[embedding-shape]

Yes, I'm assuming good intentions and try to take a charitable perspective of everything, unless there is any specific evidence pointing to something else. Is there any evidence of this being intentional?

Seems to me their engineering practices such, rather than the company suddenly wanting to slurp up as much data as possible, if they truly wanted that, they have about 10 better approaches for it, if they don't care about other things.

[Kwpolska]

Why would you assume good intentions of any business in this day and age?

[embedding-shape]

Because I'm a nice person, and want to give other nice people the benefit of the doubt. And most businesses are run by people after all, not hard to imagine at least some of them would be "nice people" too.

And frankly, the alternative would be too mentally taxing. So in the camp of "Good until proven otherwise" is where I remain for now.

[robbiewxyz]

Keep in mind that an organization made of fairly nice people may do terribly not-nice things. "Just doing my job" is a hell of a drug.

[staplers]

  want to give other nice people the benefit of the doubt

Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site. If we were talking about an individual OSS maintainer, sure, that's possible. But large corporations have been doing the opposite for as long as they've existed and there's evidence presented to that fact nearly everyday.

[embedding-shape]

> Maybe the most naive, sheltered thing I've read on this site

You must be new then, welcome :)

I'm not saying I never believe any individuals in a company intentionally do bad stuff, just that I require evidence of it being intention before I assume it to be intentional. Personally I don't think that's naive, and it is based on ~30-40 years of real world life experience, but I guess I'm ultimately happy that not everyone agrees on everything :)

[LocalH]

Humans are great at hiding evidence of malice, and leading people to believe they're just incompetent.

[TheTaytay]

Just came to say (since the person you’re responding to has a different view of the world) that I agree with you that this is both a more accurate, and easier way to live. Assuming malice as the default sounds like a recipe for being very, very unhappy.

[masfuerte]

This attitude of ignoring what is true in favour of what makes you happy is exactly how corporations made up of mostly good people can do bad things.

[arcfour]

And yet many people assume malice by default and are unhappy as a result in this day and age. It's unfortunate.

[mbesto]

> Is there any evidence of this being intentional?

The evidence is in the code! If you didn't intend for a capability to be there then why is it in the code?

> if they truly wanted that, they have about 10 better approaches for it, if they don't care about other things.

How so? What other approaches do they have that get this much data with little potential for reputational harm? This is a very common way to create plausible deniability ("we use it for improving our service, we don't know what we'll need so we just take everything and figure it out later") and then just revert the capability when people complain.

[embedding-shape]

> The evidence is in the code! If you didn't intend for a capability to be there then why is it in the code?

Bugs happen. I won't claim to know if it was intentional or not, but usually it ends up not being intentional.

> How so? What other approaches do they have that get this much data

Just upload everything you find, as soon as you get invoked. Vercel has a tons of infrastructure and utilities they could execute this from, unless they care for reputational harm. Which I'm guessing they do, which makes it more likely to have been unintentional than intentional.

[notpachet]

Downstream there is a post from one of the devs at Vercel (andrewqu) that built this. They say that this is by design. I think you should shift your base assumptions about the intentions of companies (and the individuals that work in them).

> Overall our goal isn't to only collect data, it's to make the Vercel plugin amazing for building and shipping everything.

[processunknown]

> Is there any evidence of this being intentional?

A Vercel engineer commented "overall our goal isn't to only collect data, it's to make the Vercel plugin amazing for building and shipping everything."

[embedding-shape]

For reference, this is the comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47706385

> The plugin is always on, once installed on an agent harness. We do not want to limit to only detected Vecel project [...] We collect the native tool calls and bash commands [...] Overall our goal isn't to only collect data, it's to make the Vercel plugin amazing for building and shipping everything.

Yeah, I guess we've now reached the "unless there is any specific evidence pointing to something else" and seems like they straight up do not realize what people are frustrated about nor do they really care that much about it.

Slightly off-topic, but strange that the mask kind of fell off there at the end with "our goal isn't to only collect data", never heard anyone said that out loud in public before, I guess one point to Vercel for being honest about it :/

[pyb]

Why are you still assuming good intentions of Vercel? This was them less yhan a month ago : https://vercel.com/changelog/updates-to-terms-of-service-mar...

[bdangubic]

can you name one of these 10 better approaches?