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Europe needs to escape providerism

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Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#111

Post by Alcatros552 »

Detrytus wrote: post #55
Alcatros552 wrote: post #37

The old european countries understand that education invested in the young results in taxes for the long run. Every soul without healthcare could just die along the way and all the investments are gone including the workpower I find it wrong to call it lack of creating wealth of providerism its neither of those things. Its a fine balance to understand what is best for the entire population

> The old european countries understand that education invested in the young results in taxes for the long run. But those taxes will go to IRS, because the best and brightest Europeans will emigrate to US, where there are best opportunities for them.

thats big bogus we import lots of talent worldwide

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#112

Post by askonomm »

trgn wrote: post #91
FredPret wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having been to both, this is… false. I hope you’re not basing this on news reports, because that’s never going to give you an accurate picture. In the US, I was blown away by the amount of wealth even “poor” Americans have, and how friendly, optimistic, and happy everyone is. In Europe, I only saw this in the richest few countries, and even there most people seemed to be stuck in some sort of constrained, nice-but-mi…

> how friendly, optimistic, and happy everyone is. True. But this is just cultural. Europeans complain more, it's what they do.

One could argue it's our constant complaining that leads to things such as proper minimum wage (that actually gets increased almost yearly), 1 month per year vacations that are defined as human rights that employers can't take away from us, sick days that employers can't take away from us, overtime that employers can't force on us, healthcare that's mostly the same for the poor as for the wealthy, and so on, and so on.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#113

Post by dang »

t8sr wrote: post #81
dang wrote: post #17

Oh gosh, can we please not do national/regional bickering here? That's not curious conversation ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). As a first step in a better direction, I've changed the baity title to a less baity, or at least more obscure, phrase from the article itself.

I don't see anything about this post that's against the guidelines. The topic is eminently relevant. I agree with others who have said that this is getting flagged simply because people disagree, on an emotional level. Maybe that's enough to not want this discussion here, but then we should also remove posts discussing Rust (hah).

I didn't say it broke the guidelines (other than by having a baity title).

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#114

Post by earthnail »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #105
thefz wrote: post #96

> I had never in my life met people who make stuff. In Europe, my parents worked for non-profits. The parents of my friends were mostly middle managers, financiers, or professional service providers. Living in Silicon Valley is profoundly different, because the people you meet are working on building things that you use. Your milieu is not a whole continent. I know lots of people who actually make stuff.

Of course there are people that make stuff. There are VW factories, there are natural gas wells, there is a baker just down the road selling bread. But the author is using an anecdote to make a point: America is about making stuff. Most people in the US make things. We have government bureaucrats and university professors and data entry people, but a larger portion of our population creates things, it's a part of our…

Germany exports an absurd amount of goods. However, many of the goods exported are from older technology value chains - cars for example. It’s dangerous for an exporting country to not be exporting in an entire crucial sector of modern tech: computers.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#115

Post by dang »

elteto wrote: post #74
dang wrote: post #17

Oh gosh, can we please not do national/regional bickering here? That's not curious conversation ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). As a first step in a better direction, I've changed the baity title to a less baity, or at least more obscure, phrase from the article itself.

dang: could you unflag? It's frustrating when some things can't be discussed on HN because they are insta-flagged as a way to silence them. Although this one is a touchy subject the article does raise some interesting points which could be debated.

Yes, I turned the flags off a while ago.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#116

Post by dang »

n0rlant1s wrote: post #87
dang wrote: post #17

Oh gosh, can we please not do national/regional bickering here? That's not curious conversation ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ). As a first step in a better direction, I've changed the baity title to a less baity, or at least more obscure, phrase from the article itself.

dang: Your about bio says "Conflict is essential to human life, whether between different aspects of oneself, between oneself and the environment, between different individuals or between different groups" and that is exactly what is happening here. It's a fruitful discussion with a lot of nuance and yes, disagreement. Nothing here seems against guidelines

> It's a fruitful discussion with a lot of nuance

It wasn't like that when I saw the thread; that's why I posted my comment!

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#117

Post by elteto »

dang wrote: post #115
elteto wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

dang: could you unflag? It's frustrating when some things can't be discussed on HN because they are insta-flagged as a way to silence them. Although this one is a touchy subject the article does raise some interesting points which could be debated.

Yes, I turned the flags off a while ago.

Thank you.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#118

Post by em-bee »

loeber wrote: post #84
sabas123 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The distinction between usage and production is a silly one imo. Every producer is also probably a consumer of tools.

Author here. I think you misunderstood the distinction I was drawing. How you train ML models is distinct from how you apply ML models. Regulating applications is so wide-ranging and full of edge cases that it's severely impractical. How you train them is a much narrower scope where you could actually set some regulatory constraints. (I do not endorse regulating AI at this point in time, this is just for the sake of…

i strongly disagree (or i am not getting your point)

first of all, protection of individuals is the only thing that matters.

yes, the current rules are a patchwork, but i don't see any alternative.

how is setting constraints on the language model going to help protect me from abuse by that model? for example how would such a regulation prevent facial recognition? a more limited model only limits the capacity of a facial recognition system, potentially leading to more false positives which would make things worse.

on the other hand, a rule banning facial recognition provides full protection, as does a ban on using machine algorithms to make decisions that affect a persons life.

AI use is either safe or low risk, or it is dangerous. those dangers need to be averted. as i see it, the EU does not regulate AI at all. it regulates the harmful effects of technology on people. you can build whatever AI tool you want, as long as you use it in a manner that does not hurt people. or is my understanding of the current regulations wrong?

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#119

Post by rickydroll »

friend_and_foe wrote: post #105
thefz wrote: post #96

> I had never in my life met people who make stuff. In Europe, my parents worked for non-profits. The parents of my friends were mostly middle managers, financiers, or professional service providers. Living in Silicon Valley is profoundly different, because the people you meet are working on building things that you use. Your milieu is not a whole continent. I know lots of people who actually make stuff.

Of course there are people that make stuff. There are VW factories, there are natural gas wells, there is a baker just down the road selling bread. But the author is using an anecdote to make a point: America is about making stuff. Most people in the US make things. We have government bureaucrats and university professors and data entry people, but a larger portion of our population creates things, it's a part of our…

In the US, I'd say some people make things. The rent seekers of wall street try to covert every made thing into a rented thing you never own. Renting discourages maker curiosity and leads people to the comfortable trap of providerism.

Re: Europe needs to escape providerism

#120

Post by loeber »

em-bee wrote: post #118
loeber wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Author here. I think you misunderstood the distinction I was drawing. How you train ML models is distinct from how you apply ML models. Regulating applications is so wide-ranging and full of edge cases that it's severely impractical. How you train them is a much narrower scope where you could actually set some regulatory constraints. (I do not endorse regulating AI at this point in time, this is just for the sake of…

i strongly disagree (or i am not getting your point) first of all, protection of individuals is the only thing that matters. yes, the current rules are a patchwork, but i don't see any alternative. how is setting constraints on the language model going to help protect me from abuse by that model? for example how would such a regulation prevent facial recognition? a more limited model only limits the capacity of a fac…

The critical nuance is that most of these machine learning applications have existed for a long time. We've had facial recognition for well over a decade. We've had the ability to generate text. We have statistical models for credit scoring, and so forth.

The difference -- why all of this stuff is being regulated now and not 20 years ago -- is that under current techniques, these models are just much more powerful and accurate today. The impetus for regulation is not that a given machine learning application exists, but the fact that it works really well.

The power and sophistication of machine learning models corresponds extremely strongly to the scale of data that it is trained on. If you are pro-regulation, then what you really want to regulate is not the mere existence of a machine learning application, but the scale of data with which it is created.

--

For another way of making the point: consider the phrase you used, "a ban on using machine algorithms to make decisions that affect a persons life". Examine it like an adversarial lawyer: what's the threshold for "affect"? Everything affects a person's life. Does Google Search work under this standard? It uses a machine algorithm to decide what to show, which can affect the user's life. Does Netflix's film recommendation work? Does Spotify's recommendation work? Okay, you want those things to work, but you don't want [insert other purpose]. You're going to find that the lines are blurry everywhere you look, and that makes for really difficult regulation.

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