I'm asking partially out of curiosity, but also to get ideas for interesting project areas to brainstorm.
This means crawling or using illegally obtained datasets then processing it with "machine learning" until you have enough plausible deniability to use it.
This could be used for bypassing copyrights. For example you can remix stock photos you don't want to pay for. You can crawl a competitor's dating network to build similar looking fake profiles. You can steal writings and automatically paraphrase it. You can steal algorithms by cloning their inputs/outputs. You can generate new porn by swapping faces and background.
An illegal dataset can also be used as a hidden input to improve your core product. For example you can buy up all stolen databases and logs and correlate the users. This can then be used for better ad targeting using data that isn't even available to google and facebook.
There is a huge space around """fitness""" devices that are running around the FDA regulatory process. I think there is going to be a huge health revolution by making everybody take their weight, glucose, blood pressure, sleep statistics, and heart rate statistics every day and feed them into an AI.
The major techincal step forward that is happening is microneedles that can draw out interstitial fluid. The patient doesn't feel it, and you can do things like constant glucose monitoring, and constant cortisol monitoring (which is huge) completely uninvasively. It's going to be amazing.
The breakthrough device is going to be a watch that can sense glucose and cortisol all the time. A while ago there was some PG post about wanting a tricorder, well it's coming, and it's going to look like a watch.
Sidenote: if anybody reading this is working in any of the labs working with these microneedles, please contact me, I would love to collaborate with you.
Could you replace the needles somehow? Can you avoid having to replace the needles frequently?
Every worn device that I'm aware of that continuously interacts with the body in some way is either totally noninvasive (like a pulse oximeter that just shines light through a finger, or an EEG with external electrodes placed against the skin) or invasively and persistently attached to the bloodstream or an organ system (like an IV, an insulin pump, or an implantable defibrillator).
Or do you have to somehow deliberately engage and retract the needles when putting on and taking off the watch? But wouldn't they break, or something, when the watch moves around on your wrist?
Or do you apply a disposable or partly disposable sensor under adhesive tape to one part of the body, and then have the watch receive data from it using electrical or electromagnetic signals?
The patch/sensor doesn't hurt going in but depending on where it's attached and how you move it can sometimes pinch a bit when you move around. And you'll definitely feel it when you jostle it.
In the case of a CGM like Dexcom or attached meter like Freestyle Libre or a glucose meter that takes a drop of blood on a strip, or even glucose monitoring urine strips: all require FDA approval to be marketed as a diagnostic tool. They have to show a certain tolerance of accuracy and be manufactured under GMP. The FDA isn't messing around.
I've been down this path with the FDA in a prior life so I'm not just speculating.
(Also FWIW the extremely thin needles used in the mounted devices aren't referred to as "microneedles" -- that term is used for a different technology used in some drug delivery patches.)
That sounds extremely fucked up. No thanks. How do you suppose this will be enforced? Higher health insurance rates for people who want privacy? Or are they just going to start arresting and throwing people in prison over this? Sounds like a horrible future.
There are physical constraints concerning continuous glucose monitoring, you cannot simply replace the capillary blood with something drawn from skin tissues depth. It significantly lags the real blood glucose level and the water content screws up the measurement. Even the continuous glucose monitors that are implanted under the skin and that are significantly larger than anything a watch would do have issues with precision and lag compared to the blood prick method. It is worth it because of the better control loop, but its not a simple topic.
They are also more precise than it sounds like you think they are. I think that all current models require some calibration every once in a way (maybe every few days).
Also, there is a lag, but it is fairly predictable and for a lot of potential use cases the lag is not an issue.
Continuous glucose (and lactate and maybe cortisol) monitors are not like Theranos.
How would any of what you listed help against cancer, aging and the obesity crisis?
We already know, for instance, a bit about the beginnings of glucose dysregulation in the beginning of diabetes. If we could have more samples of "continous" glucose data from a person, then we could catch glucose dysregulation before it becomes either type 2 or type 1 diabetes (or something else). We'd thus be able to more easily keep someone at risk from getting type 2 diabetes through simple lifestyle interventions (which would be a lot easier to study with a lot of continuous glucose data) or if it is type 1 we could administer the BCG vaccine to keep them from losing their pancreatic function. That sounds like a revolution to me!
Also, for obesity, it is known that lactate (and other metabolite) levels predict someones metabolic health and whether they have metabolic syndrome. If we had continuous lactate data or maybe BCAA data (this is probably one I'm not sure they can get easily with current tech) then we could find out when and why metabolic syndrome happens and how best to stop it and reverse it.
What you've just described will be one of the most regulated devices known to man in every jurisdiction I can think of including the US, Canada, UK, EU and Australia.
For example the DRM shenanigans in the GPU, or, when you can't write code for your smartphone unless you have permission from its parent company, and even with permission, you still can't write "any" arbitrary code - only some parts of the system are available to you. I'm aware of the exploits and jailbreaks, but those will not be always available.
A famous movie director once said the film director is the last truely dictatorial post left. He was wrong. The captain of a vessel in international waters is.
Id also contend the spaceship is likely controllable remotely, and monitored in both location and status.
Maybe the private submarine captain trumps all
But the point about offshore regulations being hard to enforce is interesting.
Tldw: within a small number of miles of shore it’s police or federal (USA I guess it’s similar for other countries). After that it’s up to the ship. Cruise companies don’t want crime statistics so are unlikely to do anything about petty crime. There is death on high seas act but that only helps for a blatant murder. Jurisdiction is the flag which is likely to be panama or Bahamas. Your living areas can be searched any time and security can lock you up in your cabin. Cruises seem horrible to me and there are reports in the news of fights breaking out. But the worst thing for me is why be stuck on a ship that has less to do than I can do in my home city?
However, it seems to be a more or less open secret (from a friend of mine who works in the industry) that investigations won't be conducted as diligently as if the crime had happened on land.
Part of the reason for that is that it's difficult to secure evidence after several days or even weeks and the staff on board or the police in the next port often isn't qualified to do so.
Another contributing factor seems to be that cruise ship operators don't want any hassle or negative press and therefore push for investigations to be dealt with swiftly and silently.
I think it is more useful to think of regulations in the context of history and societal values. For example, an oilspill off the shore of California helped galvanize support for the clean air movement.
Perhaps it is possible to hypergrow a business before regulation catches up. I think expecting such an outcome risks the long-term viability of a business, since ultimately its foundation rests upon trust in its brand. Companies (in a competitive environment at least) must earn goodwill from their customers to do well.
I hope all entrepreneurs think about building businesses that can thrive even as regulations shift as society changes. In other words, build in some resilience into your business model.
For example, you don't have to have a crystal ball to recognize when a business model over-relies on certain power imbalances. If you want to extract value from such power imbalances, don't be surprised when there is a backlash. For example, ride-sharing companies skirted with employee/contractor definitions. Flirting with this boundary is risky -- and naively hoping that one narrow interpretation is shared by society and lawmakers is, frankly, over-optimism.
Realism combined with long-term thinking, I think, tends to lead to similar decisions as "strive to do the right thing".
> The public outrage engendered by the spill, which received prominent media coverage in the United States, resulted in numerous pieces of environmental legislation within the next several years, legislation that forms the legal and regulatory framework for the modern environmental movement in the U.S. [2]
[1] https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/magazine/richar...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1969_Santa_Barbara_oil_spill
A prime example would be Bisq[0], which is a decentralized exchange that also has a profit-sharing token. If it were a company it would be violating trillions of regulatory laws, such as security and money laundering as its exchange token is obviously a security and it has no KYC, but there is simply nothing to shut down.
The government likes to believe that they have a handle on cryptocurrency but the truth is there is a thriving and growing suite of tools that exist to explicitly be uncensorable.
Step 1: make a law declaring it illegal. Step 2: have undercover cop attempt an exchange, then arrest/fine the other party. Step 3: repeat until no one wants to exchange anymore.
Sure, it wouldn’t be fully effective - the illegal drugs are still around, after all - but it will be annoying enough that all legitimate uses will disappear.
Like you rightly pointed out, the govt control over fiat, but that control is continually being threatened every day
I do however agree with you that cryptocurrency is a genie that the government doesn't quite understand yet. I think that cryptocurrencies are going to do for finance what the internet did for the way people communicate with each other. The entire financial system is going to be replaced.
To actually answer the question: I'm glad that ad-blocking remains unregulated for the most part. I'm scared that copyright owners could start making a case that the ads are an integral part of any given content (licensed to them at the very least if they aren't first-party ads) and removing them counts as copyright infringement.
Same would probably go for heaping all that earth on a mound, I doubt a lot of places will have explicit building regulations on an earth mound
Machine learning is a technique of mathematics. What do you even mean there’s no regulation of this subset of mathematics? If the law were to say a triangle can’t have three sides would it make it so?
"Since 1967, the second has been defined as exactly "the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom" (at a temperature of 0 K)."
Therefore, the meter may be defined as "the distance light travels in a vacuum in one of those cesium-133-related periods, times 9,192,631,770, divided by 299,792,458".
Right, but the constant c didn't have that exact value until 2019. Prior to 2019, c had an infinite number of digits. Thus, the numerical representation of constants with units can change as the definitions of the units themselves change.
I don't follow your thought process here. The speed of light has units, that's true. Being a speed, it has units of distance over time. But the question "how can you define the meter in terms of the speed of light if the speed of light depends on the definition of the meter?" is totally incoherent; the premise is wrong. The speed of light does not depend on the definition of the meter, making it very easy to define the meter in terms of the speed of light.
To take a trivial example, the speed of light is 300,000,000 meters per second and 300,000 kilometers per second. If we relabeled kilometers "flags", then the speed of light would also be 300,000 flags per second. But while 300,000,000 and 300,000 are different numbers, 300,000,000 meters and 300,000 flags are the same distance. You can't change the speed of light by defining a new unit of length. You can only change the coefficient of that unit that gives the speed of light. But coefficients are dimensionless and therefore aren't speeds. When you multiply the coefficient by the unit, you get the same constant speed as always.
I can't tell why you think it's "problematic" for a physical constant to have units, but I feel safe in saying that whatever you have in mind, it's wrong.
I agree, I messed that up. What I meant to say was: "how can the speed of light have an unchanging numerical value if the definition of the meter is not an unchanging definition?" Prior to 2019 the meter was not defined in terms of speed of light over time.
My point is that, unlike dimensionless constants like pi, constants with units can have arbitrary numerical values depending on the definitions of the units. And if you make a law that changes the definition of a unit, you therefore change the numerical representation of the corresponding constants.
In other words, if you defined a meter to be "the distance light travels in 1 second", then the constant c would now be 1 m/s.
> I can't tell why you think it's "problematic" for a physical constant to have units
Because the definitions of units can change[1]. The definition of the meter changed earlier this year, and thus the speed of light constant, c also changed. Before May 9, 2019, c had an infinite number of digits using SI units. Now it only has 9 digits. Planck's constant, along with a bunch of others changed as well during the units redefinition[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019_redefinition_of_the_SI_ba...
Again, I'm not arguing that the speed of light can change, but that those constants are only unchangeable in their symbolic forms. Laws can and do change their numeric representations by proxy of defining units.
As I and you have already stated, the speed of light cannot have any purely numerical value, because it is a dimensional quantity.
...and? What's the problem supposed to be? I've never seen anyone be confused over the idea that the speed of light is 300,000,000 when measured in meters per second, but 186,000 when measured in miles per second.
Read the whole thread, start to finish and the context should make it clear.
> I've never seen anyone be confused over the idea that the speed of light is 300,000,000 when measured in meters per second, but 186,000 when measured in miles per second.
Right, because unit conversion is not confusing. But what can be confusing is unit re-definition, which doesn't happen very often and can seem counter-intuitive at first ("how can a government seemingly change the value of a natural constant?!").
Many well known examples in the encryption field.
While we're at it, whenever anyone talks about machine learning they're not talking about a technique of mathematics, they're talking about a technique in software development (albeit that has some mathematical roots.) It's not popular because we're all passionate about discovering mathematical truths, it's popular because we can use it to make computers do cool things. :)
At some stage license plates will have to disappear, but then you move to facial recognition for cars and other meta data, they probably have unique sounds for instance.
I'd try and do a app like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_barcode_games
You should know how to monetize it.
(Obviously facial recognition works equally well here, but there is some regulatory attention, although none that would stop you)
I'd also look at things like using neural nets to detect race and/or underlying genetic structure from visual, audio and other metadata.
It seems to me that having a huge database of known locations of vehicles could be used to do some cool (but likely immoral) things, specially coupled with the fact that several state agencies all over the world make it free and easy to retrieve licensing and ownership information for vehicles. It'd also be relatively much easier to do compared to facial recognition.
The wildest idea I can think of is using reverse camera on every car and recognizing the plate of the car which is tail gating you. Now, that's more interesting, but how much of a fleet you would need to track down a random car.
Not something car manufacturers would do either, even with their love of telemetry.
(About provate property: https://www.security.nl/posting/406881/Juridische+vraag%3A+m... )
> I'd also look at things like using neural nets to detect race and/or underlying genetic structure from visual, audio and other metadata
I don't see the use in sufficiently cosmopolitan cities, which are the only places with the camera density to do this. I think there's a better case for (using audio recordings) predicting social circles, because close associates tend to pick up both tonal patterns and vocabulary patterns.
You’d be stupid to do it but you could buy a machine on eBay and start flying (or try to at least)
I've seen; low level acrobatics, low flight over people, guys taking off with no training and no instruction.
Reckless airmanship leads to deaths, but the paramotorists often blame it on the equipment, because without any agency investigating, there is only speculation.
There is an electric paramotor, with four drone like blades. That thing looks awesome; instead of the sounds and vibration of a 2-stroke engine strapped to your back, it's silent when you let off the throttle to glide. And no worries about will that lawnmower start up again.
I think they are stupid, but people queue for an escalator while a perfectly fine stair is empty right next to it. And while e-scooter as an industry like Lime and Bird is getting regulation all around the world, not sure about these skateboards, maybe with the exception of top speed.
If you mean the cultural entity from which the US descends, we can be absolutely certain that regulating sex was a priority for the last many thousands of years. (We are generally happy to trace US regulations back to pre-colonial England; I don't see why we wouldn't do the same here.)
cybernetics is "the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine."
I have seen it use to mean classical control theory, machine learning, UX design, and general computers -- but this is the first time I see it being used for implants.
I guess you can say "cyborgization"?
Also, any business becomes regulated if it gets big enough to have investors or employees.
For example, there are regulations in most states about ebikes, their motor capability and whether they have throttle.
But these are also very regularly entirely unenforced (nyc not withstanding)
It seems often interesting phenomena may have _some_ regulation but it is not remotely enforced. In my mind this meets the threshold of cool unregulated stuff.
https://arktimes.com/arkansas-blog/2019/06/26/report-despite...
So there are regulations, but they are unenforceable.
Apologies for the listicle: https://www.toptenz.net/top-10-deadliest-attempts-break-worl...
[1]: https://www.epa.gov/burnwise/ordinances-and-regulations-wood...
And about gathering wood in the forest, if you aren't the owner of the forest that is stealing.
2. Consequently, companies like Amazon as challenged by Andrew Yang should be regulated upon inspecting their earnings. This might be more common in the future.
A) Nootropics & performance enhancing/herbal supplements B) (regulation is attemped but limited on) Research Chemicals aka designer drugs
These are still fairly "wild west" but will not always be. I had a friend who manufactured herbal supplements and made a killing before selling his business and retiring. His factory was... interesting.
I just realized: Why aren't remote controlled robots more of a thing? Like surgeons who can do remote surgery, but for everyday tasks in a remote location. Vacuuming, doing laundry (because the tenant is elderly etc). I guess it's just too expensive still.
Simple AC transformers. (ba boom cha!)
IT process frameworks. Make a new one up! We have Scrum, ITIL, TOGAF etc. for some inspiration.
No education level required. No high-school? No problem. Become a CSM today... for 2 years.
Scrum = pyramid scheme
Totally agree. As unregulated as these are, they do have a chicken-and-egg problem. I can come up with a totally new framework/certification but getting people to accept it is going to be very difficult.
Also another thing is funding for startups. Smaller companies don't stand a chance against giants like Amazon because of the way they crush startups or just acquire them.
Same goes for some forms of alternative medicine, such as crystal and Reiki healing (I think)
It is not regulated what happens in the case that the vendor isn't able or willing to support those devices anymore. Keeping Apps up to date and new apps if new Mobile OSes arise or keep the light on in general. Right now it all depends on the goodwill of the vendor.
If the provider decides to not support anymore for whatever reason you have a smart brick!
Why?
Regulations exist for a reason. Complaining about regulations is like complaining that eating bacon 3 times a day isn't healthy. (Or, to put it another way, the people who complain about regulations are basically complaining that they can't screw people over. No sympathy here!)
Furthermore, this kind of thread implies that you're trying to do something unethical.
So what is it that you're really trying to do?
I'll venture you're in a stable, post-industrial democracy such that you can treat regulations as having inherent justness or rightness. Imagine if the question had been asked by someone explicitly not in such a place, and was instead asked as "I live in northern Afganistan, what stuff won't get me in trouble with the sharia law interpretation of the regional warlords?" or "I live in North Korea, what stuff won't get negative attention from the party officials?". Would you say that every regulation in North Korea or in ISIS-controlled territories are about stopping people from "screwing people over"?
Regulations aren't inherently good or bad, it's just any rule enforced with the threat of government violence for non-compliance.
The thought of specifically seeking out unethical opportunities is actually kind of funny though.
Metals, minerals, lithium you name it. Feds only regulate their financial products derived from the current value of them (“derivatives”).
Some is tightly regulated, some is still black-market and one is like "newly allowed" and driven by fad-market (CBD).
Fast and loose. Good times!