I did my best for 5 years, but I really fucked up the business by over promising (I was young, this was 10 years ago). I hit burnout a couple years in, and kept pushing. Then I had to take on debt to keep going, so I had to get a full time job to start paying off the debt. With a full time job and debt to pay I worked weekends for months to try to deliver, but after years of burnout and still so little progress I eventually had to give up.
I’m seeing a lot of comments about “you should do X” but I don’t think a lot of people understand what extreme burnout is like. My mental health was horrible after all of that, and at some point I literally couldn’t will myself to continue. After five years of work I announced the project was over in 2018. Some people understood and some people were upset. But I did everything I could for 5 years, and by that point there were a lot of better products on the market that people could actually buy, unlike mine. You give as much as you can but at some point you have to walk away.
Yes, most software is harmless. There are some scenarios where it could do harm, but ultimately said harm was the product of human usage of the software, not software inherently. There are a few examples such as medical device software and things like train software where honest mistakes can result in human harm. However even with those the issue was that humans made the mistakes.
Software development as a discipline certainly needs more rigor like the other engineering disciplines. However the AI act is premature since AI ultimately is an implementation detail for a variety of use-cases, that should be regulated independently, not AI. Regulating AI in general is like regulating electrons.
If the EU has an issue with AI potentially resulting in more misinformation, then regulate the types of sites, that is social media, that would be the vector for such spread.
I'm open to counterexamples outside those class of examples.
I don't think you need counterexamples, because your base argument is faulty. Food full of formaldyhde only causes harm as the product of human usage, i.e. someone eating it, regulation aims to make it impossible for such a situation to arise. For a less extreme but no less real example, just look at the regulation of raw milk in much of the world.
Elsewhere in the thread you have touched on firearm regulation; it's worth noting that amongst states with the capacity to do so, it is really only the US that abdicates its responsibility to regulate firearms, with predictably tragic consequences (though, as with everything in the US, that varies state to state etc.)
Your example is flawed because the harm is obvious and palpable. Not to mention food in most countries must disclose ingredients that are used. Take alcohol which is known to be poisonous. Do you support its banning: yes or no?
Food should be regulated because as you mentioned it is consumed and is a vector for obvious harm. In addition to that due to the fact that food is comprised of chemicals, it is difficult to ascertain the quality of food once prepared without consumption.
Banning AI is like banning books. Useless. Information will spread either way. It'll just do so elsewhere.
Yes, but gun regulations don't operate under the assumption that guns shoot people on their own. They operate under the understanding that people who do damage can do much more damage with guns than without.
Pretending that any of the regulation of guns or AI is done with the understanding that they are anything other than powerful tools that can be used by humans to do profound damage is a strawman argument. We all understand that guns don't shoot people on their own. Don't oppose regulation by characterizing the opposing viewpoint as something it isn't.
I'm well aware of the distinction. I'm simply saying that it is a fact that guns do not shoot people on their own. Some countries regulate differently, obviously. You also seem to think governments, which are made by the said humans that can do "profound damage", are infallible.
At the end of the day you either democratize the access, or you don't. Those who want to break the law will break it either way. All you are going to do is punish those who follow the law by not giving them access.
For what it's worth - I couldn't care less about guns and wouldn't mind their banning. However I trust my government. If you do not, I would not want guns to be banned. But that's the thing - a government I don't trust would not want citizens to have guns to begin with, and thus the dilemma.
I don't think governments are infallible, and I didn't argue as such. I don't agree that regulations are inherently bad. If you want to race to the bottom, I can easily pull out some extreme scenario of giving AK-47's to every citizen upon graduating Kindergarten, but it would be a stupid argument based on nothing you've actually said, other than taking your point to the most extreme extent. Please give me the courtesy of not assuming I hold the most unreasonable extension of my argument as well. It only sabotages the conversation.
People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?
When a tool allows a person to do a lot of damage, it should be regulated to prevent bystanders from taking the brunt of other peoples' bad decisions. A race to the bottom doesn't really help anybody.
If you're going to argue that every tool that allows people to do harm should be not regulated at all because the tool isn't anthropomorphized, I'm not sure how we can have a discussion at all about it.
> People driving drunk do profound damage as well. Cars don't kill people on their own. Would you agree with making drunk driving legal again?
No, because drunk driving inhibits your ability to operate a vehicle lawfully.
a better example would be using your phone while driving. should this be illegal? it's well documented that using your phone, even if hands-free increases car accidents. should phones be designed to automatically shut off while in a vehicle?
your ak47 example is also just silly. please use better examples to make your point.
It is still a regulation, and supports the argument that a tool that can be used to do damage should have rules to reduce the risk and severity of damage where reasonable.
There are already laws governing phone use while driving in many places. In my experience, people using phones while driving can be extremely dangerous, and I've often wished that people couldn't do so.
My AK-47 example was intentionally silly, and was framed as something silly and extreme, as a direct comparison to you accusing me of believing that government was infallible. I'm not sure why you're pointing out that something I explicitly pointed out as extreme and unreasonable is extreme and unreasonable. That was the entire point: that we will get nowhere by attacking straw men.
Given that Switzerland allow guns, this idea is that guns will make it worse is wrong. People don't need guns to make significant damage. Because guns are harder to get in Europe, nut-jobs used trucks.
The solution is to educate people to do less self or other's harm. To understand how to operate with these things.
But educating people is expensive and difficult. It also sometimes backfire in creating a population that's much harder to persuade. So yeah let's regulate these idiots to death...
I don't disagree with you, and I find Switzerland a really interesting example. Building good education, good culture, and good social values is often a much healthier outcome than regulation. In my experience, trying to build effective, reproducible education is not just expensive and difficult, but nebulous as well. A lot of American attempts to better their education systems have been expensive for questionable benefit.
I'd much rather have a good culture than good regulations, if I had the choice. I think most people would, but there's no sure path to get there. Switzerland has some magic sauce that other countries would be hard pressed to replicate at scale.
I'm not sure how you quantify "very small" here? I'm running low-level conferences [0] and they're big enough for me to be a full-time organizer for them: with a job fair that's included Mozilla, real estate, nuclear defense and various game studios.
We could check popular job boards (or HN's Who's Hiring threads) and see how many postings mention compilers, kernels, assembly, GPU, etc. Then compare that number to the total.
Did the number of jobs of people coding in assembly go down, or is it that the number of jobs of people not coding in assembly go up? (I truly don't know. Just curious)
I tend to believe that the number of people working with machine instructions might have even increased! We have much more of the tech that I mentioned nowadays compared to 90s. Also a lot of other industries have entered digital age and in many of them, i.e aviation, transportation, financial, etc. knowing the intricacies of your hardware is crucial.
The thing is that web development has seen such a boom which has seemingly dwarfed everything else in its wake.
Yes that’s correct. If you were owner operator you might be aligned with a particular firm (their name on your truck) and their dispatch would find you loads or you would also know people. You could have a dry van and look for generic loads but lots of guys I knew had specialised equipment (flatbed, tanker, etc) and over time you locked in good lanes and repeat customers. I met a tanker driver once who started in Florida, took orange juice to Canada, picked up some food ingredient in Canada , drove it to somewhere in Tennessee then took something from there to Florida. And repeat. He did that triangle for 10 years. Shipping used to be a real people business. If you had an unusual or unexpected load you’d call your 5-10 providers and they might have capacity or not, or do you a favour and call their buddies for you or not. That would almost always work out, if it didn’t you’d call the sales person from the new 3pl or trucking company who had been wanting your business and he/she would move mountains to get that chance. Definitely an interesting industry full of problems to solve. Don’t think it’s the same any more.
Wow! So really just a large mesh network of phone communication then, and you could make some real money _just_ by scraping together a steady, repeating, geographically connected schedule.
The big cloud providers have substantial free tiers (50k MAUs). Cognito, Firebase and Azure AD B2C all have a similar free tier. After you go through the free tier, you pay per MAU ($0.005 per MAU, according to https://aws.amazon.com/cognito/pricing/ , I think similar for the other providers. For smaller players, I think Stytch is 10c/MAU/month, where an MAU is any interaction with the Stytch service (login in all the many forms). https://stytch.com/pricing has more.
You'll have to dig a bit deeper into each pricing page to determine what actions make a user 'active'. I'm not aware of anyone who does MAU calculations on a day to day basis; monthly rollups are the standard.
Some folks charge per MAU (FusionAuth does) but in a band (the first 10k MAUs for a FusionAuth paid version are all one price).
Love your thinking. Rather than comingle the plastics with waste, let's keep them separate at the landfill for use when future humans figure out what to do with it.
By mixing it all together we just make it much more difficult for ourselves later.
I don't agree with you. Or rather, I agree with "just waiting" - we don't have any choice about that. I don't agree with "letting someone else deal with it".
The spent waste we've already produced needs to be stored in a way that puts it beyond the possibility of access within 200,000 years. And we need to stop producing new nuclear waste. Note that modern humans have been walking the Earth for just 200,000 years; we can't hope to be able to label it with readable danger warnings. The oldest languages we can read are only a few thousand years old. And we can't just pop it into orbit - there are many thousands of tons of it, sitting around in cooling ponds.
Well, unless we become immortal, waiting long enough means letting someone else deal with problems.
Right now, the obviously (and I do mean that) best way to deal with spent nuclear fuel is (after some cooling) to stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there. It's much cheaper than the alternatives, it's quite safe, and it doesn't preclude any other solution.
But (you might say) we're leaving the cost of dealing with it to our descendants. I respond: we leave the consequences of all our actions to our descendants. For example, if we spend resources of doing something to nuclear waste, we do not do something else with those resources that might have been better for our descendants. Economics is all about tradeoffs; you can't just look at anything in isolation.
Delaying dealing with a problem also means that those who ultimately solve it can choose the solution they prefer, rather than one we impose on them. Maybe they'll want to extract plutonium. Maybe they'll want to bury the fuel unchanged. Maybe they'll want to shoot it into space. They will know better which solution is best for them.
This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made (except if you're trying to use the waste issue as a bludgeon to force the other issue.) I get the distinct impression the waste problem is being greatly overstated for rhetorical reasons.
> stick it in dry casks and just let it sit there.
Well, yes. We have to stick it in something, and then let it sit somewhere. I'm not sure that on the surface, anywhere it can be reached by weather, anywhere close to the ocean, is a good place to let it sit.
> They will know better which solution is best for them.
Sure. So we shouldn't close off their options. That doesn't mean we don't have a problem now, that we need to solve.
[Edit] Actually, I'm not at all sure that "they will know better". It could well be that human interest in fundamental physics fades away completely in the next 5,000 years. That would leave our descendants without the tools to even understand the problem, let alone fix it, or try to exploit it.
> This question is mostly orthogonal to the question of whether more waste should be made
I don't agree. We have a problem now, of how to deal with the waste (and devastated land) we've already created; we don't have a way of dealing with it. We shouldn't make more waste until the problem is solved.
> bludgeon to force the other issue
> for rhetorical reasons
Hey, I'm taking you seriously, there's no need to suggest bad faith. Your other remarks have been pretty straight-arrow; I'm not sure why you're switching to ad-hominem now.
You have a good point and this does seem to be evolving industry practice. Sony does this in a few of their recent cameras. And Blackmagic just released a new firmware for certain Blackmagic Pocket Cinema Cameras where gyro data is stored in BRAW and then Davinci Resolve has gyro-based stabilisation. It’s not perfect, it’s not magic, it’s not a substitute for a gimbal, and there are some real limitations but that aside the results are shocking. My understanding is that rotations can be very well corrected (as it’s same camera position) but translations are not as successful. Also you typically need to shoot with higher frame rates and there is a significant crop on the resulting image. All that being said I use this frequently and my handheld casual shots are much much nicer now.
Fredrik, your work inspired me greatly and your post “notes on Tim Bray’s Wide Finder” taught me how to think better about processing data, which made me pretty good at it, which created my career in data. Thank you - you had a huge impact. Rest in peace and sincere condolences to your family and friends.
