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This sounds like you're describing an evil AI rather than a bunch of humans. I think a simpler explanation might be that they either don't understand that youtu

This sounds like you're describing an evil AI rather than a bunch of humans. I think a simpler explanation might be that they either don't understand that youtube-dl isn't a threat to them, or that OC is wrong and it actually is a threat in some way. I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do".

bitcraft 5y ago
Is it so far fetched that there are people, especially in groups, who act in extreme ways? I’m sure they are saying exactly “ We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do”, because it is optimum for them to do so.
throwanem 5y ago
> This sounds like you're describing an evil AI Yes, they're called "corporations". We used to have software that helped keep their incentives aligned with those of the species, or at least those of Americans, but the Citizens United decision and the end of Glass-Steagall EOLed that stuff without an upgrade path - I blame Google lobbyists, that's just their style - and we've spent the last couple decades finding out why that maybe wasn't such a great idea.
- sneak 5y ago
  Corporations have no minds and have no hands. They cannot think, decide, or act. Every action undertaken by a corporation was performed by a human being (or programmed by a human being). Corporate "speech" is still just human rights to free expression. Corporations have nothing to say without humans.
  - halpert 5y ago
    But a corporation is a legal construct, and ownership of one isn’t anymore a right than having a drivers license. I believe it’s totally within the governments rights to regulate them differently than the individual citizens comprising the corporation.
  - thatcat 5y ago
    A group of people takes on a hive mind aligned with the interest of the corporation and the corporate bureaucracy manages the hands that act on its behalf with an incentive structure. This constitutes a separate person, legally, with liability that is not on the individual because they cannot individually control the agenda and actions of the larger corporation.
  - ahonhn 5y ago
    And every action undertaken by humans was performed by neurons and muscle fibres.
  - phs318u 5y ago
    > Corporations have no minds I'm really interested in this view. I suspect that at a large enough size, organisations can absolutely have an emergent... "nature", which is not only characteristic of that organisation, but largely independent of its constituents (the humans). I introduce into evidence the Roman Catholic Church. It is so large, so entrenched in its ways, that it is extremely highly unlikely that an individual within it (including the pope) can substantially change the character of the organisation. I have a personal belief that humans are to very large organisations (incl. nation states) as cells are to higher-order creatures. Once a large enough organisation has "matured", humans entering the organisation adapt themselves to it (probably subconsciously), and the organisation's unique culture survives.
    - dumbfoundded 5y ago
      It's called culture and large groups of humans are known to experience it.
      - wruza 5y ago
        It's different from culture. A culture makes everyone think in a similar way, there is one role: a participant of it. A corporation doesn't have to make everyone think the same, because it has many roles and written processes and KPIs which modulate anyone taking a role into a gear that rotates accordingly to the big schema. Corporations may have culture and it may be definitive, but it's not only that.
        dumbfoundded 5y ago
        You should just google the definition of culture. Lots of work has been done to study culture at numerous levels from nations to corporations to small communities. It's called anthropology. If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.
        wruza 5y ago
  - asta123 5y ago
    There is an interesting talk 'Dude, You Broke the Future'[0] in which speaker compares corporations to 'paperclip maximizer' AI which could destroy us with their sole gole of maximizing profits (or paperclips) 0: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
  - numpad0 5y ago
    I think there is a naive assumption to it that nothing other than humans had ever been proven (smarter && autonomous && self-sustaining) than a human, thus a corporate cannot be alive. I’m not sure how is this proposition remains supported and for how long.
  - ajmurmann 5y ago
    Most people in a corporation aren't doing what they personally would like to do, but what's on the interest of the corporation and what the corporation incentives then to do. This might be at odds with the personal preferences. People's livelihood depends on the rest of the corporation remaining positive towards them and thus this bar gets moved quite far over time.
  - endominus 5y ago
    May I rephrase your statement slightly? Humans have no nucleus, no mitochondria, no golgi apparatus. They cannot transcribe RNA or respirate or activate neurons. Every action undertaken by a human was performed by a cell (or an agglomeration of cells) within it. Human "action" is just the emergent properties of cells. Humans can do nothing without cells.
    - sneak 5y ago
      Humans have mass, corporations do not. There is a fundamental difference in the concept of an entity that exists as a whole, and a legal construct that is purely an economic allocation abstraction. Nations aren't real either.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - endominus 5y ago
        Cells have mass, humans do not. There is a fundamental difference between the basic building blocks of life and a convenient term for an ambulatory hallucinating collection of them. This can go on. Do you not see the flaw in your argument?
  - oefnak 5y ago
    You should read Meditations on Moloch, by Scot Alexander.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    Humans have no minds or hands. They are just a collection of cells.
  - 20after4 5y ago
    Recommendation: read The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 5 in particular.
  - advrs 5y ago
    This is an oversimplified take, and completely glosses over macro social effects beyond "individual choice". This is the social science equivalent of reasoning about human behavior and focusing on the behavior of individual neuron connections, or the behavior of an OS by focusing entirely on the I/O drivers - wrong scope of analysis.
- spion 5y ago
  The more likely explanation is that they originally formed teams to address this problem, teams that are now left with a choice between twiddling their thumbs and this.
- advrs 5y ago
  Yeah, they really jumped the shark with that release. The meta has been changing drastically, and I don't know if the dev team really is interested in patching it back up.
infogulch 5y ago
I don't think such a literal boardroom discussion is necessary their resulting actions to be reasonably described as "against giving power to users".
namlem 5y ago
Or there's some bureaucrat who needs to justify his salary and found an easy target to go after.
matheusmoreira 5y ago
> I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do". That's pretty much what they said. Not with those words but that's essentially their thought process. > With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser. They literally want to control how you view the videos. Maybe you think YouTube sucks and would rather use mpv with youtube-dl. According to these guys, you can't because reasons nobody really cares about. It's honestly offensive enough that they think they have any say in the matter.
- bradgessler 5y ago
  They want to put advertisements in videos. If you download the videos, they can’t inject ads into them, they don’t get ad revenue, earnings decline, shareholders sell their stock, value of the stock decreases, shareholders get even more upset, stock price decreases further, execs can’t take out loans against their stock because it’s not worth enough … the cycle continues. I don’t really think it’s about control—it’s about increasing the value of the corps stock so employees and shareholders with stock can sell it or use it as collateral for loans to buy nice things.
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    And to do all that, they need control. Their stock price and shareholders are nobody's problem but theirs, none of that justifies in any way what they are doing. It's simply not acceptable to me that these people think they can decide what my computer does and doesn't display, much less what goes into my mind. Every single ad they send me gets deleted. I won't even see them because they will get filtered by uBlock Origin. They are not entitled to my attention, it is not for sale and it most definitely is not the payment for whatever content they're sending me for free. They sent me the content hoping I would look at ads but that hope failed, they need to accept that and move on, not try to destroy open source projects and own my machine so that it becomes impossible to not look at ads.
    - 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jrm4 5y ago
The "Evil AI" description is more accurate. Of course, individual humans aren't in a board room being evil -- but the incentives in place -- high paid lawyers, little targets that won't fight back, the ability for the little wormy people inside to show off "wins," and no clear incentive not to. The behavior will much more resemble the "Evil AI."
andrei_says_ 5y ago
Evil AIs are coded by humans :) Take a look at China’s use of AI tech.
TimTheTinker 5y ago
Consider this: every DVD and Blu-Ray player is working for them. It has region encoding, and a blessed DeCSS decoder. They don't mind that. But if you build your own Blu-Ray player and distribute the plans for others to do so as well, they'll be legally on top of you in a jiffy. YouTube-dl is like that homemade Blu-Ray player -- it's something that's working on your behalf, not theirs.
ajuc 5y ago
> This sounds like you're describing an evil AI Every corporation is exactly that. Humans are just the substrate it runs on.
throwaway09223 5y ago
OC is wrong. Online ad serving is a 100 billion dollar market and it is entirely dependent on control of the client, or at least the default behavior of the client, to make it show ads and to not save the media, requiring repeat visits to show more ads. It is vital to their industry that ad systems can display ads on browser clients by default. This is a huge part of the push toward apps - more control over clients. If they could go after ad-block extensions in browsers they would, but this is difficult for historic and technical reasons. Youtube-dl is a separate client with no ad-displaying ability at all. It saves the media. They're going to do their best to portray this as somehow improper because their business depends on it.
marssaxman 5y ago
> This sounds like you're describing an evil AI rather than a bunch of humans. And yet... it is entirely consistent with the way the music industry has been acting for over 20 years, since the popularity of Napster.
ASalazarMX 5y ago
Left to their own desires, it might as well be a cold algorithm: 10 PROFITS = MAX(PROFITS) 20 GOTO 10

bitcraft 5y ago

Is it so far fetched that there are people, especially in groups, who act in extreme ways? I’m sure they are saying exactly “ We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do”, because it is optimum for them to do so.

throwanem 5y ago

> This sounds like you're describing an evil AI Yes, they're called "corporations". We used to have software that helped keep their incentives aligned with those of the species, or at least those of Americans, but the Citizens United decision and the end of Glass-Steagall EOLed that stuff without an upgrade path - I blame Google lobbyists, that's just their style - and we've spent the last couple decades finding out why that maybe wasn't such a great idea.

sneak 5y ago
Corporations have no minds and have no hands. They cannot think, decide, or act. Every action undertaken by a corporation was performed by a human being (or programmed by a human being). Corporate "speech" is still just human rights to free expression. Corporations have nothing to say without humans.
- halpert 5y ago
  But a corporation is a legal construct, and ownership of one isn’t anymore a right than having a drivers license. I believe it’s totally within the governments rights to regulate them differently than the individual citizens comprising the corporation.
- thatcat 5y ago
  A group of people takes on a hive mind aligned with the interest of the corporation and the corporate bureaucracy manages the hands that act on its behalf with an incentive structure. This constitutes a separate person, legally, with liability that is not on the individual because they cannot individually control the agenda and actions of the larger corporation.
- ahonhn 5y ago
  And every action undertaken by humans was performed by neurons and muscle fibres.
- phs318u 5y ago
  > Corporations have no minds I'm really interested in this view. I suspect that at a large enough size, organisations can absolutely have an emergent... "nature", which is not only characteristic of that organisation, but largely independent of its constituents (the humans). I introduce into evidence the Roman Catholic Church. It is so large, so entrenched in its ways, that it is extremely highly unlikely that an individual within it (including the pope) can substantially change the character of the organisation. I have a personal belief that humans are to very large organisations (incl. nation states) as cells are to higher-order creatures. Once a large enough organisation has "matured", humans entering the organisation adapt themselves to it (probably subconsciously), and the organisation's unique culture survives.
  - dumbfoundded 5y ago
    It's called culture and large groups of humans are known to experience it.
    - wruza 5y ago
      It's different from culture. A culture makes everyone think in a similar way, there is one role: a participant of it. A corporation doesn't have to make everyone think the same, because it has many roles and written processes and KPIs which modulate anyone taking a role into a gear that rotates accordingly to the big schema. Corporations may have culture and it may be definitive, but it's not only that.
      - dumbfoundded 5y ago
        You should just google the definition of culture. Lots of work has been done to study culture at numerous levels from nations to corporations to small communities. It's called anthropology. If you're actually curious, you should actually read papers and studies. This HN trend of ignorantly waxing philosophically about some topic adds no value to anyone's mind.
        wruza 5y ago
- asta123 5y ago
  There is an interesting talk 'Dude, You Broke the Future'[0] in which speaker compares corporations to 'paperclip maximizer' AI which could destroy us with their sole gole of maximizing profits (or paperclips) 0: https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future https://media.ccc.de/v/34c3-9270-dude_you_broke_the_future
- numpad0 5y ago
  I think there is a naive assumption to it that nothing other than humans had ever been proven (smarter && autonomous && self-sustaining) than a human, thus a corporate cannot be alive. I’m not sure how is this proposition remains supported and for how long.
- ajmurmann 5y ago
  Most people in a corporation aren't doing what they personally would like to do, but what's on the interest of the corporation and what the corporation incentives then to do. This might be at odds with the personal preferences. People's livelihood depends on the rest of the corporation remaining positive towards them and thus this bar gets moved quite far over time.
- endominus 5y ago
  May I rephrase your statement slightly? Humans have no nucleus, no mitochondria, no golgi apparatus. They cannot transcribe RNA or respirate or activate neurons. Every action undertaken by a human was performed by a cell (or an agglomeration of cells) within it. Human "action" is just the emergent properties of cells. Humans can do nothing without cells.
  - sneak 5y ago
    Humans have mass, corporations do not. There is a fundamental difference in the concept of an entity that exists as a whole, and a legal construct that is purely an economic allocation abstraction. Nations aren't real either.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - endominus 5y ago
      Cells have mass, humans do not. There is a fundamental difference between the basic building blocks of life and a convenient term for an ambulatory hallucinating collection of them. This can go on. Do you not see the flaw in your argument?
- oefnak 5y ago
  You should read Meditations on Moloch, by Scot Alexander.
- colordrops 5y ago
  Humans have no minds or hands. They are just a collection of cells.
- 20after4 5y ago
  Recommendation: read The Grapes of Wrath, chapter 5 in particular.
- advrs 5y ago
  This is an oversimplified take, and completely glosses over macro social effects beyond "individual choice". This is the social science equivalent of reasoning about human behavior and focusing on the behavior of individual neuron connections, or the behavior of an OS by focusing entirely on the I/O drivers - wrong scope of analysis.
spion 5y ago
The more likely explanation is that they originally formed teams to address this problem, teams that are now left with a choice between twiddling their thumbs and this.
advrs 5y ago
Yeah, they really jumped the shark with that release. The meta has been changing drastically, and I don't know if the dev team really is interested in patching it back up.

infogulch 5y ago

I don't think such a literal boardroom discussion is necessary their resulting actions to be reasonably described as "against giving power to users".

namlem 5y ago

Or there's some bureaucrat who needs to justify his salary and found an easy target to go after.

matheusmoreira 5y ago

> I don't think they're sitting at a board room table saying "We cannot let them have freedom, we must control everything they do". That's pretty much what they said. Not with those words but that's essentially their thought process. > With the software, which is available on the code sharing platform Github, YouTube videos and music files can be downloaded without a web browser. They literally want to control how you view the videos. Maybe you think YouTube sucks and would rather use mpv with youtube-dl. According to these guys, you can't because reasons nobody really cares about. It's honestly offensive enough that they think they have any say in the matter.

bradgessler 5y ago
They want to put advertisements in videos. If you download the videos, they can’t inject ads into them, they don’t get ad revenue, earnings decline, shareholders sell their stock, value of the stock decreases, shareholders get even more upset, stock price decreases further, execs can’t take out loans against their stock because it’s not worth enough … the cycle continues. I don’t really think it’s about control—it’s about increasing the value of the corps stock so employees and shareholders with stock can sell it or use it as collateral for loans to buy nice things.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  And to do all that, they need control. Their stock price and shareholders are nobody's problem but theirs, none of that justifies in any way what they are doing. It's simply not acceptable to me that these people think they can decide what my computer does and doesn't display, much less what goes into my mind. Every single ad they send me gets deleted. I won't even see them because they will get filtered by uBlock Origin. They are not entitled to my attention, it is not for sale and it most definitely is not the payment for whatever content they're sending me for free. They sent me the content hoping I would look at ads but that hope failed, they need to accept that and move on, not try to destroy open source projects and own my machine so that it becomes impossible to not look at ads.
  - 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jrm4 5y ago

The "Evil AI" description is more accurate. Of course, individual humans aren't in a board room being evil -- but the incentives in place -- high paid lawyers, little targets that won't fight back, the ability for the little wormy people inside to show off "wins," and no clear incentive not to. The behavior will much more resemble the "Evil AI."

andrei_says_ 5y ago

Evil AIs are coded by humans :) Take a look at China’s use of AI tech.

TimTheTinker 5y ago

Consider this: every DVD and Blu-Ray player is working for them. It has region encoding, and a blessed DeCSS decoder. They don't mind that. But if you build your own Blu-Ray player and distribute the plans for others to do so as well, they'll be legally on top of you in a jiffy. YouTube-dl is like that homemade Blu-Ray player -- it's something that's working on your behalf, not theirs.

ajuc 5y ago

> This sounds like you're describing an evil AI Every corporation is exactly that. Humans are just the substrate it runs on.

throwaway09223 5y ago

OC is wrong. Online ad serving is a 100 billion dollar market and it is entirely dependent on control of the client, or at least the default behavior of the client, to make it show ads and to not save the media, requiring repeat visits to show more ads. It is vital to their industry that ad systems can display ads on browser clients by default. This is a huge part of the push toward apps - more control over clients. If they could go after ad-block extensions in browsers they would, but this is difficult for historic and technical reasons. Youtube-dl is a separate client with no ad-displaying ability at all. It saves the media. They're going to do their best to portray this as somehow improper because their business depends on it.

marssaxman 5y ago

> This sounds like you're describing an evil AI rather than a bunch of humans. And yet... it is entirely consistent with the way the music industry has been acting for over 20 years, since the popularity of Napster.

ASalazarMX 5y ago

Left to their own desires, it might as well be a cold algorithm: 10 PROFITS = MAX(PROFITS) 20 GOTO 10