151–160 of 235 posts
If you're lucky or famous, you can reach HN front page and get your account reinstated. For ordinary rubes, tough luck.
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Who gets the money shouldn't be your focus, it's that there's even talk of anyone building such a system at all that should be the focus. Europe has a long history of government abuses of human rights. There's absolutely no guarantee that such a system being designed and implemented by people in Europe as opposed to the US is a safeguard against any sort of human rights issues.
What do you mean, you don't think a party named the "Alternative for Deutschland" would make benevolent use of such systems when it gets into power?
Banning the entire account rather than AI access is wildly user hostile. People have years of emails and calendars on their accounts. And then you get to fight the support bots and eventually go to the actual unofficial Google support - asking hn whether anyone knows someone with a pulse at Google.
My mom’s Gmail account got banned for no reason whatsoever last week. Since then they removed her recovery number and 2FA as they ‘looked suspicious’. Access to nearly 20 years of emails, photos and docs gone in an instant. It’s been particularly painful because she used Google to log in to everything too, including for health records that she needs. There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it and apparen…
Flagged as a potential bot, gotta tread really carefully or they'll nuke my "normal" google account too.
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Gov. logins and services should never depend on companies like Google.
our govt farms the authorization out to banks (multiple of them), seems to work well. There is also a govt auth on top of that if you don't want that.
Meaning the requirement is just Apple or Google account with extra steps.
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“… There is no way of contacting anyone at Google about it …” Of course there is: you pay your lawyer to send correspondence by registered mail. Then you have them send followup correspondence a week or so later. You will absolutely get a response.
Everyone everywhere has the money and time to keep a lawyer on retainer. This is super equitable and a reasonable way to run society
If there is any company that can "ban your account" which would result in big problems for you (because, for example, they host your E-mail which means you've just lost access to password recovery for every account you have) with no recourse or due process, you should seriously rethink your approach to your online life. Host your own E-mail, people, or use reliable E-mail providers that are not huge corpo-behemoths t…
I'm currently working on a harness and I just integrated Antigravity support through `agy`. I can't risk my main Google account getting banned so it looks like I'll be stopping this immediately. Yikes... and I was feeling good about 3.8 Flash too...
OpenCode is a good harness that works with every token vendor
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Maybe we should reframe how we see the big gate keepers like Google and Apple as they seem to be a new concept. They are not governments but have properties of them. Governments are defined as having a monopoly on violence. And we, through a lot of struggles, were able to attenuate this power such that this power was not granted to a single person alone but both distributed to the judgement of many and codified so th…
> I don't believe government regulation is the answer While I agree with where you're coming from in spirit, if you want to push this then you've got to do the work of actually coming up with workable concrete approaches rather than hand waving against a whole general category of action. The problem is that digital communications lend themselves to centralized power, and power vacuums inevitably get filed by somethin…
1. I think sometimes the shape of a technology pushes a shape of society. But there's a feedback loop here. The like 15 years of tech were dominated by ad-tech which lead to algorithmic feeds that made engagement the game. This had an accidental effect of enraging people against eachother. This all started because of how much money google started raking in money on ads - people were aware, and we copy. Tech's focus on ads was an accident of history which could have gone other ways.
Maybe this seems intuitively wrong. Like there is some evolution about how these things must go. But there are a lot of examples in my experience that people see something successful and copy it and then it turns into a cottage industry of whatever that community was.
The best way forward here is to build and be successful while still following good values. The tech moment right now is ripe for it. There's a lot of reasons why open source, local first, and catering to the end user (and not making them the product) is a great way to be successful starting a company right now. Being successful in this way and talking about it breeds more likewise.
2. From what I can tell, pessimism is actively harmful. I've spent a lot of time with Russian communities (most who left due to the war) in these past years. That got me very interested in Russian history.
The weird thing about the arc of it is how similar it has been in every government they've transformed into. The same basic values hold which leads to the same problems: centralized authority, low value for human life, and general oppression. This is true in czarist times, or soviet times, or post-soviet times. Government change doesn't change cultural norms.
That's not to say I think that they are forever doomed. But it is the general zeitgeist of society that leads to the same place. And for it to ever change, their cultural values need to change.
There's a parallel universe out there where Russia is the richest country in the world that enriches and benefits the rest of world as a partner. This is obvious given its natural resources and geographic location at the nexus between great markets, and its history of producing terrific scientists and engineers.
It is the pessimism that kills all of that ultimately leading to autocrats that live to hold on to power at the very high cost of the rest of the country. The assumption that the world will just continue to be shit is what causes this cycle of abuse. It's a very hard cycle to break out collectively once entrenched. As all collective action problems are. But my, now longwinded point, is that it is not government that is the mover of change but philosophical attitude.
Zero-sum thinking, tribalism, and low appreciation for individual self-determination turns us all into a raging bucket of crabs. There will be a king crab but his life will suck too.
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We should break these companies apart - they should not have that level of power.
Centralization of power at all levels is bad. I therefore agree in spirit. But who is the 'we' in that 'we'? If you defer to a politician, you simply centralize more power into a body of government constrained by only cultural norms and donor interests. Making a change requires the shifting of the overtone window of acceptability. At that point, it executes on it own regardless of mechanism. The cultural norms are th…
You're taking it as a premise that someone should have this power, i.e. that the centralization should actually exist.
Compare two alternatives.
One, each person has (is required to have) a single account across all services. You use the same account for the DMV, YouTube, your bank and the IRS.
Two, you have an independent account for each service. You have separate accounts with the IRS, Medicare, DMV, YouTube, etc. If one of them gets messed up or compromised it doesn't affect the others. If you have a dispute with any of them it limits the blast radius.
The first one is a dystopia regardless of who controls the single account. It's subject to abuse of power whether it's a politician or Mark Zuckerberg. So the solution is to demand the second one.