A round trip cross country plane ride for one passenger is equivalent to about 500k - 1 million image generations. So all one has to do to offset their lifetime usage of image generators is forego one vacation. And this of course is only for current day carbon usage, that could go down (or up I guess but compute-wise usually things get cheaper over time).
It's a different kind of tax. The VC model is to get you addicted to a service and then jack up prices as soon as they've squeezed out other competition. You can't opt out of that game when AirBnBs take over your town.
That's fair and accurate, there's a lot broken with the system. But I wouldn't place the blame at the feet of YC, it would be just as bad without them.
I teach Tesla FSD as a cautionary tale of malicious business practices, how to deploy robots in the least safe way possible, and an anti-example of how to be a good engineer. It should be a crime to have as little a grasp on engineering and to have as much input as Musk does.
As an avid fsd user, your list makes me more comfortable using fsd than not. If there were more you’d parrot it around, but in the end, fsd is safer than humans at the wheel. As much as you dislike it because of Musk, fsd will continue to march forward and improve and millions will use it. You are beta testing fsd even if you don’t want to be.
> You are beta testing fsd even if you don’t want to be.
Exactly, that's precisely the wrong way to do ethical, responsible engineering. It's one thing to put your own life in the hands of a beta test, but it's another to put all of our lives at risk without our consent.
Distinguish a beta test from a learner driver or first year licensed driver. Why should I share the road with anyone who isn’t an experienced and competent driver?
Consent. We've consented to people learning to drive. Everyone is aware of those risks and they act accordingly. Often, to make other drivers aware of the driver's learning status, it's customary to affix a sticker to the car.
On the other hand, the public generally is not aware that these FSD machines are operating without critical safety equipment, and if they knew and were properly informed I'm not sure they would agree to be part of the test. I think Elon Musk knows that as well which is why he hasn't bothered to ask.
Moreover, I'm shocked and horrified by the number of people going around "beta testing" new versions of FSD. You'll see someone go to an area where a previous FSD version is known to fail just to see if the new one works. How is that a good idea at all? The last time you were here the car lurched into oncoming traffic unexpectedly and went down a one way, so let's see if it does it again, fingers crossed?
If we're using that definition of consent, it is an absolute unequivocal red herring. Roads are full of vehicles and full of drivers which, if you understood exactly what and who they are, you would absolutely refuse to consent sharing the road with. I didn’t consent to share the road with someone who failed to tighten their wheel nuts. I didn’t consent to share the road with that tourist in a rental car. I didn’t consent to sharing the road with a deer. I didn’t consent to sharing the road with Mercedes Drive Pilot or Ford BlueCruise or Mercedes SuperCruise or Nissan ProPILOT or any vehicles operated by Zoox or Waymo.
The dangerous you're talking about have been around for a long time, have been depicted in many forms over decades in all kinds of popular media media, have actually impacted people which has birthed reforms and new safety measures, and that is all part of the constant education and training the public receives.
None of that is done for FSD or tesla cars. People don't know how they work, what the dangers are, what their failure modes are, how to approach them, and no one is telling them!
If you want to lament a general lack of awareness and progressive education, then I'm fully on board. Perhaps we should require operators to pass an additional driver test to be legally permitted to supervise any L2+ system from any manufacturer. No BlueCruise or SuperCruise unless you've got the extra marking on your license.
But as far as "consent" is concerned, if you wish to use the public roads, consent necessarily means accepting the roads as a commons. This means, at minimum, accepting the presence of anything the relevant government authority deems legal.
I'm not really talking about formal education here.
> This means, at minimum, accepting the presence of anything the relevant government authority deems legal.
All that means if you have enough money you can put whatever death machines on the road you want. I don't think that's a good way to manage a road network, and will not ultimately lead to greater safety for all.
>> Consent. We've consented to people learning to drive. Everyone is aware of those risks and they act accordingly. Often, to make other drivers aware of the driver's learning status, it's customary to affix a sticker to the car.
It's not juts customary. Some jurisdictions (probably outside the US) require a special sign meaning "new driver" to be displayed in the car for a period.
E.g. in Greece where I stay an "N" (for "νέος" or "new") must be displayed for 12 months after a driver first obtains their license provided they're 18 or over:
OK, so, in the vein of the original thread, can you explain how Facebook would be "sowing discord" or "making people depressed and anxious" in some specific way that isn't just spreading other people's speech (ideally, in a way that is based on some objective metrics like engagement) that is Very Bad and shouldn't be allowed?
For example, are you suggesting that Facebook begin censoring information about the climate emergency because it makes people depressed and anxious? Should Facebook make sure that people don't see content they disagree with, because that promotes discord? Or is it the other way around - they shouldn't see content they agree with, because that creates an echo chamber which increases discord when they do encounter other views?
There was an experiment (granted its TikTok, but it's basically the same) where they register a new account, pretending to be a teenager and than start scrolling without liking anything. [1] The amount of extremist content that is shown is really worrying.
To answer your question, yes they should be highly regulated and forced to moderate what they show to users. Maybe even be liable since it is their decision what they show and not the users. And if their business model is then not working anymore, because it's to expensive to moderate the content, then tough luck.
OK, well, I support liberal democracy and all that entails. So we’re kind of fundamentally at odds here and probably won’t be able to find common ground.
That's ok. Thank you for the discussion. But I do wonder, should Russia and China be allowed to use these tools to sow distrust against our Democracy? For me the tolerance paradox formulated by Karl Popper comes to mind and it is a clear no.
Why is it this line of reasoning never goes into questioning just who the forces endlessly propagandizing about the need to censor social media are? Is this not sowing distrust in democracy itself? (If you can’t trust your electorate not to believe Chinese propaganda, what does that say about your attitude towards democracy as a system?) Who is doing this and why? That would seem to be very salient since much of the reporting on bot campaigns has since been discredited, with whole organizations confabulating these stories then laundering them through the media to push their desired political outcome. (C.f “new knowledge.”)
Foreign propaganda in democracies is as old as democracies themselves. It is by no means anything new; foreign influence campaigns spent enormous sums and labor trying to sway democracies from the very beginning - often very successfully. I don’t see why it’s any different for it to be published on Facebook instead of laundered through print media and rumor mills. At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.
> At the end of the day you either recognize these problems and appreciate that trusting your electorate/having a liberal democracy is the best option we have compared with the alternatives…or you don’t.
Many of those democracies are trending illiberal thanks to the useless yet arrogant liberal decrying of “there’s simply nothing else we can do” and championing a rotting status quo.
They are trending illiberal because of the tension between elites who think ignoring and censoring the popular will on various issues is wise and the voters who see that and think the only solution is a drastic one.
Several western countries could kill their more extreme parties overnight simply by enacting a few reforms with immigration and/or affordability.
Democracy does not imply that people should be allowed intentionally make people depressed and anxious for profit. There's no reason that must be allowed for a healthy democracy to work.
Liberal democracy does not mean that the government and other authorities hide information and opinions from people for fear it might make them “anxious and depressed.” I gave you a specific example: should they stop letting people see content relating to the climate emergency because it makes many people anxious and depressed?
That is the view of paternalistic authoritarian states whose primary concern is public harmony, not liberalism.
Content that speaks the truth, like content about the climate emergency is not the problem, even if people don't want that to be true. The content that are just blatant lies, nowadays even published by elected officials, that they just publish because it is in their own personal and financial interest is.
Right. So instead, a central authority determines what is true or not and therefore what is allowed to be published. Easy - there’s clearly a neutral arbiter of truth we can all depend on! So the problem was never that the algorithm let people see content that was depressing and anxiety-inducing - that’s okay - but when it does so and it’s not true. How the goalposts move.
You’re right back to what authoritarian states say and do, and diametrically opposed to what underpins liberal democracy: the idea that the demos decides what is true and good. That idea has lots of very obvious problems but we decided it was preferable to the other systems, one of which you are now advocating for. In a liberal democracy we all are responsible for persuading the people that lies are lies, not censoring them.
If you believe that the Algorithm is just too powerful and you can’t compete in the marketplace of ideas against people lying - well, you don’t believe in liberal democracy. You believe in an ideologically authoritarian state that tells you what’s true or not, and where people are not allowed to make free, (un)informed decisions.
We're not talking about the government and authorities, we're talking about Facebook. The government showing people information that makes them anxious and depressed isn't the same as a for-profit entity intentionally tailoring individual feeds to maximize people's specific anxieties and depression because they discovered it generates billions of dollars, allowing their executives to live in opulent luxury floating on mega yachts. That whole thing isn't a part of liberal democracy.
OK, so who is deciding what information makes people “anxious and depressed” and therefore what Facebook is allowed to republish in feeds? Would it be reasonable for Facebook to censor all information about the climate emergency to protect people from feelings of anxiety and depression, even if they engage with it?
That price is paid by us, not Zuck and his shareholders, so it was at no cost to him. Such is the problem with capitalism. Actually the rise of fascism has been great for Zuck and his shareholders, they'd like to see more of it.
> People get by with the existing programming languages and models, that seems to be fine.
People like what they like, and they have trouble with anything other than imperative structured programming. It’s been a pain over the last decade plus to get people just to try functional programming, and they already know what functions are!
It’s so hard I think it’s a losing battle. No matter how good a paradigm people will always stick to a) what they know and b) what they’re paid to know.
However, I still think there’s a future for paradigms like dataflow because LLMs use random esoteric languages with great ease, and without complaint. They will use the tool for the job, even if they’re unfamiliar with it at first. “Mainstream” doesn’t really matter anymore.
There is a reason imperative programming is so common. It is more amenable to poorly designed, under specified, iterative development. Most real world software is in that category naturally. If you're meticulously designing and engineering it really well from the start, sure functional languages represent it well without leaving much room for misinterpretation and thus bugs. But no one does that.
Marginal cost of adding a feature has to be proportional to the revenue made by that feature. Then In Java or go you just add a ugly special case to appease the large customer and ignore the small ones' emails. Bugs getting shunted around instead of truly fixed at the root is also totally OK as long as they are not in the major revenue/cost centers of the product. No one has time to replace these piles of hacks and eventually you would have given up most of your languages benefits and your types now mean nothing there is probably a hundred flags making it a union effectively.
Rust is one language though where hacking around goes a long way without breaking too many of the guarantees, although it's not perfect, from my experience at a company where services spanned java go rust and ruby.
> If you're meticulously designing and engineering it really well from the start, sure functional languages represent it well without leaving much room for misinterpretation and thus bugs. But no one does that.
I find functional programming better at iterative development. You don't have to go full on on types but you always have the choice to make it good in the future. And from my experience the final refactoring is just better and let you built way more on top than imperative languages.
The reason imperative programming is so common is because of network effect. Unix won over lisp machines
Ya'll don't realize what the actual plan was. It wasn't to use the mob to overthrow the government, it was to use the mob to delay the certification of the vote. Which they did, but it wasn't for long enough. They were going to overthrow the Constitution by just deciding for themselves they won despite the votes. And they're in power again, so they're very likely going to do exactly that next time.
The whole plan after the judicial effort failed (using the courts to overturn the vote outcome) and the individual shakedowns failed (calling up governors and demanding they change the vote outcome) was to pressure senators to throw out the state certificates, kick them back to the states, and have the states decide that Trump won instead. They had a whole slate of fraudulent shadow certificates with Trump as the winner ready for Senators to certify. That 10000% would have worked because there are more red states than blue, so they would have just picked Trump over Biden.
But Pence refused to go along with the plan. So the mob was the last ditch effort to convince the senators. Its purpose was not to kill the senators but to delay the vote to give more time to affect the influence campaign. So that plan was also very very close to working because they did delay the vote. It only didn't work because Mitch McConnell refused to end the session and kept everyone around to complete the certification of the vote on January 7. But the fact that it happened on January 7 means that the plan very nearly worked.
You need to look at J6 as a buffer overflow attack. There are no instructions for what to do if the J6 vote is disrupted by a mob, the hope was that but putting the country in that illegal state would allow for arbitrary instructions to be executed.
I wrote a programming language because I wanted to express the way my brain works and to help people understand the way certain people think about the world. Art or craft?
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