Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit | causal's commentslogin

The problem is that your comment and the one you're responding to can both be true: Just because the rules are heavily enforced does not mean the right rules are in place, starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.

> starting with the fact that Meta is collecting this data to begin with.

But that can't be the problem. They're collecting the data that users send them. To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.

And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?


> To avoid collecting it despite the expressed wishes of the user, they'd need to be able to recognize it as untouchable.

> And recognizing the data is the exact problem that this African firm was hired to help with. What do you want Meta to do?

This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).

If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.


> This is written as if logically exhaustive, but it misses the very obvious alternative that none of these videos should have been reviewed by a human at all (aka no reason to "recognize it as untouchable"; they're all untouchable).

No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.


> No, taking that approach would mean that when someone sends you data that you aren't supposed to collect, you collect it anyway. This is the opposite of what was suggested above.

That was in reference to the original story, that human annotation is happening on videos that no one knew were getting reviewed. If you want to talk about not collecting at all, well:

> If you want to get stricter and talk about collecting at all, Meta already has that solution too, by leaving the video in the user's camera roll. Let the user manually add the video to the Meta AI app or whatever if they want to share it with others there.


Ok, let’s see that consent form and how explicitly it states that random call center people will possibly look at anything you record. I’ll bet you a crisp $50 it was a form designed to be as click-through-worthy as possible, being sure to not trigger the “wait, should I do this?” reflex in users, and also not loudly disclosing that you could still use the device without agreeing, if you even can, while still technically “””disclosing””” this information. The tech world has turned consent into a fucking joke.

I can't say anything about the consent form. The privacy policy for the glasses is here: https://www.meta.com/legal/ray-ban-stories/facebook-view-pri...

It incorporates by reference the general Facebook privacy policy. The relevant subsection is here: https://www.facebook.com/privacy/policy?subpage=4.subpage.12...

Facebook reserves the right to share any information they have about you with their contractors, for purposes including but not limited to:

- investigating suspicious activity

- improving the functionality of their products

- providing technical infrastructure services

- analyzing how their products are used

- conducting research


Right. The whole point is that click-through consent forms get users’ ”clear“ ”consent” legally, but not morally. They’re deliberately opaque about the implications (ask 10 users if they consider recording a video on a device voluntarily ‘sharing’ it with anybody and I’ll bet 9 will say no,) are pretty inscrutable to regular people, are designed to not raise suspicions like a social engineering attack, often mean not being able to use the product they just bought if they don’t consent, (which is manipulative as hell when you’re talking about inessential functionality like telemetry,) and extremely consequential. The only evidence you need for that is how pissed off people get when they find out what these companies actually do with that consent.

There's also a cooldown period on some deletes (like secrets) to make sure you don't accidentally brick something

Even their explanations are often confabulations. Best case they point to something wrong in your prompt or agents files, but usually it’s just noise.

"Not aliens" seems obvious but shouldn't be a basis for dismissing this either. I feel like sometimes we are so determined to dismiss aliens that we accept any plausible alternative too quickly, when there might be something else more interesting that is neither obvious nor aliens.

Aliens are not plausible.

I think you just did the thing, but with his comment

Agreed, and I don't think you understood my comment.

Perhaps you didn't write what you meant. I read it as we shouldn't think it is obvious that they aren't aliens.

> there might be something else more interesting that is neither obvious nor aliens.

I tend to think there is a really good chance all the "its aliens" phenomena are natural phenomena that we are hundreds of years away from even having the tools to study. Probably like early humans trying to guess what the sun is made of.


Why not?

Nobody has ever found the slightest smidgen of evidence of aliens, nor any plausible theory of what aliens would be like. It's about as likely as someone inventing a car that runs on water.

Plenty of evidence has been found. For one, the US government has leaked/released a video showing instant acceleration of a flying object. Nothing on earth can do that.

You're heaping one implausibility (aliens) in with another implausibility (violating the laws of physics) making the combined plausibility indistinguishable from zero.

It's not necessary for me to debunk your theory. It is incumbent upon you to prove it valid.


While it's always good to elevate evidence-based knowledge above "woo" or "belief", it's not healthy to close your mind off completely against anything that isn't currently proven. We might know that we don't know a lot of things, but the most interesting thought experiments happen in the area that concerns the things we don't know that we don't know.

One can go to /r/UFOs and see plenty of "interesting thought experiments" happening in that area, and while that might be entertaining, it isn't compelling.

I think closing one's mind off 99.999% to "it's aliens" is perfectly healthy and justified. When you remove the folklore, memes, psyops and apply Occaam's Razor to the "evidence" and sort out mistaken natural phenomena, misinterpreted data, classified but terrestrial technology and outright hoaxes, you aren't left with much of anything, and certainly nothing definite. There is no reason to assume the phenomenon mentioned in the linked paper demonstrates the presence of alien spacecraft but the UFO community is going to run with it anyway.

Call me when David Grusch comes through with that "catastrophic disclosure" we were promised or when Lue Elizondo can tell the difference between a starship and a chandelier. This is just Bob Lazar and Majestic-12 all over again.


When an engineer tells me he built a car that runs on water, he'd better bring some pretty amazing evidence. And no, I'm not going to waste time reading his paper looking for the inevitable flaw, either.

I've heard "evidence" of aliens my entire life. Guess how many panned out. Zero. But that never seems to discourage anyone from believing that an artifact on a photo must have the most implausible explanation ever - aliens!

Where do you draw the line? Time travel? Teleportation? Astrology? Fortune tellers? Razor blade sharpening? Reincarnation?


... wouldn't this be a slight smidgen of evidence?

Nope

Sorry to bring the bad news.

You seem to be going off the title which is plainly incorrect and not what the paper says. The paper demonstrates HOW different models can learn similar representations due to "data, architecture, optimizer, and tokenizer".

"How Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representations" (actual title) is distinctly different from "Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representations" - the latter implying some immutable law of the universe.


> latter implying some immutable law of the universe

I think the implications is slightly weaker -- it implies some immutable law of training datasets?


I don't understand your argument

"How X happens" still implies that X happens, just adds additional explanation on top


"How" = it can happen

Without "How" = it will happen


Title is editorialized and needs to be fixed; the paper does not say what this title implies, nor is that the title of the paper.

HN automatically removes the word "How" from the beginning of titles. I suspect this title is one instance of that

Unfortunate if so, but I'm finding plenty of counterexamples in the past day alone: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=last24h&page=0&prefix=true...

Posters have a short window to edit the title back.

The exact phrase appears in the title. There is a title length limit. In this case, I don't think that it is wrong to pick the most interesting piece of that title that fits in the limit.

9 nines found somewhere after the decimal point if you measure with enough precision

Yeah! It's such a delightful site, I love these sorts of odes to a niche passion I had not yet learned to appreciate.

This is an interesting topic but reporting on what some random people typed or clicked on social media is such a shallow basis for news. It's a subjective narrative of a subjective trend.

One good thing about the destruction of Twitter was that there were less of these "some 'people' on the Internet are mad about a thing" articles.

Once again random tweets from insiders being the only clues we have to what Anthropic actual policy is

you could try customer support, that chat bot will happily loop you with some more non answers, but try to make you feel good about those non answers :)

Consider applying for YC's Summer 2026 batch! Applications are open till May 4

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: