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Comment by dang

6 days ago

[stub for offtopicness]

p.s. come on you guys - this is not what HN is for. You may not owe $megacorp better but you owe this community better if you're participating here.

Feels like the premise for a spy comedy with a protagonist whose mind can’t be read.

When the bad guys try they just get the lyrics to Yoko Ono music.

It'll be a cold day in hell before Meta gets access to my brainwaves. Good heavens, can you imagine?

  • I'm glad that, with any luck, I'll be dead before this kind of thing is commonplace.

  • 2034: brainwave readers are now production-ready

    2035: every phone comes with one so you can can do things without clicking any yucky buttons

    2036: China mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and promote social harmony. EU and US condemn. the media condemns.

    2037: the EU mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and fight malinformation. the media applauds.

    2038: the US, ruled by the blue party, mandates phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat white nationalism. the red party condemns.

    2039: the US, now ruled by the red party, abolishes the previous law and introduces a new one, mandating phone manufacturers to capture and submit brain data to the state to protect the children and combat illegal immigration. the blue party condemns.

@dang How is this offtopic?

Meta has shown remarkable disregard to users' and employees' privacy.

Why should that not come up when discussing an entirely new dystopian technology that allows them to invade privacy at scale?

  • The topic is research into brain-wave decoding.

    To take some specific piece of research going on in one corner of $BigCorp, and tar it with the brush of general sentiment about $BigCorp, is a classic example of generic tangent: where the topic goes from something specific-and-more-interesting, to something generic-and-more-indignant. We've learned over the years that this is exactly the wrong direction for HN threads to head in. Note this, from https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:

    "Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

    • It's not a 'general sentiment' or tangent though, it's specifically THE technology that has the potential to make privacy nonexistent.

      Funded by the company that in the recent past, got exposed trying to track employees computer interactions and grabbing screens. Not long before that, it was leaked that employees and contractors were watching videos recorded from meta/rayban smartglasses.

      I'm a little bit baffled by the defense here. The point of having guidelines is to use your judgement when applying them.

      1 reply →

Any minute: wear it permanently to sell training data on LLMs. Take an audited IQ test to negotiate your rate.

Better than text-stripping the internet - this thing will soon be pulling the logits as well.

Coming soon to a Meta office near you: brain-scanning to make sure employees are focused, happy, and productive!

There are no layoffs in Ba Sing Se.

  • If this happens, I'll be listening to music with the most annoying lyrics on repeat.