> argues the supposed downloads, which are roughly 22 per year
the math doesn't add up since that implies it took 100+ years to accumulate 2400 violations, but just looking at 2400 torrents, how many employees does Meta have? With at least several thousand guys, if some have poor 'keeping work and home separate' hygiene, and especially with work-from-home, they probably just forgot to disconnect from VPN after work. Seems more likely than a very sloppy AI training scheme. If they wanted to so such a scheme, it's so easy to do using a public VPN.
EDIT: If I'm reading right, they're actually just basing their suit on HOME IP addresses. So we're being asked to believe the plan was:
1. Top secret porn AI plan is hatched
2. Management considers how to accomplish this and decided the best course of action is to tell dozens of engineers to go home and download a handful of porn torrents each and bring them into work to train it.
> you don't get to have luxuries AND complain about being poor.
Some people might be inclined to try to drag you for the first half of that statement, and honestly I'm inclined to try to not judge poor people for what I usually assume is one or two small splurges that raise their moods just high enough to not slit their wrists, you know?
But I think the second half of the sentence is kinda fair. IF they are self-aware that they are choosing to divert money from more important things, it's their life and I don't really want to pass judgment. If they whine constantly that "the system" is keeping them down while continuously making "unforced" errors with their money, that's when it makes me start to roll my eyes.
I don’t think you’re wrong, but considering how imperfect humans are, it’s easy to make a mistake or two (or to basically inherit mistakes from parents, in many cases), and I think one of the problems is, it’s very, very difficult to claw your way back after that. It would be ideal if a small screw-up could be more feasibly repaired, but tbh I don’t know a fair and good way to do that that didn’t generate dependence and a bailout cycle.
No, I doubt they are. Most people who are on the streets chronically are there because they’ve burned every bridge. Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks if they had a job loss that put them at risk of hard times — on the other hand those who mysteriously have zero friends or family usually got that way by the same antisocial behaviors that contributed to their problems in the first place, until every last person that once cared said “don’t come around here anymore.”
Not saying anyone’s a Bad Person for this, but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything. You can’t fix people without at least their partnership, and generally it’s substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation. “Bitter pills to swallow” as the meme goes but anyone who doesn’t admit this is kidding themself.
> who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks
Yeah, a couple weeks and then what? Couch-surfing is a form of homelessness, and the membrane between sleeping on a couch and sleeping on the street can be very thin, especially when your health makes it unlikely you'll find work in the near future. Something as simple as a concussion can stop you from working for months.
> but treating everyone like zero-agency victims or helpless children has never fixed anything
I hear this argument a lot, and I find it baffling. What's your proposal here? That we all wag our fingers at homeless people? The people with agency who can fix their situations on their own already did—in fact, they course-corrected long before they slid into poverty or homelessness in the first place. If they had agency, they wouldn't be in this situation.
That's why I dredged up the dead comment in the first place stating it plainly "let them sink, let them go away." At least that poster was honest about the end game.
Lot of other posters here on HN seem to feel the same way but they're rationalizing it with "well, they deserve it after all". It's their fault "because they’ve burned every bridge." It's their fault because "most people have a dozen friends". It's their fault because "substances and severe mental illness that gets in the way of the cooperation."
And if we don't agree with this assessment, it's we who are not serious. But left unstated is: their way just ends up leaving this vulnerable population to die, and they really don't have a problem with that, because according to them, it's their own damn fault.
I believe the latest solution to homelessness proffered in the public sphere was from Brian Kilmeade, who said "involuntary lethal injection, or something. Just kill 'em." A final solution if you will.
I can tell your income bracket from this phrase alone:
> Most people have a dozen friends or family who would gladly give them the guest room for a few weeks.
No, most people do not.
I am aware of classic triad of "malignantly antisocial personality + substance abuse + criminal record" that makes people stay on the streets.
But a lot of people end up on the streets simply because they were already only one notch above financial destitution and so all of their friends and family.
Lose a job + get sick in body or mind, even temporarily = game over. "Friends and family" who are also financially vulnerable would ruthlessly shed the load of extra mouth to feed, much less to house.
The friends and family route works the first time around. You couch surf until you find a job, as you go through your contact list people are happy to host at first, but there comes the awkward "so... it's been a couple weeks... how's that job search going?". Then you have to put your job search on pause until you find a new place to live.
Eventually your job search keeps turning up "no" because they don't like the answers to "can you explain this gap on your resume?" and they really don't like the answer to "do you have a permanent residence" or "do you have any drug-related convictions?"
Hopefully you find a job before you've exhausted the good will of all your friends. And pray to GOD it doesn't happen again because the next time around, each one will have an excuse as to why they can't host you. "Oh sorry, we've got our inlaws, try X, Y, Z"... who are also "unable" to host.
So then your car is your home. If you're lucky enough to have one. But the point is "just have friends" isn't a solution.
Yeah the sad part is that much of the reason we have to have subscriptions is that there’s a very real ongoing cost just to avoid the platform owner breaking the software with OS changes (and of course Apple is 10x worse than any others, most Windows XP-era .exe files work perfectly fine on Windows 11 today).
Why do we need OS changes though? Well practically we don’t. But the platform owners all want to move new hardware so they need to shovel features in, which we could just completely ignore, except that they’ll abandon you to the wolves for security patches, which is about the only “new” thing we do need, if you’re not on the latest couple releases. And as for hardware, eventually you need new hardware and drivers only get created for current and future OS releases.
So the end result is we’re being led on a wild goose chase of trend-chasing shitty UI changes, adware, and performance-killing crap we don’t need, purely because we can’t run the old hardware forever, and even when we can keep the old hardware going, we can’t safely run old software for lack of patches.
Operating systems and the software that comes with them are a fat target for security problems. There's "new hardware" in turns of new phones, laptops and the core components of desktops but also peripherals from things you plug into USB and things like watches and AirPods that you might want to use with your existing phone. Both Linux and Windows run on generic hardware so they need to handle whatever AMD, Intel, Dell, etc. throw at them -- look at how Ubuntu is always coming out with new releases and occasionally makes one that is LTS.
Everyone wants to complain about the "bloat" in Windows and macOS (and fair enough, there is a lot of bloat and cruft) but blame it all on capitalism, when Linux has kept apace in growth rate the whole time. My Linux installs have been 'round about 50% the size of my Windows installs these last 15 years, never really straying far. If we ask ourselves, "Why does Linux need to keep growing?", I think we can easily see that OS churn and growth is not just "shareholder value gotta go up."
Plus when speaking about peripherals, you've got things to deal with like DMA for Thunderbolt devices and a constant stream of creative new ways to poorly implement USB to contend with. Not only is the target moving, but so is the archer and both are inclined towards sudden nonsensical moves.
> must upset him as much or perhaps more than it does you and I. We, after all, can speak publicly about how upsetting it is. He cannot.
Yes, he will just have to comfort himself by crying into his pillow made of solid gold bars on his California King-size bed made of a solid block of hundred dollar bills. Poor Tim Apple — the real victim here.
In seriousness, even if he feels (and is right!) that there was nothing Apple could do better, nothing stops him from resigning, and then publicly stating that he didn’t want to be a part of a company that had to collaborate with a brutal and inhumane government. He just would rather acquire more billions for some reason.
But haven’t many countries not only imagined but tried very different alternatives to capitalism? What have we learned from those countries?
It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.
Personally, I am far from enamored with the apparent equilibrium state of capitalism, if that’s what we have in the US. However, when you compare how I feel about American capitalism to how I feel about North Korean totalitarianism, Venezuelan corrupt socialism, Soviet murderous communism, Cuban destructive communism, etc etc. suddenly I appear to be a booster for capitalism.
> It seems to always come back to the fact that people who get power always attempt to use that power to get more resources and power, violating all their supposed values and stealing resources from the public.
Seems no different in capitalism.
Ever considered that the failures of other methods does not inherently mean the success of the current method.
Nobody said it did, but the other methods fail much harder. A fuckton more people died of starvation under Lenin, Stalin and Mao than will ever die of starvation in even the most right-wing capitalist country, because communist and extreme authoritarian socialist countries have all the same moral failings of their leaders as capitalism has, but also ruins their economies as well.
Especially given that odds are better than 50% that you will find yourself in a new, larger Russia at some point in the next 5-10 years. Not cheering the prospect, but it seems like Putin knows the US won’t get involved in Europe anymore, and therefore Russian expansion into all former Soviet territory, at minimum, just makes sense.
Latvia is more likely to defend itself successfully than Ukraine, Latvia joined NATO in 2004, an aggression there spells the end of the whole Russian oil industry, and after that Russia's North Korea.
NATO is dead. Latvia, if defended, will be defended only by anemic EU forces. Trump has made clear that he views alliances as purely transactional, and he’s obviously correct that due to geography the US has nothing to fear from any non-nuclear scenario. Therefore, I doubt either Europe or America will honor Article 5 for the other anymore.
I don’t know about Spain, but when I did some brief research it looks like senior software engineers in the UK make often substantially under £100,000. Away from London even £60,000. Most seniors at my company in the US make about £150,000.
£50-70k of incremental salary pays for a hell of a lot of health insurance premiums and retirement contributions.
> Europe…issues… can still be traced back to unresolved wealth pumps and neoliberal policies weakening the state and labor force in favor of business and billionaire interests
Is it your position that Europe just hasn’t done socialism hard enough? Can you point to an example of a country who has successfully done what you’d like to see?
> Is it your position that Europe just hasn’t done socialism hard enough?
No, obviously, but I can see how folks who cannot grasp the complexity and nuance of geopolitics might reach for classic boogeyman arguments like this one.
> Can you point to an example of a country who has successfully done what you’d like to see?
If I could, then it’s a certainty others would have emulated them by now as well. Don’t you dare try and say that “because a prior example does not exist, therefore this idea is bad”, because the entire technology field is built on people trying the same old ideas in different ways and finding out something that works better in the process. Be better in your retort rather than try and throw cheap barbs for karma.
the math doesn't add up since that implies it took 100+ years to accumulate 2400 violations, but just looking at 2400 torrents, how many employees does Meta have? With at least several thousand guys, if some have poor 'keeping work and home separate' hygiene, and especially with work-from-home, they probably just forgot to disconnect from VPN after work. Seems more likely than a very sloppy AI training scheme. If they wanted to so such a scheme, it's so easy to do using a public VPN.
EDIT: If I'm reading right, they're actually just basing their suit on HOME IP addresses. So we're being asked to believe the plan was:
1. Top secret porn AI plan is hatched
2. Management considers how to accomplish this and decided the best course of action is to tell dozens of engineers to go home and download a handful of porn torrents each and bring them into work to train it.
3. ???
4. Profit!
reply