Anyway, GPs point is that even if nobody leaked anything, and the only thing publicly known was the existence of the bugs, people would anyway have been able to find them independently. So what is the purpose of waiting 24h before releasing the patches?

But yes, I'd like to see the board of Facebook and the boards of many other companies being held liable for the actions of those companies. But for some reason, it's only ever "expedient" to grant companies the rights rightfully belonging to people, and never "expedient" to impose the same sorts of liabilities on them as on people. (Not that a non-physical entity such as a company could ever practically face the same penalties as a physical person anyway, which is another ("obvious" in your parlance) reason not to grant them those rights.)

If I was interested in going down the ad-hominem route I'd claim that you simply see the status quo as "obvious" because you lack the power of imagination to consider a more sensible alternative.

In fact, I think your argument is so backwards it actually supports my case. Why do I need to "imagine" that the owners of the company are using their rights to free speech as individuals (which is obviously not what is actually happening)? Why can't they just actually use those individual rights?

You don't like a trawling boat emptying out the lake in your village? Just imagine that the boat's captain is using a fishing rod to do the same, that's clearly a comparable situation!

If companies as a legal concept didn't exist in their current form, then we wouldn't have this problem of one person, or more commonly many people, using them as a proxy to get away with a bunch of unethical stuff. Often way more unethical that whatever Facebook / Zuck is doing, such as destroying ecosystems, prioritizing profits over worker safety, etc.

I agree with GP that the arguments one makes should reflect one's actual reasoning, e.g. "I believe it's wrong to say thing X and therefore I support deplatforming in that instace". But because "I support deplatforming in every instace" sounds stronger many people falsely claimed that to be their reasoning. And now they're forced to deal with the consequences, i.e. being called hypocrites.

Facebook is not a person. Facebook should not have "rights" nor "political views".

The silly idea of treating companies like persons and giving them any "rights" at all is what got us into this mess in the first place.

The people that lose their jobs don't need to "find replacement income streams", they need to organize in order to establish a society where we all can just work to survive and thrive, instead of enabling the richest to waste the resources of us all and destroy our environment.

So no, sorry, I'm not seeing the "other side" at all here. In my opinion the story you heard is just an attempt to (yet again) redirect the focus to machines "taking people's jobs", in order to distract from the real problem: our organization of society is completely wrong, to the benefit of certain rich people who willingly make others suffer for their gain.

People don't need or want work, they need resources. And we collectively have all the resources we need, it's just a problem of dividing fairly.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35195289/

Working at your job won't feed your family in the long run. Organizing will perhaps do so.

Western countries are supposedly democracies, so shouldn't it be possible to rewrite some laws for the benefit of the people? And even nondemocratic countries have been able to improve the conditions of the masses through organization. In any case, wanting the tech overlords to hire people to do customer service instead of using AI, seems like a very poor solution to the coming problems.

> At the library, the elderly archivist told him they didn’t carry it. After consulting her databases, she informed him that no other library in the world did, either.

> [...]

> Weber’s research turned up no other references to her groundbreaking conference.

> [...]

> When he received a pdf of the red book he was supposed to have plagiarised, he was struck by how many glaring errors it contained – and how many people had overlooked them.

> [...]

> Despite his vow, Stefan Weber has not retired from plagiarism hunting, but he has sworn to never again work with “grey literature”

Seems it's not the first time either, as Weber was convicted in 2024 of defamation due to "false and malicious allegations on Weber's blog".

If we didn't let people live off the work of others, as the capitalists do, then we could all rejoice in that we've found yet another way of reducing the labor required to produce stuff.

Yet, in the real world, it seems as despite the progress of technology, the labor of the everyman is constant, and only the richest get more and more shiny jets and yachts.

Nothing is stopping you from enjoying the sort of programming that you like. But I think it's healthy to accept that that style will soon not be mainstream. It will be like knitting your own clothes, and that's okay.

Regarding formal verification, it's not needed, as LLMs already make on average about as many errors as the average human programmer.

For me, 90% of programming is just a tool to get the job done. It's like a machine in a factory that spits out 50 spoons a minute, and it doesn't need to be any more beautiful than that. If you enjoy woodcarving and want to spend an hour making your own spoon, do that and don't let the existence of the machine make you feel that hobby is any less worth loving.

Like it or not, programming will become largely LLMs. And the comment you're replying to is actually making a pretty good case for where the use of LLMs is good: generating code to be formally verified.

I'd suggest you focus on actual crimes committed by the US government right now today, such as the Epstein coverup, the war in Iran, the genocide in Palestine, etc. etc. instead of making up nonsensical hypotheticals.