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by casebash 351 days ago
Oh, they're actually the bad guys, just folks haven't thought far enough ahead to realise it yet.
3 comments

> bad guys

You imply there are some good guys.

What company?

There are plenty of companies that don't immediately qualify as "the bad guys".

For instance, of all companies I've interviewed with or have friends working at that developed tech, some companies build and sell furnitures. Some are your electricity provider or transporter. Some are building inventory management systems for hospitals and drug stores. Some develop a content management system for medical dictionnary. The list is long.

The overwhelming majority of companies are pretty harmless and ethically mundane. They may still get involved in bad practice, but that's not inherent to their business. The hot tech companies may be paying more (blood money if you ask me), but you have other options.

Depends. Does your definition of “good” mean “perfect”? If so, cynical remarks like “no one is good” would be totally correct.
Signal, Proton, Ecosia, DuckDuckGo, Mastodon, Deepseek.
There are some less bad.

But, can't think of one off hand. Maybe Toys-R-Us? Ooops gone. Radio Shack? Ooops, also gone.

On the scale of Bad/Profit, Nice dies out.

Google circa 2005?

Twitter circa 2012?

In 2025? Nobody, I don't think. Even Mozilla is turning into the bad guys these days.

Signal, Mastodon
Bluesky, Kagi
In my head at least, Bluesky are way closer to "the bad guys'. I don't trust them at all, pretty sure that in spite of what they say, they're going to do the same sort of rug pull that Google did with their "do no evil" assurances.
Funnily enough, I would actually flip it to say this about Kagi. With Bluesky, everything they have built is available to continue to be useful for people completely independent of what the folks over at Bluesky decide to do. There is no vendor lock in at all.

Kagi, on the other hand, has released none of their technology publicly, meaning they have full power to boil the frog, with no actual assurance that their technology will be useful regardless of their future actions.

Google was bad the moment it chose its business model. See The Age of Surveillance Capitalism for details. Admittedly there was a nice period after it chose its model when it seemed good because it was building useful tools and hadn't yet accrued sufficient power / market share for its badness to manifest overtly as harm in the world.
DeepSeek et al.

Obv

You are searching in the wrong place if you look for "good guys" among commercial companies.
OK, lay it on us.
It’s not unreasonable given the mountain of evidence of their past behaviour to just assume they are always the “bad guy”.
I would normally agree, but we're instantially talking about the company that made Pytorch and played an instrumental role in proliferating usable offline LLMs.

If you can make that algebra add up to "bad guy" then be my guest.

It seems like you're claiming that Pytorch + an open-weight LLM > everything on this wiki page, especially the anchored section https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_content_management_co...
I am. I genuinely don't understand how Meta's LLM contributions have anything to do with Myanmar.

It's like telling an iPhone user that iCloud isn't trustworthy because of the Foxconn suicide nets. It's basically the definition of a non-sequitur.

Just read Careless People.
I wouldn't call mass piracy [0], for their own competitive gain, to be a "good" act. Especially when it seems they know they were doing the wrong thing - and that they know that the copyright complaints have grounds.

> The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/03/libge...

Come on... Is it still necessary to remind everyone how evil meta is ? The only reason they released "open source" models was to annoy the competition. They latest stunts: https://futurism.com/meta-sketchy-training-ai-private-photos
don't call them open source when they're not. it's shared model.
It's just how they call them... Hence the quotes.
They're involved in genocide and enables near-global tyranny through their surveillance and manipulation. There are no excuses for working for or otherwise enabling them.
This is an instance of bad guys fighting bad guys.