There's an anecdote I remember reading somewhere: When an 'embedded systems' engineer was to present a web-based product they were tasked to build, the managers/reviewers were puzzled they couldn't find any bugs. Asked about this, the engineer replied: "I didn't know that was an option".
Definitely a different mindset/toolset is required when it comes to building systems that have to be working autonomously without "quick fixes" from the web.
Yes but I would push back a little on the idea that you simply put yourself in a "mindset of writing bug-free code."
Simpler code has fewer bugs. Embedded code tends to be simpler and more targeted in its role. Of course, putting yourself in the mindset of writing simpler code is great too - if you have the time to do so, and the problem you are solving is itself sufficiently simple.
Embedded code is also simpler because it has to be. When you are confined to a microcontroller, there isn't room for bloated app frameworks, hundreds of NPM packages, etc.
Depends on whether there's room in the budget to integrate something like a full-fat Raspberry Pi board, at which point, your light switches and thermostats can be full-fledged Kubernetes nodes if you like.
Never underestimate software developers' ability to simultaneously over- and underengineer a solution, especially if the only limitation is hardware cost (read: somebody else's problem).
The embedded engineering mindset is not a mindset of "writing bug-free code"; it's a mindset of treating the first ~20% of the time budget you're given for the project as time spent designing and writing code (and constraining scope appropriately); and then treating the rest of your time budget as time spent coming up with every possible way to validate/static-analyze/fuzz/etc your code you can, and then debugging all the resulting failures. (Which also implies structuring your code so that it remains at all times extremely testable, whether you are writing tests just then or not.)
A lot of people who are cheering right now are going to be screaming bloody murder in 10-20yr when the "below this population density generation and storage makes more sense than grid" threshold creeps up into the lower end of suburban population densities and some industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.
Energy independence is a two way street. This is essentially a domestic internal soft power lever that is going to go away or be nerf'd.
Why is it bad if some industrial users of electricity buy fields around their factories and set up their own power generation there instead of hooking up to the power grid?
> industrial users can just buy the fields or hills around their factories and put up panels or wind turbines rather than negotiate with a bunch of entities.
Domestic users can just do the same. Some of us already have.
Yes, it’s not alway possible but a huge portion of domestic usage can be covered with a small install. Payback 5-10 years.
First: The same argument applies to suburban population, where autarky is even easier/cheaper than for industrial consumers: Just slap panels on the roof and a bunch of batteries into a shed, done. We won't even need much cheaper panels nor cells, really; it's mainly labor, integrator-margins and regulations that make this less (financially) attractive than the grid right now (pure cells are already in the $60/kWh range for single-digit quantities).
Second: If industrial consumers stop contributing towards electric grid costs and the general public dislikes it, you can just regulate against it, problem solved. But in practice governments already try to make the energy situation as appealing as possible for industry, so there is very little actually leveraged power that you really give up anyway.
You're absolutely right it applies to suburbia too, not just rural areas and industry in rural areas.
> you can just regulate against it, problem solved
I think that is exactly what you'll lose the ability to do. If Marvin Heemeyer didn't need the town's septic connection we wouldn't know his name.
A huge fraction of regulatory enforcement exists in the gray area of "the government is wrong, or their enforcement of it is wrong but it's cheaper to bend over and take it than to fight it through a courtroom". If farmer Johnson can slap up a building kit on his property and power it with stuff he bought online and doesn't need the power company, Joe Schmo can do the same with an ADU. Yeah, they'll both get dragged through court but $50-100k of court costs to be proven right is a much smaller threat when the project can be done and generating income for the duration of the court case (it also renders the typical tactic of dragging out such cases much less effective).
And at a slightly larger scale, if some business interest can negotiate purely with a municipality to take over some disused factory and bring it back into use and get their power via bunch of panels and not get bogged down with state permitting to get a transmission line and substation the state loses a huge number of levers over the business interest and also they lose levers to control poorer municipalities (who'd happily take the business). Once again, they'll get dragged through court by the state, but spending 5yr and $200k just to be right isn't a dealbreaker when your widget factory has been operating the whole time.
Yes, of course governments can do worse things if they feel like it, but they run into problems of political optics and will more or less instantly.
You already see this kind of thing in some of the highest cost areas. Certain demographics in the greater NYC area often do building and land development things this way. It costs the same at the end, but by doing it without asking you get to use it while the whole process runs.
The electrical utility DTE, in Michigan, required Google to do this for their new datacenter ("Project Cannoli") to avoid increasing consumer energy prices. They are building solar and battery storage to serve the load, as it is the cheapest and fastest new generation that can be built.
I see nothing wrong with power users committing to clean energy and storage to accelerate their development plans, or to allow them at all. I am unsure who is going to complain about this model. Lease or buy as much land as you need to deploy clean energy.
> Google’s data center operations will be served by 2.7 gigawatts (GW) of new resources for the grid, including solar power, advanced storage technologies and demand flexibility. This Clean Capacity Acceleration Agreement with DTE (the same structure as the Clean Transition Tariff) will bring new, clean resources online, while supporting the state’s transition away from coal-fired power. As part of our standard approach to building new data centers, Google will fully cover its electricity costs and infrastructure needs, helping to ensure that its growth protects local ratepayers and actively bolsters the long-term resilience of the state’s electricity grid.
Interesting. I didn't know a extension’s web-accessible resource (e.g. chrome-extension://<id>/...) could be abused to learn about the user's installed extensions by checking whether it resolves or not.
because corporate greed corrupts every nice thing: it pushes the other (maybe more moral) 'nice thing' alternatives out of the ecosystem by subsiding using VC funding to provide 'NiceThing!' for free until 'NiceThing!' is the monopoly or bought by another entity to become part of the monopoly (due to weak/not enforced antitrust laws).
~20 years later on all the "Digitalisation of Schools" brought us is waning attention spans for children but billions of sells to Big Tech for software, and e-devices that after a few years become electronic waste to be shipped to a poor country stripped for rare earths and finally ending in landfills in Africa or Asia to poison the ground water.
That's because our idea of "Digitalisation of Schools" is putting a textbook into pdf form, let student use a computer to open it and call it digitalisation.
I am somehow involved in this field and am yet to see an actual paradigm shift anywhere in Europe. Going back to books just mean that we will continue using old methods, because those same old methods moved onto screen didn't bring improvements we though they would as we labeled them digitalisation
I remember that - even though Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day' - he never allowed his children to use iPads.
I bet Zuckerberg doesn't allow his children to use social media.
And I assume that Sam Altman won't allow his children to use AI chatbots.
It tells us nothing. People act like this is some big hypocrisy or revelation. First of all, Jobs DID allow his children to use iPads, but it was limited. People take a single quote from the Isaacson biography out of context, assuming that he never let his children have access to iPads at all, forever. Other interviews he gave talked about limiting access - like ALL families should do.
Jobs was literally just parenting. Limiting screen time is something all parents should do. We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess. Calling tech executives hypocrites for having common sense parenting limits is not really a dunk.
Not to mention the iPad was only on the market for a year and a half before Jobs passed, in which there was no time for real educational software with traction to make it into schools.
He was talking about a future he was aiming for. I know it's hard to remember the tech optimism we still had heading into 2010, but most people still viewed things as getting better at that time. When Jobs announced the iPad, the iPhone had been on the market for 2.5 years and we basically only saw the conveniences of how cool it was to be able to check Facebook on the go with a cool futuristic touchscreen experience.
It's really easy to see how misguided Jobs was with 15 years of hindsight.
> We also limit access to sugary foods and other things that can be damaging in excess.
Maybe you do, but not everybody does. 19.7% of American kids are obese. The hypocrisy is that tech executives promote and lobby for excessive use of their products (even manufacturing addiction), but know better for their kids.
If the fact that these CEOs responsible for propagating disruptive technologies - CEOs exposed to the effects every day, have unprecedented insights (internal analytics) and the best staff around them to assess the tech's potential positive and negative consequences - DO NOT want to their own to partake in it even though advertising it to anyone else, then - if that tells you nothing - you are just plain ignorant or vested in their companies.
Except that the supposed views held by these CEOs (iPads, social media, AI, etc. can be bad for kids) are also widely held mainstream views. That's the only reason people are bringing the views up here...because they already agree with them!
There's absolutely nothing insightful about CEOs with "unprecedented insights" coming to the same conclusions as everyone else.
Is this the same Jobs that famously denied paternity of his daughter, Lisa Brennan-Jobs, and was only forced to accept her as his daughter when a US federal court forced a DNA test on him proving she was in fact his daughter?
Yeah, something tells me we shouldn't be taking advice regarding children from this man.
This meme where people liken electronics with tobacco is foolish. Smoking is physically harmful in any significant dose. Screens are perfectly fine in moderation and can even be beneficial when used correctly.
Its a luxury that affluent people have to limit these things. When you're at your limit after a long day of work and still have stuff to do at home the kid gets the phone, iPad, or whatever while parents do the needed to run the household. Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Yes, tech companies are liable for pushing this technology that they know to be addictive.
There is no apologist revisionist history for billionaires that are actively making the world a worse place. People act like Jobs was some kind of hero. Dude was a snake. Made some damn good products, but you don't achieve that level of wealth by being a kind person.
> Wonder why obesity is such a problem for poorer families. Convenience.
Assuming this were to be the case, one would need to explain why this doesn't happen to men.
> Among men, the prevalence of obesity was lower in both the lowest (31.5%) and highest (32.6%) income groups compared with the middle-income group (38.5%).
And among women, one would need to explain why it doesn't happen to Black women.
> Among non-Hispanic black women, there was no difference in obesity prevalence among the income groups.
It also needs to explain why no statistically significant result happens for Asian women
> Among women, prevalence was lower in the highest income group (29.7%) than in the middle (42.9%) and lowest (45.2%) income groups. This pattern was observed among non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic Asian, and Hispanic women, but it was only significant for white women.
Without looking deeper into the issue, the natural thing the income vs. obesity thing overall shows is a population blend issue (Simpson's paradox). It gets too tortured otherwise: yeah, Black women always have inconvenience, Asian women mostly don't have more convenient lives as they become richer, and White women get massively more convenient lives as they get wealthier. Men until 2008 got less convenient lives as they got wealthier and then their lives got neither more convenient nor less convenient but stayed the same.
That's pretty rough number of epicycles to stick into this convenience angle.
I think you are right, and your "bet" about Zuckerberg checks out, at least according to media reports about his family. Still, asking someone to draw an inference based on three pieces of evidence, of which two are a bet and an assumption, seems hasty.
For a random individual plucked out of general population, you would be correct. Three is hardly anything. However, for individuals that effectively determine what actual average is to a population ( by shaping tech that shapes said population at the very least ), it does not seem hasty. It may be a proxy, but it is not hasty.
I agree that we shouldn't have iPads and similar electronics in the classroom. But I would advise into reading too much into the societal beliefs of inventors and how their tech will play out.
Consider Lee de Forest, one of the early pioneers of radio. He expected radio to act almost like a moral and intellectual uplifter for society. He thought people would use it to essentially listen to religious sermons and educational lectures.
To be fair to the Forest, both of those did and do occur! But they were vastly overwhelmed by "entertainment" - similar to the printing press and other mass-media opportunities.
The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation. You can find videos discussion many of them in-depth. Someone in Nepal with an Internet connection can get an education that would rival the best universities of the 1800s, if they want.
> The Internet allows you to get every classical work of philosophy or theology online immediately both in the original language or in translation.
LLMs also do quite well at "decoding" the obscure language of these classic works and rephrasing it in more contemporary terms. Even a small local LLM will typically do a good enough job of this, though more world knowledge (with a bigger model) is always preferable.
I'm close-reading Aristotle in a Meetup group where we compare many translations and indulge the controversies in translating the Greek.
When I've tried to get LLMs to bear on a topic, they can't even relate to the concept I'm looking at, instead generating a summary of the easiest parts. LLM is basically a beginner student.
Yeah Sam Altman's kids will use chatbots but here's the difference, your kids no matter the amount of money you're willing to spend will never ever get to use the chatbots Sam Altman's kids will have access to to build their legacy.
In the Steve Jobs era (there was a very short overlap between the introduction of the iPad and the death of him) my local school did actually use iPads to replace books. It was fine. Students liked using features like search. What mattered was that (1) iPads then didn’t have multiple windows so students still took notes by hand; (2) the school also required almost all homework to be handwritten.
> And that much of Silicon Valley’s leadership (and the world’s rich, for that matter) send their own kids to Montessori, Steiner, and other educational institutions that prefer pencil and paper to digital tablet, conversations to smartphones, modeling clay and outdoor imagineering to online gaming.
> In their book, ‘Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making Our Kids Dumber,’ educators Joe Clement and Matt Miles write: “It’s interesting to think that in a modern public school, where kids are being required to use electronic devices like iPads, Steve Jobs’s kids would be some of the only kids opted out.”
As troublesome digital tools are in practice, the stories of "tech execs refusing digital tools for their kids" is a trope often promoted/created by kindly put fringe actors.
It’s probably more nuanced than this. Would I have let my kids use Facebook in the height of its popularity. Absolutely. It was fun, engaging and user driven.
Now it’s just an absolute cesspit of paid content, ads and boomers posting in groups.
I don’t even think it’s appropriate to call it social media anymore. It’s barely social.
Not a single friend of mine posts anything on there.
Parents do not have to be "experts in chilhood development" to know what is best for their children. Especially experts in their fields like the manufacturing of alcohol, guns or other products universallly considered dangerous.
So, if parents can rely on a a century of more of science showing the negative impacts of guns, tobacco, and alcohol on children… they can rely on vibes and politicians for evidence of harm from screens?
I’m not even arguing with you. I’m just disappointed in how quickly so many on HN throw out all pretense of being interested in data as soon as a personal hot button issue comes up. It’s human nature I guess, but still depressing.
You feel pain? Doctor says it's probably in your head because statistically you shouldn't. -- Based on countless true stories.
Data is map, not terrain. It can explain some of the quantifiable world, not all of it. Common sense can also fill some of the gaps, some of the time. And there remains plenty still that's too entropic for our grasp. Waiting for data to speak is not always the best move. Heck, it might even sometimes be the worst. It seems this is a lesson we collectively keep forgetting over and over, despite the endless list of data-backed "facts" that, in hindsight, it turns out we were wrong or short-sighted about. Apparently, that too is human nature.
The existence of science does not obligate us to either receive a double-blind study of massive statistical significance on the exact question we're thinking about or to throw our hands up in total ignorance and sit in a corner crying about the lack of a scientific study.
It is perfectly rational to rely on experience for what screens do to children when that's all we have. You operate on that standard all the time. I know that, because you have no choice. There are plenty of choices you must make without a "data" to back you up on.
Moreover, there is plenty of data on this topic and if there is any study out there that even remotely supports the idea that it's all just hunky-dory for kids to be exposed to arbitrary amounts of "screen time" and parents are just silly for being worried about what it may be doing to their children, I sure haven't seen it go by. (I don't love the vagueness of the term "screen time" but for this discussion it'll do... anyone who wants to complain about it in a reply be my guest but be aware I don't really like it either.)
"Politicians" didn't even begin to enter into my decisions and I doubt it did for very many people either. This is one of the cases where the politicians are just jumping in front of an existing parade and claiming to be the leaders. But they aren't, and the parade isn't following them.
Screens are harmful for adults too. Everyone knows this through the personal experience of doomscrolling hours of one's own life away. Why would they be any better for children?
Or do you imagine that there's a study out there that will reveal that arguing on Twitter with someone called Catturd2 is good for your mental health?
No, but I believe that science and quantifying the specific danger leads to better policies than going on vibes. For instance, laws to require safe storage are based on data quantifying reductions in harm to children [1]
Data beats vibes, even when vibes are qualitatively correct. I’m surprised this is surprising.
Engineering or marketing ? I doubt Zuckerberg or Altman have much involvement in engineering after their products took off. After a certain point they were no longer engineers of their products.
There is the Stanford Persuasion Lab study on infinite scroll... rather than take it as a cautionary finding, tech has embraced the infinite scroll. Because incentives.
No - but they could hire full-time panels of such experts, and never miss the money.
More to the point - if the CEO of DogFoodCo won't let his own family pets eat any of his company's flagship products, then maybe smart dog owners should follow his example?
Do they need to be? If I was a billionaire surrounded by the most educated and competent people in the world I wouldn't even spare a thought for the "Whole words are better than phonics" crowd.
So it’s kind of an appeal to authority, without any evidence of authority?
I’d be super interested in the panels of experts that Jobs, Zuckerberg, and Altman (assuming GGP’s “asssumption” is correct) convened when making these decisions.
Absent that, this isn’t any more persuasive than saying that Coca Cola is good for infants because I assume Coke execs feed it to theirs.
I am saying that tech execs have no special knowledge, and their actions should not be used to inform one’s own opinions or social policy on the topic.
There IS tons of data in this area. Please, do yourself a favor and read it (pay attention to the population of studies —- many use adults in their 30’s or older as proxies for children).
You can absolutely find real data supporting your position. And it will be more persuasive (albeit less dramatic) than imagining what Altman probably does.
No need for the leading question/bait when you know what they’re saying. No one said they’re experts on childhood development, they’re saying “it’s telling they won’t even let their kids use these services when they swear it’s safe for our kids to do so.”
He (Zuckerberg) doesn't. It tells us that they know that kids should not be using any of this technology as it is extremely addictive to kids who are none the wiser.
> What does that tell us?
It tells us three things:
1. Do not give a child access to iPads, social media or ChatGPT until they are old enough and are aware of their addictive nature.
2. Get them to read books as an alternative.
3. Being unable to restrict access to iPhones, ChatGPT to a child is a parenting skill issue and not the responsibility of a government to impose global parental controls on everyone for the purpose of surveillance.
I was nodding along until the third point. As a parent it can be really hard to deny your kids to smartphone/tablets when other parents don’t care and all their friends play Roblox, use WhatsApp to communicate, or watch YouTube.
Your kid will be the odd one out, missing some shared culture, left out of conversation or meetups they arrange in IM, etc.
The government should absolutely forbid social media and addictive games to kids under 16, otherwise it’s very hard as a parent to escape these little addiction machines and you can only try to limit damage.
Of course, we have to find a way that is not damaging privacy at the same time.
(If you don’t have kids or have kids that are under ~10, you do probably not know what the pressure is like… yet.)
Did you read my comment? The issue is not being able to say 'no'. The issue is basically Sophie's choice: it's saying 'no' but then your kind misses out on a lot of social interactions with their peers vs. saying 'yes', but then your kid has a risk of getting addicted to this crap.
Missing out on social interactions weighs heavily on kids too.
Making everything harder is that even primary schools sometimes allow kids to play kids to play Roblox or use ChatGPT. For parents it's an uphill battle if even their role models think it's fine to play addictive games or make Tik Tok videos. We picked plenty of battles of not allowing videos of our kid to be uploaded to Youtube/Facebook, etc., luckily there are consent forms now, but you have to be constantly vigilant, because sometimes the consent forms are ignored or you get e-mails saying 'if you object, react by the end of the day'. If they play at friend's houses, they typically have access to the same games as well. Do you also want to say 'no' to playing at other kids' homes?
It has been shown scientifically that social media, certain games, etc. are bad and nearly as addictive as heroin. Maybe it's time to make a law to forbid use by kids, just like we have laws that you cannot sell alcohol, drugs, or cigarettes to kids?
And again, we should find a privacy-preserving way to do it.
Missing out on social pathology is a good thing, not a bad thing. You should absolutely teach your kids to defy any peers or self-proclaimed authority figures who are expecting them to engage with that crap. It's called having healthy boundaries.
Well how do you tell your kid "no" when he asks for candy, when he can get as much as he wants at friend's houses, school, the library, or basically anywhere outside your house?
Edit: better exaple would be cigarettes, since that's something we as a society recognize is bad for kids and generally require proof of age if there is any doubt. Imagine if all your kid's friends smoked, and there were cigarette vending machines at school, and all you could do was say "no."
3. When your net worth is measured in billions you have other opportunities in your parenting not necessarily afforded equally to every other parental unit.
You've fallen for the false framing. "companies have free reign to engineer as much addiction as they want" and "government enacts universal age verification surveillance" are not the only two options.
The key message that poster before tried to convey was
that they themselves do not believe into their own products,
not that rich kids are privileged royal kings today. This
ties into e. g. Facebook trying to addict people into using
it - infinite scrolling as an example. The latter can be
quite a problem on youtube or people using smartphones while
riding in a subway, jumping from pointless video to pointless
video - this is quite addictive.
The biggest problem is you get conditioned to instant and constant dopamine hits, which works directly against a lot of the things one is supposed to learn in school.
Kids learn the A-Z in record speed in 1st grade. But they don't learn to concentrate or that learning things can sometimes be challenging and the value of perseverance and that understanding eventually comes.
So in later grades they pay for learning the A-Z too fast through the iPad. Because they didn't learn how to learn.
The net effect in Norwegian classrooms over past 5 years of iPad education seems to be negative and it is not about what kids are exposed to. It is about not learning to concentrate.
Also a good reason for why one shouldn’t have one’s child raised through the policies of people who don’t want kids. If they don’t have any skin in the game…
It's also a reminder that there's often a gap between what technology companies market to the masses and what the people behind those technologies actually endorse for their families
You are assuming they all act as wise and with the foresight of Jobs.
Jobs was a products guy that had an intricate understanding on the relation of people and technology. The others are just finance bro's dressed up in tech clothes.
> Steve Jobs promoted the iPad as a replacement to the 'heavy schoolbooks kids had to carry all day'
This is largely an American phenomenon. If you visit some other countries, students don't walk around all day saddled with what look like Medieval tomes in backpacks that come comically close to dwarfing the student. There is no reason for them to be so thick, so heavy, so expensive, hardcover, or even loaned. And there is no reason to lug them around all day either.
Frankly, teachers should be relying more on delivering material in class without a textbook.
That the US and by extension the West is ruled by corrupt individuals that knowingly harm their fellow citizens. However, especially the US, few people will parent their children in a way that will protect and strengthen their kids. The schools, which gave up on success years ago, will continue to harm the children. The community with do nothing since they view the parents and the schools as the guardians of children, not themselves. Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
So the kids will continue to be harmed. EdTech will get money because this time they will do it right. AI will lead to a new thoughtless generation.
>Almost no one wants to be the childless crank that shows up at a PTA or school board meeting demanding that tech be removed from the daily lives of the children.
I had never even realized.
As a bonus I now also see cranks proposing to raise other peoples children in some kind of sweatshop calling it education and schools. As if that was ever the goal.
On another totally unrelated note, this guy [1] that is not at all connected to the Epstein class whatsoever (he is) and is only an advisor to the leader of some some small little organization called the world economic forum says you and your children should be kept “happy” with drugs and video games.
Skip to the very end for the statement or listen to the whole little clip to hear how the demigods think about you and your children “worthless” children.
How ironic: once the exfiltrators of all of the web's data have consolidated it into their own walled-garden it becomes 'proprietary' and must - of course - be protected from exfiltration by others as if it was their own.
This is something these tech giants ignore intentionally. Infact many people don't even know about how they train their model by scraping data for free & when it comes to their code being open source, you see Takedowns lol. Interestingly, Anthropic made a bigger Contribution to open source itself.
Definitely a different mindset/toolset is required when it comes to building systems that have to be working autonomously without "quick fixes" from the web.
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