Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe the added point was that new tools identify a group of bugs, and then there aren’t more bugs to find. At which point it becomes another tool you use and don’t think about. Also, from what I recall, Anthropic and OpenAI subsidize their prices by ~40x? That said, given the prices*quality of recently released open models, I think the cost issue is moot.
> Also, from what I recall, Anthropic and OpenAI subsidize their prices by ~40x? Ed Zitron said this?
Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
251–260 of 285 posts
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#252From TFA: > In this last Bikeshed in acmqueue, I will ponder the far future of free and open source software (FOSS), hoping to upset so many readers that... > During the past couple of decades, rampant neoliberalism and “globalism” allowed... And I’m out. I guess congratulations to the author. Mission accomplished. But I’m disappointed that the article took a turn towards partisan politics.
You should've kept reading: > During the past couple of decades, rampant neoliberalism and “globalism” allowed the U.S. tech industry to capture almost the entire European IT market, including all “social media.” This has recently proved to be a ghastly mistake, and now the EU, along with its member states and companies, are scrambling to claw back their digital sovereignty. This is not a partisan political statement…
The term neoliberalism has no meaning, it's purely used in a pejorative way by leftists. If you want to talk about world markets, just say world markets. Or "free market", but it has free in it so it makes the effect less powerful.
Also, the reason the EU does not have that many tech companies is not global competition; it's that it takes 6 months to hire someone, you cannot fire them ever, and nations tax you based on your unrealized valuation because they don't really believe you should be running things on your own.
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#253Earlier quoted context omitted.
Okay? That is not parental controls that are [L]egally require[d] ... to be effective and easy-to-use-if-you-take-a-few-minutes-to-read-the-instructions. Additionally, I expect that -due to kids lying about their ages- within five or ten years, the regs will have "graduated" from self-attestation to ID and biometrics collection. It's likely that other states will require that sort of collection much sooner, causing e…
I'm not the biggest fan of the current age verification schemes, but I don't think the idea kids can lie about their age differs in the threat model posed under either system. Presumably, under the law, parents would be the ones to create a child account with a non-editable-by-the-child-account age fields which would then be used as a legal source of reference. If you assume the child can create an account without su…
> I'm not sure what additional fine grained factors you may be thinking of precisely...
Read [0] and consider the array of specific things that a guardian may wish to protect their ward from. Make sure to make your list cover children of all ages as well as adults with a wide array of cognitive impairment.
> That being said, age based restrictions isn't a fine grained control over the system as perhaps one would like but that also would be inherently more complicated to think about from a legislative perspective...
So? Legislative or regulatory restrictions on human behavior must be as restrictive as required to achieve the stated goal, and not significantly more. The courts are especially concerned about this when it comes to restrictions on speech. If a set of legislators need to sit with something for a quarter or two to understand it well enough to properly regulate it, then that's what they're getting paid to do.
> ...when it looks like a lot of parents are looking for a blunt generic button...
You can have preset lists of categories to block in a system that doesn't care at all what your age is. Surely you know that.
> Presumably, under the law, parents would be the ones to create a child account with a non-editable-by-the-child-account age fields...
The California law has no such requirement. Go read it, it will only take like ten minutes. [1] My summary of it as "the kids can lie about their age and there are no consequences for lying" is not even a little bit unfair.
> Our laws already very much care about how old you are.
The identity-verification systems we're talking about didn't exist twelve months ago. These are new systems being designed in a world in which it's trivial to have a centralized database that contains dossiers of all of everyone's customers everywhere. [2] Nearly all other regs that restrict based only on age were written in a world where that was either impossible, or extremely expensive and time-consuming.
Even if that weren't true, all one needs to do to see how these regs will be actually interpreted by most businesses is to look at all of the companies that are preemptively requiring upload of live video, pictures of one's face, pictures of one's government-issued ID, and/or deep analysis of one's activities with their systems. No US state requires any of that, but it all got slammed in when legislators started talking about doing age-based restriction of Internet services.
Had legislators clearly said "We're going to be designing and enacting laws that require designated guardians to be able to prevent their wards from engaging in guardian-selected categories of activities. We want every guardian to be able to protect their wards, regardless of the age of those wards.", you'd see companies building and deploying very different systems.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48911863>
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...>
[2] Am I saying that there exists a centralized database of all of everyone's customers everywhere? Absolutely not.
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#254Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
This often massively discounts the cost of reversing decisions. People often work to build things without any thought given to those who have to maintain it afterwards. Especially when it's not them. I worked at a large, publicly-traded multinational where decades prior and they were still just a 4 man startup they decided the database server and all timestamps should be in the local timezone. They are still using ES…
I sort of agree. But I kind of think it misses the point. Bike shedding means no decision is made. That is the worst possible outcome as it provides absolutely zero value. Even a wrong decision provides at least some value even if it fails horribly. Maybe we paint the shed black and it burns down due to excessive heat, but it’s a bike shed so who actually cares if we need to rebuild the entire thing and paint it whit…
> Bike shedding means no decision is made. That is the worst possible outcome as it provides absolutely zero value.
And "bike shedding" is now a term that people hyperbolically apply to any discussion of something the labelling-participant doesn't really care about. A lot of times doing nothing is actually the best business outcome. Waiting until you have more, better information is great.
Lots of stakeholders ask for things that they think matter and then realize two weeks later doesn't and a ton of man hours have already been spent trying to build those skateboards as fast as possible.
> Even the timezone example isn’t really that material IMO. Sure, it’s an extra annoyance to normalize timestamps to locale in every app/debugging query. But in the end it’s just not that big of a deal.
Oh god are you underestimating the long term impact of data not being stored in UTC. For one, it will be a perfectly reasonable thing that your engineers forget this fact and build new systems in UTC, because that's the reasonable thing to do. Also as the years go on your company will make acquisitions of other companies and whatever timezones their data is stored in (hopefully UTC but obviously not always). To properly integrate this data you have to determine for every timestamp whether there was Daylight Savings Time happening at the time on every single object. You also have to figure out all kinds of edge cases around leap seconds.
Otherwise you have a ton of data that's out of chronology. Pity you if that's a thing that matters to you (it almost certainly does).
Also maybe you're lucky enough to be in a position to modify timestamps of all of your objects in all your datastores without significant engineering effort and coordination...but probably not. Obviously the reason the company I mentioned hasn't done it is because they're in that position...
But say you don't want to "fix it" and just want to do this "on every query"...now this process above is something you have to do across maybe thousands of services for potentially every request...
No big deal, he says...
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#256Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How do you propose they find out, without asking you to prove it? How do I propose the government know if I have kids? I'm pretty sure they already know that I don't?
I don't think the government knows if a given random IP connection has kids, or is you.
My entire point is that there's absolutely no need to know if a "random IP connection" is a kid when there are so many mundane reasons to use the internet that aren't objectionable for the hypothetical child who the connection might have behind it. It's the equivalent of making anyone walking into a grocery store show their ID in case they happen to buy alcohol later. I don't drink alcohol either and have no need to buy it, and I'd be similarly incensed if I got carded every time I walked into a store to buy eggs or milk.
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except we do that for venue that serve poison aka bars, so if you put it that way, it doesn't seem totally absurd.
And gambling! A poison of the mind, if you will.
A lot of things people do on smartphones have very similar effects as gambling. It's only not as catastrophic, because most users don't lose all their money on it.
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
Backwards. The government knows who has kids because they do things like issue birth certificates and operate state schools. In a lot of places it's legally very difficult not to be listed as a parent on government records. So why should I have to prove I don't have kids when the government can know I'm not on any of those lists?
The government departments know those things because the parents registered on those lists. It doesn’t automatically just “know”, and that info is historically not usually shared between government departments
That doesn't make the burden of proof magically mine.
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#259A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…
This reminds me of my experience as a senior contractor joining teams that seem to enjoy endless discussion. For example, when implementing a new feature using an open-source library or framework they will want to make a prototype of all possible libraries, make a report about each of them, have some big discussions about which to choose, and only _then_ start the real implementation. My advice is always to just pick…
> If a decision is hard to make, its often because the differences are small, and therefore it doesn't matter much and you might as well decide by dice-roll.
My life became soo much easier when I had that insight. I used to spend so much mental energy on decisions that most often were inconsequential.
Re: Goodbye, and Thanks for All the Bikesheds
#260A bit of an aside, but after someone introduced me to the notion of Reversible Decisions, it quickly became apparent to me that the solution to the bikeshed problem is to throw money at it before the roosters can start preening about which color the shed should be. Decisions that are reversible should just go with the instinctive answer of whoever volunteers to work on it. I've been in many meeting rooms where, becau…
This is what usually happens if you let incompetent people make design decision: they stay with the first and worst version forever. Right now I'm in the process of leaving a company where this happened over and over again. The company's product and design aspects were always neglected in this specific way: whenever a problem was discovered its solution was assigned to whoever would write the code to solve it. That's…
> This is what usually happens if you let incompetent people make design decision: they stay with the first and worst version forever.
This is what usually happens when you confuse the decisions that mattered from the ones that didn't. It's like back before 'just use a linter' was the solution to code formatting. You'd start a project, you'd have the 'code style meeting' and everyone would bash themselves into the rocks of whitespace and bracket placement, and never get to things like code organization, structure, and naming of things.
So then you end up with code that uses the same noun in three places to mean 3 different things and uses it as a verb in a fourth.
You only get so many opportunities to really change the direction the boat is steering and you can wear out your welcome trying to exceed it. If you get some things right they'll let you do a few more.