People have incredibly poor critical-thinking/media-literacy skills now, even on HN. Nobody will ever question why a particular group is arguing for this position, or consider whether they might have some self-interested reason to bend the truth, or selectively mis-present it, or just flat-out lie. And it gets worse when they see it in some popular piece of media and assume that means it's inherently credible/truthful.

For example Qualcomm's allegations against ARM last year (that ARM was "preventing 3rd party IP from being in proximity to ARM IP" etc) appear to have been entirely false and untruthful, but people didn't critically consume that and largely worked on the assumption that if QC said it, that it must be true. A year later, has anyone else had problems integrating 3rd party IP into ARM designs? No? That's because it was just Qualcomm going to the tech media with a bullshit story, and they dutifully carried it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33419138

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32675376

It's happened over and over even in the tech community: Google and the "pwease open up imessage and use RCS" page (while their proprietary encryption extensions lock everyone else out), MS/sony/epic/facebook/netflix levering open the app store/sideloading, blindly believing the EVGA ceo when he implied that poor lil EVGA barely made any profit during 2020-2021, and that this was also true of the other partners (as they scalped onto ebay, like MSI, or sold at inflated prices through first-party stores, etc) etc. People are not critical thinkers when they are presented these sorts of messages in media, they tend to assume that if it's in media it must be true, or if a company PR spokesperson says it then it must be true.

(and in fact this is a perfect example of a why there is no reason to "assume good faith" when a megacorp is trying to push a particular PR spin, and it is in fact not helpful and usually incorrect (Hanlons' Razor is wrong as a heuristic) in these PR battles. PR messaging of all things does not deserve or benefit from the application of hanlon's razor.)

I touched on all these same themes of media-illiteracy at the time too. These were pretty unbelievable stories at the time and it was very obvious that people were uncritically consuming PR spin. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33822020

Anyway, back to present-day: obviously Google/Amazon/FB would very much prefer a permissive-license model where they can take the fruits of the open source community and privatize the profits (and build proprietary extensions) while contributing nothing back, whether that's apache-licensed code or RISC-V core designs. So it's in their interest to push back against commercial operators who can counter-negotiate and re-internalize those profits, or AGPL that encumbers them from doing this in the first place. But people are so very very credulous about these "pwease be nice to widdle google, we're so helpless and innocent" thinkpieces.

It's just crazy to me that it keeps working over and over, even on the HN crowd. It seems like hanlon's razor has really become a thought-terminating cliche for a lot of people, it is an excuse for credulity and avoidance critical thought. Why bother? Malice doesn't exist, hanlon's razor is always the simplest answer.

I'd guess that even here, probably less than 25% of people are media-literate, in the sense of being able to sniff out a story that doesn't make any sense overall, or identify a source as a PR spin piece. People genuinely assume that if Google puts out an article analyzing a license or something that it must be factual and balanced, or at least not contain any intentional misrepresentations, etc. And as you can see from qualcomm, or google's own RCS article - this is not always the case! Companies do just go and lie, or spread PR that is true "from a certain perspective", etc.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2022/08/new-google-site-begs...

People used to pride themselves on "having a finely-tuned bullshit detector" and we've just replaced that with hanlon's razor. bullshit doesn't exist, hanlon says so. it is a sad state of decline for critical thought. but people love a good thought-terminating cliche.