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More like a tiktok spam botnet for hire.

Thank you for explaining that.

Yeah true, how do we know these bridges and towns were there beforehand? Maybe Apple has never had good coverage in this area.

Just linking to a map doesn't tell us what was removed or when.


My family name comes from a Christian town in the mountains of Lebanon. I'm positive it was previously on Apple Maps (I've shown it to people before), but now has no label. It still exists on other mapping services and if I search on DuckDuckGo, the top info summary includes an Apple Maps widget with the town. Clicking on it takes me to Apple Maps with the pin in the right place, without a label.

So it's clear that it was there and is no longer there. I'm not making a judgement as to why it's no longer there (the post on X makes an unsubstantiated claim that it's intentional). Could be a bug for all I know. I'm unwilling to make the leap that it's some malicious attempt without actual evidence. I can only verify that it no longer has a label.


I noticed a post on Reddit that claims Apple Maps only briefly had small towns listed. It's possible when I showed the town off in Apple Maps it could have been during that window. I looked through my texts and found when I recently shared the town a couple months ago it was on Google Maps because I was sharing a picture that was posted on Google Maps (my mom sent me an old photo of an overlook of the town and I sent a modern picture with the same vantage). To my knowledge Apple never had any local photos (just the town label; however briefly).

https://safereddit.com/r/applemaps/comments/1sjlfs2/where_ar...

Since I don't look at the town often, I'm certainly willing to consider that they once had a data broker for the maps that they no longer have access to (or possibly trialed a data broker). Anyway, just thought I'd add as much context as possible, as it's definitely more nuanced than the social media posts imply.


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Please don't post reddit style garbage comments like this.

>The purpose of a system is what it does.

I am so tired of this saying.

It's not true, in general. Systems almost universally have unintended consequences and result in side effects their designers did not foresee.

Designing benchmarks resistant to adversarial attempts to exploit the benchmark software is just something no one was thinking about when they created SWE-bench.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_wha...

You are misunderstanding the saying. It is entirely about unintended consequences and viewing the system for what it actually does and not any stated intentions of the designers.


I will propose that you are wrong.

1. We must ignore the intentions of the designers (your claim), and instead see what the outcomes are

2. Therefore we should ignore Beer's intentions when designing the phrase POSWID, and instead see how it is used.

3. The overwhelming majority of people using it on the internet (including the GP comment) is to imply that the people perpetuating the system actually desire the outcome.

So the purpose of POSWID is clearly to imply intent.


Whose intent? POSWID Is about structural incentives not personal intent, and these can be, and likely are, an emergent behavior. It’s about reframing away from intents, treating the system as a structure and removing the whole structure for replacement. As opposed to localized reforms which are exposed to the same prior emergent behaviors leading to constant backsliding.

> Whose intent?

The intent of those creating or perpetuating a system.


There are plenty of cases where you absolutely can/should discuss outcomes in a way where the intention is not factored in because it can often be straight up irrelevant.

If a gun is developed with the intention of hunting only bears and someone uses it to shoot people, you don’t have to constantly preface things by talking about how it’s supposed to be used only on bears. Sometimes that fact, depending on the context of the conversation, is simply not relevant.

To cover my bases here: yes it often is relevant and maybe even critical info, but it often isn’t either of those things.


I agree with the idea that intent is often irrelevant. I disagree that POSIWID is a good way to communicate that idea.

Well that’s stupid and completely ignores the meaning of the word “purpose”.

It does not ignore the word. It subverts it, and that's the point. It's the system equivalent of "death of the author", which states that omes a work is written, the authors intent loses relevance and the work must be examined on its own. The aurhors opinion or relationship to the work carries no more weight than any other persons.

That's not "true" in any demonstrable sense, but it can be a useful form of analysis. As it is with "purpose of a system"


This is not how people outside of cybernetics use POSWID. From context it does not appear to be how SlinkyOnStairs was using it either.

I think it's also trying to be too cute. The first two definitions of purpose on Wiktionary[A]:

1. The end for which something is done, is made or exists.

2. Function, role.

People (uselessly) talking about the purpose of a system are often referring to #1, while POSWID is using it to mean #2. The real point of POSWID is that only definition #2 matters. POSWID is a terrible phrase not because it is wrong, but because is is an equivocation -- I suspect that Beer intended it as a pun, but the difference between the two is if one gets the joke. POSWID gets used incorrectly because people don't get the joke.

A: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/purpose


> From context it does not appear to be how SlinkyOnStairs was using it either.

The exact definition of "purpose" doesn't matter much here.

The particular version of the heuristic used here is that the stated purpose and the actual purpose often differ. POSIWID being the observation that the actual purpose is reflected by the outcomes of the system, because if that isn't the case the system gets changed.

Thus, the observation about AI benchmarks. AI companies have had years now to stop using unreliable benchmarks as advertising material. There's been years of piece after piece about the problems with these benchmarks. And yet the AI marketing continues as is.


> POSIWID being the observation that the actual purpose is reflected by the outcomes of the system, because if that isn't the case the system gets changed.

I fundamentally disagree with this, and it seems to differ from how other proponents of POSIWID in this thread view POSIWID.

It also seems trivially false; systems are dynamic what was the purpose of the system just before it was changed because people didn't like the outcomes?


I'd go further and say this is also the cybernetics equivalent of the religious teachings about humans, specifically the whole "judge by one's deeds, not by one's words" thing. So it's not like it's a novel idea.

Also worth remembering that most systems POSIWID is said about, and in fact ~all important systems affecting people, are not designed in the first place. Market forces, social, political, even organizational dynamics, are not designed top-down, they're emergent, and bottom-up wishes and intentions do not necessarily carry over to the system at large.


If you accept what the system actually does now, and decides to live with it as it is, you just deprecated the original "purpose" and made it irrelevant. You embraced "the purpose is what it does" - to you.

IMHO the saying is meant to make you reflect.


I think the point is that if the side effects become known and are accepted, or if they are known and rejected, then indeed the purpose of the system is what it does.

> Designing benchmarks resistant to adversarial attempts to exploit the benchmark software is just something no one was thinking about when they created SWE-bench

That seems like a major oversight. "AI does whatever maximizes reward/minimizes loss, not what you actually want" is one of the biggest challenges in ML in the last two decades (relevant here because researchers selecting architectures and training regimens that maximize public benchmarks are just a bigger training loop with those benchmarks as reward function). And the analogous issue post-training in AGI-like systems is well studied as the alignment problem, the core issue of classical AI safety

If cheating the benchmark is easier than passing it, you expect the cheating strategy to emerge and win. (Just like you would with humans btw)


I think the point of the saying is that as systems tend to expand, sooner or later we become part of them. That means that we can no longer see them from outside, we're now part of the system and our goals and the system's goals will align. Then the purpose of the system can't be anything else than what it does.

Same. Anyone who has designed anything at all in any domain realizes that what your intentions are and what materializes are often not the same. You have practical constraints in the real world. That doesn’t somehow make the constraints the purpose. The saying makes no sense.

In true HN fashion, you’re an engineer that somehow thinks that they should just form opinions through your divine intuition instead of actually reading the source material, which you very clearly haven’t done.

You’d think that for you to become “so sick of” a saying, you might actually at some point read up on what it means.


This has nothing to do with AI, the school got hit because it was directly next door to a military base.

You're mistaking it for Shajareh Tayyebeh Elementary School[1], double tapped with tomahawks in the opening salvo of the war. That was another school, hit later. There was multiple schools attacked.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Minab_school_attack


Well no, actually. Both halves of that statement are false.

Injecting ads will get you removed from the extension store if caught, while adblockers are advertised on the front page of the store.


Google's "Manifest 3" rules, vs. ad blocking, in Ars Technica.[1]

Did the JSON formatter with ads get kicked out of the extension store yet?

[1] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/08/chromes-manifest-v3-...


Manifest 3 explicitly enables ad blocking through the declarativeNetRequest API. It's trivial to do so, and many blockers exist in the Chrome Web Store.

ublock origin light is featured in the chrome web store.

But it isn't as featureful!

Everybody freaked out about Manifest v3, but I'm running Chrome + uBlock and still not seeing any ads. Seems like a nothingburger to me.

Water is merely 49C, said the frog. It's not even 100C. I'll stay.

Google really is slow boiling Internet until everyone forgets you can have stuff without ads.


The trouble with missile interceptors is that they're overkill. Drones are slow, unarmored targets that could be taken out by a bullet.

What you need is small automated point-defense turrets, mounted on whatever you want to protect.


In orbit? Probably not. No country has operational satellites designed to attack ground targets. They would need to launch missiles or send drones.

In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry. But this is easier said than done; they tend to be deep inside enemy territory. And drones are made out of commonplace consumer electronics parts, which could be made in thousands of factories around the world.


> No country has operational satellites designed to attack ground targets.

Why are you so sure of that? It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.

Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.

> In a total war you absolutely do target factories and industry.

And that's what you would do - or threaten to do - long before you start replacing your roads with tunnels as the author is suggesting.


> It would be very surprising if at least the United States and Russia didn't have orbital weapons. They've been in sending large stuff to space for decades.

Depends on what you mean by “orbital weapons”. I assume you are not thinking of the sidearms of astronauts, or anti-satelite satelites.

If you are thinking about nukes pre-positioned in space then the 1967 Outer Space Treaty bans the stationing of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in outer space. And this is not just paper prohibition. The reality of space based nukes is that the time between deorbiting and touch-down is so short that nuclear armed states would treat their launch (the time when they are placed into orbit) as an attack and launch in retaliation against the launching country.

Basically if you try to sneak them into orbit and the enemy finds out about them you will be anihilated. This is just simple MAD doctrine. So the strategic balance which is preventing you from launching your ground based warheads is the same which is preventing you from launching your future space based warheads into orbit.

> Of course they wouldn't have told you or anybody else who isn't supposed to know.

I wouldn’t assume that you or me would learn about it. But it is almost given that the peer nations would figure it out. They spend considerable resources trying to figure out if you are doing this. And then they get MAD and your country is no more.


No idea how actually efficient that would be even in theory. I guess it's not technical technicaly impossible, but would it really bring any benefit compared to launching possibly many more cheaper transcontinental rockets from earth were maintenance and control is definitely easier.

>Many of the "thousands" of bugs and vulnerabilities it found are in older software, or are impossible to exploit.

So?

Modern software is designed with a defense in depth model, so it often requires chaining multiple vulnerabilities to get a successful exploit. But individual vulnerabilities still need finding and fixing because people might find vulnerabilities in the other isolation layers later.

I swear every time an LLM does something useful, the usual band of skeptics bends over backwards trying to invent reasons to dismiss it.


The argument is that it is older software in the sense that it's unmaintained because better alternatives exist.

Also, I don't believe it is fair to dismiss skeptics as inventing reasons. If anything, "believers" are bending over backwards to praise Anthropic even though they didn't actually release anything.


I swear every time an LLM does something stupid, the usual band of AI hype pushers bends over backwards trying to invent reasons that it's actually good.

Exactly. If I had a nickel for every mention of "just wait 'til the next release!!" as some sort of justification for whatever's going on right now, I'd be a rich man.

Im still waiting for a project that is not a 'pet project' that is mostly LLM-assisted that Wow's me. Why is it taking so long I wonder? Hmm, perhaps all this 'intelligence' is neat. But it is not what pushes humanity forward - which ultimately is what matters. That's the whole point of expending resources...

Quite possible.


All the problems? Really?

The words "scale back to" are vague, but I'm struggling to think of any current global problems that weren't at least exacerbated by social media.

Then you need to think a little harder.

You have one thing on your mind - "social media bad" - and it is poisoning your ability to see the complexity in the world. There is rarely a single cause for anything, and there is never a single cause for everything.


Hyperbole is a thing that exists. It is also rare that anyone says anything that is meant to be taken 100% literally.

Go ahead and name one then. I have this feeling you won't.

"[G]lobal" is doing a lot of work in this sentence if I'm reading it as intended; this seems to exclude international conflict and intra-national strife (which are very big issues).

The EFF is and has always been a political activist organization.

Of course they care about ideological concerns.


Those concerns have evolved away from their original mission. Not an unusual situation for organizations like this as a they shrink and lose relevance.

It reminds me a bit of the ACLU. If nothing else, they were always respectable in their vociferous defense of the 1st amendment and free speech. But they got caught up in other ideological battles, and transitioned to a more partisan organization... defending speech they politically agreed with, not worrying about others. Generally, becoming more small-minded.

The ACLU was always considered a leftist organization, and I'm sure that in general most of it's staff was so; but their mission was scoped to certain issues, and anybody who agreed with that mission, despite their other politics, could support them. Once partisanship takes over, though, it isolates them.

If the EFF isn't careful, it is going to be an organization not for those who support certain digital freedoms, but for Leftists who support certain digital freedoms. That'll do nothing but make it more difficult to accomplish their original goals.

I expect it'll also come with a loss of focus, similar to what happened at Mozilla.


> But they got caught up in other ideological battles

That wasn't the cause, that was the effect. They got flooded with cash for participating in particular ideological battles, so they continued, the smarter older people got disgusted (and just old) and left, the stupider newer people who came in were only interested in working on those ideological battles, and at some point the ACLU ceased to stand for anything in particular and became Yet Another Democratic Nonprofit.

Hopefully this isn't happening with the EFF. If they just become Democratic Tech CEO Pressure Group, it'll be another once great institution zombified.

> Leftists

Such an abused word. These are just Democratic Party partisans. They have no firm political opinions other than their own moral superiority, just like their opponents. They're building careers; it's a politics of personal accumulation.


My sibling in sin, I have an EFF tee from about 2001-2002 that reads, in boldface, “FREE SPEECH HAS A POSSE”. They have always been broadly political.

This does not address the substance of the comment you are replying to. In fact, that comment was itself replying to a comment making the same argument you are making, explicitly explaining why it is non-sequitur.

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I miss when tech was mostly the former. Or many just the world when these niches could exist without political activists for the omnicause.

Agreed. There are a lot of things that don't have anything to do with software freedom in this explanation of why they're leaving X. I think they've lost the plot.

You learned how to identify them better, and the community is hiding their identity less.

Nothing happened, except maybe you forgot what it means to be a hacker.


Spoiler: it's the same people

I was around both communities before the transition happened and you're really only about 20% right.

What makes you think they are shrinking and losing relevance, other than feels?

It's just logic. Unless their twitter audience all create accounts on these other platforms, then by default the EFF have both shrunk their influence and lost relevance.

Their post is a good start. The 'numbers' argument is just a facade to leave X because they don't like Elon.

Sad to hear. Can you help me understand its shrinkage and loss of relevancy?

Where in my comment did I claim otherwise?

You discussed two distinct groups: "certain ideological concerns" and "the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about". I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.

You might be right; I don't know what the broad populace thinks of what EFF does.

I'll ask you then: What are the three main areas of advocacy where you think the EFF has been the most visible and/or effective?


It's an association fallacy - Musk may be a radical extremist on the right, and a technology mogul, you may find yourself aligning with some of his world views (not all of them, remember he is an extremist relative to yourself).

So when people support EFF's technological goals (freedoms for users on technology platforms), if they are themselves possibly on the right, they project their own values onto the organization or system (which here is the EFF).

Never-mind if some of those values are incompatible with the values you think you hold (being authoritarian generally is incompatible with being not being authoritarian about technology). When someone points out the (otherwise obvious) contradiction to you, you're surprised that your set of values is incongruous.

Now this can happen to anyone coming from any political starting point, they agree with something but find it doesn't quite fit with their world views. If you are deeply religious about it, you tend to hold on for dear life and either decide to "pick" on set of values over another (suddenly you realize, actually, yes you would like to enslave everyone) or engage in some form of hypocrisy or another (authoritarians are good, but for some reason or the other I'm going to make an exception for technology).


I dunno. My understanding of coalition building is "we disagree about a bunch of stuff, but we agree on this one thing, so let's work together on it". You seem to be saying: "if you disagree with me on the other stuff, your agreement on this thing is rooted in a contradictory value system you haven't fully examined".

Is that correct?


Not exactly.

Values have a hierarchy. You can't (effectively) agree to painting everything the color blue, if you can't agree what the color blue is.

And you will run into a very similar issue when everyone starts objecting to the pink you have spread everywhere, despite supposedly agreeing to the color scheme.


> Not exactly.

But then you go on to describe exactly what @Brendinooo described, just under the guise of your system of "value hierarchy." The problem is that you can always default to "our values are hierarchically misaligned" and then never have to do any coalition building ever.

So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.


> if you disagree with me on the other stuff

This part is too broad.

Hierarchical values are just that. Not wholesale. We call that nonsense, e.g. I believe pigs can fly, therefore the sky is red. They are making an ontological error.


For a Christian, a top maxim in their value hierarchy would be rooted in Jesus' famous commandment: "Love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, and mind." Now, if you're an atheist, this might be nonsense to you. You might not believe that Jesus was resurrected or that God even exists. To you, these are fundamentally irrational statements ("pigs can fly," etc.). Under your system, if you were an atheist and your opposition was a Christian, you could never possibly build a coalition because there's a disagreement at the top of the value hierarchy.

But this seems wrong because people of different creeds and value systems do stuff together all the time. Or am I misunderstanding your point? What I understand @Brendinooo to be saying is: "we may not share the same moral framework (or value hierarchy, using your term), but we do agree on X, so let's do X."


I think you confuse beliefs with values by placing that at the root.

I'd have a problem with it if my tax bracket were determined by whether I loved the Christian Lord rather than any other deity.

People of different faiths band together because of shared values that actually make a difference as long as they are happy to live and let live on matters of belief.

It is true that a lot of values sit on a foundation of beliefs, via the teachings we think are inextricably associated with our beliefs.

A Christian's values (e.g. "you are born a boy or a girl') might conflict with a trans person's beliefs ("I was not born with the body that matches my gender identity"). Meanwhile another Christian's values ("God has a plan and your body and gender identity must by definition be a part of that plan") might be entirely compatible.

Beliefs are absolutely foundational but all the values built on them are just received wisdom, interpretation etc.

Of course, it is easy to confuse these things, and people who rise to power are often those who do. Keeping an open mind requires time and mental energy. CEOs and world leaders rarely have time to examine their values, and refraining that act as "questioning my beliefs" reframes a rational act into an invitation to have a crippling crisis of faith - which is much easier to tell yourself is a temptation of the devil that you must not indulge.

By shying away from such examination they have much more time and mental energy and deciseness to execute effectively on their agenda.

The obvious downside is that this lack of reflection means the agenda they execute so effectively on is potentially not what they actually would have chosen if they'd really thought it through in a rational way.


You are gravely misunderstanding my point.

You can hold some values as core to your position, your belief. Outside of your beliefs, there is a strict hierarchy of values.

Colors require perception, kinematics breaks down without velocity/acceleration.

Being Aetheist or Christian conveniently doesn't tend to conflict with the general hierarchy of values, which is independent of your particular religious interpretation of them. Your interpretation of the general hierarchy, can cause issues, however.


> So how do you solve that? Because it seems that you can't.

By design. Activists and left-wingers in general enjoy losing and being underdogs and infighting constantly


I don't know, I've noticed this in the right as well. I think there's always some degree of purity-testing to any community, though I agree there is more on the current (radical?) progressive end than average.

Funny, how those in a hierarchical system political system struggle so much to understand, hierarchy.

It's per the usual for extremist ideologies, chock full of hypocrisy and nonsense.

Note that, I have no problem with conservative or liberal value systems...


I guess, to use the terms of your analogy, I don't think people disagree on what blue is. "Don't add backdoors to e2e encryption" is blue; and plenty of people who are coded all over the political/ideological spectrum recognize it as blue and want the wall to be blue.

You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.


If people are interpreting this is an analogy, that is probably the issue...

> I guess, to use the terms of your analogy

It is not an analogy, though, it is an example of a hierarchical value.

> You seem to be saying that people can't paint together unless everyone agrees on who holds the brush, what brand of brush is used, and what everyone's broader philosophy of painting is.

But these are not all hierarchical values. You can't paint with a brush unless you know what a brush is. Holding the brush, the brand of the brush, are not values implicit in the hierarchy of what a brush is or how to paint with one.

Your last example "broader philosophy of painting", is an example. You can agree to all use a brush, but if you stare at a wall and call it "painting", you've violated the agreed upon hierarchy.


It's hard not to see this as you just restating your argument.

If "no backdoors on e2e encryption" isn't a sufficient definition of blue, if that's just staring at a wall, then what is the hierarchy, specifically? What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?


> What do I have to believe, in concrete terms, before my support for digital privacy counts?

I think that this is fairly simple. Digital privacy requires digital autonomy, privacy without autonomy is tantamount to a promise without any way to verify (confirming a negative is often difficult if not impossible).

Your beliefs may conflict if you find yourself pro-authoritarian (no autonomy).


I can't definitively give you a top three and honestly don't see any value in ranking them like that. I would simply describe them as the ACLU for technology and the Internet in that they fight for general civil liberties. X and more specifically Elon Musk have shown that they are on the opposite side when it comes to many of those civil liberties even if they all agree on some other issues. Online censorship (both explicit and through algorithmic bias) is the most obvious example that bridges your two distinct groups. Musk might claim he agrees with the EFF on that, but through his and X's actions, it's clear he doesn't.

EFF has basically only succeeded in defending Section 230, which makes me wonder if the people who talk in this article and the people elsewhere on HN denouncing Section 230 know about each other.

There's been a lot of misinformation around section 230 in the last several years. This might be helpful, either as something to give out or to receive, depending.

https://www.techdirt.com/2020/06/23/hello-youve-been-referre...

Granted, it's from 2020, so there may be updated versions by now.


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Whatever you're trying to imply here, it's a personal attack that does not contribute to the discourse.

The OP is coyling spraying half baked questions across discussion in an effort to do who knows what. It is an attack on the delivery, not the person.

No, nothing of the sort is happening. There is no reason to assume bad faith in those questions. The questions are not "half-baked".

I make such dismissals because if I merely expressed doubt, it appears that you would make the same accusations against me.

The burden of proof is on you; what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence; etc.


Just noting that I saw this, but I don't really see a point in replying outside of this comment at this time because I don't feel the need to prove myself to you, and I don't know how I could change what I'm writing to satisfy you personally anyways.

Have a nice evening!


> I think you're getting this type of response because many of us can't see any actual difference between those two groups besides your own politics and assumptions.

I think that is why, yes.

I also think the differences are really obvious, and I genuinely can't understand why so many people here can't see that.


This might be the most interesting insight I gained by commenting here today. I expected people to be on board with it; I didn't expect people to be so acclimated to it that they don't even see how others might notice it.

Onboard with what? Acclimatized to what? You reactionary types are always so damn cryptic and vague.

I suspect you're not asking these questions earnestly, given that you then pivot to calling me a "reactionary type".

I'm asking them earnestly!! Why wouldn't I both ask and express frustration??

Insufferable.


Why did you call me a "reactionary type"?

I can understand frustration at me being "cryptic and vague" - and that's something I could answer for you!

But it seems like you already have an answer to that question, you have made a judgment about my values, and are now calling me insufferable.

I asked you a question in this comment - and I wouldn't mind an answer, which is why I'm not tacking on a "you people" comment or some kind of insult, because I think that would make it less likely that I get one.


You've expressed a sense that the organization has become “too political” in a specific way (e.g., emphasizing equity, anti‑discrimination, or skepticism of state/corporate power as a matter of justice), and that this is a kind of ideological overreach.

You've implied that digital privacy, encryption, open‑source software, and anti‑patent‑trolling should be treated as pure technical and legal questions, not as expressions of a progressive political ideology.

I'm surmising a desire to roll back the organization’s explicit engagement with social‑justice‑adjacent politics and return it to a more “classical” techno‑libertarian or “just fix the code and laws” stance.

Musk is not a neutral businessman but a political actor whose projects (X, Grok, etc.) help entrench an authoritarian, far‑right political economy. Any attempt to normalize him—or paint his products and services as neutral—is, in effect, reactionary opposition to a broader societal reckoning with fascist tendencies in tech and politics.

The reactionary position is the one that wants to preserve or normalize Musk’s power, image, and platforms as “just business” or “apolitical tech.”


> in a specific way

In one sense: yes. But in a different sense, if their post was about how they were leaving a more left-leaning platform and they dropped in a bunch of examples about how it was important to support gun-rights and pro-life groups and was alienating people on the left as a result, I'd like to think I'd be objecting in a similar way. (I certainly wouldn't be saying that you can't be pro-encryption without converting to libertarianism or whatever.)

>should be treated as pure technical and legal question

I would like that, yes. I remember being super annoyed watching net neutrality become a partisan issue in real time. I believe that ideologues are always going to exist, but for a lot of us, it's our choice to decide whether or not we are going to play that game or if we're going to do the work to persuade the persuadable and build coalitions to get wins where we can get them.

That's why I chose to be vague in some of my language, because I think it's important to be able to modulate how you speak to different people in service of other types of goods. I don't see a benefit of trying to litigate abortion or authoritarianism in a Hacker News thread about the EFF. I do see a benefit in trying to convince people that advocacy groups staying in their lanes, and that it's good to have voices that try to operate outside the left/right divide in the US in 2026.

>roll back

I get that you're saying that because it fits certain definitions of "reactionary". I don't believe in turning back any clocks, even if I might be in favor of bringing back, in some form, policies that have been dropped. If you see that as a distinction without a difference, so be it.

But "reactionary" often has a particular set of right-wing connotations that I wouldn't feel comfortable identifying myself with.

From there you pivot hard into your criticisms of a particular person as well as your perceptions about how he impacts the broader political landscape. As I started to reply to some of those ideas I realized that this is all a pretty different line of discussion than the idea that you originally engaged with me on, or even what the EFF said in its own post.


Then you are doing yourself a disservice by alienating people that agree with you on important issues but disagree with you on others.

Why would you say "this statement shows XYZ" if you didn't believe XYZ was a new piece of information?

My original comment did not claim that they were not ideological and it did not claim that that they do not do political activism, so a reply of "[o]f course they care about ideological concerns" makes no sense to me.

You said the "statement pretty clearly shows that they have certain ideological concerns..." like you were uncovering some hidden truth or gotcha in between the lines here. Was that not what you intended to write?

And then like what is the point of your original comment if you agree that what you could only deduce earlier is now an obvious truism?


IIUC, "clearly shows" doesn't apply to "they have certain concerns" but rather to the part that you replaced with "...". In other words "the statement clearly shows that they value [their certain concerns] more highly than the kind of stuff we tend to think the EFF primarily cares about"

He's saying that they have ideological concerns beyond the ideological concerns you would tend to associate with the EFF (digital privacy, open source, patent trolling, etc). I for one am sad to see that this is the case. There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.

This is an important point and it feels odd that the entire discussion seems to not be able to engage with it, but on another level it might be the same problem. As a long term financial support of the eff I'm starting to get the same awkward feelings that made me question my financial support for Mozilla and Wikipedia. Any time someone views the world through a single lens, it highlights some things and ignores others and it seems like a net loss to the world that everything is being forced into a being judged along a single (increasingly polarised) axis

That's what the comment is stating, but I disagree with the statement. This is perfectly in-line with the EFF's mission.

Keep in mind that X only has ~500 MAU, putting it in the same league as Pinterest or Quora.


A free and open society is a prerequisite for the rights EFF fight for. We cannot enjoy the freedoms of digital privacy in a an authoritarian regime. The rights to fight for EFFs concerns are currently being threated by the fascist turn of the USA. Thus, the EFF and other likeminded organizations are very much justified in leaving X.

> There are fewer and fewer organizations protecting civil rights without being dragged into left/right tribalism.

I would rather challenge this image that civilization is declining, independently of the political forces in power. This is a common motif in facism; I'm reading from your comment something along the lines of: "once we had noble organizations that were pure and didn't bother with ideology -- now things are worse, and in fact those guys are dirty for engaging in politics". What's really happening is that power in the US has been seized by fanatics and you fucks (respectfully) are letting them get away with it.


Disagree with so much here. But if, in your mind, the US is turning authoritarian, this is a "cut off your nose to spite your face" move. They should be taking the fight where it most needs fighting. They should not be making donors like myself question whether we still share objectives.

You are completely correct in your analysis. Reading some of the responses here - people who think the EFF should only fight for some rights for some people and only on corporate platforms instead of across society at large - would be shocking if I hadn’t already seen how willing rich tech bros are to overlook everyone and everything else for their own personal gain.

What are you talking about? I feel like I’m taking crazy pills reading these comments.

Do you not see that civil rights are being infringed _right now_, by the republican administration in our government? Protecting those civil rights will require criticizing and acting against republicans because the fascists on the right are trying to turn our country into an autocracy.

Sorry if that hurts your feelings, but you can’t be that fragile if you want to live in a free nation. The EFF taking a stand here is fighting EXACTLY the fight they need to be right now.


[flagged]


> they have been silenced by the platform

Where do you see that? All I see is a claim that it no longer makes sense from a financial standpoint (but no comparative numbers provided for the other platforms they are keeping, which is sus, especially given their presence on very niche platforms like Bluesky), and vague justifications based on identity politics and "community care" loci, which is either nonsense or deep argot unsuitable for the intended audience.


> Where do you see that?

Assuming that Twitter's user count has remained relatively steady (within 100% either way), the only thing that could explain a huge drop in views would be a change to their opaque algorithm.

> To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago.

Twitter's user count has trended upward for the last 10 years: https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

Therefore, Twitter must be downranking or silencing the EFF's account. Unless you have a better explanation?


Bluesky might have be niche in terms of users but it's an open platform like activity pub so it's at least quite aligned with the EFF mission.

just not twitter censorship

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