idontknowtech

This sort of stuff will continue happening until the regulatory framework acknowledges a fundamental consumer right to privacy.

If a data broker collects data without the consent of the consumer, then their only real risk is a class action lawsuit which drags on for six years, gets settled for a few days profit, and the consumer gets $13.50 after the legal fees. This massive skew in the risk reward calculus of data brokers is why we have the problem. Because there's little to no real downside, the trend is automatically collect as much data on as many people as possible.

Fixing this means big, mandatory, cash penalties in the law code - say $5k per consumer data leak, directly to the affected consumer, with added penalties if the company lies about the leak or delays payment. The fine must be big, mandatory, and paid directly to the consumer. Only that changes the risk reward ratio.

In that new world, companies would have to re assess their risks. They'd either build invulnerable systems and hire a lot more people reading HN to protect their golden goose, or better still they'd decide to exit the business entirely. That sounds bad, but the only reason the industry exists is because regulators failed to foresee massive leaks like this happening every three months.

We need a consumer data privacy law, with massive fines, to force companies to change their behavior. What we're doing now clearly does not work.

Bitcoin would make an awful legal tender, because by its design supply decreases while demand for it increases. An ideal, 0% inflation currency (assuming that is ideal) would expand and contract automatically with economic conditions. Satoshi considered this problem but decided it was too complicated to implement, which is why he went with the fixed supply route.

Still, it's worth remembering that a fixed supply currency will inevitably fail just as the metallic standards (which were semi fixed supply) did, and for the same reasons: politics. Metal backed currencies fell because the political will required to coordinate the system fell apart. Newly-enfranchised workers didn't find the message "suck it up, the gold standard requires it" very appealing politically, so they voted for other things that entailed fiscal and monetary policy. Central Banks, seeing the writing on the wall, abandoned gold en masse, with the US retaining it only for other central banks.

Bitcoin would have the same problem. It would be inevitably deflationary - halvenings, for example, are tied to computational power. Presumably, more demand for Bitcoin means more computational power, so its supply decreases just as demand increases.

Deflation is even worse than inflation for working people. Investment dries up, because why would somebody take a gamble on a business if they can keep their cash in their closet and make money, risk free? Employment therefore drops, while people decrease spending - why spend $100 on something today, if you can buy it for $85 in a year? Additionally, loans get more expensive in real terms, wages decline, and a whole host of other bad things happen.

That's why central banks target +2% inflation, in part. Inflation is preferable because it encourages investment, discourages nominal (and only nominal) wage decreases, decreases the real value of loans to the benefit of the debtor class, and other benefits. Central Banks also have a pretty successful record dealing with runaway inflation - hike rates, cause a recession, wait - whereas they lack tools to deal with deflation. At its simplest, the solution to deflation is for everyone to get a check from the government, but this whole field is considered weirdo experimental land and has only barely been tested.

All that is to say: Bitcoin is fundamentally ignorant of history and is incapable of becoming anything other than digital gold. It has a floor value which it cannot sink beneath: online gambling, illegal things, and privacy advocates (in that order) guarantee it will never truly hit $0.00. But it would be an absolute catastrophe for any country to adopt as its actual currency.

Now that I think of it, Bitcoin is perhaps one of the earliest examples of technophiles assuming society should work according to computer code, thereby "cleaning" these imperfect human systems by replacing them with the inevitable future: A philosophically-driven (rather than pragmatically or empirically, for example) system, with clear and inviolable rules, limited to no exceptions, and a happy ignorance of why existing systems came to be. After all, why study the past when we're creating the inevitable future?

It's definitely a bubble. Sam Altman wants to build $7tn worth of data centers; if that's not an indication of how ridiculous this has gotten, I don't know what is.

LLM has been vastly oversold to the general public as "AI" when the technology is nowhere near that. We haven't invented turing complete robots that independently identify problems, learn the solutions, and respond. LLM as a technology might not ever be able to do that, by the nature of how it works. We have only created chatbots that reply to prompts, with a higher than acceptable inaccuracy rate. And yet this justifies $7tn.

But silicon valley figured out that saying "AIAI" on repeat works for funding, then other companies started pretending they were the same for the instant stock gain. Rising interest rates and this wave led everyone to pull out of other companies and dump into anything vaguely related to AI. They rode the price up, and now that interest rates are falling (making other companies more attractive) they are rotating out.

This probably didn't become a full on bubble like crypto did because interest rates were high. It's still a bubble, but seems to be pricking of its own accord as opposed to becoming a gigantic, systemic problem.

That said, when rates fall again, we might see a second boom there. Or maybe another fad will strike silicon valley, to continue the trend.

VR - Crypto - Metaverse - LLM?

It's an unanswerable question, but the only option we have is to try and make them work. At least until the next best system comes about. Regressing backwards because old things lasted awhile is hardly the place we should aspire towards.

I'm generally sympathetic to what you're saying, but I also detest a16z and Horowitz personally for being the epitome of "software guy decides he's expert at everything now" and his role in the crypto bubble.

Should the hacker have tried more? Sure, maybe. Do I really care? Definitely not

If you want to get really scared about methane leaks, sinkholes are forming across the tundra as global warming melts the permafrost, creating gigantic methane bubbles as the previously frozen organic material now rots. Those bubbles explode once big enough, creating massive pockmarks which fill in with water.

The amount of methane they leak is estimated to be gigantic, but without full coverage we'll never know.

Idiotic decision by that employer. Who cares where the employee is, if they're a top performer?

I'm convinced the back to office mandates come from people who thrive in office environments. Those people succeed, get promoted, become leadership, and then assume everyone else works just like they do. It's absolutely not the case.

That's without going into the many, many studies of office environments which provide empirics disproving common myths about office work, such as the oft-repeated lie that open offices encourage collaboration. Those facts just don't compute for people who love working in those spaces, so they ignore them and repeat happy lies instead.

If you want to see some arguing really hard, check out r/UkraineRussiaReport

I enjoy it because you can genuinely interact with FSB influencers.

Couldn't agree more fully. It's a shallow lens that's not very good at prediction.

Foucault is the primary intellectual force behind the contemporary social science trend of seeing everything through a power relationships lens. His influence cannot be overstated, at least in the American academy. It's bizarre.

It's typical for architect "manifestos". Makes them sound more serious and important than they are

This seems to be the crux of their argument, and I find it convincing:

> Passing comprehensive privacy legislation would be a major public good–but APRA no longer can be called comprehensive. Civil rights guardrails are essential for consumer trust in a system that allows companies to collect and use personal data without consent. The new draft strips out anti-discrimination protections, AI impact assessment requirements, and the ability to opt-out of AI decision-making for major economic opportunities like housing and credit. We cannot abide a regime that would perpetuate, in the words of Dr. Ruha Benjamin, a form of ‘Jim Code’: ‘the employment of new technologies that reflect and reproduce existing inequities.’

I recall one from Sydney which tested backyard eggs and found that basically all of them were terrible. I don't have it saved, however.

I'd be terrified of what else the battery company put in the ground.

I'm all for gardening - there's something therapeutic about seeing a plant grow and evolve over time. You can see something tangibly change over time as a result of your work, something quite rare in today's world where we spend our time on computers producing ephemeral things like files.

That said, I'm completely opposed to urban food gardening (including chickens) because the land you're growing in is likely poisoned by years of urban pollution. Whatever you grow in those areas is going to bring that bad stuff along with it, which means your backyard tomatoes probably wouldn't pass FDA approval.

Chickens are even worse, because they'll eat whatever's on the ground and that stuff gets into the eggs. So while it looks great on Instagram, your backyard eggs are probably full of rubber, asphalt, gasoline, plastics, and all the other stuff that's wafted into your property over the years.

So anyway, by all means garden and have fun doing it, but if you haven't had your urban soil tested and verified as safe, don't eat anything that comes out of it.

Great point. Editors are filters for what the general public sees. The analog here is probably BookTok or whatever the social media version of book influencers is. They similarly can be expected to promote what they like, or eventually lose authenticity and viewership. Or just start including cartoon sounds into every video.

What we need are large, mandatory, fines for every data breach that happens. Say $10k to every person whose address gets leaked. Then we'll see companies start treating consumer data as a risk, not just a low -cost asset.

> They delight in breaking rules, but not rules that matter.

To them*

Which is the whole problem. These narcissistic egotists think they, alone, individually, are capable of deciding what's best not just for their companies but for humanity writ large.

From the headline, I thought this was yet another attempt by some silicon valley bro to handwave furiously about everything being thermodynamics. Thankfully, this was not the case.

I'm kinda surprised nobody's done this before, given how important estimating wastage is.

Most people don't think about debt rationally. If going into debt can accelerate your plans by a significant timeframe, why not do it, assuming it's affordable? Especially if you can get money without having to give up equity. Their funds accelerate your business, you pay them back with the increased earnings. It's literally how capitalism is supposed to work.

Today's generative LLM model fundamentally cannot generate new breakthroughs like that. The tech simply doesn't allow it, for one simple reason: LLMs not only don't consider, but are fundamentally incapable of considering, the science of their output before creating said output. They only consider the likelihood that each word they generate should follow the previous based on a trillion inputs.

We might as well use a random chemical element generator, plug that into our models, and save a ton of money on compute instead.

At best Gen AI can be used to create inputs for massive N genetic simulation problems. Most of its suggestions will be bad, but maybe another program can filter the good ones out.

What irks me about the fad investment bubbles of the last few years - crypto/nft, defi, metaverse, now AI - isn't just how much money they've wasted on nonsense. It's that it was wasted with complete assuredness bordering on Messianic belief that this fad was the thing to end all things.

This is Ice Cube the rapper turned actor turned reality TV star. He turned his blinding talents to cutting edge science and here we are.

To take the metaphor further, it's like this except the software is hosted on GitHub and open to public commits with limited moderation. It grows and changes on its own without anybody really knowing what's happening in total. (Here your metaphor needs no expansion)

Yes definitely. But the fields of planning and architecture have learned lessons from those mistakes. These engineers, being fundamentally ignorant of their subject matter, are guaranteed to replicate the errors of the past. They're simply not qualified to do the job they're trying to do.

Completely agree that hubris in this area isn't unique to programmers. I'm an architect, and plenty of architects have developed some truly idiotic ideas for ideal cities. Corbusier's plan for Paris was to level it and replace it with skyscrapers.

What bugs me is that the programmers of today seem to think they can optimize everything. Not only are they incapable, they're simply unqualified. At least professional urban planners have studied the topic in depth. Google throwing an engineering team at cities is just ridiculous. Might as well poll dentists on the best way to build software.

Silicon valley in general seems to think everything should be a computer, or at least as efficient as one.

Cities are incredibly complicated things that no central planner can ever fully understand. There are layers upon layers, all interacting with each other, and all changing constantly.

Only a silicon valley programmer, blinded by hubris, would assume they can "optimize" a city, as if their unique ability to program computers enables them to analyze and improve incredibly complex social structures. They will fail.

I absolutely hate the proliferation of online gambling everywhere in the US. I'm used to it in Europe, but it's still jarring to me that live broadcasts will regularly mention betting odds in an attempt to get people to gamble.

I can't imagine how difficult it must be for somebody with a gambling addiction. I also can't help but think what kids think about gambling if its thrown at them constantly.

Gambling for me is analogous to marijuana smoke. It's stinky, and I don't really want it in public, but I don't mind if you do it behind closed doors. I just don't want to see it constantly.

The argument is that a company like Apple, instead of investing its cash pile itself, should return that money to its shareholders who will, collectively, better allocate their capital than Apple will. This is almost certainly true.

The company then has essentially two choices on how to return that money. It can pay dividends, which are taxed, or it can do stock buybacks, which are not taxed until investors choose to transact their holdings. Financially, for most investors, buybacks are better.

I'll also point out that buybacks don't obfuscate prices, but instead permanently change them. By reducing the equity outstanding, the equity remaining gets more valuable.

I'm an architect, and I can't imagine using blender to design anything architectural. Purpose built architecture BIM software like Revit is just way better. Expensive, but better