It sounds like it should solve your problem. At first it seems to work. Then you keep on finding the footguns after it is too late to change the design.
Contracts are designed as a minimum thing that can work. The different groups who want different - conflicting - things out of contracts now have a common place and syntax examples to start adding what they want without coming up with something that either breaks someone else, or worse each group doing things in a non-uniform way thus causing foot guns.
Contracts as they are today won't solve every problem. However they can expand over time to solve more problems. (or at least that is the hope, time will tell - there is already a lot of discussion on what the others should be)
I think that a "minimal viable baseline" type implementation should not break the ODR.
In Rust these types of proposals are common, in C++ less so. The incredibly tedious release process encourages everyone to put in just as much complexity as they can safely get away with.
We've always been bikeshedders. For example, back in Slashdot days, some company would decide to migrate something from Windows to Linux. Immediately the debate became whether they should have gone with Debian or SuSE instead of Red Hat.
The reality is that Starbucks is the world's biggest unregulated bank, with their claws in the real estate industry. Who got that way by selling the experience of hanging out in a convenient coffee shop.
Their business has run into trouble a couple of times because MBA types in the company lost sight of this, then focused on trying to sell drinks efficiently. Thereby diluting the brand and business.
If you've got 22 minutes, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ym7YwFq8ZuM is a very informative walkthrough of the history and the business by the always funny youtuber, The Fat Electician. Highly recommended.
IMO, they, like many other companies, were doomed by the constant chase for growth. Once they had a large share of "have a milk-coffee drink in a nice lounge" market, growth slowed. But having a large market share, good margins and growth that is the same as population/gdp (+/-) is just not acceptable.
So they try to find a way to get more growth, even if it changes and perhaps kills what the business was.
Around 2000 the founder stepped away, and MBAs brought in automated machines. They were more efficient and consistent at making the drinks than the baristas, and business tanked. The founder came back in 2008, got rid of the machines, and brought the baristas back. Business took off again.
In the context of AI automation I keep coming back to "cute Starbucks barista" as the archetypal automation-proof job. Because the job isn't producing the beverage, but the little moment of human interaction. (Especially these days, when not much of it remains!)
Same goes with supermarket checkout. I noticed many people intentionally take the line where the human scans your stuff. They enjoy it!
Unfortunately many zoomers do not appear to have been informed of this fact, and will give you a worse experience, "humanity wise", than the self-check out machine!
When you treat your job as robotic, aside from making the experience worse for all involved, you are also competing with actual robots, i.e. competing on speed, price and consistency, which is not a great place for a human to be.
I'm assuming you're talking about those Clover machines. They were really, really good and well designed IIRC. Trying to automate the barista with them; well, that's where they messed up!
Sometimes having a lot of experience, is a negative for dealing with new things.
The problem is that one's past success leads to ego. Ego makes it hard to accept the evidence of your mistakes. This creates cognitive dissonance, limiting contrary feedback. The result is that you become very sure of everything that you think, and are resistant to feedback.
This kind of works out so long as things remain the same. After all one's past success is based on a set of real skills that you developed. And those skills continue to serve you well.
But when faced with something new, LLMs in this case, past skills don't apply. However your overconfidence remains. This makes it easy to confidently march off of a cliff that everyone else could see.
I remember reading that this is why scammers like to target doctors and former business people. It seems becoming very proficient in one narrow area can leave you vulnerable in others.
Unfortunately, that population immediately equates the two for good reason. Bills that are presented as "for the children" usually are a power grab.
Even more unfortunately, the issue is so emotional that we can't have a reasonable discussion on it. This limits the discussion to proposals that sound good to angry people. And the opposition to those who can get angry about something else. Which limits how much reason is applied on either side.
For example, look at the idea of a national sex offenders registry, like we have in the USA. The existence of such a registry is reasonable given that we're no more successful at stopping people from being pedophiles, than we are at stopping them from being homosexuals.
But the purpose of such a list is severely undermined when an estimated quarter of the list were themselves minors when they offended. The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?
> The age at which people are most likely to land on the list is 14. But a man who liked 13 year olds when he was 14, is unlikely to reoffend at 30. What is the purpose of ruining the rest of his life for a juvenile mistake?
am I like misunderstanding or what does this mean exactly? I'm so confused. "reoffend" what kind of offense are we talking about here?
Exactly. It is much easier to get people to agree to do questionable things, when there is pressure to "do something".
A more limited bill takes off the pressure to "do something", and therefore makes the more extreme bill harder to pass later.
In this case there is reason to suspect that the real goal of the bill is not catching pedophiles. Instead it is to give police broader powers of surveillance in the name of catching pedophiles, which they will then be able to use for other purposes. This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU. Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
> This is particularly problematic given the ways that it could be abused by some of the more authoritarian governments in the EU.
> Yes, I'm thinking of Viktor Orbán of Hungary.
Lol what?
The UK leads [edit: in Europe overall, obviously not the EU] with approximately 18 per 100k prosecuted for online speech. Germany is at about 4 per 100k. Poland at about 0.8 per 100k. Hungary about 0.1 per 100K.
For any definition of authoritarian that relates to chat control, the UK is two base-10 orders of magnitude more authoritarian than Hungary (7 base-2 orders of magnitude).
This figure in the UK is unsourced and I'm fairly sure is not true (or at least not what you've labelled it), and has been quoted out of context by people trying to stir trouble not reasoned debate. I'll assume good faith here and say the start of the video lays out why the figure is not what you've labelled it to be
The issue isn't how much free speech online is being punished. It is how surveillance could be used to reinforce authoritarianism.
The UK does a lot of prosecuting people for having said nasty things online that someone else didn't like.
Hungary is far more inclined to surveil political opponents, put people in their network in jail without fair trial, surveil successful businesses whose bribes were insufficient, find excuses to punish those businesses.
Not only are there not similar reports about the UK, but its better position in international corruption rankings points to a culture that would be less likely to tolerate this.
Any further questions about why there should be concerns about how Hungary would be likely to abuse a law like this?
Germany and Poland are. Does the existence of a non-EU country in a data set about European countries detract from the fact that Hungary doesn't prosecute people for online speech to the same extent as other European (incl. EU) countries?
I'm quite sure they thought about the UK as well, given the practice of prosecuting for lawful speech, jailing or arresting for planning peaceful protests (or threatening to arrest a man with an EMPTY placard), jailing for opposing the genocide or voicing support for the unlawfully proscribed organisation.
That's actually not possible due to something called the GZK cutoff. Which is a weird phenomena that causes apparently empty space to turn somewhat cloudy for sufficiently high energy photons. Here is how it works.
If an electron and a positron meet, they turn into two very high energy photons.
Because physics is time reversible, if two high energy photons meet, they have a chance to turn into an electron-positron pair.
If an extremely high energy photon meets a low energy one, there is a moving reference frame in which they have the same energy, and are both high energy. Therefore they have a chance to turn into an electron-positron pair whose center of mass is in that reference frame.
The result is that if a photon is above something like 10^15 eV in energy, it can annihilate itself against any photon in the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMBR). There are lots of photons in the CMBR. Those collisions are sufficiently likely that such photons essentially cannot travel intergalactic distances.
If you go back to the early universe, the CMBR was much denser than it is today. Making the distance that such photons could reasonably travel even shorter then than it is today.
That said, no good storyteller should let inconvenient physical fact keep them from writing a good story.
Does that interaction cascade such that space is effectively even more opaque as the flux increases? Or could we inlist an even more unimaginable flux of high energy photons to clear the path and allow the observed x-rays to come out the other end of the very long path..?
My understanding is that it doesn't. Though if the energy gets high enough, you can start to get other particles out.
As for protecting one photon with a sheathe of other photons, the energy density required for that tube is absolutely insane. We're talking photons spaced the width of a proton apart, with very high energy. Even assuming that it could be assembled, the gravity from the leading edge of the tube is going to do "interesting things" to the rest of the tube. Maybe even black hole levels of interesting...
My top complaint is that if I've successfully used a pattern, I want my text removed. I keep forgetting to backspace a bunch, then get frustrated that my pattern isn't working.
There is a politically correct thing to say about having kids. It is wonderful, I love them, it made me want to be a better person. That's all true.
I'm not going to be politically correct. I'm going to be honest. For some of us, it is a hard reality check.
As children, many of us had various kinds of hard experiences. You can get a rough idea of how hard your background likely was by tallying up the different kinds of Adverse Childhood Experiences that you had. The result is your ACE score, and it is a standard risk assessment tool. You can find the list near the end of https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/24875-adverse....
My ACE score is 9/10. Most of you won't have had that level of challenge, but a lot of you had problems. I've done a lot to deal with my background, work on my mental health, and so on. I swore to break the cycle, to give my children a better start than I had.
I mostly succeeded. Only mostly. The impact of my failures became obvious when COVID turned many homes into hothouses for mental illness. My kids were not unique in their struggles. But within their peer group, it was my kids that were hit first and hardest. And then I did not cope well with the result. As a result I, also, have been having mental health problems.
For people like me, I recommend a long and hard think before having children. If you do have children, you will naturally try to do your best. I certainly did. You are extremely unlikely to succeed as well as you'd like. I certainly didn't. And so you should also prepare to give yourself grace for the ways in which you might fail. If I had done better on that, then I would have been better able to carry on and try to pick up the pieces when the shit hit the fan.
To everyone who is beginning on this journey, I wish you luck. Cherish what you have. Do your best.
And if your best did not turn out to be as good as you wanted, you have my sympathy.
It sounds like it should solve your problem. At first it seems to work. Then you keep on finding the footguns after it is too late to change the design.
reply