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Comment by viscanti | Hacker News Reader

A lot of hand waiving about how "minor paperwork" for everyone isn't such a big deal. But very little coverage of what benefit that paperwork is accomplishing. This looks like a big bag of regulatory requirements, some which might be good and some which might be bad ideas. If it's the start of a discussion around what actually good regulations look like, then they have to start somewhere and maybe it will accomplish that. If it's an actual proposal and we have to take or leave everything, maybe they need to go back to the drawing board and figure out something better.

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This is true, but I do think it's worth reflecting on why/how.

Someone writes these things. They are influenced by lobby, yes, but even lobbies, think tanks and such generally draw their ideas from what's lurking around in their vicinity.

There are no secret "geniuses of working out how this should work." That is what it is, and it shouldn't surprise anyone.

The public sphere is not good at producing politically practical suggestions either. It's good to talking s** and offering charismatic partial answers, speaking for some specific interest or opinion. Barely better than the lobbies, sometimes worse.

That's an interesting concept: There's the theory, that I tend to believe, that any successful complex system was born as a simple system, then evolved by iteration, etc. (it's from a 1970s systems theorist, iirc). Trying to birth a complex system directly is almost inevitably a mess.

But does it apply to legislating? One drawback might be that political will and attention is fleeting; and interests become vested in a current state, blocking change; and it's now or not for another generation or so.

It's worth keeping in mind the well-known principle in economics that incumbent market participants, with large economies of scale, have a strong incentive to pursue regulations that increase fixed costs but don't substantially affect marginal costs, or are otherwise decreasing costs with respect to scale. This makes it harder to start a competing firm.

That is a risk, but regulation can also keep the market open to competition, preventing incumbants from abusing their market power. Antitrust law, for example, and the FTC do that.

Right. But this is not a thread about the general merits of government regulation in business. This is about something specific, and this principle is essential to keep in mind when evaluating any specific new regulation.

All the principles are essential to keep in mind; I don't see why that one is priviledged.

Because we should have a high "index of suspicion" whenever we see incumbent corporations pushing for regulation that would suppress competition.

If we want to have good regulations and effective regulatory agencies, we should be judicious and methodical about what regulations are adopted, who is granted enforcement authority, and what that authority consists of.

> Because we should have a high "index of suspicion" whenever we see incumbent corporations pushing for regulation that would suppress competition.

It's mostly circular reasoning: Why is it more important? Because we should have a high index of suscipicion, because it's more important.

I think we should be equally suspect of people pushing against regulation, which also empowers the powerful.

> One drawback might be that political will and attention is fleeting; and interests become vested in a current state, blocking change; and it's now or not for another generation or so.

If a problem, like tracking what non SOTA models are doing with respect to safety, don't rise to being worth regulated, then why bother regulating it? If you're going to force everyone in the field, in California, to file additional paperwork (and understand what they're legally supposed to report and how and when), then you probably should have a compelling argument for why. If you didn't do that now, and it's never a big enough problem to regulate then you've done no real harm. If it's clearly an issue that needs to be regulated in the future then it should be easy to do so.

> If it's clearly an issue that needs to be regulated in the future then it should be easy to do so.

That hasn't really been the case, though. Lots of things have needed regulation for a long time - look at carbon emissions, for example - and it doesn't happen.

Perhaps the solution is to create the regulatory agency and give them a legitimate process to create new regulations as needs change. Legislatures have limited time and expertise, and can't possibly keep up anyway.

>A lot of hand waiving about how "minor paperwork" for everyone isn't such a big deal. But very little coverage of what benefit that paperwork is accomplishing.

I also came here to comment on my concern about this. Only big players with significant legal resources like Google/Microsoft are going to be able to compete once you let this element start to creep in.

You also end up with a growing group of individuals whose livelihood is tied to whatever the regulatory regime is. If you are paying people to write new laws and regulate things, they are going to write even more regulations. Whether or not the insidiousness of this was intentionally malicious doesn't matter, you end up with a bureaucracy that only stops after a revolution or significant political change.

Some of these people are directly employed by the government, others are tied to (government funded) non-profits. They may have good intentions, but it is the end results that matter. Ultimately, they will not speak against the self-interest of their own group.

From the standpoint of software development, think of it as a codebase you can't refactor but has an endless stream of new business logic which may or may not conform well with the database structure. Eventually it just stops working.

To speak about Google/Microsoft/Big Tech in particular, it isn't just legal resources - it is overall resources. Doing basic things get a lot more expensive and slow.

Which little players can buy 30,000 Nvidia A100s?

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