Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46790198

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Edit: cael450 has already offered a specific example of this threat vector: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46758387

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45921637

Points: 3

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The GitClear whitepaper that Marcus cites tries to account for some of these factors, but they're biased by selling their own code quality tools. Likewise, GitHub's whitepapers (and subsequent marketing) tend to study the perception of productivity and quality by developers, and other fuzzy factors like the suggestion acceptance rate -- but not bug rate or the durability of accepted suggestions over time. (I think perceived productivity and enjoyment of one's job are also important values, but they're not what these products are being sold on.)

Part of the apprehension might be caused by the difficulty of rezoning itself. The only people with the determination and money to get a zoning variance are big developers who need a big building to make it worthwhile. That's how you get 50- or 100-unit apartments going up in single-family neighborhoods, and a "missing middle" of density and affordability.

It's one of the big criticisms of Microsoft Recall: the database is locally generated and encrypted at rest, but practically, any user in the same home with device access can probably access it, and bypass any efforts you've made to delete your browsing history or messages.

Remember that abusers are often controlling and suspicious, so disabling Recall, denying them access to your devices, or changing your passwords is enough to set them off because you appear to be hiding something (maybe making plans to leave or report them).

Plausible deniability can be an important feature for activists and regular people alike. You can't always predict when a relationship goes south like this, or get out of it as soon as it does, or afford and hide a burner phone.

One of my friends remarks (edit) that tech companies should have a social worker and a public defender on staff for threat modeling these things.

Everything outside that structure is an afterthought. The occasional indie hit songs and labels have failed to upend the music industry power structure for a century (they tend to get acquired if they get big enough). Tons of people making songs mostly for themselves will only dilute the power of smaller players.

The labels will probably extract some licensing fees off the stolen copyrighted training data, but they famously don't care about their musicians earning a livelihood.

The Grugq created a tool for this a decade ago (sadly unmaintained): https://github.com/grugq/portal as part of a presentation about operational security for hackers. It's a great watch if you're interested in how various (in)famous hackers thought they were secure and got busted anyway. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XaYdCdwiWU

Imagine if a million developers simultaneously got much worse at their jobs!

[0] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/07/is-ch...

Alliance for the Future is a lobby group of effective accelerationists who endorse some of Marc Andreesen and Peter Thiel's views in their manifesto, and based on that plus this article, they seem to oppose the bill entirely.

A place to start for a breakdown of what's in the bill is the Context Fund analysis that AFTF links to. That analysis cites similar critiques from EFF, the Software & Information Industry Association, and others. All of these are from the perspective of voting against or substantially changing the bill.

I haven't found "pro bill" opinions as easily, but I haven't been plugged into the conversations around this, so I'm missing anything that doesn't appear on the first few pages of Google or DDG.