pessimizer

Please release more fake polls. Polling is almost always an attempt to influence elections, which is why they press release them. The results are race-based astrology. There's little reason to believe that fake polls will be statistically less accurate than real ones. People pretend like the prediction markets are news, and they're just a group of degenerate gamblers with money to burn who are summarizing what they're reading on twitter.

It is insane that Democratic candidates are dropping out of races as a result of reading fake polls on twitter. If their candidacy could be destroyed by that, it shouldn't have been started in the first place. Also, typical authoritarian solution to try to figure out how to eliminate or prosecute fake polls, rather than to end the substitution of triangulation for belief. It would be wonderful if someone could believe in something other than winning. You might win; people are starved for candidates who believe in something other than personal enrichment.

You can't libel the general public. I can lie about whatever poll I want, as long as I'm not selling you anything (which would be fraud.) Politicians can't be prosecuted for the promises they made during the campaign that they immediately abandoned after being elected, but I, a random citizen, am held to a higher standard about my pronouncements of the opinions of the randomly chosen and race-weighted public? Get out of here...

This is because they are baffling. I still don't understand BLM. Those women came out of nowhere; everybody organic who initiated the initial Ferguson protests was executed, and the media went all in. I am a black American and I know very few black Americans who participated, but tons of white liberal types. All of the black American people I know of who tried to get involved and started their own local chapters of BLM got no support or money from the national organization, other than disapproval of protests that they wanted to do on their own about local issues that they cared about. The national organization was drowning in institutional money.

Everything about it was just bizarre. I still can't deny that it was a color revolution to unseat Trump, and I wish I could.

Also, I still have a weird video of some strange masked and "tactically dressed" man who walked into the middle of the protests in some town and just started breaking the windows of businesses (an Auto Center iirc) without speaking to anyone who was actually protesting (peacefully), while they were yelling at him to stop. He then just leaves, and while one guy is walking after him and questioning him, he threatens the guy until he stops following.

There's also the weird French stuff where "black bloc" people are doing damage or in one case throwing a flash bang grenade, police rush in, a few words are exchanged, and then this "black bloc" leave with the police.

The blaming of the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs is the real conspiracy. What it looks like to me is that people may be engineering protests to justify crackdowns, or turning existing protests violent in order to shut them down. The masking that has been done since the "black bloc" started ruining protests and escalated greatly after covid just makes it too easy. Also the fact that these protests are generally slacktivist and not organized, so people don't expect to know each other. They get messages on social media that say that there's going to be a protest about some subject, and they feel obligated to show up - but they have no connection to each other.

It's weird that that's how it's expected to be now. This "protest" ritual has gone to the limits of artificiality. The "No Kings" "protests" in the US are directly run by Democratic contractors, and they text spam relentlessly from voter lists (I've gotten dozens, if not a hundred or two.) It isn't like grassroots people get together, discuss their grievances, and decide to coordinate a protest. It's completely top-down, coordinated with elections, and has no articulable grievances, just slogans.

Alienating, isolating, dislocating people, and shattering communities and families has resulted in people who are completely subject to centralized control. The state thinks the most dangerous issue in the world is that people might be able to speak to each other in an unmediated fashion. Can a state like that ever be happy about family, friendship, or community?

Or it will just park in the lot behind the jail, after safety legislation is passed that requires all new cars to double as jail cells.

Your hearing will be done through Android Auto/CarPlay directly with GPT-17.2 StellarumThalamum.

This violates the RICO statute; the entire organization was aware of and relied on the widespread and organized violation of copyright laws as the basis of their entire business. It is a criminal organization, should be seized, and everyone in the chain of command that was aware of or executed on this plan should be tried criminally.

I do not think training an AI model is Fair Use, because LLM "training" is being used as a metaphor for building a matrix with a computer. Only people and animals train and learn; computers run statistical problems over input, which in this case was illegal input acquired by humans.

But it does not matter whether training LLMs is Fair Use, "Fair Use" is a strange and arbitrary legal term that can be expanded to include AI if we wish. This was organized crime whether or not LLM training on copyrighted materials is fair use. It was organized crime whether or not they planned to use them for AI at all.

AI is irrelevant. They could have trained it on GPL'd or MIT code (as long as they then distributed according to the terms of the licenses), and works in the public domain. They could have gotten what they were doing explicitly declared to be fair use by the Library of Congress, and then purchased the materials, like they are belatedly doing now. It wasn't necessary to violate copyright law to prove the technology. They could have proved the technology, then asked for copyright law to be clarified, and licensed huge volumes of works from the very few publishers we have left. Becoming a criminal organization was an explicit choice they made, and they discussed its illegality, and even the risk that it would be discussed on HN, which might inspire prosecution.

The reason they are not being prosecuted is because the rich are beyond the law; prosecutors will not prosecute them. The RICO statute is clear, and explicitly mentions copyright violation.

We can sentence the executives harshly, but go easy on the lower level people, because they are intelligent and valuable to advance the technology. The executives aren't necessary for anything. They're currently running finance scams that are extremely dangerous for the economy. They belong in prison to protect the public.

This is an option that people (real people, with names) have, and are not taking. When they say that they care about law and order, and are worried about the behavior of these companies, they are lying. Trump could literally nationalize them for what they've done. They're vulnerable to any state's attorney who has any author in their state whose book was downloaded. Libgen/Annas-archive would have been the most important honeypot in history.

The guy who was killed was a propagandist. Also his children were killed.

> The guy got more chances than the average US resident who would get shot by the cops for less

Using violations of rights to justify more violations of rights. This makes a lot of sense!

Weird you don't feel the same obligation. Recommending more of the same is always safe somehow, even when it continually fails. The ability of certain people to implicitly trust the system that is now headed by a wrestling valet game show host is infinite.

Will you still believe in it when he gets a third term?

> covert both sides argument

As if somebody should be embarrassed about this. Extreme partisans think "both sides are doing it" is a logical fallacy, because of course their side isn't doing whatever you're talking about, if it's bad.

You're being very kind. Many people in Congress know that their base is overwhelmingly against this, so the corrupt ones (the vast majority, especially any with good committee assignments) vote against it only if they're sure there's absolutely no chance of it failing. Whether or not they're currently in power doesn't matter. There's horsetrading even between parties to make sure donor/intelligence-supported bills will pass, but also to give people whose elections might depend on it the opportunity to vote against them.

The last thing that Republicans want is another America First libertarian troublemaker in Congress, and the last thing that Democrats want is some lecturing lefty. It's about business, not beliefs. Also, it's probably increasingly about blackmail.

When this math somehow fails (which happens every once and a while if somebody surprises them), it throws everything into chaos.

The problem with AI on Wikipedia is that the reason I've noticed it is because I've just seen blatantly incorrect stuff, mentioned breezily in passing, with no references. It's shitting up a thing that was already pretty easy to shit up if you had a motive, and your changes often wouldn't be noticed for months or years if an article wasn't well-trafficked.

AI doesn't even have a motive, it's just dumb - so you can't even track the mistakes to specific motivated users or networks of users. There's no way to clean it up.

Although I have to agree with you (probably, because I'm going to put words in your mouth) that this is a basic problem with wikipedia and how it is structured and governed, rather than a problem with AI. Anybody could always just put nonsense anywhere at any time; AI is just a chaos monkey. Wikipedia can't rely on groupthink to maintain itself, it has not worked and will not work, chaos monkeys are needed.

> an increase in efficiency

An increase in efficiency in and of itself, maybe, but there is no such thing. The increase in efficiency has largely come from deskilling the job. Deskilling the job makes the employees time less valuable, because they can be substituted for another more easily.

[edit: it's important to mention that this is compatible with programmer ego trips. I consider myself a reasonably good programmer and I've been doing it for a long time, but AI has made me far more eligible for jobs in languages that I have never used on platforms that I have never worked with.]

But another factor is that just because you can do work faster doesn't mean there's more work to do, so if you were hitting all your deadlines before with two employees, now you can fire one. Which one that will be is the result of a reverse wage auction.

The history isn't particularly long.

Back to the office is always an excuse for fairly indiscriminate downsizing. If they find you indispensable, they'll just make an exception for you.

For others, there's the buyout. They're telling you to do something you don't want to do, and at the same time telling you they'll pay you not to do it (and quit.)

It's a merger, they promised to do this. No matter what fake antitrust settlements and judges said. They're already deeply in the hole valuation-wise, they aren't going to be able to downsize their way out of it. It's the least they can do.

I'm actually curious if the plan is to have it take out a bunch of loans, strip the thing of assets, and dump it.

> It's crazy that we put that stuff into balloons for fun

We barely do anymore; one of the main reasons the Party City chain went bankrupt was the sharp rise in the cost of helium. The other two were covid and private equity of course lol.

> The following year, the owners had Party City borrow $338 million to pay themselves a dividend.

Random people that you're expecting to look stuff up for you aren't customer support; they're comparable to 404 Media, except they don't even make a living from views. They're simply random people that you're taking advantage of.

People linked you to lmgtfy because they were saying you were lazy or stupid, not because they weren't going to support their products. They hadn't sold you anything.

You can't blame Flock. They're making the very safe bet that cops are very, very stupid and have a lot of xenophobic, conspiratorial theories about crime.

Meanwhile, Flock is in and of itself a conspiracy. The only way to fight (imagined, arbitrary) conspiracies is (of course) to conspire. They won't fight fair, so you can't either.

It's important to mention that mainstream liberals and European radical NATO centrists believe exactly the same thing, just aimed at the people who they're afraid of. Neither side, the social liberal centrists or the anti-social liberal centrists, is going to slow the adoption of Flock at all. Eventually somebody is going to drag out Obama (at significant cost) to defend it in some commencement speech, and he will also blame the Russian Chinese anti-Semitic mullahs, and youthful idealism. To "No Kings" liberals, this will be completely different.

It's a false equivalence, they'll say. Somebody taught them that a few years ago. Then they'll say something about "whataboutism," and finish up by explaining how two things can be true at the same time.

AAVE was an awful term, but "Regional African English" and "Afro-English" is even worse if you're trying to talk about black Americans.

Are you talking about the English of Africans in different parts of Africa? If so, are you including the voices of white and Mediterranean Africans?

I'm confused. As a black American with roots (going back a couple centuries) in the Ark-La-Tex, I would think our dialects would be covered under "Southern American," which makes me suspect that you were referring to me with all of those references to another continent.

The left is supposed to be about police reform. A lot of people in this thread seem to be reacting like a hit dog simply to the phrase "hyper left leaning."

If you identify as being on the left, you should identify with wanting the police to answer FOIA requests, and you should be happy to be associated with this.

Like another commenter, I've also been on the other side, and there was open discussion about how to delay responses or leave incriminating information out of them.

I remember specific examples of figuring out spurious legal objections to raise that would immediately fall if challenged, but would take months to challenge. I also remember people using records retention policies as 1) an excuse to destroy records that were still held, and pretending like they had been destroyed in the past, and 2) actively changing them in order to destroy things that had been requested, but maybe the request had been withdrawn to be resubmitted. I, as the IT person, remember being asked to come up with technical reasons why something could not be done, or would be expensive to do.

Related: I remember my innocence as an eager little guy in one of his earliest professional jobs, installing a system that would make everybody's email easily searchable if a subpoena or a FOIA had to be responded to, and the sheer panic and chaos that ensued. The solution was to install a chat that instantly dumped history and was not searchable, and to have a lot more face to face meetings.

Hanlon's Razor is a corruption enabler that only resonates because people confuse it with Occam's Razor. Occam was a logician; Hanlon's Razor was some bullshit submitted to a jokebook, and nobody knows who "Hanlon" is supposed to refer to.

> Inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones, or ca. 1930s or 1950s America about the instate the draft, don't tend to do well. That isn't a trait generally selected for.

I have no idea what you mean by this. I'm pretty sure that inquisitive 13-year olds in war zones do as well or better than dimwits in war zones, and I'm absolutely sure it's selected for. I don't know why you think stupidity is an advantage in a dangerous or difficult situation.

Too many resources are invested in children who would do well no matter what situation you put them in; imo as a retroactive justification for withdrawing resources for racist reasons. You'd think if you had an intellectually inferior group (whether genetically or due to environmental reasons), you'd invest most of your resources into them - but instead it's generally used as an excuse to withdraw resources.

The biggest secret when it comes to selective schools and universities, is that you don't have to do anything to a smart kid in order to graduate a smart kid. If the reputation of your institution is based on the achievements of its alumni rather than the improvement of its students, selecting for smart kids is loading the dice. They'd do well without you.

That's basically the model of the modern private university: give full scholarships to really talented kids (who have already proved their superiority in often very adverse circumstances), and charge the sky to the idiot children of the upper middle class, who gain prestige through paying for the credentials that the talented were paid to take.

> A hyper-inquisitive 13-year old in a peaceful, poor country won't do as well as the same individual in a rich one.

I have no idea how you've decided this. I don't even know what you think a rich country is. If it's rich with no class mobility and no access to higher education or reasonable subsistence for the poor, he'll do badly. If he's in a peaceful poor country without an overbearing class structure, where he can learn in his leisure and his belly is always full, especially now with communication the way it is, he'll be able to do whatever he wants to do. The problem might be class war zones, not war zones. An bright poor kid is running the risk of getting shot or disappeared for doing his best to improve the lives of the people around him in a way the bosses don't like.

I never had a good math teacher in college that graded homework. The good ones told you which problems to do, and they told you that you'd be doomed on the exams if you didn't do them. They also only assigned the problems that had answers in the book.

Making homework a part of your grade is like making attendance a part of your grade. It's something that teachers who aren't capable of teaching do, so they can give students who haven't learned a thing reasonable looking grades. Students have always cheated when homework was graded, it's just that AI makes it so flagrant that it can't be conveniently ignored.

I'm overestimating people, though. There are clearly teachers who are still pretending like students don't cheat when it's like five clicks now. It was much, much harder when tons were still cheating half a century ago. You had to actually meet each other. Admitting that you're collecting a check for nothing is tough, especially because now you're going to have to work.

Who am I kidding? Teachers will just start talking about how grading is bad or racist or something, or saying that using AI is actually better preparation for the future. Hell, they should have done that half a century ago: in real life, being able to cheat well is the best skill.

> But you can still get a house twice as big as what your parents had at your age in a new subdivision in Tennessee.

Tennessee suburbs are eyewateringly expensive. Your parents made a living wage at a job that doesn't exist in the US anymore, and definitely isn't located in Tennessee anymore. The mean homebuyer is older than your parents.

You can get a cheap house in the middle of nowhere where all the industry was destroyed for imports, services destroyed for outsourcing and the retail was destroyed for the internet and big box chains, if you are a wealthy person who works remotely or at one of the local health insurance conglomerates.

If you are not a wealthy person who works remotely, you can't live there anymore; it is not cheap for you. In fact, all of your family (who has lived here, near each other, for generations) has to figure out where in the country they will have the best chance to feed themselves (or whether they should leave the country) and move there. Now, they're trying to get by without the support of each other, making them more alienated, isolated and dependent on corporations and the state.

There are natural limits to this sort of evil. People won't starve to death quietly.

> The old single family home next to the new apartment building gains land value.

And this is why large property owners fund YIMBY organizations. I have no idea how they've managed to convince people of normal intelligence that relaxing restrictions on zoning lowers property values, and that's why the selfish senior citizens who stubbornly continute to live in the homes they've lived in for decades are against it. It doesn't make any mathematical sense at all. They just are willing to believe anything that promises to give them what they want, which is other people's homes who don't want to sell and who don't want to live next to 900 people on a tiny lot with no parking.

The most insulting part is when they pretend that this is racism, while YIMBYs have been gentrifying black people from the neighborhoods they've been in for centuries, into the woods. The reason they're so frustrated about senior citizens in San Francisco or wherever is because they can defend themselves, while black people can't. Black people are being annihilated from urban neighborhoods; you're seeing them replaced by rent-stressed immigrants who don't have families or connections in the country to retreat to.

> Building more housing is a valuation win-win, the pie just grows.

No, it's a win for people who sell. It's not a win for people who want to keep their homes, and their communities. It's a win for alienation and cultural destruction, pushed by people who either have no roots, or who keep their roots safely protected a thousand miles away.

This is not "software," this is video games. Video game nonsense is such a drop in the bucket, and it matters orders of magnitude less than video game addicts think it does. I could maybe understand it being mentioned in comparison to the film industry - they're both artistic creations that require a bunch of work by large teams. But that's also what's exceptional about them - 1) they mostly fail, and 2) they require expensive marketing and distribution.

When one guy (this guy certainly isn't the first or the best) makes a thing that manages to catch fire a bit, the big players can simply buy it. They can even force a sale, or otherwise refuse to let it be widely distributed or marketed. That's the stick, the carrot is that if it's genuinely resonant with people, they can just throw you life-changing money (i.e. pocket change for them) and generate billions for themselves.

Music barely democratized when production got in reach of the masses; as film production got cheaper, quality indy films became fewer and harder to find, and never in a theater; and as video games become cheaper to produce, Steam can make or break any of them at will, and do the same as any other monopolistic distributor - if they don't, it is by choice. If it is by choice, the person who made that choice will eventually be replaced with somebody who mocks that choice, because they will pay the most.

"Efficiency" doesn't benefit individuals at all without antitrust; it is extracted like any other value. One thing that changed about the music industry is that when it was a thousand companies, you could just bring talent and they would put you where you would earn them money - now that all media is owned by a few companies you are literally expected to bring a hit album to a record company before you get signed, and getting signed then gets you access to the media, wide distribution, and venues. They don't really even pay you, you pay them. Since they control distribution, they don't even really need talent - they can just imitate it. The reason they're giving you a deal is in order to tax your success.

The impact of the Industrial Revolution was that people were forced off of their farms, which were merged into super farms, exactly as they expected. They went from working for themselves for six hours a day, and living in relative comfort, to working for 14 hours a day and living in crime and disease ridden tenements. Their lifespans decreased by a decade. The air, land and food was poisoned. They likely died before they saw any improvements in this, and those improvements eventually came from anarchist and communist unions, and their own education about how they were being used. Then those unions and organizations were crushed, and their names were cursed; even somehow the word referring to the members of the "People's Party" became an epithet to throw at people who thought government had a responsibility to the people. Term limits were introduced so they wouldn't have a president like FDR again, although FDR's reforms ironically served to weaken the unions that saved them, so they could be destroyed completely subsequently in the name of war.

Even today, people say "you can't yell fire in a crowded theater" and don't know that it is something a judge said about a left-winger passing out antiwar pamphlets. They just repeat it, because they heard it. That's what happens when someone controls distribution.

I believe in efficiency. Efficiency under capitalism without effective devices to maintain competitive markets is simply more value for the parasites to extract.

Everybody found it easy to imagine the impact of the Industrial Revolution. That's why they broke frames.

This outlet is so transparent. The reasons for the rise in inequality since 1980, and the insane corporate profits that are going to the people who own equity and capital are not ACA subsidies, the Iran war and fucking tariffs.

Trump, Trump, Trump. Vote him out and we'll make sure that ACA continues, the Iran "conflict" is fought responsibly, and free trade will never be questioned again. This will somehow help income inequality in ways that I'm not going to tell you.

edit: and I'll add a reminder here that no one ever projected that ACA would lower healthcare costs - only that it would slow the growth in healthcare costs, which it managed to do for maybe three years. The purpose of ACA was to get single-payer people to shut up, and to institutionalize a bunch of insurance companies by promising them a consistent income.

Another reminder that "The Conversation" is a website of completely shady origins and financing that was pushed into the conversation out of nowhere. It licenses all of its articles creative commons so they can be mirrored on multiple websites, and relies on being pushed by social media. They're written by no one with any reputation to protect. It's Radio Free Europe level propaganda, but without honestly announcing itself and with no loyalty to any particular country.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conversation_(website)

Last reminder, Sunday is when political propaganda articles get pushed on HN, because it is a low-traffic day. There is not a single interesting thing in this article; there is nothing "you might not expect" except the brazenness in trying to assign 50 years of neoliberalism to Trump in the end.

Except LLMs are "System I" writers. You'll be more satisfied with what they've written if you haven't really understood it and just let it wash over you.

It only falls apart when you actually try to figure out what's being said.

I find the most passionate advocates of LLMs right now to be the people who are

1) also the most passionate advocates of not reading or reviewing their output in any detail. They seem to be actively annoyed by the idea that people think they should. And

2) people who have a strange theory of mind about LLMs that excuses the low quality of their output. I've heard many times people advancing the theory that LLMs are coding in a particular way because the way that LLMs code is the way that they (the LLMs themselves!) are best able to work with the code.

In fact, I get the impression from these people that they think that their touching the code would actually ruin this delicate balance that the LLM is trying to make. This is actually crazy thinking. On a pretty obvious level, they already think that any LLM they encounter is a super-intelligent God acting in mysterious ways, and that they only way you can ruin its plan is by questioning it.

The slop-in, slop-out theory. I'm very much an advocate.

The neat thing about LLMs is that in a way they proved that only the truth turns out to be grammatical (statistically), largely because there are so many more ways to be wrong than right that the mode is almost always right.

But people also lie and bullshit in consistent ways, with the intention of fooling people with well-known empty arguments. Part of being a "good writer" is to make the meaningless sound meaningful - and the techniques are ancient.

Train on a bunch of people trying to push their framework and get rich, whether in online garbage, literary garbage, or in ostensibly serious nonfiction or scientific works, and you'll end up with modal language that is trying to play deceptive games with reasoning, but has nothing in particular it's trying to convince you of (no motives.)

People would either fall for that language (if they weren't thinking much and the context was one that comforted them), or they would methodically try to put that language into a model (let's say a series of syllogisms for an argument about what to do or what to believe, but it could be any model), and see that it failed. And speaking again of the context, the context of humans interacting with human content implies motives that help the listener focus on particular parts of their model to look for rhetorical tricks. The LLM, again having no motive, just does this in random places.

The latest advances in AI have been in the tooling around AI, which I think largely reduces to recursively creating models and populating them in outputs short enough that hopefully the text generation won't go off the rails.

Symbolic AI is coming back, it's just that the mortar is random word association.

Call me crazy, but I think Georges Bataille saw all of this. In my interpretation, he simultaneously thought of random associations as the most important component of reason and also completely irrelevant in the reality of the world. The only way you could discover the structure of things is through random collisions; your view of the universe was entirely constructed by your prejudices, lusts, and fears; but whether that view was wrong or right was based on how it worked and the particular content of the id-garbage that got you there was ultimately irrelevant. The fabric of the world is completely id-less, but can only be digested by id-driven beings. LLMs (without the tooling around them) are all id.

European governments have been pretending to drop Microsoft for 20 years, I suppose the first one that did it got a big discount, and now they do it whenever they want to reduce costs. Europe will never slow, and in fact will continually increase, its dependency on the US forever.

We propagandize them against all alternatives, like Russian energy and Chinese everything, and employ all of their academics and politicians at our nonprofits and universities, sprinkling credentials all over them. Europeans love a credential; makes them feel superior. Money well spent.

I've been hearing that AI is a security armageddon, it's about time we realized that it's the means for a rebirth of the ancient art of rooting sleazy devices.

I bet AI could help us to keep the updates rooted, too. To lock out the manufacturers and to update some IoT garbage to work locally. And to port some drivers.

In this particular case it is not viral. All MIT-licensed code can be "licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under" GPL 2. The point of the MIT license is that it can be freely relicensed.

You actually have more rights with that file than with the others; the GPL doesn't restrict non-GPL'd code distributed with it, it requires that that code be licensed in a way that allows it to be distributed under GPL 2. For example, I myself can take this code and redistribute the entire thing under GPL 2 without an exception for ./kernel/mem.c (as long as I include any acknowledgement required by MIT, such as a copy of the MIT license and a copyright notice.)

You're overcomplicating things and (maybe accidentally) spreading FUD. MIT was specifically designed to be compatible with anything from copyleft to proprietary.

No, it is an acknowledgement of reality, and a plea not to pretend to be doing something when you're not. Apple is horrible, but are no worse than Google. Better in my opinion, because they never pretended to value freedom, and have a sense of ownership over their customers that is sometimes protective. Also, the phones are simply useful longer.

> My main point was that regulation is no longer a reliable check on Mag7 mega-corp abuses.

It is a bad point that was not made at all. The fact that corporations are effectively, and often literally currently unregulated is not proof that regulation is not "a reliable check on" abuses any more than my not wearing an oven mitt and constantly being burned is proof that wearing an oven mitt is not reliable protection against being burned.

Apple is too big to choose differently. There are two choices. Both are horrible. Eventually you will need to make a choice between one or the other to participate in banking, paying your utilities, buying things in stores, logging onto any internet site, maybe paying tolls, maybe even driving (your license might be issued to your phone.) To some extent, some of these things are true now.

Why would anybody owe you a "fig-leaf" excuse? Nobody is trying to placate you. They're just telling you what they think and why they are doing what they're doing, you should be grateful.

I'm speaking as someone who uses Debian on everything, who went from N900 to Firefox's phone to a $20 Android stuck on 8 that I've never hooked to the Google Play store because I don't have (and have never had) a "Google Account," only F-Droid - a phone that I refuse to browse the internet on or connect to my email (I don't have any social media except HN.) It is nothing to brag about, it is stubbornness. It does not move the needle in any way, and I would not have to make an excuse for not doing it, especially to you.

Anyway, I don't use coreboot, don't have a Linux phone anymore, and accept binary blobs in some of my packages, so am I really doing anything?

There's nothing more annoying than this purist faux-radical attitude I hear from people so much dirtier than I am. Are you sure you're not using Apple just so you can lecture people who do? Is that the real sin that Android is committing by closing up and becoming indistinguishable from Apple on policy?

Nobody will cry for a second about you not using Apple or Android except for you. The only way to stop this is through regulation.

Sci-fi films from the 70s and 80s were not recreating stories from the 80s and 90s.