Counteroffer: the App Store and the Play Store will be used for the precise reason they were built, enforcing top-down social control.
Gruber, you've been far enough down this road to understand that you don't get a choice. Apple and Google can say "fuck you" all year, and you cannot "make" them do jack shit. You are either with them, or you leave for greener pastures. App distribution monopolies cannot be used for good, it's what people have said for fucking decades at this point.
People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. Obviously all social media platforms have people posting this garbage, and while they enforce the rules as much as they can, stuff slips through. X is not uniquely awful. It's just in the hands of the wrong guy. Elon may be a polarizing and offensive grifter, but I have zero interest in continuing to go down this road.
This of course implies that the crisis itself and persecution of Musk/Grok is politically motivated, or just based on stupidity.
I don't give a shit about X. Truly, I wake up and exist for weeks at a time without realizing the website exists or that anything happened on it whatsoever.
What I'm laughing at is Apple, who has had decades to forfeit their App Store monopoly. They didn't, largely because of pants-on-head stupid ideologues like Gruber defending their backwards logic. And then again with the client side scanning controversy, and now again when Gruber is mad that the shoe is on the other foot.
Apple is fascist. That's all there is to it. It's just a long, painful let-down for certain cheerleaders who really, really want to see the App Store used as a cudgel for good, vindicating the bootlicking apologists who put us in this miserable position.
I'd also note in advance there is a big difference in someone figuring out how to jailbreak Gemini or OpenAI, and then the companies responding swiftly to fix that, than what has been reported with Grok where it was basically wide open to create those images.
But, like.
If I have like ... a mole somewhere under my clothes, Grok cannot know about that right? People will know what they themselves look like naked?
Someone looking at Grok's output learns literally nothing about what the actual person looks like naked, right?
Kinda sounds like somebody should just make something that creates this for every picture ever? Then everybody has a defense -- "fake nudes!" and the pictures are meaningless?
Do you agree that unflattering fake nudes of Trump should also result in platforms being banned from the appstore?
…Are Apple and Google combined really not powerful enough to take on Trump?
This smacks of learned helplessness to me.
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
unless some ex spoke about that gross mole you had in twitter or some data that was scraped somewhere, no.
Not sure what the actual odds are of it knowing if you have a mole or not.
Furthermore, I don't think that fake nudes of the US President are morally equivalent to fake nudes of minor public figures who are 99% women, even if the law treats them the same. We need to take into account the completely different lives that men and women online experience, where women are constantly subjected to sexualization and abuse.
This is one of those topics that discussion on HN is hopeless because women are so underrepresented.
This gets fuzzy because literally everything is correlated -- it may be possible to infer that you are the type of person who might have a tattoo there? But grok doesn't have access to anything that hasn't already been shared. Grok is not undressing anybody, the people using it to generate these images aren't undressing anybody, they are generating fake nudes which have no more relationship to reality than someone taking your public blog posts and then attempting to write a post in your voice.
A topic in the news lately is the upcoming midterm elections. Could they not threaten him with an aggressive informational warfare type of campaign? After all, he benefitted from the coordinated influence campaign that russia undertook during the 2016 elections.
Not only do apple and Google have a huge amount of power, but all anyone wants is for X off the app store, and apparently even this author agrees they're powerful enough for that.
So i don't see how Cook and Pichai are, in fact, anything but cowards
I'm not sure what your mental model is for someone's visual likeness.
I'd propose a blind-inclusive analogy of what is happening on Twitter is anyone can create a realistic sexdoll with the same face and body proportions as any user online.
Doesn't that feel gross, even if the sexdoll's genitalia wouldn't match the real person's?
https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fig...
As for the political content of this article, I would argue that Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks. Certainly, Big Tech knew how to shut him up when he was doing an actual self-coup. What changed between Trump I and II is that the liberal establishment saw this act and realized they'd let Big Tech get away with murder. Antitrust is Big Tech's existential threat, and that's a power Trump absolutely does wield.
Of course, Trump is not the only person wielding this power. The EU, Japan, and other countries are passing laws to strip Apple of their power to control apps. So they need Trump to use US trade policy - the biggest lever we have[1] - to beat the EU into compliance with Apple's rules.
There's an additional wrinkle in this story, though. Musk isn't actually favored by Trump anymore. He was a Trotsky - useful to the Trump regime's ascendance to power but not necessary now that it's in place. I don't think Trump is actually defending Twitter from Apple's actions so much as this has always been the limit of Apple's power.
Going back to Tumblr, there's a reason Apple went after them. They were small, and easy to bully. For all Apple's grandstanding about "privacy is a human right", the only thing they did to stop, say, Facebook[0] was take away IDFAs. Facebook has blatantly violated Apple's guidelines time and time again, up to and including shipping ad tracking VPNs using Enterprise signing certs, which is extremely forbidden by Apple policy. If you or me did this, we'd be so blacklisted from writing iOS code we wouldn't even be able to open Swift Playgrounds on an iPad. And all this happened before Trump II figured out how to threaten the economy into compliance.
Twitter has shrunk from what they were pre-Musk, but they're still big enough that they can pay the third world to tell Americans why America should kill people who live in the third world. An iPhone that can't Tweet is materially worse, so Apple is going to let Twitter get away with murder (or, more specifically, trafficking CSAM). If you're big enough, the laws do not apply.
[0] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.
[1] This is literally the stick we used to copypaste DMCA 1201 into the local law of basically every country, over the objections of everyone including Americans!
My point is that nobody is getting undressed and no privacy violation is being done. Fake nudes are fake.
Flagging as silent protest won’t progress the debate because the issues and reasons don’t get discussed, people just object. If people dislike the direction HN is going they should be encouraged to speak up so everyone can talk through it.
Perhaps we need to reset community norms around flagging?
I just clicked here to certify this would have been flagged. HN does not disappoint.
The only thing I like more than this confirmation are those posts you see sometimes of people smelling their own farts talking about how HN is oh so special because someone posted a reply that happens to be well thought out because they are competent in some narrow technical subject.
Either the flagging tools are too easy to get hold of for new users, or the culture of flagging on this site is positively rotten due to the lack of enforcement or a too-specific definition of what "bad faith" is.
Gamified moderation tools require oversight.
Apple and Googles revenue combine to around 3% of US GDP (substantial!), but it’s not like they would threaten to take that elsewhere or stop selling in the US or something. The ways they can “hurt” Trump hurt them and the rest of the country also. But Trump can do targeted damage to them across many avenues with a stroke of the pen (or even a Tweet)
Any forum is only good as the community that posts there.
Most communities tend to only be as good as their worst members.
Remember that time Elon Musk apologized for banning someone that posted CSAM and then unbanned them? I sure do, considering that was the reason why I left Twitter three years ago.
I guess it’s like how the hippies were mostly bought out by the 80’s - what was that saying from SLC Punk, “I didn’t sell out, I bought in”?
I knew when this issue hit the fan that you'd get hordes of overly-literal engineer types arguing that the person wasn't actually violated, or that "how is this any different from someone drawing a hyper-realistic picture of someone naked?" I can actually even (well, somewhat anyway) sort of understand this viewpoint. But if you want to die on this hill, you will, most people in the real world would condemn and ostracize you for this viewpoint.
A lot of people view flagging as "that is a troll post/comment" or "that was made in bad faith". But I think another reason many people flag is "this topic is highly unlikely to generate any useful discussion" or "this topic may be fine for discussion, but not on HN".
FWIW, I disagree with the flagging in this instance. Most importantly, I did learn something useful in the comments (the bit about how Apple previously almost banned Tumbler due to unintentional CSAM). But I also don't really begrudge folks who voted to flag. Political topics always have a lower bar for flagging IMO, because they nearly always devolve into useless tribal warfare - useless tribal warfare that you can easily get in spades on nearly any other forum/social media site online. And just look at the comments on this post. Most of them I'd characterize as generally uninsightful, and even disregarding my opinion, tons of the comments here are downvoted. So if some folks are a little too trigger happy to flag because they're at least trying to keep HN's uniquely high value discussions, I don't really blame them.
So while I disagree with the flagging in this instance, I also disagree that HN generally has a problem with bad-faith flagging.
We didn't get bought out, Daring Fireball did. I have genuinely zero interest in watching him document the fact that Apple's monopoly ignores his demands. The true "hacker ethic group" recognized this decades ago, and stopped supporting Apple long before their ideology synchronized with pedophiles.
Some things need saying.
It doesn't always have to be a spirited, constructive rich debate in the comments. Some times it's just okay for one of us to tell it like it is.
I agree there are plenty of things that don't need repeating, don't need redundant commentary, and a billion etceteras, but the US is dangerously broken and the tech industry need to do their part to steer her away from endless fascism. This needs to be said, heard, and acted upon.
But to your main point: if you agree it's gross, do you not agree it is a violation of _something_? What is that thing if not privacy?
It would be interesting if HN tried to create a safe space for people to discuss political subjects, free from flagging and downvotes, similar to the design of anti-polarization projects in the past.
I have seen this explanation several times, and it seems like an unfalsifiable conjecture that assumes a lot more good faith than one can expect out of a somewhat-mainstream tech-focused social media site which does not vet the users that sign up for it.
Then again, in fairness, my view is also conjecture. However, I've also noticed in controversial threads it's not uncommon to see reasonably-stated posts getting flagged/dead, and one would expect to see a lot less of this behavior if users were actually at reasonable risk of getting their flagging privileges revoked. So I at the very least feel like there's some basis to my conjecture.
Of course, the ultimate problem is that the flagging behavior seems largely absent of accountability. We don't know who flagged the post, and we also have no insight into how often the moderators of this site yank away moderation tools from their users.
I suppose Gruber pays with his watch and hasn't seen a $20 bill recently.
At any rate where some of this stuff is concerned, fake CSAM for example, it doesn't matter that it is "fake" as fakes of the material is also against the law in some places at least.
if the problem is just the use of the word "undressing" I suppose the usage of the word is completely analogical, as nobody expects that Grok is actually going out and undressing anyone as the robots are not ready for that task yet.
I genuinely wonder what it will take for people who think like you to understand the dangerous slope the world is on because of just Trump and his cult.
propaganda works. we are in this place globally because it works.
That in mind:
Gruber unfortunately is making a bigger case for less vendor control over a user’s device, not more.
To make my political opinion more clear, the reason why Trump is able to do all this insane shit is because everyone in a position to tell him "No" has decided not to. Most of the political fights he wins are because he bribed or demoralized the other side into not showing up - not because he's winning on merit or power.
Meanwhile the actual voters - the people who matter - are way angrier at Trump than they were last term. Trump fucked up the Epstein files so badly the House had to pass a law to force him to follow his own god damned campaign promises. The MAGA coalition is falling apart. And on the other side, candidates that actually promise economic relief (as opposed to social justice[0] only) are doing quite well. If the DNC were to pull their heads out of their asses and stop trying to run extremely unpopular candidates on the basis of "well, they're not Trump" and "it's her time" they'd be winning bigly.
[0] To be clear, the problem is not social justice in a vacuum. It's the use of it to avoid having to talk about economic issues. Ever since Obama we've had a string of neoliberals that emphasize social issues to avoid having to talk about the economy, even though at least some of those issues are downstream of economic problems they don't want to touch.
What do you mean by "flag without recourse"? That's one bit I still don't follow.
Oh! Well that certainly helps, I shouldn't have assumed they didn't exist.
>flag without recourse
I'm just referring to posts of a certain subject matter that tend to get flagged. If I'm anti-XYZ, is there anything stopping someone from flagging all things XYZ so they don't make the front page?
Yes, two things: (1) we take away flagging privileges from accounts that appear to be flagging based on such an agenda, and (2) users email us to review cases where they feel an article is on topic for Hacker News and should not have been flagged. We always review those cases, and sometimes we turn off the flags (but not always—it depends on whether we agree that the article is on-topic, contains significant new information, and can serve as the basis for a substantial discussion, among other factors).
More explanation at https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que..., including >>46378818 .
Dignity. Albeit indignation always ends up being controversial in some sense.
That's shortsighted. The Trump admin is sanctioning and pressuring other countries who try anything against X and Grok. The State Department is issuing strident threats. Abroad, they see X as a way to turn allies nationalistic and make their ideology sweep the world. At home, they see it as a tool to secure their power.