Asymmetric Apologies | Sajarin Dider

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When a large tech company gets caught siphoning private user data in the background, the response is pretty predictable. The corporate PR machinery, run by empty suits, issues a statement and they offer the standard, bureaucratic symmetric apology :

"We take your privacy super seriously. We have updated our internal policies and we promise to do better. We don't expect to be forgiven, we're simply here to apologize."

This is literally cheap talk. If you've broken the trust of your users, asking for more trust from them is borderline abusive.

You can't rely on these sorts of apologies to win back the hearts of your users. Instead you have to put something real at stake.

An asymmetric apology is a structural amputation. You offer a disproportionate, irreversible concession. You permanently surrender power that you had over your users in exchange for a chance at their renewed confidence.

In 1215 AD, King John abused his power as sovereign by increasing taxes, seizing assets and pissing off his barons. In retaliation, his lords banded up and rebelled against him and he was forced to cowtow to their demands. King John couldn't lower taxes or return the ill-gotten wealth, those terms would not have appeased his enemies. To save his throne from immediate violent overthrow, he signed the Magna Carta and surrendered the structural concept of absolute monarchy; making himself and all future kings and queens subject to the same laws.

Another well known example is Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast. For 20 years, Dungeons & Dragons allowed third-party creators to build and sell content using D&D's core rules under the Open Game License (OGL). In early 2023, leaked documents revealed WotC planned to revoke the original OGL to extract royalties and assert restrictive control over creators' work. The community revolted, canceling digital subscriptions en masse and launched a massive boycott.

While WotC initially tried standard symmetric apologies and offered a slightly revised "OGL 1.2". The community rejected it. And in order to stop the bleeding, WotC released the entire 400-page core rulebook (SRD 5.1) directly into the Creative Commons (CC-BY-4.0). WotC literally removed their own legal power to ever attempt the cash grab again.

Some folks think the recent Grok Build open source release is bad. It's of course an obvious attempt to distract from the fact that they violated basic security sanctities of their users. Now every tech influencer can make their "I code reviewed Grok Build" videos, collect their nut, and move on from the whole scandal.

But there's a positive, incalculable outcome to it all as well. Users can freely modify, build on top of and distribute better versions of the harness. It's free for communities, users, companies and countries to use and learn from. Maybe the code quality is shit; it'll get better. Maybe it's not trustworthy; people will untangle the telemetry. Perhaps, TUI harnesses aren't your thing; someone will extend it with a GUI.

As an example, here are what users are already building with forks of Grok Build:

thedavidweng/gork-build — 12 commits, most developed fork. Rebrand grok→"gork", stripped vendor telemetry, lock data-retention opt-out only, block x.ai auto-update, OSS governance + Apache-safe rebrand, README comparison table. Positions as "VSCodium-style privacy fork."

thomas9120/grok-build-archival — 1 commit: Windows script to disable telemetry.

DigiGoon/digi-grok-build — 2 commits: ship "dgrok" multi-provider CLI with /provider + install scripts; build from source instead of x.ai CDN.

victor-software-house/open-grok — 2 commits, "opened to every provider" (docs/architecture so far, code pending).

LukaMucko/grok-build — 1 commit: extra_body support for provider-specific request-body fields.

RapidAI/grok-build-desktop — 3 commits: Tauri desktop ACP client (GUI), bilingual README, self-hosting docs.

mazdak/grok-build — 2 commits: theming (system-default + Catppuccin).

saqoah/grok-build — 1 commit: Kotlin MemoryBackend interface + utilities.

There's usually asymmetric upside for the user when there's an asymmetric apology. That's not nothing.

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