64 karma · joined January 24, 2022
Even in the future if they are required by law to provide it, I wouldn't bet against the craftiness of the providers to invent some sort of network effect dark pattern to make it painful, if not outright impossible.
Just as an example, with Muse I can already see that the way they are thinking of making money is via taking a transaction cut, so it's not that hard to imagine that Meta can negotiate deals for txns that happens through Muse which won't be available elsewhere.
Tin foil hat version of me thinks that all the closed model companies want to desperately build an abstraction layer on top of the model, so that they can limit access to the model directly and build a locked down relationship with the user.
Other inference providers should counter this by providing their own version of standardized managed agents.
Coincidentally, I published a note on my blog just about this today https://aditya.rs/blog/2026/09/29/inference-providers-should...
I was mostly interested in solving a very specific problem for myself (basically poll a website behind auth + 2fa and react/notify to changes) and since I also had recently gotten into frontend decided to also try out building extensions.
I knew about Tampermonkey and such but had never used them, and I also wasn't sure if they would be long term viable with MV3 coming in. Moreover I also wanted to explore some way to keep options open in case chrome ended up being very heavy handed with extensions, in the process I discovered there are still a lot of things you can do if you really really wanted to bypass the current limitations.
In the end though I personally decided to use Violentmonkey instead of this, but this could be an alternative direction for others who don't/can't use dev mode for extensions.
Yep, this is the reason why I think we should continue to have a regulatory stopgap to provide a floor for acceptable behavior
haha yeah, you're right I could have been more clear on why I thought there was a need for it.
One way to look at it (though might not be a strong argument) is even with the current regulatory framework, the incentives are not aligned. So I don't think regulation is a way to align incentives rather it acts as a floor of what should be acceptable behavior.
The reason why I think a regulatory stop gap is needed is, when a problem doesn't have enough momentum towards it, it's much easier to make a problem worse than to make it better and regulation acts as a valve by indicating the directional progress we want to make and prevent making it worse at least until there is sufficient momentum that progress from the problem is clearly much better than the alternative.
That said, I think for the problems I used as examples in the article the current mechanisms and the current framework we have are sufficient, and possibly no new regulation needs to be taken. (i.e, for the case of doctors, we already have pretty good mechanisms to prevent doctors from creating actual harm, for climate change we already have limits on carbon emissions, etc.)
You're right I didn't mention specifics of on who would create these. A naive answer would have been "why not anyone?", but you bring up an interesting point on who would actually hold the bet for a long duration of time and be guaranteed for pay-offs.
I disagree with the problem of enforceability of the paying out in case someone looses a long position, since it's also a current problem with the standard futures for stocks/commodities, where the brokerage firm would be liable for paying up in case of defaulting on a margin call, so similar structure might be imagined for these cases.
With regards who might create these futures, the government seems like a good candidate, but really if we do have a solid clearinghouse with similar structure for handling margin calls etc. I don't see why not anyone can create these.
The regulatory concerns for implementing these is very valid, but I was primarily just interested in exploring the idea.
If they really believe that climate change is not real, then they would benefit from owning the futures which pay off when if the climate really doesn't warm more than 2°C in the next 3 decades.
One of the things I was interested about is problems where there is possible deniability and attribution ambiguity, in these cases my thinking was it is better to scope and anchor to a larger issue that might occur and align incentive towards a more holistic outcome rather than specific service. The futures approach was a general way of doing it which is agnostic of the problem in hand (though the specific implementation of it would inevitably be tied to the outcome you want in the end).
The doctor example is a common example I keep using since it is very simple to explain, it is purely for exploratory purposes and I did note that it is quite possible not all doctors and consultants might do this. My point was not to deride anyone but rather to just explore an idea.
If you don't mind sharing what was the level you were interviewing for and how long did the whole interview process take?
I think in general I can see that startups are exploiting the interviewing process itself as an arbitrage to get smart people in. Large companies to some extent are very set on the interview "loop" and would go through the whole assortment of their test suite irrespective of who it is, maybe they can afford to and they may even have to at scale as a process discipline to avoid false positives. But this is a clear advantage for startups hiring since by their nature itself get lower inbound so they can customize their interviews to either make it more specific or remove certain rounds altogether depending on the signal they get from the candidate.
> e) Not really necessary
What do you mean? As in you didn't have a need for managing the time because you weren't really interviewing for a lot of companies or you didn't find the number of interviews too much of a burden on your time?