wolverine876

What if the wheelchair malfunctions and injures someone else? What if my car malfunctions and causes an accident?

Also, I don't want to live in world of frauds and scams and other crimes, trying to navigate it, for obvious reasons. It's also an economic disaster.

You're doing an awful lot of work to empower already powerful people by removing democratic power over our society.

It seems like quite a rush of it today. Did someone put up the anarcho-libertarian bat signal?

> The first step is to stop thinking of "the public" as a monolithic entity whose interests are pursued by the government, and instead recognize that control over things that have a major impact on the lives, welfare, freedom, and prosperity need to be things they can effectively control or opt-out of as individuals.

If AI takes over the world, or others pump lots of GHG into the air and cause climate change, or someone sets off explosives and burns down my neighborhood, or my frozen chicken contains poisonous bacteria, or my bathroom sanitizer doesn't really sanitize - how do I opt out?

Plenty of regulations coexists with FOSS, obviously.

The arguments against all regulation are transparently weak, and the apparent dogmatism discredits everything else. Why be so dogmatically anti-regulation? Dogmatism isn't about finding truth but about serving someone's political interests. If I understand correctly what's happening, whose interests are you serving and why?

> we don't ban individuals from working on project cars, or driving them on public roads - instead, we have standards for OEMs and individuals, and prosecute negligence

I'm not quite sure what you mean, or what in AI safety you see as analogous.

For other technology, certainly building and using certain things is illegal - you can't make hand grenades, lots of chemicals; I'm pretty sure you can't own certain instruments of crime, counterfeit money, etc. Many things you can do; it's not all or nothing.

Humans aren't tools and therefore can't be 'useless'. You matter intrinsically. The most important lesson I've learned in life is the need to know and love myself - in a healthy, compassionate way. It doesn't matter what some other people think, what I do for them. I matter and you matter.

People are responsible for their own behavior. They can't blame the game.

It's all theoretical. Do you see it actually working out this way? When and where?

> regulators just, you know, look at the design of the chairs to evaluate them for certification. But customers could do the same thing for themselves, at less cost (what, you think those government regulators work for free?). So the regulations are actually adding zero value. But they're certainly not adding zero cost.

I have little idea how to evaluate the safety of an electric wheelchair, and don't have the time to acquire the expertise to learn how to do that with everything I buy. But we all can chip in and pay someone, who has the expertise, to do it once rather than than millions of people doing it redundantly.

Free markets are not a panacea, nor do ideal free markets ever exist anyway. Also, free markets require regulation to prevent powerful actors from making them non-free.

> the market will produce it.

Only if it's profitable. Feeding poor people, caring for the indigent, etc. isn't profitable.

Not all regulation causes costs to go up. Some causes costs to go down, for example, by correcting inefficiencies created by raw game-theory market competition. Some reduce costs by creating a safer environment for investment, reducing risk. Regulation serves market participants too.

How do think we should address security around AI, and the public's control over a major impact on their lives, welfare, freedom, prosperity, etc.

It's impressive that not only has private equity enshittified even nursing homes and wheelchairs, they have persuaded people to empower PE even more by reducting regulations. Do you think PE will suddenly change without regulation?

PE is responsible for PE's actions. If these services and goods decline under PE, with the same regulations as before, then the cause is clear.

In my personal experience, lots of people were talking about it, including the White House; there were articles in the NY Times about it, etc.

> When prices rebounded in early 2020s, there was a lot of scar tissue in the industry about overproduction. Producers are now extremely conservative

In corporate America generally, it seems to be a widespread strategy to limit supply and drive up prices. Sometimes it's done explicitly and illegally, such as in rental housing (look up RealPage). Is there evidence that it's particular to shale production?

> I think the typical Democrat-Party view that "oil bad" and "oil corrupt" lacks nuance.

You said it, then said it lacks nuance.

This article covers it in more detail:

https://www.defenseone.com/technology/2024/05/giant-military...

“One thing that you notice in underwater vehicle design is you typically can have either a vehicle that lasts very long periods of time but can't really carry anything with it,” Woerner said on a podcast in 2022. “But if you want something that can carry a sensor or payload that is perhaps a larger size or mass, or has a larger energy draw, you tend to need a more traditional underwater vehicle, propeller driven in most cases. And those tend to not have anywhere near the endurance” that the military is looking for.

The ocean itself is full of potential sources of energy, such as currents, waves, and even subtle differences in water temperature or salt levels. But there’s no single perfect source of ocean energy for what DARPA is trying to accomplish.

“If you're interested in maybe closer to surface transport, wave energy is a really great resource, most of the wave energy is distributed near the surface. If you want to go into deeper water, right? That means that wave energy wouldn't be a great resource for that,” Sandia National Laboratory engineer Kelley Ruehl, an advisor on the program, said on the podcast. Similarly, current energy is a very localized resource, where we have tidal streets— those are unique locations in the world. So it's a very specific place that one would need to harvest tidal-energy resource.”

DARPA said PacMar Technologies, another contractor on the Manta Ray program, will spend the rest of this year testing a full-scale energy-harvesting system.

Mullvad's security team should have found this problem on their own, and as soon as it appeared:

Inspect security empirically - you might think that your security must work, but that means nothing; you must investigate empirically: All data going to the Internet must pass through the gateway. Collect the packets on the gateway, not on the device, and inspect them for leaks. Finding leaks should be trivial at that point.

The only trick might be cellular connections: We don't know that leaks aren't unique to cellular connections. I know cellular gateways can be setup, but are the packets inspectable at a level that will reveal leaks?

Other animals, and most of our ancestors, don't 'get by ok'. They live/lived short, painful, meaningless lives. Many/most die before reaching adulthood; they suffer disease, famine, war; they were illiterate and endured brutal physical labor, no freedom, a constant struggle to survive. Many people still suffer from most of those things.

We don't need every application of technology, but the rest is a fantasy.

The way the world is today, that's the result of earlier people who changed it.

Almost everything we have, from religion to politics to technology to morality to language to culture, etc. etc., all comes from people who intentionally changed things. Compare us to our ancestors 10,000 years ago, nomads emerging from the Paleolithic with only stone tools, no writing, etc.

Reactionary perspectives - the hot trend of the unwitting - seem to think that the world was what they grew up with, as some natural state. Someone dreamed, worked, sacrificed, persuaded, etc. to make it this way.

It's great news - we can do it; we can make a better world. You don't have to be Copernicus or Jefferson to do it. Our ancestors paved the way, put down lane markers and signs, gave us every tool we need. What are you waiting for?

I get the impression that some small liberal arts colleges have similar cultures; that's a major part of their appeal (though I say that without experience of Caltech or 99% of small liberal arts colleges). Now that I think of it, I wonder how much Caltech is inspired by a similar concept.

My theory-in-development about such environments is that they require three things: First, a mission or goal that is 'good' (in the perspective of the people there), that brings out the best in people. 'Make lots of money' or 'monopolize the book trade or 'squeeze $$$ out of nursing home patients' demand values that affect how personnel treat each other. Second, they need a sufficient proportion of personnel who have passion for the 'dream' or 'mission', and who also have a certain level of humanism - not as much philosophically as their norms for behavior, especially trust and compassion for each other. Third, they need a small enough group that it doesn't need to be administered by bureaucractic rules, which become necessary as groups grow too large to run on interpersonal relationships. Also, it is of course hard to change cultures in existing organizations.

Could all of Lockheed be run like the Skunkworks? The full company can't be as selective about personnel and it's very large. There are many people, of course, who couldn't care less about such culture and will destroy it offhand. When I've been lucky to be in such magical cultures, the proportion of a-holes was small enough that they complied with the norms of the group; on one team of about only 14, when two leading proponents of the culture left then the a-holes tore apart everything - they resented the culture.

Thanks for the insights. It seems like almost a dreamlike place for young, passionate STEM students.

> the idea that just being in the presence of asbestos is enough to form self-propagating cancers like it's some sort of radioactive isotope... doesn't make any sense.

It doesn't make sense to you and therefore is worth exploring. At the same time, unless one is an expert then the fact that they don't understand isn't much evidence that it's untrue.

Most people don't understand much about my field of expertise; their lack of knowledge doesn't invalidate most of my field.

> There’s that Asian rapper who spoke up about the DA and immediately got ganged up on to apologize.

You said you were afraid to express your opinion and implied (maybe my misunderstanding) some physical risk. Has anyone been physically attacked for it? I'm starting to think otherwise.

> 2 more elderly Asians were attacked

How does that threaten you for expressing your opinions? Also, in a large city, some are attacked every day; is there evidence of elderly Asian people experiencing particularly high crime?

> Thanks to people like you

That's way out of bounds on HN. You seem to be the person doing the attacking - and in fact taking the 'victim' position is often used as a justification for that.

Also:

  “unique per product” means unique for each individual product
  of a given product class or type.

Overall, why not just require random passwords of a certain length? Compared to generating a hash, generating a random password is easier (no data input, such as the serial number, is needed) and no less user-friendly.

Or, define it in terms of entropy? Maybe that kind of technicality is too hard to understand.

What is required for punishments to significantly deter and otherwise affect corporate behavior? Is there research on that question?

I assume part of the answer is some ratio of corporate assets or revenue, as well as how the fines are implemented.

> But I honestly just don't get the link to ovarian cancer.

What does that mean and what does it signify? Do you know enough about cancer, microbiology, the female reproductive system, etc. that you would 'get' it and that you trust your intuition?

I don't 'get' much of advanced mathematics, but that doesn't at all invalidate it in my mind, or represent evidence to others.

Is your post more than, 'I kinda wish I didn't know the facts here' - a human reaction to bad news.

Focusing on the level of society as if it's a corporate entity that should profit, rather than on individuals, is a major error in conceiving of our communities and countries; that assumption or premise is the root of our greatest evils:

When some leader starts saying that we should serve 'society', it is a rationalization of corrupt power [0] - they mean others should sacrifice for the leader. First, the leader is free to sacrifice if they think it's important, but somehow that is always for others to do. Second, who defines what society needs or should be? It's mostly an abstract question. Inevitably, it is defined to serve the leader - and notice also the usual corruption of such leaders. Third, it usually also involves hurting others. Everything, every moral, is sacrificed to 'society', i.e., to the leader. ("You shall know them by their fruits", said the authors of the Gospels, millennia ago: good leaders bring out love, freedom, peace, prosperity; bad ones bring out hate, violence, division, greed.)

The point of society is individuals, each person's freedom, welfare, and opportunity; "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights". Rights belong to individuals; free will and choice are theirs; justice is on an individual basis, not for groups. 'Society' exists only for its individuals: "to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed".

The 'societies' that recognize individual rights are the most free (of course), most prosperous, and most safe and stable in the history of the world.

[0] I'm not at all rejecting service. The idea is that we should serve each other, not some mythical 'society'. Society is a tool to serve each other, and nothing more.

I wasn't really using at as evidence in a debate, but they do have time on their hands to do more than study. I thought Caltech students' love for their subjects is what makes them different, not that they were compelled to study all the time.

I understood you the first time, though thanks for clarifying. My questions are based on that understanding.

> UCLA renting the lawn next to the protesting students to some outside pro Israeli proterstors

What does that mean, 'renting the lawn', and where can I read about that?

> The part about police just watching the students being beaten is also a nice reminder that police have no legal duty to protect anyone in the US. You can be beaten to a pulp in front of an officer of law and he can just watch and enjoy.

That's something that I've wondered about, and which seems to attract little attention. Wouldn't that depend on local law? And wouldn't it at least create liability for the city, just like not inspecting a building that collapses would create liability?

Kids playing outside are committing crimes? And they don't commit crimes because they aren't outside - as if that would stop someone from robbing a store?

Let's ignore the lack of evidence for the extreme claims (the fact that they are commonplace claims doesn't make them true).

> I didn't realize I need to be hacked or knifed myself in order to "not be threatened".

Did someone say that?

> And if someone says something or God forbid reacts to stopping bad behavior as we have seen, mobs of these people show up and harass people who want to live in a good society.

My question was, has anyone been attacked for expressing those views. This sentence seems to say they have - is there evidence of it happening?