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Malus – Clean Room as a Service

malus.sh

541–550 of 566 posts

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#541
post #75

An interesting aspect of this, especially their blog post ( https://malus.sh/blog.html ), is that it acknowledges a strain in our legal system I've been observing for decades, but don't think the legal system or people in general have dealt with, which is that generally costs matter . A favorite example of mine is speed limits. There is a difference between "putting up a sign that says 55 mph and walking away", "putt…

The legal system is fundamentally broken. It's not designed to handle the kind of throughput that is required to enforce justice in countries with many millions of inhabitants. The legal system is mostly a fantasy. It doesn't exist for most people. Currently it only serves large corporate and political interests since only they can afford access.

Surely the number of people needed to maintain a reasonable throughput of the legal system scales approximately linearly with the number of offences? I don't see why a country of millions would be unable to have an efficient and functional legal system, even if the US does not.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#542

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should welcome more precise law enforcement. Imperfect enforcement is too easy for law enforcement officers to turn into selective enforcement. By choosing who to go after, law enforcement gets the unearned power to change the law however they want, enforcing unwritten rules of their choosing. Having law enforcement make the laws is bad. The big caveat, though, is that when enforcement becomes more accurate, the r…

One issue is that imperfect enforcement is often how the momentum to change the law is created. If the police had been able to swoop in and arrest the "perpetrators" every time two men kissed, homosexuality would have never been legalized; If they had been able to arrest anyone who made alcohol, prohibition wouldn't have ended; if they had been able to arrest anyone with a cannabis seedling, we wouldn't have cannabis…

This brings up an often overlooked aspect of the role of laws in society, that it it’s important that there exist an ability to break laws. It’s critically important to the growth and flexibility of a society that laws are never perfectly enforced, that there remain ways to evade persecution. It is healthy. Faced with this situation, societies have to think further about what might have been missed in existing law that would cause ongoing skirting of the law and find better ways to structure its mutual responsibilities that we each impose on each other, often unjustly. It would be a terrible thing if the snapshot of laws at any given moment in time was allowed to be perfectly enforced. Laws are not moral documents. Their creation is fraught with unjust power grabs and non-universal moral codes. They are also created knowing that they will not be perfectly enforced and are given exaggerated cruelty when enforced to discourage others. Perfect enforcement would require a full rewrite of all laws.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#543

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance While it is true that many people do speed, that doesn't make their speeding "the real speed limit".

Speed limit is only a proxy for your braking distance in case of emergency braking (at least in most cases, but also a proxy for bad road conditions in others): the point is to ensure safety, and not a particular speed. I've driven behind drivers driving 25km/h in a 40km/h area and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk with right of way (if somebody jumped out elsewhere, they'd probably just run them over at 25…

> speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver"

Which is a dangerous line of thinking, as everyone thinks they're above average.

Speed limits are also, to some extent, designed around physics. Higher-speed accidents have more kinetic energy.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#544
post #537
post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably because non-autonomous vehicles will still exist. Heck, there are moving violations you can perform on foot.

Sure, in the same way that vehicles without backup cameras or even airbags still exist. They will become less common over time. Vehicles don't have to be fully autonomous to provide this "service". They just need to have a reliable grasp of which road segment they are on and what the speed limit is. It will take some time but it won't be long before there are no cars left on the road that lack the (at least theoretic…

I would note that motorcycles, ATVs, tractors, etc. still don't have seatbelts or airbags. And sure, that's partly because, for some combinations of safety feature x vehicle class, they fundamentally can't. But we could have just outlawed public road use by those vehicle classes because of that. We didn't, because the lack of much more basic safety features (e.g. a roll cage) was already "priced in" to our decision to allow those vehicle classes on the road to begin with. These vehicle classes represent different trade-offs in safety-space, that operators of all vehicles sharing the road are highly aware of, maintaining a sort of mutual understanding of vulnerability of the different types of vehicles they're sharing the road with.

(That is: it's not just that motorcyclists themselves are more aware that they could be fatally T-boned (and so drive more defensively / keep more distance to avoid that outcome); it's also that drivers of heavier vehicles who encounter a "trolley problem" where they can either veer to hit a car, or to hit a motorcyclist, are aware that there's far less metal protecting the motorcyclist from the impact — so they are very likely to choose to veer to hit the car instead.)

And because of this, I would expect that we would never truly see the elimination of speed-limiter-less road vehicles, even if all cars were mandated to have them. There's just too many other things on the road (motorcycles, ATVs, tractors and construction equipment, e-bikes, etc) that are designed with these different safety trade-offs, such that they would likely never end up having the speed limiting imposed on them.

And that's enough things still on the road that could be dangerous if they hit someone, that would need to be pulled over for speeding, that I wouldn't imagine we'd see "off-board" speeding enforcement go away any time soon.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#545
post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I live in a developing country. What I find is that the corruption is generally easier to navigate here that it was in the USA. The corruption in the USA is much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture. At the local level this can look like a local ordinance where “only a contractor with xy and z (only one of which is needed for the job) can bid, favoring a specific contractor. Here you just figure out com…

> much more entrenched, in the form of regulatory capture I am unsure how to interpret this comment. It is so broad that it dilutes the effect. Are there any wealthy countries that you feel do not suffer from the same issue?

Idk, I’ve not lived in any wealthy countries besides the USA.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#546
post #465

I wish we'd distinguish between bullshit and clearly identified things that _may_ be future threats. The linked post contains a whopping lie - "What does it mean for the open source ecosystem that 90% of our open source supply chain can currently be recreated in seconds with today's AI agents" It can't. Not even close. Please, do show a working clean-room implementation of a major opensource package. (Not left-pad) W…

This is a good idea. Do you have a package in mind?

Depends on the size you want to tackle. Let's shoot for MIT licensed or similar, so we don't have to do the unethical thing.

ESLint or Webpack would probably be attempts that are decently sized for a challenge.

Cheerio would be a bit smaller.

Chalk is probably close to the absolute lower bound of what's even meaningful. (You'd likely just regenerate a package that size from scratch instead of wondering about compat)

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure how that makes sense, it takes a third of the time, but you're only going 5 km/h faster?

I presume they're beating some ill-timed traffic lights and overstating the savings.

Yes about traffic lights pattern: 5 traffic lights along the way, each with ~90s wait time or only a zero or a single wait and then riding the "green wave". So not overstating the savings either.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speed limit is only a proxy for your braking distance in case of emergency braking (at least in most cases, but also a proxy for bad road conditions in others): the point is to ensure safety, and not a particular speed. I've driven behind drivers driving 25km/h in a 40km/h area and not stopping for pedestrians at a crosswalk with right of way (if somebody jumped out elsewhere, they'd probably just run them over at 25…

> speed limits are designed for the less than median "driver" Which is a dangerous line of thinking, as everyone thinks they're above average. Speed limits are also, to some extent, designed around physics. Higher-speed accidents have more kinetic energy.

I put the "driver" in quotes: it is not just about ability (let alone perceived ability), but also about equipment (car braking power, tyre quality in relation to road conditions), attention and driving style. You can be reasonably and objectively above average just by having great tyres and strong brakes paired with average attention (which you can control too) and average style/ability.

Re: Malus – Clean Room as a Service

#550
post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How close to your desired speed are you able to maintain? > 50km zone is now 30km, and you didn't decelerate quickly enough and were going 32km at the threshold. Is the argument that you and others would be unable to safely achieve the posted speed within the speed limited area? For example, if you feel you can't drive more precisely than 40-50 when you are aiming for 45, in the above scenario, you could start with y…

I know how to drive a car. I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately. The point in this absurd scenario is that perfect enforcement of the speed limits is asinine, because if you make any mistake at all, no matter how insignificant, you get fined. >automated speed-keeping My car displays what it thinks is the speed limit on the dashboard, and it ge…

Are the scenarios you laid what you honestly expect the world would turn out to be like if the world changed in the coming years so that speed laws are consistently applied? It seems like you believe that if the law was consistently applied, nothing else would change -- not the laws, speed limits, conservative behavior, etc (whether based on lawmakers' actions nor voters' demands) (other than the enforcement/penalty frequency going up to match how often people break the law)?

Isn't that like saying "What would the effects be if time travel existed" but assuming that doesn't then prompt any changes in human behavior, laws, other technologies, etc. from what people were doing everyday and what existed before it? When discussing "What if x changed", I think we need to also take into account the other changes in laws, behaviors, etc. that one expects that to then prompt - whether big or small.

> perfect enforcement

Isn't consistent enforcement of the law far better than the current inconsistent and unequal enforcement, where people already face unequal enforcement for 'driving while black', where if an officer is having a bad day or doesn't like you they can already cite you strictly, and where other people are regularly able to get away with 20 mph over a limit, where every driver and officer guesses/decides for themselves about whether the current limit should be strictly enforced vs allow 5 over, 15 over, etc etc?

> I usually set speed limiter to the posted speed +3km. Measured with GPS, this hits the desired speed accurately.

So instead of aiming for 33 in a 30 km zone, couldn't you aim for a slightly lower number in order to avoid the scenario you expect for yourself where if the law was consistently applied you would be "would be broke and homeless - possibly in prison"?

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