[HN Gopher] The Candid Naivety of Geeks
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The Candid Naivety of Geeks
Author : SlackingOff123
Score : 84 points
Date : 2025-03-29 19:45 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (ploum.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (ploum.net)
| beeflet wrote:
| yeah it sucks that a lot of the rust ecosystem is pushing
| permissive licenses over copyleft
| arccy wrote:
| copyleft is less free than permissive. noone should be
| compelled to share their work if they don't want to.
| lovich wrote:
| But we collectively should be compelled to protect it under
| IP law?
|
| I'm personally completely fine(legally not morally) with
| people or organizations who want to keep trade secrets
| secret, but not if they also want society to protect anyone
| copying their work. The tradeoff is you show society how to
| accomplish your innovation and we'll guarantee you profits
| for X years with the might of law
|
| Edit: this was in response to the comment about no one should
| be compelled to share their work. I don't know enough about
| the nuances of copyleft vs permissive licenses to have useful
| commentary
| rakoo wrote:
| Individual freedom doesn't exist in a vacuum, it is only
| effective if collective freedom is aimed and enforced. Having
| the freedom to live under a roof _at the condition that you
| have enough money_ isn 't something I'd consider actual
| freedom, and yet someone is _free_ to restrict access to land
| and empty housing. That is plain stupid for a healthy society
| beeflet wrote:
| the "freedom" being limited in this case is the freedom to
| privatize otherwise public work
| arccy wrote:
| privatise your additional work on top of the public work.
| the public work doesn't stop being public.
| rini17 wrote:
| In theory. In practice it does stop being public because
| it is either sold or used as a leverage as a whole,
| public and private parts together.
| okanat wrote:
| Rust libraries "have to" be permissive due to the way they are
| compiled. Rust's current compilation method requires everything
| to be compiled with the exact version of the compiler at the
| same exact setup due to lack of ABI compatibility guarantees.
| This means everything has to be compiled from source. LGPL
| doesn't work since it will force companies to release their
| entire source code.
|
| Without the ease for proprietary software development Rust
| wouldn't get as popular nor it would receive the same support
| from big tech. Without that popular support it wouldn't be as
| performant, nor it would attract the top system programmers it
| did.
|
| It is also extremely naive to think that copyleft licenses
| aren't actively violated. It is rampant and at this point
| violating them is the industry standard actually. Making
| software effectively "ownerless" by accepting many independent
| developers makes it also equally hard to defend its licenses.
| The socioeconomic system of the West prioritizes private
| ownership. Without a clear private owner (or a consortium
| acting on behalf), it is hard to defend GPL and the rights.
| beeflet wrote:
| a permissive license is essentially the worst case scenario
| for a violated copyleft license
| MiiMe19 wrote:
| Thought the title said greeks and was very confused when I
| started reading about amazon. Very good article though.
| robwwilliams wrote:
| Guy on a good soapbox, but heavy on assertions and high emotion.
| Those damn trade-offs!
| itsanaccount wrote:
| Except the trade offs only go one way. Its a rachet. You never
| get more free, open systems. Over time your life and the life
| of your children only gets more bound. It's frog boiling.
|
| You're displaying the exact naivety he's trying to point out.
| Karrot_Kream wrote:
| Ploum's Doctorow-adjacent nuance-free condescending nerd-rants
| always makes me want to channel n-gate.
| cavisne wrote:
| Google has been around since 1998 with people putting every dark
| secret and worry into search queries. Not once has someones
| searches been leaked by employees, despite highly political
| people working at these companies with a lot to gain by leaking
| to a journalist or similar.
|
| Likewise with private messages on Facebook, order history on
| Amazon.
|
| Big Tech has way more to lose than the small "privacy focused"
| alternatives, and clearly for them to go this long with this many
| employees its through design not luck.
| thakoppno wrote:
| > In the case of one 15-year-old boy Barksdale met through a
| technology group in Seattle, Washington, he allegedly tapped
| into the boy's Google Voice call logs after the boy refused to
| tell him the name of his new girlfriend. Barksdale then
| reportedly taunted the boy with threats to call the girl.
|
| This doesn't quite refute your assertion of no leaks of
| searches but it is just as egregious. You are right about
| incentives too.
| philo_sophia wrote:
| Upvote. Employees are the actual enforcement of tech ethics.
| See Google project maven pushback
| prophesi wrote:
| It's a moral race to the bottom when the salary's good and
| competition is fierce. It's great that Google pushed back
| against Project Maven, but nothing stopped the other 21+
| companies from participating.
| delusional wrote:
| the "Naivety" of Geeks has less to do with "trusting the
| marketing" and more to do with having to navigate a society
| increasingly indifferent to the issues brought up.
|
| A decade ago I ranted about Facebook to my technical friends.
| They all agreed that it was a terrible privacy nightmare, that
| eventually it would start selling that data to generate a profit,
| that we really ought to use something else, but in the end I had
| no alternative. As one of them said "If you don't have anything
| to hide, you have nothing to fear". I was ready with the counter,
| but before I could even get to the counter point he retorted
| "Yeah that's obviously not true, but it is the argument". At the
| time I didn't understand, but now I do. Fighting against these
| systems is meaningless for the individual. I can't stop Facebook
| from gobbling up all my data any more than I can dictate that the
| petrol in my car must be ethically sourced from Sweden.
|
| You can't distrust your way out of Google, Amazon, and Apple
| storing your voice.
|
| It was a lot easier to be a counterculture rebel when what you
| were counter cultural about was the driver for the printer at
| your research institution. When I want to pay my taxes (which I
| can do electronically, imagine that) I need my phone and browser
| and weird authentication app to work. I need them to be the ones
| that everybody else uses, because if I'm using some niche
| application, nobody is going to help me when it breaks. When an
| important email doesn't arrive in my mailbox, the sender isn't
| going to be understanding that I want my mail on protonmail that
| for some reason has a technical problem that day. He's going to
| ask me why I'm being difficult.
| skybrian wrote:
| Having better priors can be useful, but they're no substitute for
| evidence. These assertions about how naive you supposedly should
| have been about some company are less useful than sharing
| evidence about what the company actually did.
| ConspiracyFact wrote:
| I came here to say this. Does the author not think that dozens
| of these "geeks" have enough technical acumen to figure out
| what information their Echo is sending to Amazon's servers? It
| would have been a noisy scandal.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| There is a lot of discussion here about the motivation of
| companies and what they can share or remain private in relation
| to their objectives and making a profit. But, I think to provide
| a much better argument is what are their actual motivations to
| have privacy in all of the systems to begin with.
|
| Apple and Amazon will at minimum compromise your privacy to
| improve their products. And since they have no extra motivation
| since they don't make more or less money (because Siri and Alexa
| are loss leaders) they will have no extra considerations of
| privacy regardless.
|
| Comparing Signal to protonmail is a much more interesting problem
| and you can go on to what has been subpoena from Signal and
| protonmail. Since there was one actually disclosed we can see the
| information (or really lack of) that was given by Signal [1] . We
| have a statement by proton mail on what can be subpoena [2] but
| there have been arguments against it.
|
| [1] https://signal.org/bigbrother/cd-california-grand-jury/ [2]
| https://proton.me/legal/law-enforcement [3]
| https://protos.com/protonmail-hands-info-to-government-but-s...
| troupo wrote:
| Apple used to have privacy as the differentiating and profit-
| driving factor.
|
| This will immediately get thrown out of the window when it
| hurts profit (and may have been already been thrown out of the
| window, see OpenAI partnership).
|
| On top of that, at this point all they have to do is to just be
| ever so slightly better than the rest when it comes to privacy.
| The bar is so low as to be non-existent
| int_19h wrote:
| OpenAI integration in current Apple products needs to be
| enabled to begin with, and then it still prompts you before
| sending anything to OpenAI servers, so I'd say it's in line
| with their practices so far.
|
| The reason why I trust Apple a little bit more than, say,
| Google on something like this is that Apple is pitching their
| products as luxury goods - a way to be different from the hoi
| polloi - so they need features to plausibly differentiate
| along these lines. And privacy is one thing that they know
| Google will never be able to offer, given its business model,
| so it makes perfect sense for Apple to double down on that.
|
| (Ironically, this means that Apple users benefit from Android
| being the dominant platform.)
| philo_sophia wrote:
| As a tech employee who has worked on software privacy controls
| for consumer devices at amazon I have a couple thoughts. First,
| let me clarify that I am still highly skeptical about any tech
| companies privacy promises. That being said, the privacy control
| I worked on for one of Amazon's devices was a pita. It was a
| hardware switch which completely powered down all sensors, and
| modifying code related to it required extensive testing to
| preserve customer privacy. Amazon at least emphasizes to
| employees earning and retaining customer trust. The real reason I
| actually semi trust tech companies privacy policies is the ethics
| of individual employees. Maybe I'm projecting my disgust at
| privacy infringements onto my coworkers, but I generally believe
| these large corps can't hire sufficient teams of devs to build
| privacy compromising systems without at least one person
| whistleblowing.
|
| My $.02
| saagarjha wrote:
| Sure they can. Just build something that allows for abuse, set
| up controls that prevent individual employees from abusing it,
| then have an exec secretly do whatever they want without your
| involvement.
| kleton wrote:
| > The quokka, like the rationalist, is a creature marked by
| profound innocence. The quokka can't imagine you might eat it,
| and the rationalist can't imagine you might deceive him. As long
| they stay on their islands, they survive, but both species have
| problems if a human shows up
|
| > In theory, rationalists like game theory, in practice, they
| need to adjust their priors. Real-life exchanges can be modeled
| as a prisoner's dilemma. In the classic version, the prisoners
| can't communicate, so they have to guess whether the other player
| will defect or cooperate.
|
| > The game changes when we realize that life is not a single
| dilemma, but a series of them, and that we can remember the
| behavior of other agents. Now we need to cooperate, and the best
| strategy is "tit for two tats", wherein we cooperate until our
| opponent defects twice
|
| > The problem is, this is where rationalists hit a mental stop
| sign. Because in the real world, there is one more strategy that
| the game doesn't model: lying. See, the real best strategy is "be
| good at lying so that you always convince your opponent to
| cooperate, then defect"
|
| > And rationalists, bless their hearts, are REALLY easy to lie
| to. It's not like taking candy from a baby; babies actually try
| to hang onto their candy. The rationalists just limply let go and
| mutter, "I notice I am confused". This is also why they are poly.
| verisimi wrote:
| 12+ years of instilling faith in schooling and science does
| work. So when people realise that this is a corporate world,
| that money directs everything, even what they have been trained
| to think, it comes as a bit of a shock. But mostly people carry
| on anyway, as they have the habit.
| namaria wrote:
| Repeated games are studied in game theory, and the winning
| strategy is to "trust, retaliate, and trust again". Logic isn't
| limited to first order logic.
| jlg23 wrote:
| The Candid Naivety of Geeks
|
| > Did you really think that "marketing" is telling the truth? Are
| you a freshly debarked Thermian? (In case you missed it, this is
| a Galaxy Quest reference.)
|
| Did you really think that an article humiliating your readers is
| going to change anything?
|
| Yes, we the people, are stupid. No, we the people, are not keen
| on being called stupid. We might accept that from people we
| admire but not from someone we have to look up on the interwebz.
| Someone who has to point out that there is a page on him - in,
| for god's sake, the FRENCH wikipedia! And yes, I missed it,
| because Galaxy Quest is nice popcorn TV but nothing I would
| commit to long-term memory.
|
| No matter how justified the cause, badly voiced anger just sounds
| like something between bad impulse control and idiocy.
|
| I get the points the author is trying to make, I sympathize with
| them, but I would never send that text to anyone I try to
| convince.
| antonvs wrote:
| 100% agreed. This is just someone self-reporting on their own
| recently discovered naivete, but projecting it into others.
| lukev wrote:
| Ok this is a little frustrating for me. Not because there aren't
| bad actors (there are, and LOTS of them, basically anything ad-
| supported.)
|
| But we're in a capitalist system, right? We want companies to
| compete on features that have value to users. And privacy is
| definitely a thing of value.
|
| And god help me, I never wanted to be an Apple apologist, they're
| a giant capitalist organization. But they're also the ONLY one
| that is attempting to compete on the basis of privacy.
|
| And so they have e2e encryption on iMessages, most of iCloud, are
| the only people doing meaningful things with homomorphic
| encryption and AI, etc. They recently, very publicly, turned off
| these features in the UK due to recent legislation.
|
| But if I look at what they're doing, and the audits they're
| admitting, and the political hits they're taking, and if I
| dismiss all that I'm supposed to be "candidly naive"?
|
| Do you want us to choose our platforms on the basis of privacy,
| or not?
|
| And I'm not just "trusting" Apple, I'm looking at their financial
| incentives. Which are focused around selling extremely
| overpriced, decent quality hardware. Not ad targeting. For me to
| believe that Apple is wantonly and deliberately harvesting my
| data would require that I believe they have an entire secondary
| advertising business that has remained completely under the
| radar.
|
| Again, fuck you for making me defend Apple. They have so many
| issues. But also if we just go pure nihilist and don't even
| _allow_ companies to compete on the basis of proper security,
| what 's left, unless we go offline entirely?
| refulgentis wrote:
| My jump to conclusions mat says "The author doesn't understand
| tech!"
|
| I worked on on-device speech at Google, both frontend and
| backend. Unless there was a secret cabal mirror team that did all
| the evil stuff and made us _think_ we were writing the code that
| was shipping, it doesn 't come close to describing how things
| actually were worked through internally.
|
| Most trivially, and narrowly, Most Evil Amazon would be _just as
| happy with a transcript of what you said that was recognized
| locally_. There 's 0 reason they need the audio. I'd also hazard
| a guess _they 're not streaming audio to the server_, no one
| would create a hotword detector that would rely on that, due to
| the latency and bandwidth demand alone.
| ricardobeat wrote:
| Funny read.
|
| > And that's why I see Apple as a cult: most tech people cannot
| be reasoned about it.
|
| After presenting zero actual _reasons_ to believe they are not
| taking privacy seriously. Just.. beliefs.
|
| > Corporations are lying. You must treat every corporate word as
| a straight lie until proved otherwise.
|
| > I don't say that Signal is perfect: I say I trust them to
| believe themselves what they announce.
|
| I share the distrust in corporations, but there is zero
| _technical reason_ to believe Signal apps are more secure than
| Apple 's unless you reviewed the code yourself, entirely, and
| built it from source.
|
| Pot, meet kettle.
| verisimi wrote:
| He says he has read some code:
|
| > First of all, Signal is open source. And, yes, I've read some
| of the source code for some feature I was interested in. I've
| also read through some very deep audit of Signal source code.
| kiitos wrote:
| principal naivety here seems to be by the author
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