jmward01
As I write, I clarify my own ideas. If I'm being honest I'm probably writing this more for me to better understand what really has worked than as a response. I hope it generates a good response and makes me think and refine more and I hope it makes others do the same, but really, selfishly!, I am doing this for me I guess to help me focus on these things in the future.
So, with that I think this may be where I am really trying to go with this. Maybe we are missing the point with these things. Maybe we should hammer in these math concepts, NP growth, gradient descent (iterative development) and how to measure when teams and problems are breaking because of the math so that we can understand and address the root issue better. I have ever heard anyone explain that NP math concepts and gradient descent dominate the reasons why teams fail or succeed, but the evidence is everywhere. Push the why and how to spot it and less the prescriptive how? Maybe a more effective set of things the industry could be pushing are simpler checks: how big are your teams? How many problems are they thinking about at a time? How many levels of teams do you have compared to the size of the organization? Can each member of a team articulate that team's goal? Can they articulate what their team is currently, this minute, working on? Can the team above them articulate how the goals of the teams below them fit together to solve the problem they were given? Are teams talking when they shouldn't? (We so focus on teams not talking that we often miss that talking too much is kind of a bigger deal). That kind of thing. More management and organization and less process and product oriented.
- Teams stay relatively small so if problems are big then they divide and conquer with teams of teams so that they can:
- Bite off problems that they can fit in their heads which allows them to:
- Meet often not to just speak out loud with nobody really listening, but instead to actually coordinate and plan concrete steps that progresses the problem. And they can make daily adjustments not just because they are a small focused team but because they also:
- avoid backlogs, feature lists and similar documentation where possible since these things give them momentum in the direction they thought they were going when these products were created and not in the state the problem is in now.
Each of these things fight, well, math. Communication is a math problem. If everyone is talking to everyone about everything then you have a non-polynomial growth problem. Designing the big problem perfectly from the start is NP. Divide and conquer doesn't give you a perfect solution, but it gives you a really good one and it gives it to you in reasonable time. Splitting the task, and the team, and minimizing the communication, and accepting the loss in finding the perfect solution that triggers, is all needed for divide and conquer. We never accept that though so it turns back into an NP problem and something ends up dropping. Time, quality, capability or, unfortunately often, the whole thing fails. Similarly, if you put things on a backlog then prioritizing that backlog is again NP and that is especially bad if there is one massive team backlog from all sources. Backlogs become dead idea bins because it isn't possible to organize them efficiently so stop wasting time on them. If your team is properly sized they know what is needed now so they can make the next small step and they can optimally design and implement that step in their piece of the bigger problem. They will get done quickly and have a good product as opposed to getting done never because of the pursuit of the perfectly coordinated and communicated solution.
If you divide and conquer properly then the communication/process you use at each team's level becomes so obvious that every formalized system out there becomes silly. Let the team do whatever works for them. They are small and nimble and learn to talk to each other so no need to slam a process at them that makes them a machine.
When Russia made its current play at taking over Ukraine it failed miserably. The dumbest plans executed with no ability to react to the real state on the ground were all on display. They had the capability and they had the resources but their ability to execute at the operational level was terrible and for all the same reasons we are terrible. Centralized command, no ability to package up a problem with resources and a commander and hand it off, no ability to react. Their operational level was broken fundamentally, just like ours is. The scariest thing about the Ukraine war right now is that they have learned the operational level of war. They can plan and react. They are now a force to be reckoned with because they know how to use their tools, including AI, to be effective.
We went through this same learning curve in WWII. We were terrible initially. Russia sent a huge column of resources on a major road and let it stall, we put a bunch of battleships right next to each other. But then we learned and by the end of it we could pull off d-day. Those planners then left the military and got us to the moon with slide rules. We still haven't gone back and it isn't because our technology is worse, it is because we started loosing that operational knowledge again.
The end result of the school bombing will likely be even more oversight at the highest level, more centralized decision making and review, which is exactly the wrong direction needed to fix the problem. We need to rediscover the operational level of war. We need to learn to be responsive. We need to stop trying to create a 72 hour steady state cycle that serves nobody but manual writers and embrace that war is chaotic and if you build a process that makes it feel steady state you have really built a cycle that looses wars and bombs kids.
- Investing in alternatives has led to massive new industry that is improving the economy of those countries that do it. If your argument is an economic one then jump onto the solar, wind and battery bandwagon.
- There are virtually no real short medium or long term gains economically here. Gas is the only thing still competitive with solar/wind and its costs are rising while solar and wind continue to fall. Building new maximum pollution plants would drop that internalized cost but who in their right mind would fund something so obviously DOA?
- Obviously the externalized costs of greenhouse gas emissions are deeply undervalued in this move. Even if they are 'fake news' in the US, the rest of the world is finally starting to take them seriously. The US's diminished soft power means it won't be able to easily bully the world into allowing it to pollute without consequence and such an obviously hostile move means it will loose even more of its soft power by taking this position. So on the international level this means we burn a lot of political capital and gain nothing but decades of distrust and anger.
- Current events show that energy security is dominated by decoupling from fossil fuels. This weakens the US strategically and continues to set it up to be manipulated by exceptionally hostile actors.
- Oh yeah and, of course, climate change is real.
This continues the US down the path of being the best buggy whip maker in the world. Worse than that, the US is becoming an obnoxious buggy whip maker who's neighbors are starting to hope fails horribly and will help make that happen as moves like this continue. This is stupid at every scale and in every dimension.
- Customers being able to decide their own routing with true logic is a huge feature. Open router provides the seamless switching/api, route switching decisions are available in a client.
- Similarly, providing hooks at this level gives a chance for stats/other things that are hard to plug into prod code elsewhere
- a true middle man hosting for other things like MCP may also turn into a real win once it is implemented.
Just a random thought though. My point about quality/cost being clobbered by bad providers remains. The fact that cache and quality is badly handled makes me doubt that training data choices are being respected. You need a more public trust/certification process for providers with real teeth when they cheat. I'm going to wait a bit to see how things evolve and check back later.
The thing that amazes me about this is the timeline here:
00:30 The nose and right main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 158 knots.
...
00:19 The left main gear touched down at a groundspeed of 134 knots.
00:15 A pilot called for a go-around.
11 seconds and 24 knots after the nose touched down and then the left main finally also touched down? Wow. Then 4 seconds after all that the go-around. It is one thing to hold the nose off for that long, but a main mount?!
I want FSD, but I want it on consumer terms. Safety is only one aspect and it is the one constantly brought up. It is important, but in the long term it will be solved and the more important things will remain. Concepts of privacy, ownership and access will be the real issues of the future and should be the most important discussions about FSD, and transportation in general, now. If we allow FSD to go the rout it appears it is going, car companies requiring you forfeit you privacy, subscriptions and not ownership and companies clearly demonstrating their first attempts at gating access by advertising where you should go and emphasizing where they don't want you to go, then the FSD future we are being led to is a dystopian mistake.
You may not believe FSD will ever get here but I think it is easy to see the direction car companies are pushing things. I am happy to see safety is being solved but I would rather see a major push towards a FSD future that is more like a 1950's space opera than a 2000's tech dystopia.
There are legitimate reasons for some ability to conduct surveillance, but without a cost any surveillance method becomes mass surveillance. That cost must be human, it must scale in human time, or it turns into mass surveillance since without a human cost all it takes is one person and one button to watch one or a hundred thousand people.
Technologies like flock have no human scaling cost. They run 24/7/365 and make surveilling one person or hundreds of thousands of people as easy as pushing a button. There is no human scaling cost to them. That means that all it takes to abuse a massive portion of the population is one person and one action. The probability of abuse, abuse which harms a population as a whole, therefore approaches 100% no matter how 'good' the controls are on it. All mass surveillance technologies have this fundamental flaw. The consequence of that abuse is that people, rightfully, will believe that they are being watched, legitimately or not, 24/7/365. The harm here is clear. A society that is under mass surveillance is a society that is having its basic freedoms continuously attacked.
Mass surveillance, surveillance without a direct human cost that scales with the level of surveillance, is not compatible with any definition of 'freedom'. Or, to sum all this up, every argument about how a system like this could be made better to limit harm is a red herring because technologies like Flock have a fundamental flaw that is incompatible with any definition of a free society.
This is the statement that matters and why I think electric is a huge deal. We can't get new designs into the air. It costs too much and takes too long. Electric has the potential to bring the design cycle back to something reasonable. Electric engines, and the supporting systems around them, are just so much simpler so there is so much less to certify. Once we really start designing for electric, and iterating on those designs, I think we will start seeing massive gains very rapidly.
The essential idea here is that there is a real cost per DMCA notice that turns into a reward for those incorrectly accused. As the total number of DMCA notices go up the more bond money is floating around ready to pay those harmed by the system. DMCA takedown agents now have a real incentive to get it right. The better they are the more money they save. The trick is to set the bond high enough to turn it into a real value prop. The only thing missing, I think, is the upward pressure on the base bond. I think that should be set by the global ratio of successful to reversed takedowns. If the industry is spamming the bond goes up and payments go up. If the industry is policing itself the bond goes down.