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Comment by Aurornis | Hacker News Reader

> What AI boosters don't realize is that we're not in the optimistic days of the 1990s anymore.

Comments like this are in a different reality than most consumers. Most consumers don’t care about things like avoiding lock in to a platform. If the platform solves their problem then they don’t have any reason to leave it anyway. They’re not worried if their data is used to show them more targeted ads.

Topics like this show a sharp divergence between what you read on Hacker News and how actual users operate. We already knew that people who don’t trust Facebook aren’t going to suddenly start using Muse. They were never going to consider it. For the people who do actually use Meta products, which is a customer base counted in the billions, many will not have any problem using these tools.

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Imagine we were talking about soda (or pop, or coke, or soft drink, depending on your dialect). Personally, I find it absolute insanity to be regularly consuming so much dissolved sugar especially during our ongoing obesity and digestive health epidemic.

But, “most consumers” don’t care about that. The beverage industry is insanely profitable, especially with recent forays into “energy drinks”.

Do people who drink so much dissolved sugar live without consequences? Absolutely not. They have a significantly lower quality of life and die much sooner than people who do not drink dissolved sugar.

I don’t see your comment as a valid dismissal. Just one more way that individual outcomes in our society are increasingly K-shaped.

Another way to say this is that your parent may be suffering from lack of imagination. Stuff like this can (and should) be regulated. Consumer protection is a thing most jurisdictions do. In fact there are millions of possible markets which consumers would absolutely fall victims to, but government regulators prohibit it because of the harm it causes consumers. Government regulators can (and should) apply the same logic to AI, but they don‘t. There is not really a good reason why they don‘t other then some ideological movement towards ever greater neo-liberalism, deregulation, and laissez faire capitalism.

Expanding on this thought (too late for an edit), there's a nice simile to be had:

  - technologists : software that is bad for privacy
  - nutritionists : food and drink that gives you diabetes

So, I'm no nutritionist, but I pay attention enough to pay attention when they say I shouldn't drink a liter of Coke every day. As technologists, we should carry the torch and speak loud-and-wide about the dangers of software that is bad for privacy.

I asked my wife to not share any info with Muse and she said “Well they know everything already”. Well I was able to convince her not to with some stories about hallucinations of agents getting things horribly wrong as agents in the past, because the privacy concerns just didn’t phase her. Shes even more aware than most people since I’m very privacy aware. 100% it’s very echo chambery to claim that it’s not 1990 anymore. It’s like a historian saying that history won’t repeat itself because we all know what happened last time

My wife and I do not even allow Meta Apple and Google products or proprietary software in our home (unless owned by guests) because they are all predatory and endless alternatives exist.

Do you allow guests to use their Meta Apple and Google products in your home?

Begrudgingly if for short periods of time, on a dedicated wifi network, but if they are visiting my home I encourage them to interact with me and others instead of doom scrolling.

Try as I might some are so addicted and gone now that they just come over, doom scroll for a few hours, and leave. Maybe they feel like they get something out of just being in the same room as other people. It confuses me, but I will not force my views on guests.

What software / hardware do you use? How do you get around binary firmware blobs?

I use Linux and maintain my own Linux distribution. All software I directly touch and rely on is Open Source and does not spy on me. I do not own or use a smartphone. I do however permit the use of proprietary software for purely entertainment use cases, such as video games, but never for a -tool- that I use to do my job or live my life.

I even have a Talos workstation. Open hardware motherboard and open spec CPU both made in the US with fully open hardware. Also a Precursor which is similarly open.

I support these efforts as much as I financially can, but I admit open firmware/hardware is not a gap I have fully closed day to day. Yet. Deep down in some hardware is firmware I do not control, such as on the inside of my AMD GPUs. But I wallet-vote for those over Nvidia who require proprietary code in user space where it requires rights within my operating system.

> I do however permit the use of proprietary software for purely entertainment use cases, such as video games

How do you isolate those from affecting the rest of your machine? Do you use a different machine for entertainment? A different account? Something else?

I’m not judging or trying to catch you in some kind of gotcha, I’m interested in your setup in case the idea is something I could use myself.

All machines that can do things like play games are untrusted to the point I never even lock them. They are treated as game console.

I sometimes consider going scorched earth, but then I realize doing so will leave a conspicuous void which may also limit my options in the future.

Hmm. The areas where I ran into a brick wall on this were firmware for SSDs and hard drives. Doesn’t exist in open source form.

True but if it is immutable it still meets the FSF definition of an appliance regarded as a closed hardware problem vs a closed software problem.

Software Freedom means no one has more control of the hardware in front of you than you do. If no one can change the SSD firmware, then it is part of the hardware.

Now for firmware that can be changed, that is a different story and maybe the OpenSSD project gets us there. We will see.

I see a lot of validity in your reply, but I think there is still nuance in how these priorities are expressed. How would you compare this issue to the Flock backlash, for example?

I think most people draw a strong distinction between privacy violations that are done "to them" and privacy issues with things they've chosen to use, even if they're quite similar from a technological perspective. I'd bet a lot of anti-Flock people have location sharing enabled on their phone.

And there is a very American anti-government aspect to it as well.

How do you explain the brand segmentation Facebook is doing with Muse? They're keeping the Meta / Facebook brand very far away from the Muse product.

Doesn't that imply Meta itself believes users care?

This is only true as long as they don’t think about the future or do risk management.

Most consumers absolutely care, why do you think the biggest bipartisan issue is a massive national backlash against tech companies and a clear majority of workers being against LLM tools in the workplace?

These types of comments just show what a massive bubble you're in.

That backlash is based on conspiracy theories about data centers using up all the water and the legitimate fear of AI taking their jobs, not anything to do with privacy.

No the backlash is based on very real decline of material concerns, please try to speak in reality and talk to other humans outside of VC.

That's been happening for the past almost exactly 60 years, AI had nothing to do with the majority of it.

> a clear majority of workers being against LLM tools in the workplace? > These types of comments just show what a massive bubble you're in.

The fact you think it's a "clear majority" and not a "sizable, but still loud minority" of workers shows that you're in a bubble.

The vast, vast, majority of people are largely apathetic to AI as a technology at large, with general techbro-sentiment trending very negative (for all technology, across the board), especially towards SV/AI figureheads.

If we’re talking about the average consumer, they’re increasingly hostile towards ML in general and Facebook in particular. The majority want the tech regulated stat, so you might want to think twice before appealing to the masses.

Most consumers do not want or need agents which also shows how much of a bubble tech people are living in.

Well they will start caring when their teen with image issues starts getting targetted beauty ads[1], or when they get pregnant, want to abort, and get directed to an anti-abortion center instead[2], and afterwards they get served "abortion reversal pills" ads[3].

Or when they are hit by any other privacy fuckup like that.

[1] https://futurism.com/facebook-beauty-targeted-ads [2] https://www.bbc.com/news/health-61320202 [3] https://tech.yahoo.com/general/articles/facebook-made-money-...

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