So are serial killers. A small minority of people can affect the lives and health of a lot more. A handful of people roaring through a neighborhood at night like this can mean nobody ever gets a proper night's sleep.
If someone plays with a laser in your eye, being told "it's just light, it's one guy, can you just ignore him, he'll grow out of it", won't be a consolation. You'll want him stopped.
> Most people grow out of it after one car like that.
> hands off managing Valve for precisely this reason
Remember that this means he's not the "hands" but he's still very much the head. You'll only know what Valve really is without him when he's no longer around.
> which seems to imply that by 80 life is over and not worth living.
That's a big leap you made. But I'll tell you what, this is a question you'll be able to answer when you are in your 80s, not your parents. I have a strong feeling you'll understand what I mean without needing to jump to conclusions.
Don't you miss the simpler times when people could just frantically applaud Musk's genius and not be inconvenienced by the truth of how big of a role deception, grifting, and outright fraud played in his success?
> society thinks 80-year olds are physically less fit than they are in reality
If anything the bias is the other way around. You get to see all the 80 year olds who are fit enough to interact with society. You never see the the ones who are wasting away in their homes, hospices, and hospitals. Being old and needy is an invisibility cloak.
> I also think 80-year olds are influenced (even if slightly) by that
That "slightly" is doing a lot of heavy lifting. At that age people care about society only in the "decent human being" kind of way, not in the "let me please some strangers" kind.
That's good to hear but that wasn't really the topic of the conversation. We were discussing people with life threatening illness where the treatment severely lowers quality of life for a very uncertain outcome.
Do you think the "things to look forward to" would incentivize your parents to focus on clinging to life at the expense of drastically increased suffering and plummeting quality of life, or on maximizing the quality they still have at the expense of losing some months or years?
Even if you are still in good condition overall, at that age you know you're probably running your last lap and the things to look forward to are nowhere near as satisfying as they were even a few decades earlier. You can always find joy in the little things but they're always shadowed by other inevitabilities.
By 80 most people have reconciled with the idea that they don't have too many years left even in the best of conditions. There's no hope of extending life, and there's little to look forward to, they already lived through all the important milestones they could realistically see. Quality is all that's left to hope for.
At 50 they still can still hope for recovery and a life beyond that. They have a lot of moments and milestones ahead of them, at least with family and loved ones - see their kids graduate, get married, or have their own children. So if the hope is stronger than the pain, they'll sacrifice the quality of life.
> Apart from steam, I don't think I've heard anything but bad news from modern consoles.
Gabe is in his mid 60s, I'm prepared that in the next decade or so there will be a change of guard at Valve and the slow train of enshittification will get moving.
P.S. There's been a lot of groupthink and bandwagoning for Valve, ignoring all the dirt under the rug. But at the end of the day, by comparison, they are the best behaving in the field.
> Is there evidence that European courts have sided with that?
Is there evidence of the contrary? Maybe any store can just delete your personal data right after charging your card and claim GDPR prevents them from shipping your product.
Silly arguments work both ways. You just picked the one that confirms your bias.
GDPR under no circumstances forces processors to delete everything, it defines legitimate interest. Retaining a person's purchases is as legitimate as it gets so the data can be retained for as long as the purchase is valid. And the license itself isn't even the user's personal data, it's just a license, so Sony could give the option to export that license to be used later - even in a cryptographically secure format that can only work if e.g. the account is created with the same email address. If they delete the personal data and throw out the baby with the water, it's not GDPR forcing them to do it.
Look, first you were wrong with the confidence of an LLM and claimed an argument that was literally in the definition of copyright fair use had absolutely no relevance whatsoever for copyright. Even now you are surprised that I invoked fair use on reading a book. That was to respond to someone who "brilliantly" brought up reading Harry Potter [0] as evidence that the law allows any extent of "memorization" and reproduction of copyrighted material.
Then you switched to a barrage of questions on the premise of words in my comments that were neither written nor implied. If you muddy the waters just enough maybe everyone gets lost in there.
> The google books case and the google thumbnails case shows that you can make near verbatim copies of works at scale and still be considered fair use
Now maybe we agree "reading Harry Potter and remembering some lines" is indeed fair use, but you decided my argument is still not relevant to create a distinction between "reading a book" and "feeding it all into an LLM" because of an vaguely related exception. For better or worse thumbnails are a copyright violation according to some courts [1]. But looking at the big "Books" decision (this is the one you meant?), did you check out the court's opinion [2]? Why would you believe the two cases are substantially similar? Just because they're both big tech? Just for yourself, from the definition of fair use and referencing that opinion, do you see any significant differences between "Google Books" and "big LLM"?
> You can't then use that as a premise to say that the courts are tilted towards ai companies
The highest bidder is what I said.
> Not to mention it's questionable how ai companies were suddenly able to corrupt all the judges, some of which were appointed decades ago, even though they only got rich a couple of years ago.
You're getting creative" about what I wrote. "AI companies"? They are just the big corrupting agent of the day, and nobody with deep enough pockets had "revolutionized" the legal areas they're working in to this degree until now. Tech in general has been doing it for a few decades already. Other incredibly powerful industries have been doing that in their respective areas for even longer. "Suddenly"? The US justice system has worked exactly like this for so many decades when it came to the interest of very deep pockets. "All judges"? I said "the system" because all judges don't have the ultimate power to ultimately decide on things.
I'm surprised at your surprise that reading a book is fair use, and that courts have been "captured" and beholden to economic interests above justice for so long we forgot when it started.
> None of those are relevant factors when it comes to copyright law.
And yet they very much are. US copyright law has the concept of "fair use" in 17 U.S. Code § 107 [0]. I'll paste here for your benefit, #3 is the one I referenced as most obvious but #1 and #4 are also very relevant:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
Naturally remembering some parts of a legally purchased book verbatim is fair use. "Memorizing" the entire library obtained via torrents and incorporating that in a commercial product that can output all that content doesn't sound like fair use to me.
The US justice system is too captured and corrupt at this point to take as reference because decisions there are bought by the highest bidder. But for the purpose of this discussion let's not play dumb for the benefit of trillion dollar corporations.
Did I? And who would this person I attacked for leaving Google be? My comment's right up there, feel free to just copy/paste the "you're shit because you left Google" part. It's fine, don't scramble, that's not the point.
Good on them to leave, better late than never I guess. In you frenzy you ignored that the point almost everyone on this side of the fence makes, this thread included, isn't "bad that you left", it's "don't pretend it was morally better when you joined". Because that's how all these people like to wash the stench and paint themselves in a better light. When (generic) you started a decade ago you had to wade through what in 2017 was neck deep shit, looking for that paycheck. Googlers of today also have to go neck deep, just in what 2026 defines as shit [0].
> You’re not influencing anyone’s behavior nor meaningfully educating anyone. You’re basking in your feeling of moral superiority while you look down your nose.
My friend, it's just me, you, and the other googler here on a submission marked as dupe and already in the HN cemetery. I wasn't putting on a show for the world. I know you are personally invested in defending your choices at any cost lest your internal moral framework collapses. Your livelihood and self worth depend on that. And I know I'm not educating you because every one of the people who lies to themselves that "they did it better in their time" will still lie to themselves for that paycheck in the future. Every few years they have to explain how it wasn't like that at the beginning, when it totally was for anyone with eyes and not just a money counter. No rando on the internet will ever educate you differently.
And believe me when I tell you I will never feel morally superior to anyone working for Google and friends for two reasons. I've probably done worse in my life before I've done better, and bragging about being morally superior to a generic googler is a victory without glory.
[0] But I'll leave you with what I told googler #2 earlier:
> You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for "moral inflation".
> It was different 9 years ago, in ways that are specifically described in the blog post you're ignoring
I'm not OP but I'm not ignoring anything. In 2017 Google was doing just as many "questionable" things for that time as today. Googlers at the time were embracing doing the shitty thing of the day. All that happened in the meantime is that Google did even shittier things that made those older ones look tame by comparison.
By the time you were at Google the company had a litany of reported concerns. Look at them [0], look at how many happened before 2017. And that's just one list, only about very public privacy concerns.
You know how $1 in 2017 is $1.37 in 2026? Well it's the same with character in a society that just degrades morality. What looks like an unacceptably high moral debt today in absolute figures is probably the exact same debt you took on a decade ago if you adjust for inflation.
> I don't think you and these others are commenting in good faith.
An entirely expected yet still disappointing cop-out.
> You can’t hold together your premise for 2 sentences
Or maybe you were so eager to lob a snarky remark that you failed to put in your full attention and intellectual capacity to understand what I said. See, this is how you assume good faith. So let's run through it again with clarifications that would pierce even a googler's shield, shall we?
>> morally bankrupt
...Is what I said. Morality is a sliding window, it moves with time to follow the tolerance of society. But when in the past you supported something that was outside that window for that time you can't come a decade later and over-impose today's window of morality to make it look like "we were pretty swell back then by today's standards". Morality by comparison isn't morality. Otherwise all you'd ever have to do is wait for someone to do worse and then you're Mother Theresa.
Google will do worse next year, and even worse the year after that. Because every generation of its employees see dollar signs and embrace doing the shitty thing of the day. Today's generation implements Android lockdowns, first party malware, more spying, you name it. Even the googler in the submission thinks this is a sign of moral bankruptcy. But ten years from now when Google will have promoted through a few more shittiness levels this same generation of googlers will come out to say "this is not the company it was x years ago". And if I'm still alive maybe I'll tell them the same thing as today: they went morally bankrupt when they embraced doing the shit of the day, not when that finally became tame by comparison.
> I am not personally answerable for all the faults of a megacorp
It's not very fair for you to answer for the faults of the megacorp but to be honest you kind of put yourself in that position when you defended the indefensible.
For all intents and purposes, looking from a user/customer perspective, Google is just as morally bankrupt today as it was 9 years ago. And that's what really matters. You can rationalize it, you can pretend that you couldn't see the trend, that it didn't smell as bad back then, but at the end of the day what Google is doing today is just as morally acceptable as the things they were doing in 2017 were at the time. We just pushed the baseline down and normalized the ever worsening behaviors.
So let's not judge 2017 with the eyes from 2026 when the things done back then look more palatable. If you were to ask 2017 me about Google you'd get the same answer as today. Then again I wasn't paid by Google so I could afford to give that answer.
> There is a product development strategy (I'm not sure if there's a formal name for it) where you're given a lead on a finite-but-large supply of parts you can acquire for absurdly cheap; so you buy the batch;
This is how Aldi and Lidl fueled their growth. Instead of focusing on thousands of different product offerings, they looked at a narrower selection of products (~20 times smaller than their higher end competition) they can buy in very high volumes at substantial discounts. Their offering is defined by what is available for them at the time to buy under those conditions. Instead of ensuring a specific product is always available on the shelves, they might just stock a different product at specific times.
This is less obvious when 90% of their sales are under their private label but the supply behind it is whatever they can negotiate for a better deal.
Their "middle aisle" is the perfect example of this, it really just stocks a mix of whatever is the cheap product of the week and may no longer be available next week at the same price so they stock something else.
So are serial killers. A small minority of people can affect the lives and health of a lot more. A handful of people roaring through a neighborhood at night like this can mean nobody ever gets a proper night's sleep.
If someone plays with a laser in your eye, being told "it's just light, it's one guy, can you just ignore him, he'll grow out of it", won't be a consolation. You'll want him stopped.
> Most people grow out of it after one car like that.
Someone else grows into it.