I've been hearing much more lately about how crude our approach to farming/agriculture is and how counterproductive current methods are. No-till, carbon farming, cover crops, etc. which spend more effort in creating a balanced ecosystem where crops are incorporated versus placing product, extracting value, leaving nutrient deficient earth behind.
There's an interesting documentary called Biggest Little Farm where a couple tries to strike that balance although not focused on tech/automation. This article bringing in the resourcefulness and ingenuity of farmers with tech alongside that balanced ecosystem has worldwide impact.
10 years of R&D good enough? I'm not claiming there aren't advances but there's a long tail to implementing new things.
Crude as in there are many forms of existing processes we have inherited and continue on. No different than any other industry but this one has been linked to profound impacts on a multitude of outcomes that affect many in more immediate ways.
We have such a throwaway culture that prototyping and experimentation has a fairly low bar/cost. Getting serious and building a "sellable" product can have a bit of a ramp (my opinion due to the administrative and scale aspects which can arguably distract from the goal) but if you stick to the "by-the/for-the community" approach I feel we have a great moment where the protocols and many of the tools are open to try with.
The challenge is the electrical side if you come from software and vice-versa. There are plenty of resources but it's scattered and getting started ends up touching a little bit of everything.
Python and Arduino / Pi have been incredibly friendly to augment and don't feel like you need to start from scratch, take something that exists and extend it.
Zigbee, X10, WiFi, and Bluetooth LE are all common and open ways to talk with easy to comeby plug-and-play ish modules/hats for microcontrollers.
I suggest Python, not necessarily my favorite, but by far the friendliest and batteries included for experimentation.
This is an awesome list of questions and it's incredibly thoughtful that you documented and shared it with us.
It reminds me of Hitchhikers Guide where they know the answer but need the question. So many answers are out there floating around that we are often trying to force into certain frames for various motivations.
Having questions that get us thinking, recognizing how unclear things are in current state, this
feels like such a powerful thing to share.
Apologies for the diatribe, very much appreciated.
I think this represents two issues. One: AI is not AI but a litany of conditionals that poorly reflects what we as humans can determine fairly quickly. Unless the process is unquestionably objective and possibly quantitative in its outcome, I just don't feel full automation will be without these events.
Google as a business automates everything. They are over their ski-tips in the amount of "getting it perfect" that is possible and are completely accepting of "close enough". I don't think this thought process is unique in the corporate world and unless revenue is impacted heavily, they will not be incentivized to incur the heavy cost of making the end-user whole. The majority of revenue is ad based meaning B2B. Users are a bucket of data, not the person they are selling to.
It's like complaining that a cattle farmer doesn't treat his cows kind enough...the farmer would think you're nuts despite the masses possibly agreeing.
As it relates to this specific type of content, I'd rather see something bad happen to good people than something good happen to bad. Maybe it's unpopular, and I'd hate to be the person on the receiving end, but unless we can have truly objective AI, I don't think we will be absent of these types of problems. In the meantime there has to be someone in the background fixing these cases and Google has shown clearly with YouTube...unless you are making enough noise they aren't listening.
"but unless we can have truly objective AI, I don't think we will be absent of these types of problems."
You don't need "objective AI." In this case, you just need a process that goes to a human when it is contested. Sure, make the user pay a certain amount of money to get an investigation by a third party or to have all the information provided to a court. But if Google made a mistake, and that mistake caused tort, Google is going to have to pay out.
The appropriate thing to happen here is something along these lines:
Google's AI tells the person their account is cancelled, but they can contest it for $100. The person contests it, and a human is put on the case and investigates. That person determines that Google made a mistake, and Google will restore the account quickly, and pay the person $200 for the hassle.
I meant to say specifically that until we can define things from an objective and not subjective stance, AI will not fare better.
That's an interesting proposition on the solution. I feel I see some potentially undesirable effects similar to the legal system but perhaps better than what exists currently.
While I like the spirit of this idea, wouldn't the reviewer be incentivized to say "no" to as many claims as possible? This is akin to how health insurance reviews work and, at least in the usa, that never goes poorly...
No, it should not be Google doing the review, it has to be a non-biased third party. This should apply to a lot of things, including app store stuff. Google doesn't make the decision, but they do get a share of the fee (if they don't have to pay out), since it is a hassle for them and they should be protected against frivolous complaints.
And by the way, while I'm sure Google should have to restore the account in this case, I'm not so sure Google should have to compensate even for the investigation fee. Because honestly it is a tad clueless to take photos of a kid's privates and allow them in the cloud. He didn't do anything truly "wrong" (in the molestation/ child porn sense), but still should have known it wasn't a good idea, so paying $100 for his mistake and being without his account for a week sounds about the right "punishment."
I think the reality is it technically hits this legal grey area. The whole, dating for years and one kid turns 17 while the other is 16 (or whatever the boundary case may be)...this letter vs spirit of the law argument.
It is by definition distribution of this material and to have software edge-case exceptions allowing certain situations through is something I can't imagine anyone willing to sign their name to endorse.
It seems from a heartless management perspective that the simplest decision is to walk away from the whole situation, wash their hands of it, and accept this as collateral damage.
I love playing on lichess. My kid is a fan of chess.com and I try to play with him occasionally, I just have a stronger preference towards the former.
It almost feels like the Wikipedia vs Encyclopedia Britannica argument. Chess.com just feels like a company driven on profits whereas lichess has made adjustments to be reasonable about their own OpEx costs (specifically just the controls on game analysis and not wasting compute).
I really respect and appreciate the work lichess does.
I feel like the "Crypto Crime Wave" is really about NFT foolishness.
I had a lot of friends reaching out to understand more. A lot of them didn't really like the reality of how simple it would be to lift and mint a new thing. They were convinced they were holding a winning lottery ticket and I was a bad guy for saying it wasn't what they thought.
I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does, they are not as smart as you or they think. I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
Parasites live in the real world, the digital world, on the internet attached to whale buyers, and in the real ocean attached to real whales.
I've been burned so many times in crypto but I've been burned equally, if not more, by options offers, RSU bonuses and blackout periods, company mergers and subsequent outcomes of my shares, 401k/, etc etc.
We are constantly outrunning this wave and we are asking for transparency. Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't but we need to be expecting this public nature of failure and not being able to hide the juggling of balance sheets to hide insolvency
When quoting someone please use the full statement. You've paraphrased and injected your own meaning which is incorrect.
> I've never encouraged people to buy crypto and if someone does [encourage people to buy crypto], they are not as smart as you or they think.
> I personally invest in crypto because fundamentally I believe something deeper that I hope works.
I've implemented my own blockchains, I have produced patents in the space, I have spoken and worked in this space for a significant amount of time.
Pumping and dumping is a get rich scheme which is destroying the perception with very real victims. I feel bad for people young and old that attempt to play in the stock market options space and lose it all because they are gambling thinking they will get rich.
I feel equally for those getting hurt in crypto despite the sad reality that they should have come in with questions not hope of a windfall.
These two things are more alike than different in my opinion
The difference is that buying crypto is like buying a pet rock or a bottle of air. In fact it's less than that.. It's literally nothing. It's a greater fool market and it's certainly not currency. In addition there's companies (lenders, exchanges, issuers, etc) which build their businessesn on schemes built on schemes that you are supposed to trust which you can't because no one person understands the code or the infrastructure and systems that the code is built in. All in a totally unregulated market that can be shut down in bits and pieces or even all at once by the government. And then you have people touting it as a legitimate asset class deserving investment. And now it's all coming tumbling down.
The fact we have currency that fluctuates on a day to day basis despite not being tied to anything beyond our trust in the system is not much better of an argument.
There was a point that the U.S. based it on the gold standard which locked in how much could be produced. This would be similar to how certain crypto lending exchanges claim they are backed 1:1 with dollars to create this concept of stablecoins.
The crypto is easy to determine, the dollars not so. Some are having audits to provide trust and transparency.
The clearing houses and financial levers are more complex than many understand. Our financial systems operate on trust, credit, and risk more than they do on having everything working in proper order.
I'm not saying crypto is THE solution and maybe in it's current state it isn't. I have learned a lot more about what exists today because I have something to contrast it too and I understand different pros/cons that I didn't see before.
>The crypto is easy to determine, the dollars not so.
I don't think we can use such excuses anymore. Luna was supposed to be backed by $3b worth of btc. We have absolutely no idea if this capital was actually used to defend its peg or if Mr Kwon pocketed it all. Crypto is just as hard to determine if not more so
> The fact we have currency that fluctuates on a day to day basis despite not being tied to anything beyond our trust in the system is not much better of an argument.
Translation of what you wrote: "I've never really thought about economics for more than a couple of seconds, and therefore I cannot see the difference between the US dollar which literally supports a 21 trillion dollar economy and is guaranteed by the full faith and credit of the richest government in history, and a cryptocurrency backed by no one, which performs perhaps 0.01% of the transaction that the dollar does."
I'm quite familiar with the economics and it has served me well enough.
I'm talking about the actual systems and physical infrastructure.
I have been fortunate to work with some of these larger institutions which carry the "full faith and credit of the richest country in the world".
Save Dunning-Krueger in your back pocket, I learned that quite some time ago in college, you may not be finished with it just yet.
If you are serious about learning look into FedNet. Bump that against the white and yellow papers and you'll have a better understanding of what I mean.
I think you're misquoting, though I had to read it a few times myself. I would read the first quote more along the lines of "if someone does [try to convince you to buy crypto] they are not as smart as you or they think."
Parent pointed out that I misinterpreted an ambiguous phrase, that the “not as smart” people are those encouraging others to buy crypto.
Mea culpa, although if anything this is an even more extreme example of attribution error:
(paraphrasing) “I invest in crypto for grand and philosophical reasons, and would never dream of promoting it to others (except by regularly claiming that it will save our supposedly broken financial system). Others who promote cryptocurrencies are opportunists or fools.”
Far from increasing your credibility, having been involved in cryptocurrency development more likely than not has hopelessly biased you towards this kind of messianic “crypto will save us” thinking.
I think to expect perfection in timing and aligning work done by humans, even where someone could make reasonable foresight arguments, is overlooking how challenging this wide level of supporting an ecosystem is.
The response they made is in regards to security and making ut clear to users that they are expected to be anti-fragile to change. Even if the roadmap itself changes.
I've changed decisions, even flip-flopped several times due to uncertainty. When at the heart of the message they are acting with positive intent, I applaud their short, sweet, and to the point message along with their reasoning.
I worked with an organization that allowed TLS 1.1 for far too long because customers systems hadn't been updated. If they paid enough money, we had to allow it. Meanwhile we were getting beat up by the competition because, "Why would any good development company allow this?!?"
It's such a powerful tool at surface level in this api/k8s interfacing world that looking under the hood and seeing all the work just knocked me over.
You all have done something so powerful for the community regardless of the hiatus.
THANK YOU!