Expertise and good verification automation tools: TLA+, Coq/Agda/Lean, specification synthesis, property-based testing, good old unit + functional testing, and elbow grease.
It won't be dissimilar to being a consultant now. I've spent years consulting where my job was to tame legacy code (that is, code which is not under test and nobody knows how it works). The value in roles like this is that you work at a level higher than the code in order to get the team able to understand the system and be able to start extending it again.
Thank you for spending the time to write this comment. As a solution architect, I don't write production-level code. I did not know of anything beyond unit / functional testing in verification automation.
Popular music has already been synthetic and souless for decades now. People will listen to what sounds good to them, and we already know the bar is very low, and that the hard truth is that it is all subjective anyway.
More of a behavioural science take. Is music the sound that is played or the people making the sound?
We’ve had software accompaniment for a long time. Elevator music. The same 4 chords arranged in similar ways for decades. Hasn’t destroyed music. Neither will AI.
At some point people are going to want to know who’s on the other side making the music.
Unless your argument is that nobody values artists… which is I guess one of the primary conceits of GenAI enthusiasts today.
They eventually have to turn a profit or pass the hot potato. Maybe they’ll be the next generation of oligarchs supported by the state when they all go bankrupt but are too essential to fail.
My guess is that profitability is becoming increasingly difficult and nobody knows how yet… or whether it will be possible.
Seems like the concentration of capital is forcing the tech industry to take wilder and more ludicrous bets each year.
Finally. We all “know” that corporations will always choose profits over literally anything else. Glad to see the come back of the FTC. It seems we only get meaningful progress when there’s strong regulation.
Other notable examples: the EPA. There was a time when people had to wear gas masks out doors in some cities because the pollution was so bad before regulations and enforcement came into place. Similar stories with CFC emissions.
The development of the Internet has been accelerated under mostly conservative leadership which has been walking back regulations. And while much innovation has happened in that time I think a great deal more could have been achieved if it weren’t focused on this kind of profit-at-all-costs environment it’s been simmering in.
I live in a high rise in a major US metro (not NYC). A building across the way installed a new HVAC handler that whines at a relatively high pitch (think industrial shop vac) 24/7. One of my favorite parts of fall is being able to have the windows open and have lovely fresh air, but I can hardly hear myself think. And we're a good 100m away from the thing!
This is to say nothing of the traffic noise or garbage trucks or whatnot--but a building appliance? I thought surely that must be regulated, or at least controllable. It's unreal the lack of attention people pay to it.
Maybe there is a law on the books that the building owner is violating. I'm not sure where you'd look or what you could do about it, but the NYC equivalent would be calling 311 to file a noise complaint.
While it is true, better regulations are needed to get control of some of these companies, those same companies are going to attempt to buy off politicians and whoever possible. It's not going to be any kind of easy battle or quick fix, and the public is going to have to get more involved, to make sure the needed laws and regulation get passed.
Many people fear that a corrupt or authoritarian regime might misuse data to cause harm. However, the reality is that such regimes tend to carry out harmful actions regardless of the data they collect. Data can make their efforts more efficient, but the real danger lies in the regime's intent, not necessarily the data itself.
Exactly, historical authoritarian states got by just fine by reading the mail and listening to conversations. You don't need to know which fragrance I bought last week to oppress me, and it wouldn't help anyway
But they broadly didnt actually get along just fine... Almost without exception they have falleb, commonly due to internal resistance. Making that internal resistabce harder via enhanced surveillance is the issue that could make future scenarios even worse.
The most defined example would probably be Apartheid South Africa. Despite being in a weak position, having few resources, and dealing with constant losses, the ANC were so successful in harassing the National Party over three decades that the National Party finally ceded power in 1993. This was enabled by radio broadcasts, fast printing, and starting in the late 1970s digital espionage. Information and the spread of information was tightly controlled by the National Party, which is one of the three major reasons why it took so long and why slow erosion was the only viability rather than full immediate revolution.
Do you have a link for the first one? I don't think that has happened (although it could under Texas law as I understand it)
Is there an actual case where data described in the article was used for anything like what you're suggesting?
The actual cases involve people reporting each other (a man reporting a woman he is dating for example).
Sounds to me like blaming the acid rain on the acid detectors
Ads don't do that. Maybe you're thinking of organic posts, which are not ads? Or do you have examples of "extremist" ads?
Having worked on this stuff, I can tell you that the data relevant to extremist rabbit holes is not what the FTC is talking about. Facebook learns enough from which posts you click on to know which extremist content to suggest (and then they intentionally do not suggest it)
The necessity to engage people for the advertising business model to work does do this. People are naturally engaged by outraged, the algorithms “figure this out,” and systematically produce outrage. No ads, no existential need to arbitrarily increase engagement.
Consumerism makes society less conflict. This idea was implemented by propaganda in 30's by Edward Bernays. Propaganda was later changed to term public relations after connection with Nazism during WW2.
I'm sick of needing to spend weeks researching which couch or mattress to buy because corporations will happily sell me a terrible couch for $3,000 that only cost them $50 to make. It'll fall apart in a year or two, conveniently after the warranty expires, but hey, their profits are going up so who cares about the buyer?
I'm sick of events like the Boar's Head listeria outbreak killing 10 people happening with regularity now. Last year it was eye drops causing blindness. The companies don't care beyond the lawsuits they'll face, who cares if people die as long as their profits go up?
I'm sick of oil companies lying about the environmental harms they cause. Their profits are going up, so why should they care about climate change or the tainted groundwater their fracking causes?
I'm sick of seeing ads and billboards for corporations everywhere I go. I'm sick of being tracked because corporations can make x% more money with my data than they can without it. Installing uBlock Origin is easy, but we now have facial recognition systems with physical cameras in the real world. Can't do anything about those unless I just never leave my home.
I'm sick of people defending this behavior by asking "what tangible harm have you experienced?". The tangible harm is that I'm fucking tired. I'm tired of living in a society that requires expending so much mental energy just to exist.
I should be able to just trust (within reason, of course) that a $1,000 mattress will work for X years without needing to research whether the company is decent or known to be awful. I should be able to buy chocolate from the grocery store without needing to research whether the corporation (or any of its 24 parents and subsidiaries) used slave labor to produce it. I shouldn't need to worry about bottled water being stolen from aquifers by corporations that will simply move on after destroying the communities that depend on that water.
I vote, because it's all I can do, but that accomplishes nothing because we're stuck in a two-party system that won't let me vote for a candidate far enough left to actually fix things. Instead we continue to maintain the status quo, because corporations have more money and political power than civilians.
I'm well aware that this reads like an overdramatic manifesto. I'm just sick of everything feeling like it's getting worse all the time, and it seems pretty causally linked to the rise of corporations. Is it too much to ask that I be able to live without them invading _every single aspect of my life_? I don't think it is, but I think we're too far gone at this point for it to ever change.
100 years ago well before the invention of so-called surveillance capitalism, people were making soft drinks out of radium, and inhaling asbestos.
Many things are better since then. Some new things are probably worse, but every reasonable measure of human welfare suggests we are better off than we were previously.
Something some subset of us are worried about right now, whether it’s WiFi or 5G or Covid vaccines, will turn out to have had horrible consequences and you can’t really fault the rest of us that we didn’t listen to the crazies.
Just embrace panglossian optimism because the alternative is to just be angry and exhausted and indignant all the time and then you’re no fun at parties.
When you go across a long enough timeline variations occur. Nothing over time in human history is a constant linear improvement. We may be better off than we were in 1924 in terms of health and safety, but we're definitely not better off than we were in 1994. Legislation hasn't kept up with chemical science and social engineering, and enforcement has been tentative as fights between executive power and judiciary power create years long arguments that get in the way of preventing harm. For example Red 40 is a dye that's well known to cause cancer with a high degree of certainty (not probability, certainty), while the artificial sweetener sucralose is genotoxic. You go drink a can of Faygo Cherry and it's got both. The FDA hasn't been able to regulate either because they haven't been legislated the power to do so, are now even more crippled thanks to the overturning of Chevron, and companies keep funding "alternative studies" that they can present to lobbyists.
It's hard not to be angry and exhausted when you have to be a chemical engineer just to know what's even safe to eat.
So tired of people making excuses so that some billionaire can buy another yacht. Can we finally actually start investing in people and putting people first instead of corporations.
> similar tangible harm caused by lack of regulation on data collection?
There’s a spike in teenager suicides, girls in particular. The phenomenon is well researched, it correlates with popularity of social media among teenagers. I believe that’s causation not just correlation, because social media didn’t became popular everywhere at once, they did gradually for different countries/languages, the teenager suicides spike follows.
Restricting data collection will fix that by dismantling the business model. Will be harder for tech companies to convert screen time into profits. Will even flip the motivation developing addictive apps: the more time users will spend there the more bandwidth they consume i.e. profits will turn into costs. Which is good for most people, except employees and stock owners of social media companies.
P.S. Personally, I prefer more radical approach: total ban of advertisements on the internets. Many cities did it for billboards, I don’t see why we shouldn’t do the same online.
Banning online advertisements would essentially cripple small businesses in the US. Even local businesses today rely on online ads for foot traffic. Banning ads would send us back to the economy of the 1950s, where most profit accrues to a number of powerful corporations, and small manufacturers and creators have no market power.
I used data and ran experiments to measure and mitigate teen well being and harm at Instagram. I was not on the team responsible for this, but I worked on organic ranking and was responsible for understanding and measuring the impact of these things. I can say with certainty nobody cares more about teen well being than Meta. It's their future, and the success Instagram over Snapchat is essentially completely due to better positive interventions for well being. We measured this carefully with RCTs and had more data than anyone on the planet.
Overall Instagram is net good for the majority of teens across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net negative for a small percentage. Meta spends hundreds of millions trying to fix those latter, rarer cases.
> where most profit accrues to a number of powerful corporations, and small manufacturers and creators have no market power
You’re describing the status quo with online ads still legal. Amazon has 37.6% share of e-commerce; small manufacturers can’t compete. Google hosts 79% of videos viewed over the internets, and it abuses small creators really bad, with no ways to appeal or contact humans.
One of the reasons how these corporations became that powerful was unrestricted and legal digital surveillance. Another reason, anti-monopoly regulators asleep at their job allowing big tech companies to easily acquire competitors (e.g. Google was competing with YouTube for a year or so with “Google Video” product, failed, then acquired the competitor).
> net good for the majority of teens across a wide variety of well being metrics, and net negative for a small percentage
Many researchers who don’t work for FB were warning for years. Couple years ago some of that internal research was leaked, here’s a copy-paste “Thirty-two percent of teen girls said that when they felt bad about their bodies, Instagram made them feel worse” https://archive.is/qBpaq#selection-915.1-915.113 I would not call 32% “a small percentage”.
Another thing, “negative for just a small percentage” is a poor defense. Even if it’s indeed tiny, it still doesn’t mean the business model should be legal. Imagine a lottery where 0.1% people win $1M, 1% people win $10k, 10% people win $1k, 89.9% don’t win or lose anything, and 0.01% lose their life – don’t you think a business model like that should be illegal?
Do you have any examples where the data was obtained from sources that collected it for ads? As I understand it, the sort of data that is collected for behavioral advertising isn't useful for identity theft and has not been used in that way.
For identity theft you need things like names, addresses, SSN, W2 income, etc
before regulation, we had multiple actual rivers that caught on fire from all the stuff they would dump in it. multiple different times. it’s wild to me how people argue with sincerity that we don’t need to stop them sometimes.
I didn’t get the analogy. I built a card payment processing stack that works on multiple partner bank backends and of course it’s built on event sourcing because accounting is.
The usual analogy used here are double-entry ledgers. I’m not sure what state machines, Marco Polo, and google maps have to do with it.
Although I suppose you could look at your aggregates as state machines if you’re using them to validate commands before adding new events to the log.
I found reading the article a bit frustrating because it keeps talking about those analogies and never gets to the actual point. I kept reading thinking "surely there will be some practical examples in the second half of the article" but there wasn't much to that effect.
Wow! It has come such a long way since its early, humble beginnings.
I saw the original lightning talk that introduced Hy to the world at Pycon those ages ago. Soon after I met Paul and started contributing to the early versions of Hy. I was responsible for the CL-style kwargs (you’re welcome), some minor innards, and a library or two.
Whimsy is useful, especially to keep enthusiasm up. It’s nice when hackers can be hackers and not every thing is business.
While I haven’t been involved in years it brings a smile to me face to see the project continues apace. What a great milestone!
Businesses that want to integrate with larger SaaS providers and enterprises are often compelled to implement SAML. I used to fight tooth and nail to avoid it over issues with the SAML spec but... business is business.
Good suggestions from the article: work around it. The non-technical folks may force you to implement it in your system. Doesn't mean you have to leave your systems vulnerable.
Pretty good advice. I believe it should be the default. The situations that require permissiveness should be exceptions and treated with a high degree of scrutiny.
It won't be dissimilar to being a consultant now. I've spent years consulting where my job was to tame legacy code (that is, code which is not under test and nobody knows how it works). The value in roles like this is that you work at a level higher than the code in order to get the team able to understand the system and be able to start extending it again.
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