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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
Any forum is only good as the community that posts there.
Most communities tend to only be as good as their worst members.
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”?
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.
Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards
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.
https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/11/01/nsfw-ai/
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhank-suman-7995741b4_inve...
https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oxrcd2/gemini_25...
This of course implies that the crisis itself and persecution of Musk/Grok is politically motivated, or just based on stupidity.
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?
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?
My point is that nobody is getting undressed and no privacy violation is being done. Fake nudes are fake.
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.
Any woman that happens to matter to you in anyway?
Maybe when someone post a picture of her, and someone else asks an overhaul of the picture of her covered in semen, you can philosophize about the technicalities of whether those were her covered in semen or if that was an extrapolation of how they would like covered in semen.
Maybe you can debate this with the coomers in X even.
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.
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.
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.
Thus, I am convinced that Apple is working with the pedophiles, and not against them. You're mistaken if you think the App Store is a tool for enforcing justice.
Citation, please?
Also, the entire DF article at issue here takes Apple to task for cozying up to his administration.
In my experience, the most confident people are usually the ones who turn out to be most often wrong.
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.
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.
Do you agree that unflattering fake nudes of Trump should also result in platforms being banned from the appstore?
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 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.
…Are Apple and Google combined really not powerful enough to take on Trump?
This smacks of learned helplessness to me.
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
https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fig...
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.
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)
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!