s no telling whether it will give the wrong answer or right answer, and either way, it wasn’t because of some intent to be more or less accurate.In the same way, there is no intention behind Google’s actions regarding this renaming other than to maximize a profit term. There is no intention to serve or resist a fascist state. Tomorrow their actions will not be correlated with today’s actions except to the degree that they maximize profit, and they should not be confused for the intentions of some intangible sentient entity called “Google”.
I’m painfully aware of how LLMs function, I’m unfortunately in the IS industry. It doesn’t change the fact that corporations can and do assist fascist states when they see fit, either for profit or for the personal goals of those in charge. It’s a bad example to make your point to be honest, because while an LLM has no living parts and is not able to think, companies are made up of living, thinking human beings with their own ideals. A company is not a person, they’re groups of them though. And thanks to the supreme court and US government, in the US, they sometimes have more rights than an individual does.
Intent does not matter - the result is the same, that they’re assisting with fascism. They are “bending the knee”. There is nothing with that expression that necessarily requires explaining intent, it can exist on its own or with intent. Bending the knee is an action with results, it’s not necessarily an intent, although it certainly can be.
I acknowledge that they are profit driven, but these companies are also run and operated by billionaires who have their own personal interests, including authoritarianism. This shows in their leader’s personal actions and how the companies lobby. While most of it is to drive profit and “make line go up”, you also have sick fucks like Peter Thiel who use their wealth to spread their own ideals. He spreads those ideals by convincing billionaire company owners like Musk to further spread authoritarianism through lobbying and company policy.
The point is not these semantics that you keep bringing up when we are on the same page. The point is that, intentional or not (and reasoning aside), they are doing what a fascist wants, using the power that they have to spread misinformation and falsehoods. They have the power to not fall in line, and instead are being good lapdogs to Trump. That is what people need to remember, regardless of intention.
You bringing intention into this is exactly the excuse they will use if Trump & Co ever lose power: that they had no intention of helping authoritarianism, that they were just looking out for shareholders, that their guidelines were broad enough to allow outsiders to influence changes on their platform, etc. That line of thinking is exactly what should be avoided, they will say anything to make their “line go up”. The reasoning doesn’t matter when the result is helping a fascist state be fascist.
Yes, I made this point above. I assume you aren’t suggesting a majority of the individuals working for Google, meta, Twitter, OpenAI, etc. are pro fascist. Yet without them, they would not achieve any of their fascist goals. So how is that possible?
And my point is that it’s not always the same. In the near future, Google or some other corporation, will do something notably anti-fascist. And you’ll be in a thread about it surrounded by commenters saying “I’m buying from this company now, because they get it!” And you’ll be trying to explain why that’s not how it works using functionally the same points I’m making here.
We don’t have to imagine, there are tons of companies who helped the Nazis who are still household brands today. Are those fascist corporations? All the individuals from back then are dead. Are they still fascist? If not, when did they change? I contend that none of them have ever changed, because none of them hold any ideology.
Ascribing personalities to corporations is a phenomenon our primitive brains are fooled into, because we didn’t evolve to understand what a corporation is. It’s the same phenomenon as when people form relationships with LLMs.
Good luck in that next thread.