7 ms·

‘Fuck you, make me’ without saying the words

132 points by chmaynard 9mo ago

bigyabai 9mo ago
> This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms. 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.
- genter 9mo ago
  Counteroffer: the App Store and the Play Store will be used for the precise reason they were built, making their owners a shit-ton of money.
- Amezarak 9mo ago
  I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. Indecent faked pictures of public figures may be gross and indecent but it isn't clear they're always illegal and outrage is highly selective - there used to be one going around of Trump with a tiny penis. Anyway people get banned for that too. 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.
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    > People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. 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.
  - rorylawless 9mo ago
    Illegality is a floor, not a ceiling. It is justified to adhere to and promote a morality that sets higher standards than the law, including taking the view that creating and distributing indecent images of people should be prohibited.
    - Amezarak 9mo ago
      Who decides on the morality? Do you agree that unflattering fake nudes of Trump should also result in platforms being banned from the appstore?
  - rectang 9mo ago
    I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally. 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.
    - Amezarak 9mo ago
      They aren’t tolerated on X, people get banned for this. That’s why the whole thing is so duplicitous. x is not different from other platforms in this regard. Grok on X was also limited to paying users because of this.
  - fzeroracer 9mo ago
    > I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. 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.
- otterley 9mo ago
  This really isn’t the time to bootstrap an “App Stores are inherently bad” argument to complicate the matter. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
  - bigyabai 9mo ago
    [flagged]
    - otterley 9mo ago
      > Tim Cook gave a convicted rapist a golden trophy for his manufacturing prowess Citation, please?
      - bigyabai 9mo ago
        Coming in hot! https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-trump-ceo-tim-cook-glass-corning https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
        otterley 9mo ago
        AFAIK Donald Trump has never been charged—let alone convicted—of sexual relations with a minor. He was also not convicted of sexual assault, even of an adult. (See https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-guilty-rape-1799935 https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-g...). Nevertheless, there are plenty of other reasons to despise him. Also, the entire DF article at issue here takes Apple to task for cozying up to his administration.
        bigyabai 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        otterley 9mo ago
        On what, exactly, in your confidence based? In my experience, the most confident people are usually the ones who turn out to be most often wrong.
blizdiddy 9mo ago
[flagged]
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - dang 9mo ago
    No personal attacks, please.
- surgical_fire 9mo ago
  Incidentally, those creeps already have the shape of humans. They are already anthropomorphic.
sixQuarks 9mo ago
Users showed that Gemini and openAI also undress people, it’s not just grok.
- emilfihlman 9mo ago
  Yeah the reason Google and OpenAI etc are silent is because their services do the same but they "aren't the bad guys" so if they shut up the crisis will pass. This of course implies that the crisis itself and persecution of Musk/Grok is politically motivated, or just based on stupidity.
  - mirabilis 9mo ago
    The same capabilities might be present in many available models, but I do think that the public/social aspect in usage is quite different— people can’t come into my Google account and save nudified versions of my family photos directly to my Google drive, but X generated a lot of attention because the users are directly replying or quoting other users and @ing them with the modified photos.
- hn_throwaway_99 9mo ago
  Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported. 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.
  - Amezarak 9mo ago
    Grok has never been "wide open" to undress people. Anyone reporting that is being extremely duplicitous. Any image-to-image on Grok has stringent NSFW filters for exactly this scenario. People have worked out jailbreaks and those get dealt with.
    - hnburnsy 9mo ago
      https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatbots-can-strip-women-in-photos-down-to-bikinis/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatbots-can-... https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/11/01/nsfw-ai/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/11/01/nsfw-ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhank-suman-7995741b4_investigative-report-shubhank-suman-activity-7414555686392627200-SAiL https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhank-suman-7995741b4_inve... https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oxrcd2/gemini_25_pro_is_completely_uncensored_if_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oxrcd2/gemini_25...
samlinnfer 9mo ago
[flagged]
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago
> It’s folly to think these CEOs should steer their companies into direct confrontation with Trump. …Are Apple and Google combined really not powerful enough to take on Trump? This smacks of learned helplessness to me.
- alexford1987 9mo ago
  No, they’re absolutely not
  - yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago
    I am ignorant and I don't know how to quantify any of these things, but it just seems strange to me that entities accounting for such a large part of the US economy have no leverage over 47. 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.
    - queenkjuul 9mo ago
      Companies that big can do whatever they want. People just make excuses
    - alexford1987 9mo ago
      They have some leverage over his party politically or him as a candidate, but as a sitting president (especially one as unhinged as he is), his power is absurd. 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)
  - _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
    Only because they personally chose the 'obey in advance' starting with funding his inauguration and power leveled him up. https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fighting-tyranny/ https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fig...
ChrisArchitect 9mo ago
Post in question that this is just a comment on: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560359
kmeisthax 9mo ago
Apple nearly killed Tumblr over accidental third-party CSAM. Them not doing shit about Twitter[0] is complicity in my book. 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!
- thiht 9mo ago
  > Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks I genuinely wonder what it will take for people who think like you to understand the dangerous slope the world is on because of just Trump and his cult.
dang 9mo ago
[stub for offtopicness]
- spankalee 9mo ago
  My god, how is this flagged? It's extremely relevant to Hacker News.
  - surgical_fire 9mo ago
    Are you surprised that HN users are fine with their big tech overlords? 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.
    - otterley 9mo ago
      The best thing to do right now is politely email hn@ycombinator.com to bring the mistake to their attention. I’ve worked with them in the past, and I’m confident they’ll unflag it.
      - surgical_fire 9mo ago
        Whether they unflag it, the community still flagged it. Any forum is only good as the community that posts there. Most communities tend to only be as good as their worst members.
        cowboylowrez 9mo ago
        This is a very interesting community. It could be that some just flag politics, I'm sure there could be analytics on the flags by user to help filter out the hysterical lightweights and the 4chan adjacents. I personally would like to follow the flagged posts first then the rest lol I do understand some posts need to go though and the flagging feature is still probably useful.
musicale 9mo ago
> No other president has ever abused (or, if you support him, wielded) the powers of the office like Trump has I suppose Gruber pays with his watch and hasn't seen a $20 bill recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson
cmxch 9mo ago
The neat thing is that Apple and Google are already doing that, just not in the preferred direction. That in mind: Gruber unfortunately is making a bigger case for less vendor control over a user’s device, not more.

132 points by chmaynard 9mo ago

> This one, I think, is worth picking. This is a moment when the App Store and Play Store can stand firmly on the side of longstanding and correct societal norms. 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.

genter 9mo ago
Counteroffer: the App Store and the Play Store will be used for the precise reason they were built, making their owners a shit-ton of money.
Amezarak 9mo ago
I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. Indecent faked pictures of public figures may be gross and indecent but it isn't clear they're always illegal and outrage is highly selective - there used to be one going around of Trump with a tiny penis. Anyway people get banned for that too. 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.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  > People are mad at X for political reasons, and they think this is their lever to get rid of X. 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.
- rorylawless 9mo ago
  Illegality is a floor, not a ceiling. It is justified to adhere to and promote a morality that sets higher standards than the law, including taking the view that creating and distributing indecent images of people should be prohibited.
  - Amezarak 9mo ago
    Who decides on the morality? Do you agree that unflattering fake nudes of Trump should also result in platforms being banned from the appstore?
- rectang 9mo ago
  I think you are wrong to see this as purely political. Women being portrayed as nude, battered, covered in semen, and so on are genuinely horrified. Such images would not be tolerated if they were sourced from a political ally. 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.
  - Amezarak 9mo ago
    They aren’t tolerated on X, people get banned for this. That’s why the whole thing is so duplicitous. x is not different from other platforms in this regard. Grok on X was also limited to paying users because of this.
- fzeroracer 9mo ago
  > I find this whole thing extremely tendentious. CSAM is illegal and people are banned from X for producing or posting it. 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.
otterley 9mo ago
This really isn’t the time to bootstrap an “App Stores are inherently bad” argument to complicate the matter. Sometimes the enemy of your enemy is your friend.
- bigyabai 9mo ago
  [flagged]
  - otterley 9mo ago
    > Tim Cook gave a convicted rapist a golden trophy for his manufacturing prowess Citation, please?
    - bigyabai 9mo ago
      Coming in hot! https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-trump-ceo-tim-cook-glass-corning https://www.theverge.com/news/737757/apple-president-donald-...
      - otterley 9mo ago
        AFAIK Donald Trump has never been charged—let alone convicted—of sexual relations with a minor. He was also not convicted of sexual assault, even of an adult. (See https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-guilty-rape-1799935 https://www.newsweek.com/fact-check-was-donald-trump-found-g...). Nevertheless, there are plenty of other reasons to despise him. Also, the entire DF article at issue here takes Apple to task for cozying up to his administration.
        bigyabai 9mo ago
        [flagged]
        otterley 9mo ago
        On what, exactly, in your confidence based? In my experience, the most confident people are usually the ones who turn out to be most often wrong.

blizdiddy 9mo ago

[flagged]

bigyabai 9mo ago
[flagged]
- dang 9mo ago
  No personal attacks, please.
surgical_fire 9mo ago
Incidentally, those creeps already have the shape of humans. They are already anthropomorphic.

sixQuarks 9mo ago

Users showed that Gemini and openAI also undress people, it’s not just grok.

emilfihlman 9mo ago
Yeah the reason Google and OpenAI etc are silent is because their services do the same but they "aren't the bad guys" so if they shut up the crisis will pass. This of course implies that the crisis itself and persecution of Musk/Grok is politically motivated, or just based on stupidity.
- mirabilis 9mo ago
  The same capabilities might be present in many available models, but I do think that the public/social aspect in usage is quite different— people can’t come into my Google account and save nudified versions of my family photos directly to my Google drive, but X generated a lot of attention because the users are directly replying or quoting other users and @ing them with the modified photos.
hn_throwaway_99 9mo ago
Can you provide a link with evidence of that? I haven't seen that reported. 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.
- Amezarak 9mo ago
  Grok has never been "wide open" to undress people. Anyone reporting that is being extremely duplicitous. Any image-to-image on Grok has stringent NSFW filters for exactly this scenario. People have worked out jailbreaks and those get dealt with.
  - hnburnsy 9mo ago
    https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatbots-can-strip-women-in-photos-down-to-bikinis/ https://www.wired.com/story/google-and-openais-chatbots-can-... https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/11/01/nsfw-ai/ https://hub.jhu.edu/2023/11/01/nsfw-ai/ https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhank-suman-7995741b4_investigative-report-shubhank-suman-activity-7414555686392627200-SAiL https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shubhank-suman-7995741b4_inve... https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oxrcd2/gemini_25_pro_is_completely_uncensored_if_you/ https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oxrcd2/gemini_25...

samlinnfer 9mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago

> It’s folly to think these CEOs should steer their companies into direct confrontation with Trump. …Are Apple and Google combined really not powerful enough to take on Trump? This smacks of learned helplessness to me.

alexford1987 9mo ago
No, they’re absolutely not
- yakshaving_jgt 9mo ago
  I am ignorant and I don't know how to quantify any of these things, but it just seems strange to me that entities accounting for such a large part of the US economy have no leverage over 47. 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.
  - queenkjuul 9mo ago
    Companies that big can do whatever they want. People just make excuses
  - alexford1987 9mo ago
    They have some leverage over his party politically or him as a candidate, but as a sitting president (especially one as unhinged as he is), his power is absurd. 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)
- _DeadFred_ 9mo ago
  Only because they personally chose the 'obey in advance' starting with funding his inauguration and power leveled him up. https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fighting-tyranny/ https://www.carnegie.org/our-work/article/twenty-lessons-fig...

ChrisArchitect 9mo ago

Post in question that this is just a comment on: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are cowards https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560359 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46560359

kmeisthax 9mo ago

Apple nearly killed Tumblr over accidental third-party CSAM. Them not doing shit about Twitter[0] is complicity in my book. 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!

thiht 9mo ago
> Trump is a lot less powerful than John Gruber thinks I genuinely wonder what it will take for people who think like you to understand the dangerous slope the world is on because of just Trump and his cult.

dang 9mo ago

[stub for offtopicness]

spankalee 9mo ago
My god, how is this flagged? It's extremely relevant to Hacker News.
- surgical_fire 9mo ago
  Are you surprised that HN users are fine with their big tech overlords? 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.
  - otterley 9mo ago
    The best thing to do right now is politely email hn@ycombinator.com to bring the mistake to their attention. I’ve worked with them in the past, and I’m confident they’ll unflag it.
    - surgical_fire 9mo ago
      Whether they unflag it, the community still flagged it. Any forum is only good as the community that posts there. Most communities tend to only be as good as their worst members.
      - cowboylowrez 9mo ago
        This is a very interesting community. It could be that some just flag politics, I'm sure there could be analytics on the flags by user to help filter out the hysterical lightweights and the 4chan adjacents. I personally would like to follow the flagged posts first then the rest lol I do understand some posts need to go though and the flagging feature is still probably useful.

musicale 9mo ago

> No other president has ever abused (or, if you support him, wielded) the powers of the office like Trump has I suppose Gruber pays with his watch and hasn't seen a $20 bill recently. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson

cmxch 9mo ago

The neat thing is that Apple and Google are already doing that, just not in the preferred direction. That in mind: Gruber unfortunately is making a bigger case for less vendor control over a user’s device, not more.